the Pitt 43: Living the Questions

Last time we dug into our Quaker heritage in the Vineyard and the Friends practice in a worship meeting.  I want to pick up where I left off in terms of a life of faith being more like a guided inquiry than a settled issue.  Among the Society of Friends, in their life of worship, rather than writing creeds and statements of beliefs, they write queries, that is questions that they want to explore together.  This is definitely counter the church cultures I've been involved in, and it seems so good and right to me. 

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” - Hebrews 11:1

It also reminds me of when I was in 4th grade (Miss Logan’s class! Go locomotives!!), I volunteered to be one of several students to be ‘blind-for-a-day’. We were blind-folded as soon as we got to school and paired with a classmate with sight, who would be our guide. This experience left quite a lasting mark on me. I vividly remember having to ask my guide for everything and about everything, and through our interaction, I learned that I could trust my guide. I learned it through asking and then living the questions I was asking, like:   

·       where is my pencil (like I could actually write anything, seriously, I was blind-folded?!)

·       where exactly were we in the hallways? (and where was the restroom…?)

·       what was for lunch? (I trusted them to help me sit down in a seat at lunch time and that the seat was there…and that it was my lunch in front of me.)

…but probably my most vivid memory is of my other senses coming alive in Miss Howell’s music class as I experienced music without eyes and only with my auditory and feeling senses…I could feel the music!  It made me realize that something that I could not see even with my eyes open had substance and verve and delved deeper inside me than merely my ear-drums.  And while I was utterly dependent for almost everything from my guide to live this one day in a disoriented fashion without sight, I discovered something: there was substance to things I could not see, like music and fresh air and even closed air inside the building felt different than outside at recess; I could live by faith (trust) only as I allowed myself to risk trusting my guide and then actually step into the experience that hobbled some of my senses but activated others.

“…for we walk by faith, not by sight…” - 2 Corinthains 5:7

The eternity in that teachable moment in my life has had a formational effect that echoes in my journey of faith.  As I have reflected on it since that time, quite possibly because of that profound experience, I am comfortable with mystery and living out questions that I may not fully answer completely. I love this quote from Henri Nouwen:

“…we need to live the questions of our lives, both alone and in community, as we seek our mission in the world…frequently, we are restlessly looking for answers, going from door to door, from book to book, or from church to church, without having really listened carefully and attentively to the questions within…Without a question, an answer is experienced as manipulation or control. Without a struggle, the help offered is considered interference. And without the desire to learn, direction is easily felt as oppression.”

Pat answers are seen for what they are: unreal and unloving.  Instead, as we interact with people who are truly struggling, I find this piece of advice from the prophet Jeremiah– as translated by Eugene Peterson in The Message at Jeremiah 23:25 – to be essential: “Instead of claiming to know what God says, ask questions of one another, such as ‘How do we understand God in this?’ But don’t go around pretending to know it all…”

My intuition tells me this is going to be significant for us in urban Pittsburgh.  I'm going to begin looking into a thought I had: Faith as Guided Inquiry.

So having studied and practiced spiritual direction for a few years, I have come to realize not only how important being non-manipulative is, but also how important the questions are – and following those questions by living in them, toward them in a centered-set kind-of-way; this means I need to trust Jesus.  I think we need to trust God in our endeavours to live the questions.  The advice the poet Rainer Rilke once wrote to a younger poet seems to ring true for us today:

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”

[to be continued...]