Our Questions

Hello faithful family, friends, and followers and welcome again to the continuing story of our new normal life. We have had a good week despite the turmoil going on in the world around us and in some of the lives closest to us. Tragedies, trials, upheavals, and uncertainty come in many forms, from personal and interpersonal, to national and international - physically, relationally, financially, and geopolitically.

I have to say that one result of our having been through an experience like the accident and its aftermath, is that it has a way of “leveling” many things. What I mean is that, whatever the issue, whether conflict and uncertainty locally, nationally and/or in the world as a whole, I sometimes actually appreciate my PTSD flashbacks, because once I catch my breath, I can usually feel a sense of calm along the lines of, “If, by God’s mercy and grace, we made it through that, we can make it through anything!” 🙏🏻

Or, from another perspective as Thomas Merton once put it:

“Only the man who has had to face despair is really convinced that he needs mercy. Those who do not want mercy never seek it. It is better to find God on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt a need... A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless than one that always verges on despair.”

Not that I feel our life, “always verges on despair,” but I appreciate the point I believe he was trying to make.

The turmoil, trials, and challenges we all face, whether despairing or not, often lead to asking questions of God and of each other and can send us, or at least me, doom scrolling through our news and social media feeds. But this week I came across yet another reflection from Frederick Buechner which I found personally very helpful in redirecting my emotional and spiritual energies. Buechner writes:

On her deathbed Gertrude Stein is said to have asked, “What is the answer?” Then, after a long silence, “What is the question?”

Don’t start looking in the Bible for the answers it gives. Start by listening for the questions it asks.

We are much involved, all of us, with questions about things that matter a good deal today but will be forgotten by this time tomorrow—the immediate wheres and whens and hows that face us daily at home and at work—but at the same time we tend to lose track of the questions about things that matter always, life-and-death questions about meaning, purpose, and value. To lose track of such deep questions as these is to risk losing track of who we really are in our own depths and where we are really going.

There is perhaps no stronger reason for reading the Bible than that somewhere among all those India-paper pages there awaits each reader whoever he is the one question which, though for years he may have been pretending not to hear it, is the central question of his own life. Here are a few of them:

• What is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? (Matthew 16:26)

• Am I my brother’s keeper? (Genesis 4:9)

• If God is for us, who can be against us? (Romans 8:31)

• What is truth? (John 18:38)

• How can a man be born when he is old? (John 3:4)

• What does a man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? (Ecclesiastes 1:3)

• Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? (Psalm 139:7)

• Who is my neighbor? (Luke 10:29)

• What shall I do to inherit eternal life? (Luke 10:25)

When you hear the question that is your question, then you have already begun to hear much.