Bless the Questions

 

One of my favorite quotes is from Rainer Maria Rilke, “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.”  This week, perhaps you found yourself a bit frustrated or flummoxed because you could only think of times when you felt afraid or unloved.  To be sure, negative thoughts can stick and stay around like Velcro while positive thoughts slip away quickly like an egg off Teflon.  Plus, we live in a culture that craves and cultivates quick responses on social media.  We want easily consumable words and images that we can rally around.  Brian McLaren says that we often prefer a simple lie to an ambiguous/contradictory truth.  But to live the questions?  To live in uncertainty and ambiguity and contradiction?  We are all a mystery inhabiting this earth.  Why we do what we do when we do it, is not so easily understood or articulated, especially when we feel put on the spot.  So let us bless the questions we hold with shrugged shoulders whilst scratching our heads.  Let us bless the big questions that don’t get solved instantly or immediately but take time to unfold and as they unfold new wrinkles appear that change everything.  Let us bless the small questions that can baffle and bewilder us, because sometimes I don’t know which flavor of ice cream I want!  Let us bless the invitation to doubt, holding onto a faith that has doubt dancing with it, trusting that if we are 100 percent certain, why would we need faith?  Let us bless the impractical and inconvenient and moments it feels like it is two steps forward and twenty steps backwards!  Let us bless this moment it all its messy beautifulness and amazing awfulness that life is not a math equation to solve but a question and mystery that we live with God, each other, and the swirling spirit within.  Bless you with the questions today and the ones that visit you tomorrow, for in our prayerful ponderings (just as Mary did the night Jesus was born), we might discover the divine in the most unusual (a manger), unlikely (a stable), unconventional (with shepherds) places of our life.  May it be so for you and for me.  Amen.