GETTING THE QUESTIONS RIGHT

        Whether from exasperation or for encouragement, Dad used to say to his eldest, "Son, you ask more questions than a Philadelphia lawyer."  I never understood the allusion to the Philadelphia lawyer but I sensed the appropriateness of seeking more information and knowledge.  Knowledge for its own sake can be , well, informative and also satisfying.  'Knowledge seeking understanding' takes the enterprise to another plane.

     So,  "I don't know" perhaps becomes one of the most difficult acknowledgements we can own.  Ambiguity, uncertainty, ambivalence, open-mindedness, and other such postures which indicate tentativeness of knowledge and understanding do not come readily nor easily. Nor are they often popular. Especially is this the case when circumstances and persons (sometimes literally) cry out for "ANSWERS' and "CERTAINTY".

    Tonight in casually surfing assorted blogs, I came across one which assigned to a literal flaming HELL anyone with a scriptural interpretation at variance with the author's. What CERTAINTY of having all the ANSWERS!  In the 1950's a comedian named Brother Dave Gardner had a routine that included this line: "Don't tell me your doubts. I have enough doubts of my own.  Tell me something you believe in !"  And, in the face of BIG QUESTIONS, his sentiment finds a lot of "Amen's".

   By contrast, this morning in my re-reading of Parker Palmer's Let Your Life Speak, I met anew his account of friends who came to "comfort" him when he was in the depths of a major clinical depression.  While his visitors meant to be helpful and kind, their 'answers' failed.
After his return to health, he wrote: "One of the hardest things we must do sometimes is to be present to another person's pain without trying to 'fix' it, to simply stand respectfully at the edge of that person's mystery and misery." (page 63) As a therapist, I am still learning that speaking as if I fully understand my client's concern can be grandiose and downright insulting. . . much like Job's 'friends' in that Biblical book.  

    Life is full of questions, some trivial, some important: "Think it'll rain?", "Who won the game?", "Will you forgive me?". It is a great achievement to ask the right questions, especially those that have to do with  life's meaning. We can live without a lot of things but not about meaning and its sibling, purpose.

    My academic and spiritual mentor, the late Reverend Doctor Harrell Beck of Boston University School of Theology,
often urged  that , "The questions of God are infinitely more satisfying that the answers of [humans]."  Questions are healthy; they mean that we are paying attention to life.  And it is important to frame the questions well which is not always easy nor pleasant.  An anonymous author wrote,  "The answers are important only if you ask the right questions."

   Ultimately, the questions are not solely intellectual. Rather they call for living, even with partial answers, partial understandings, ambiguities.  There sometimes seems to be an abundance of "Answer People." The late Dag Hammerskjold scornfully noted of an unidentified person, "Not knowing the questions, it was easy for him to give the answers."  To some of the questions, "answers" will come in time; for others, it is okay to say, "We don't know."  Our knowledge is tentative and provisional.

   Esther de Waal, an Anglian woman steeped in the Rule of St. Benedict, wrote in Living with Contradiction that God's promise "is not that we shall escape the hard things but that we shall be given grace to face them, to enter into them, and to come through them. The promise is not that we shall not be afraid. It is that we need not fear fear." (p. 116)

     What that 'looks like' and how one grows into that kind of groundedness are, I believe, life long questions that defy cliches and easy answers.  Emmanuel --- heard often during the recent Advent and Christmas season --- can provide a solid place: "God With Us".
   
     Satchel