Who will answer my big questions?
Big questions--not, "What's for dinner," but big questions, such as, "Who am I? Where do I belong? What's my purpose? How can this happen to me...to my family?"--are not questions with simple answers. Beware of either offering or accepting simple answers to big questions. The most effective companions are not those who are anxious to distill and to dispense information, but those who are willing to be silent though present, comfortable in abiding with another through the unknowing.
Men and women rob themselves when they move from one book to another, one person to another, one community to another, seeking simple answers to big questions without first acknowledging their inner clamor and embracing solitude and silence in the company of God.
The one seeking simple answers to big questions should be encouraged...first, to create a space in which she regards her questions as a quest--replete with narrative's essential joy and sorrow, love and fear, faith and doubt; second, to develop relationship with a "witness to human vulnerability" who will journey with him--one who does not hide behind his own emotional, mental and spiritual masks; third, to ask and, better, to live the questions.
Nineteenth-century poet Ranier Maria Rilke advised a student:
I would like to beg you...as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a 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 into the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer (Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet). Rather than ask, then, "Who will answer my questions?," perhaps it would be best to inquire...
"Who will help me to live my questions or, better, to live the quest?"
Henri Nouwen, a twentieth century author, observed:
When
God enters into the center of our lives to unmask our illusion of
possessing final solutions and to disarm us with always deeper
questions, we will not necessarily have an easier or simpler life, but
certainly a life that is honest, courageous, and marked with the ongoing
search for truth. Sometimes, in living the questions, answers are
found. More often, as our questions and issues are tested and mature in
solitude, the questions simply dissolve [Nouwen, Spiritual Direction,
pp. 12-13].
Name a time in your life when a painful or persistent question was dismissed or casually answered by another. What impact did that response have on you?
What's the persistent question at this time of your life?
Consider the truth of this statement: Our lives are not problems to be solved...our lives are journeys to be lived.
What would it look like to create a daily, reflective journal of your journey?
Want more? This week's article was taken from our newest resource, Henri Nouwen on Spiritual Direction, available here and now.
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