Consumed in questions...

I was having lunch with a friend on Monday, great conversation and fellowship...with Jesus at our table. We talked about the questions in our lives. How is answers leave us so unchanged, and comfortable, whereas questions unhinge us, leave us teetering on the edge. Questions almost envoke a sense of fear, it is like we're falling and need to grab something fast. But yet, questions transform us, they humble us, drawing us deeper and deeper into something beyond us. We seem to be a church of comfortable answers, of having God, and life's mysteries figured out...is there no more mystery, and questions left?

My ego lives in the world of fast food, it growls like a hungry stomach for instant gratification...it demands immediate satisfaction in the form of easy digestible answers. Junk food answers, no nutritional value, that leave me fat and lazy. They never sustain me like deep mysterious questions.

I am told, for example, that Jesus only directly answers 3 of the 183 questions that he himself is asked in the four Gospels! (I will let you find them!) This is totally surprising to people who have grown up assuming that the very job description of religion is to give people answers and to resolve peoples' dilemmas...the church is the place folks come to for anwers, solutions to there problems, a religious fitness program. Apparently this is not Jesus' understanding of the function of religion because he operates very differently.  Jesus either keeps silent as with Pilate (John 19:9), returns with another question as with the coin of Caesar (Matthew 22:19), or gives an illustration, as with the Good Samaritan story (Luke 10:30).

Instead, Jesus asks questions, good questions, unnerving questions, re-aligning questions, transforming questions.  He leads us into liminal, and therefore transformative space, much more than taking us into any moral high ground of immediate certitude or ego superiority. He subverts up front the cultural or theological assumptions that we are eventually going to have to face anyway.  He leaves us betwixt and between, where God and grace can get at us, and where we are not at all in control. It is interesting how little room there is for grace in etched in stone answers. It probably does not work for a large majority of people, at least in my experience.  They merely ignore you or fight you.  Maybe this is why we have paid so little attention to Jesus questions and emphasized instead his seeming answers. They give us more a feeling of success and closure...we can walk away having figured it out, solved the puzzle. We made of Jesus a systematic theologian, who walked around teaching dogmas, instead of a peripatetic and engaging transformer of the soul.  Easy answers instead of hard questions allow us to try to change others instead of allowing God to change us. 

In the evening, as the light dimmed and silence surrounded me...I thought about my friend all the conversation we had around lunch and was reminded of this poem by, I believe, Thomas Merton...

My Lord God
I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself,
and the fact that I think I am following
your will does not mean
that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that my desire to please you
does in fact please you.
And I hope that I have that desire
in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything
apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this
you will lead me by the right road
though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore will I trust you always
though I may seem to be lost
and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear,
for you are ever with me,
and you will never leave me
to face my perils alone.

Comforting, that even in the midst of the unknown, the depth of mystery, in my questions that seem to have no center or edges...He is with me. An answer so mysterious, so beyond...but, yet so comforting, I pull it around me like a blanket. It is all I really need.

Comments

[Richard L]

Great prayer! Any follow up from the art exhibition in Lent?

[A]

Yep, that's Merton. Great stuff.

[Kel]

I read here often but don't comment much - today I had to

being led into that liminal space is scary stuff, because that is exactly the place where we must acknowledge we are not in control - and we don't know all the answers

most people will contort themselves and their lives into all sorts of crazy things so they never have to be in that space

the place of unknowing

thanks for this post

[ron]

Hey Kel, thanks for dropping by and sharing. I'm finding each day we have the opportunity to walk in that liminal space...it is there, if we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear. It takes the courage to surrender that it is not in me to go there...that it is only " in " Jesus I can go. I guess it has to do with daily carrying our cross...of dying and living in the power of His resurrection. Blessings my Australian brother...Ron+

[Kel]

I'm a she not a he!
just had to clear that one up . . .