Asking
Questions
“I
would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience
with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the
questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in
a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could
not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps
then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even
noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
Rainer
Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)
This
quote from Rilke was the contemporary reading at my church yesterday.
We hold that God didn't stop communicating with humanity with the
Book of Revelation, but is still speaking today. Our minister, Sally,
talked about how questioning is often shamed out of us as we go
through school. The kid that asks too many questions is made fun of
and shunned until he stops asking. I remember a boy who was in school
with me, whose IQ was several standard deviations above the rest of
ours, and not only did he ask too many questions, but he corrected
the teachers when their information didn't jive with his research. He
was not a popular child.
There's
so much that we aren't born knowing, isn't there? As little children,
we learn quickly to ask a million questions a day. I remember times
when my own children were small, that I thought I would pull out all
my hair if I heard “Why?” one more time. If we are fortunate, we
keep that curiosity throughout life. We never stop wanting to know
more about a variety of things. A curious mind it a pearl of great
price.
Sometimes,
however, we have questions for which there are no answers. The big
questions, like, “Why are we here?” and “What is God?” and
“Why is there evil in the world?” have no easy answers. We can only speculate. But
holding the questions themselves is of value. They force you to open
your eyes and ears and mind to the possibility that the answers will
come. Rilke is quite right, some questions can only be lived into.
I
hope you never stop questioning. Learning is a life-long pursuit that
keeps you nimble. When you run up against something unanswerable,
just hold the question, and life will show you the way.
In
the spirit,
Jane
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