“ALL life is a tension of apparent opposites. Life abides and life advances by a sort of counter-pull — what I have called a tension — between forces that seem to be the negation of each other. Thus our life is conditioned by death: the animal dies and the man eats it and lives; man dies to himself in order to live to God, and living to God finds himself too. Again our freedom is made perfect by obedience; thus a man is free to live if he obeys the laws of nutrition, is free to build himself a home, to sail the oceans of the world, to fly in the air, if he obeys the laws that govern the universe. One might go on endlessly listing such things. And no one of them is accidental or incidental. Our life is truly seen as a tension of opposites. We ourselves, like all created things, exist because omnipotence made something of nothing. We are best expressed as nothingness worked upon by omnipotence, the two most ultimate of all opposites.”

— Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity (Sheed and Ward, 1946)

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