The Uncomfortable Truth: Why Tension Isn't Your Enemy (It's Your Architect)

Most of us spend our lives trying to escape tension. Our imagination regarding attention goes easily to Thanksgiving dinner conversations about politics or the time you sat in the wrong fan section at a football game. That is to say, for the average person, tension is to be avoided at all costs. What if the very thing we’re trying to avoid is essential for our growth, resilience, and vitality?

The Natural World: Life Through Struggle

The naturalist, E.L. Grant Watson, observed, nature thrives on a "tension of opposite". An idea he learned from the work of his contemporary Carl Jung. For Jung the concept was particularly pronounced in the mid-life struggle of the simultaneous longing for settling down and the equal, but opposing drive toward "reinvention". For Watson this concept broadened into the realm of biology where a seed bursts forth from its casing, a tiny, violent act of growth fueled by internal pressure. Muscles grow stronger only when challenged and stressed. Without this dynamic push and pull, there's no evolution, no adaptation, just stagnation. In his book "But to What Purpose" (1946): he explicitly discusses his struggle to reconcile his scientific training at Cambridge with his "numinous" (spiritual) experiences in the Australian bush. His only way to hold both was to reconcile with the implicit tension that pervades life on earth.

Firstness, Secondness & Thirdness

C.S. Peirce, famous for his development of semiotics, observed that all of life fits into one of three categories. Firstness, which is a state of pure being - the redness of the red or the sweetness of honey. There is simply the quality. No analysis, no comparison, no interpretation. Imagine a child seeing snow for the first time. For one instant there is simply,"Wow."

Secondness, or actuality Peirce understood as a state of resistance and encounter. This happens when the child touches the snow and recoils from the cold. The inescapable encounter with reality as it truly is. It is the realm of struggle, opposing forces, reaction, and collision - where our ideas meet the contours of reality.

Thirdness is the place of synthesis, where meaning emerges and the child learns that the snow returns every winter; and that snow is just frozen water that melts when it gets warm. From Thirdness emerges relationships, language, habits and law.

Put another way, all being (Firstness), experiences resistance (Secondness) on it's way to meaning (Thirdness). Life is an unresolvable vibration among these three forces—leaving us forever caught in the vital tension between what is felt, what is fought, and what is understood.

Of course Peirce was only trying to make philosophical sense of what humans experience on a deeply personal basis. We tend not to think of Secondness as bad, and for good reason. Secondness is the place of our first experience of snow, just like it is the experience of our first kiss. Differentiation, and the types of collisions we experience as teenagers are the most indelible features of one's personal history.

• The day you show up to school for Halloween for the first time and the gaze of your peers tell you that your costume is either too little or too much.

• Going to your first party and running head first into your own sense of autonomy.

• Being called on in history class to comment on James Madison's contribution to the formation of America's Constitution, and running headfirst into your own lack of preparation for class.

Tension is the dialogue between sweet and salty, umami and bitter. It is the dialectic between drama and repose, suspense and levity. Tension seems to be in the middle of everything we love about life.

Good Tension

If tension is cornerstone to life, how are we to give it better attention? Too often we settle for easy answers that collapse the tensile (tent like structure made up of strong tension points) structure of reality.

For example, at Versailles, shortly after WWI, the Allies took the path of least resistance, trading the exhausting work of long-term European stability for a vindictive revenge tour against Germany. Instead of sitting with the messy, nuanced tension of rebuilding a continent, they implemented crippling reparations and called it a day. Ultimately, they prioritized immediate emotional satisfaction over actual problem-solving, which laid the exact groundwork for a second global catastrophe two decades later in WWII.

In contrast, after World War II, the Allies still demanded accountability through occupation, demilitarization, and war-crimes trials, but the Marshall Plan added economic reconstruction and political reintegration, helping former enemies—including West Germany—become partners in a shared European future. The contrast reveals that lasting peace requires tension. In this case, the tensile structure of reality looked like holding together the seemingly opposed ideas of justice and mercy, so that security and restoration, justice and mercy were able to blossom. Versailles largely asked, “How do we prevent Germany from threatening us again?” while the Marshall Plan also asked, “What must Germany and Europe become so that we can flourish together?”

This Plural Moment

This idea has deep ramifications for our current sitz in leben (situation in life). The world is more plural than ever before. At a block party one neighbor brings halal kebabs, another brings vegan curry, someone arrives with Norwegian waffles, and the Baptist wonders whether kombucha counts as alcohol. At a cuisine level, one can imagine the benefits of this-new-plurality. But when it comes to political discourse or conversations around spiritual themes, proximity to the "other" suddenly gives way to dreams of "what once was". Unfortunately, most of the time, what is meant by the "good old days" is the comfort of predictability and sameness (homogeneity).

Let's be honest, sameness is easy to manage. Little thought needs to be given to what's for dinner because everyone agrees. It's easy to rest in a worldview, despite it's deficiencies, because no one shops around for a worldview - worldviews are the water in which we swim and the gut level place from which we live.

At its best, the United States belongs not to one race, religion, or cultural tradition, but to a plurality of people who have continually remade it together. Our tables carry flavors from nearly every corner of the world, each generation adding something new. Our greatest music and art have emerged where African, Indigenous, European, Asian, Latin American, and countless immigrant traditions have met, collided, and created something none could have produced alone. Even our most transformative politics—from abolition and suffrage to labor and civil rights—have arisen when different people brought their histories into public life and insisted that America’s promise grow large enough to include us all.

Tension is not necessarily evidence that something has gone wrong; it can also become the place where deeper truth, humility, and communion emerge. From a Trinitarian perspective, plurality is not the enemy of unity—unity without plurality is merely sameness, while plurality held together in love becomes communion. Our task, therefore, is neither to eliminate difference nor to retreat into relativism, but to become the kind of people who can inhabit difference without fragmentation or domination. As Justo González suggests, “God may be giving us a glimpse of the truly pluralistic Reign of God that stands at the heart of our hope.” Perhaps, then, this pluralized moment is not a threat from which the Church must escape, but a gift through which the Church may finally learn to embody the relational integration of differentiated persons in love. (Justo L. González, “Looking for God in a Plural World”)