Three Questions

Lately, three themes have been bouncing around in my mind: promises, home, and wonder. I have been pondering them for several things - my blog, my ceremony work and my personal life. I am preparing a workshop on how to write meaning-filled wedding vows. I just finished a home-rededication ceremony. And I am hoping to experience a little wonder in the upcoming holiday season.

And while all these things can be life-affirming and fun, they are also “big” ideas. I find myself asking am I really up to dealing with such immense concepts? Can I get them right? Can I find “the” answer?

Maybe the answer is to just keep being curious.

Then I listened to Krista Tippett, whose voice never fails to inspire me. She is the creator and host of the podcast On Being. Whether interviewing physicists, poets, archbishops, or activists, she opens our eyes not to just new subjects, but new ways of seeing. I cannot emphasize enough how amazing she is as a resource for exploring important questions.

And questions were the focus of a nine-minute piece she just put out. I had to laugh. There I was pondering questions and answers, and the universe sets before me someone I greatly respect, taking up that very subject.

She talked about living the questions that perplex us. She brought up my favorite quote from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke from his “Letters to a Young Poet.” 

(Published posthumously in 1929, it was a collection of ten letters of advice to Franz Xaver Kappus on writing, creating, and living. The 19-year-old military student wanted someone to tell him if his poetry was any good, and how did one actually  become a poet.)

Rilke’s advice was not exactly a step-by-step manual. He wrote, “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 now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now 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 questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

When I read that years ago, it knocked me over with its depth and simplicity.  And since then I have tried to be a little easier on myself when I feel confused by life and downright harassed by all the possible answers. I have, indeed, tried to live the questions.

Tippett had a similar reaction to his words. Questions became a practice for her. She went on to discuss the qualities of the questions we ask each other and ourselves. I took some notes while listening to her. The following is a bit paraphrased:

“Questions elicit answers in their likeness. It’s hard to respond to a combative question with anything but a combative answer. The opposite is also true. It’s hard to resist a generous question. There is something redemptive and life-giving about asking a better question. We are shaped by the quality of the questions asked of us as much as the answers we have in us.”

She sees creating, and asking, and living morally imaginative questions as a spiritual discipline. She encourages us to formulate a question and commit to living with it for a month or a year and see where it takes us, what it shows us.

So I am taking the three themes I have been pondering, promises, home, and wonder, and turning them into questions I can work on living.

Why do we make promises, what gift does a vow made give to us?

How can I really live in my home, not just inhabit it?

How can we create child-like wonder in our ordinary days?

I totally get Franz Xaver Kappus’s craving for a different response. There is a part of me that chomps at the bit to construct some great answers to my queries. Yet, I am willing to try to delay that desire. I am willing to try to live the questions and see where they take me. 

Anyway, I am beginning to think that the really good questions are never truly answered – not definitively. Or maybe the answer is to just keep being curious.

Remember to create, celebrate, and gather.

(I hope what I write here on Celebrationism.net is helpful. But I know that it cannot replace actual therapy. If you are dealing with serious emotional challenges, please seek out a mental health professional.)

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