Читать книгу There are no Right Answers to Wrong Questions - Peter C. Wilcox - Страница 10

“The longest journey is the journey inward”

—Dag Hammarskjold

In 1968, Thomas Merton wrote his second diary, which he called Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. He said that this book was completely different in its style and content from his first diary, The Sign of Jonas, which he wrote in 1953. This second diary was “a personal version of the world in the 1960s.” It was very different because Merton’s questions about life, society and issues in the world were very different. He said: “These notes . . . are an implicit dialogue with other minds, a dialogue in which questions are raised. But do not expect to find ‘my answers.’ I do not have clear answers to current questions. I do have questions, and, as a matter of fact, I think a man is known better by his questions than by his answers.”10

Merton had come to realize the importance of asking the right questions that shape us. It is our questions that allow us to grow. How, then, do we get to the right questions for our own lives? The right questions about God and our spiritual lives. The right questions about our own lives on so many levels. The right questions for us to grow spiritually and psychologically. The right questions for us in terms of the more. And how do we assist others in giving voice to their right questions?

For each of us it’s a learning process. We each have to learn how to ask our own right questions. Here are some helpful ideas on how we might accomplish this.

A. Living Your Questions

The first thing we need to learn is how to live our questions. This is what the popular German writer Rainer Maria Rilke tried to encourage a friend to do when his friend was struggling with several issues in his life. In his book, Letters to a Young Poet, he wrote: “I beg you . . . to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the question now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”11

Live the questions now so that at some point you will live your way into the answers. There is an art to living your questions. You peel them. You listen to them. You struggle with them. You let them spawn new questions. You hold the unknowing inside. You linger with it instead of rushing into half-baked answers. The Jesuit writer Anthony de Mello put it very well: “some people will never learn anything because they grasp too soon. Wisdom, after all, is not a station you arrive at, but a manner of traveling . . . To know exactly where you are headed may be the best way to go astray. Not all who loiter are lost.”12 As a matter of fact, those who loiter in the question long enough will live into the answer. “Search and you will find,” Jesus said (Matt 7: 7). I sometimes wonder if this means search long enough and you will find. It is the patient act of dwelling in the darkness of a question that eventually unravels the answer.

Let me give two examples. A woman begins to notice that her work no longer gives her the satisfaction it did in the past, and then she starts having difficulty in her job. It’s perplexing, painful and frightening. At first the only question she asks is what do I need to do to keep this job, to get comfortable in this job again? But as she lives with her question and struggles with its implications, her question begins to change. What might God be calling me to in terms of my vocation at this time, she begins to ask? And, as she lives with her new question, she eventually lives into the answer that she ultimately feels is God’s will for her.

In the second example, a man receives an unexpected inheritance—a large amount of money. The first question that comes to mind for him is what can I spend this on? But as he lives with the question, reflects on it, prays about it, his question, too, begins to change. He now asks, how might this gift that has fallen into my life be a gift to myself and others? In these examples, there is time to take action—to decide about the job and to figure out what to do with the inheritance. But before doing this, and in the midst of doing this, we are invited to stay with our questions, to live with them so that they will connect us with the Lord who can be met along our vocational paths and glimpsed in unexpected gifts.

B. Learning to Wait—in Expectation

Simone Weil said that “waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life.”13 But most of us find that waiting for anything can be very annoying and frustrating. In our society, we are not patient waiters.

We live in an age of acceleration, in an era so seduced by the instantaneous that we are in grave danger of losing our ability to wait. Life moves at a staggering pace. Computers yield immediate answers. Pictures develop before our eyes. Satellites beam television signals from practically anywhere, allowing distant images on different continents to appear almost instantly in our living rooms. Complex life issues are routinely introduced, dealt with and solved in neat thirty-minute segments on television. Space travel, mobile phones, instant coffee, disposable diapers. In almost every way, we are enclosed in a speeding world. We are surrounded by fast lanes, express mail, instant credit. Faster is better. Ask almost anyone. Quick and easy are magical words with enormous seductive powers. Advertisers know that if they put them on a product it sells better—whether the product is instant potatoes, instant money or instant pain relief. We’re told that we can walk off ten pounds in two weeks, melt five inches in five days, or just take a pill and do it overnight.

A young monk once asked Abba Moses, one of the desert fathers, how to find true spiritual growth. “Go, sit in your cell”, said the monk, “and your cell will teach you everything.”14 Somehow, we have lost this important secret in the spiritual life—that in stayedness, as George Fox called it, we find the realm of transformation. In the stayedness of waiting, we find the questions emerging that we need in order to grow. The Scriptures are filled with stories about the importance of waiting. In the Old Testament, we see Noah waiting for the flood waters to recede; Daniel waits through the night in a den of lions; Sarah waits in her barrenness for a child; Jacob waits for Rebecca’s hand. The Israelites wait in Egypt, then wait forty more years in the desert. Later, they wait seventy years in Babylonian captivity. Jonah waits in a fish’s belly. In the New Testament, Mary waits; Simeon waits to see the Messiah; the apostles wait for Pentecost; Paul waits in prison.

Furthermore, the Bible is rich with language urging us to wait. “In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength” (Isa 30: 15). “For you I wait all day long” (Ps 25: 5). “My soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning” (Ps 130: 6). “If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay” (Hab 2: 3). “But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Rom 8: 25). Sometimes, I wonder if waiting is the missing link in our spiritual growth, the lost and forgotten experience crucial to becoming fully human, fully Christian, fully ourselves.

One day, while reading the Gospels, it occurred to me that when important times of transition came for Jesus, he entered places of waiting—the wilderness, a garden, the tomb. Jesus’ life was a balanced rhythm of waiting for God and then expressing the fruits of that waiting.

We can easily view waiting as mere passivity. However, the words passive and passion come from the same Latin root, pati, which means to endure. Waiting is both passive and passionate. It’s a vibrant, contemplative work. It means descending into the self, into God, into the deeper labyrinths of prayer. It involves allowing our questions to emerge, listening to disinherited voices within ourselves, and facing the wounded and broken parts of our lives. It means struggling with the vision of who we really are in God and developing the courage to live that vision.

A retreatant at St. Meinrad Archabbey tells the story of how difficult it was for her to quiet herself and become still. One day she noticed one of the monks sitting perfectly still beneath a tree. He was the picture of waiting. Later she sought him out. “I saw you today sitting beneath the tree—just sitting there so still. How is it that you can wait so patiently in the moment? I can’t seem to get used to the idea of doing nothing.” He broke into a wonderful grin. “Well, there’s the problem right there, young lady. You’ve bought into the cultural myth that when you’re waiting you’re doing nothing . . . . When you’re waiting, you’re not doing nothing. You’re doing the most important something there is. You’re allowing your soul to grow up. If you can’t be still and wait, you can’t become what God created you to be.”15

One time, Jesus told a parable about the ten maidens waiting for the bridegroom (Matt 25: 1–13). Five came prepared with extra lamp oil to wait through the night. The other five didn’t plan on having to wait, so they brought only the oil that was in their lamps. Naturally, their lamps gave out. When they left to go buy more oil, the bridegroom showed up, and they missed him.

On one level, the point of this story is that we should always be prepared. But it is also a story about the importance of waiting—waiting through the dark night of our questions. The idea is that waiting precedes celebration. If you don’t show up prepared to wait, you may miss the transcendent when it happens.

It is also important to see in the Scriptures that we have a God that waits for us. The parable of the prodigal son could also be named the parable of the waiting father. It tells us much more about God than anything else—a God who watches and waits with a full heart for us to make our homecoming.

Henry David Thoreau wrote at the age of twenty-five, “nothing can be more useful to a man than a determination not to be hurried.”16 He decided to turn away from the lives of quiet desperation he saw all around him and march to his own different drummer. On February 8, 1857, Thoreau wrote this in his journal: “you think I am impoverishing myself by withdrawing from men, but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature.”17

What has happened to our ability to dwell in unknowing, to live inside a question and coexist in the tensions of uncertainty? Where is our willingness to incubate pain and let it bring something new to birth? What has happened to patient unfolding, to endurance? These things are what form the ground of waiting. And if you look carefully, you will see that they are also the seedbed of creativity and growth. As Thomas Merton observed, “the imagination should be allowed a certain amount of time to browse around.”18 Creativity flourishes not in certainty but in questions. However, security is always very seductive. For most of us, it is much more difficult to venture out of our comfort zone. We prefer instant knowing rather than deliberate waiting. When we learn to wait, we experience that where we are in the moment is truly what is important and precious in life. We discover, in T.S. Eliot’s words, “a lifetime burning in every moment.”19 Through our journey of waiting, we come home to live out a new, more authentic vision of who we are. As Eliot also wrote: “we shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and to know the place for the first time.”20

God is offering each of us an invitation. A call to waiting. But we have to be patient. We have to let go, tap our creative stillness, and let the right question emerge. Most of all, we have to trust that the Lord is always present to us helping us live into the answer.

C. Learning to Become Still

Another factor that is important in asking the right questions in life is learning to become still—quiet—reflective. Why? Because it’s only when we are still and reflective about life, that we can allow those right questions to emerge. Without reflection about the issues in our lives, we will often jump too quickly to the wrong answer or never get to the right question.

One of the best known but least observed verses in the Bible is this: “Be still, and know that I am God” (Ps 46: 10). The verse tells us something so powerful that we scarcely recognize it. It informs us that in the act of being still there is a knowing, a transcendent knowing that is available to us at no other time. The counselor Helen Luke cautions that without significant times to be still, we “extinguish the possibility of growth and walk backwards.”21 Here is the paradox: we achieve our deepest progress standing still.

The story of Bartimaeus in Mark’s Gospel (10: 46–52) is a wonderful story about waiting in stillness. He waited along the side of a country road. He lay on a roadside outside Jericho, waiting for Jesus to come and heal his blindness. But he also waited with hope and trust. He possessed an immense faith that Jesus was coming soon. We don’t know how long he waited—only that when Jesus finally passed by, Bartimaeus filled with faith, asked for his sight and received it. The gift of sight, the gift of being able to truly see what our important questions are in life, comes when we are still, filled with hope, faith and trust.

Jesus seemed to always have a soft spot for the marginal people in life, including beggars. He touched, healed and blessed them. He spoke highly of a beggar named Lazarus who lay under a rich man’s table, begging for crumbs. Can it be that beggars know how to open their hands, trusting that the crumbs of grace and mercy will fall? Is it because they have faith in something beyond themselves? Beggars are reduced by necessity to the sharp knowledge of their utter dependence. They have no bank accounts, no investments or stocks or any of those things we think give us security and in which we place so much of our hope. Beggars must simply trust, moment by moment, that somehow they will get fed. They live off hope. They live, not with clenched fists but with open hands, ready to receive. Henri Nouwen wrote, “when you want to pray, then, the first question is: how do I open my closed hands?”22 Prayer is a way of life which allows you to find a stillness in the midst of the world where you open your hands to God’s promises, and find hope. Bartimaeus can teach us about prayer where we are sitting ragged in our need with our hands wide open, trusting that the Lord will give us the grace to allow the right question in us to emerge.

D. Learning to Listen

Sometimes, we have a tendency to make things much more complicated than they need to be. That’s the way it often is with prayer. Now, we all know that there are many different ways of praying, many different techniques that we can learn that will enhance our prayer life. But there is great value in keeping things simple and uncomplicated in our prayer life.

If we look on prayer as basically a conversation between us and God, we may be inclined to focus on our part of the conversation—what we say to God. But if we can learn to listen to what God has to say to us, we might find our prayer life taking on a new dimension. And this can be very important for the right question to emerge within ourselves. If we can simply be in God’s presence and not worry about what we are to say, we can hear what the Lord is asking of us. But this is not easy. We are so busy and there are so many distractions around us, that it takes practice to simply sit in the Lord’s presence and listen to what He might say to us or what He might be inviting us to. What I mean by this is exemplified in a story about an old peasant and St. John Vianney, the Cure d’Ars. It seems as though this old peasant would simply come into an empty church and just sit for hours. One day, the Cure d’Ars decided to ask him what he did during all these hours in church. The old peasant replied, “nothing. I just look at Him and He looks at me.” This old peasant understood what listening as a way of praying was all about.

That is one of the ways that learning how to listen in our prayer life allows our right question to emerge. This is not a matter of frantically praying for answers to anything in particular but is open to all possibilities. Emily Dickinson wrote: “I dwell in possibility,” and so do each of us as we try to discern what the Lord is asking of us. Very often, our right question is not something monumental. Rather, it is often something that has to do with the more, with generosity. For some of us, the more might be about our careers. For others, the emphasis might be on relationships and how we can become more loving. For still others, like the rich young man, the Lord may be asking us to give up something, some dimension of our lives, so that we can follow Him more closely. Perhaps we are being invited to give up our jealousy, envy or some grudge that we are holding. Even the idea of acceptance or surrender can be associated with the idea of generosity. Maybe the right question for some of us is to accept something in our lives that we can’t change. This certainly requires a great deal of courage, faith and trust. Whatever the particular area of life is that we are concerned about—if we have as a basic stance in life that we want to be more generous, to give the more in whatever ways the Lord asks of us, then as we listen more in our prayer, the right question will come to us.

St. Paul understood what prayer as listening is all about. In his Letter to the Romans he wrote: “The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God” (Rom 8: 26–27).

E. Learning to Be Courageous

We might not ordinarily associate the idea of courage with learning to ask the right questions about our lives. But it can be a very important element in the process. Why? Because it takes courage to be open to new ideas, new ways of thinking about things, new questions that might open up new possibilities in our lives.

Several years ago, I retired from a career of over thirty years in counseling and teaching at several universities. One of the things I remember reflecting on and praying about was what I would do with my time. How could I best use it? I remember praying about wanting to be open to all possibilities. I thought I wanted to spend some of my time doing volunteer work but was not sure what kind of work, or how I could best use my talents. As I prayed more about this, I discovered that this was an important right question for me at the time. I wanted to live with this question so that I could live into the answer.

Gradually, I began to think that I would like to help the poor in some way. Although I had done this in a variety of ways in the past, I felt this time I was being invited to work with the poor in a direct way—to be on the front line, so to speak. At this point in my discernment process, I mentioned this desire to several of my friends, and they wondered if this was the best way to use my talents. After all, they said, you have your doctorate, have owned a very successful counseling practice and have taught at several universities. Would it not be a better use of your talents to try and become a member of some organization and influence policy development on a larger scale? Valuing their feedback and wanting to be open to where the Lord might be leading me, I began to incorporate this question into my own prayer life. However, as I did this over the next several months, I kept coming back to a desire to work directly with the poor. Eventually, things became clearer for me. As I tried to live the question, I lived into the answer. I have always had a special love for St. Francis of Assisi, who loved and served the poor, and I knew there was a place in Baltimore called the Franciscan Center. I felt called to contact them and eventually began volunteering there one day a week. One of the many things we do at the center is to feed the hungry, and this is what I ended up doing. I am one of the many volunteers who feed a hot meal to between 400 and 500 people, five days a week. This has allowed me to be on the front line in serving the poor. Maybe at another time I will be called to be on the board of an organization or invited to develop policy or strategy, but for now this seems to be a right answer to a right question for me.

Courage comes from the French word coeur, which means heart. In order to ask the right questions or to make changes in our lives requires that we take heart. The heart is the seat of the will. This is the place God awakens, the place where the gentle uprooting takes place. It takes courage to let go and yield to the questions that come into our hearts. It takes courage to become who you are meant to be.

The opposite of courage is not only fear but security. In the story of the rich young man, Jesus told him to “go, sell what you have . . . and come follow me” (Mark 10: 21). Besides the obvious meaning of this parable, I sometimes wonder if Jesus might have also meant, go, sell your security. Stop clinging to your old ways. Let go and launch out into the deep of yourself. Where there is no risk, no new questions, there is no becoming, no growth; and where there is no becoming, there is no real life. The true spiritual sojourners are people who risk, who are willing to let go.

Some years ago, I heard a story about a lady who volunteered at a shelter for abused children. One day, this lady met a boy named Billy. He had been terribly wounded and was reluctant to go beyond the security he had found in his room. The day of the Christmas party, he shrank against the pillow on his bed and refused to leave his room. “But aren’t you coming to the party?” the lady asked. He shook his head. “Sure you are,” said another volunteer beside me. “All you need is to put on your courage skin.” His eye brows went up. He thought for a moment. “Okay,” he finally said. While the lady watched, the other volunteer helped him don an imaginary suit of courage skin, and off he went to the party, willing to risk leaving the secure place of his room. Go, sell all you have, Jesus said, and follow me into life. Sometimes, we have to leave our comfortable lives, listen to our new right questions in order to grow and gain everything. Maybe in the end, we need to be more like Billy. We need to put on our courage skin.

10. Merton, Conjectures, 1.

11. Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 34–35.

12. de Mello, The Heart of the Enlightened, 38.

13. Weil, First and Last Notebooks, 99.

14. Merton, Wisdom of the Desert, 30.

15. Kidd, When the Heart Waits, 22.

16. Thoreau, The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Journal 1, 385.

17. Quoted in Robert Bly, The Winged Life, 58.

18. Merton, Contemplation in a World of Action, 358.

19. Eliot, “East Coker,” 129.

20. Eliot, “The Little Gidding,” 145.

21. Luke, Dark Wood to White Rose, 42.

22. Nouwen, With Open Hands, 16.