Questions, Questions
Sermon given at the Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
January 6, 2019
by The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
Sitting in a hotel lobby reading the New York Times while waiting for a car, I became aware of a conversation between two women seated near me. The pair, perhaps a mother and daughter, were discussing something related to the younger woman’s career, which from the way they were talking was reaching a critical juncture. I try not to listen to other people’s conversations to which I have not been invited, but I’m blessed…and cursed…by quite sensitive hearing and often my attempt or intention to not listen to something often proves unsuccessful short of removing myself from the room.
As the conversation progressed, the older woman began to press the younger woman about the importance of playing up her STEM education, which focuses on science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and being aware of her strengths and weaknesses in each area. Clearly whatever career this young woman was about to begin, it had required a significant body of knowledge. The attainment of which, presumably will enhance her marketability in the workplace. And, more generally, will undoubtedly brand her a “smart” person.
When I was a kid a smart person was someone who had all the answers. This was usually a person others would describe as “good at school.” The person with the best grades. The highest test scores. An honor roll student. Smart people were those who seemed to know something about almost anything. Perhaps this describes you or someone you know.
Somewhere along the way I gained a reputation for being a smart person. Which admittedly, provided some small consolation for a kid always picked last for any activity that might call for anything even remotely resembling athleticism. For when it came to picking teams for games where having a broad store of information and the ability to recall it as needed was a competitive advantage, games like Trivial Pursuit, I was often picked first.
When playing such games having the answers all but assures success. Yet, in so much of life, having ready answers, or worse, thinking we have all the answers, does not necessarily assure success and even risks denying it to us.
I’m reminded now of a conversation I witnessed at a Christmas party just a few weeks ago where a young man in his early twenties, fresh from an internship but not yet graduated from college, was pontificating on the realities of the workplace to a man more than twice his age. A man who, incidentally, had just recently regained employment after being laid off from a job he had held for more than a decade. Fortunately for the young man, coming across as a “know it all”, was greeted with knowing amusement at his naivete rather than offense by the older man. A potential employer may be less forgiving if the young man were to repeat such a performance at an interview.
On a broader scale, having or thinking we have all the answers courts disaster. History reveals when we’re “too smart for our own good”, as the saying goes, economies collapse, nations fall, and a planet is hurtled toward demise.
What we seem not to realize or be able to accept is that ready answers are not THE answer. Such answers will not and cannot fulfill us for very long. They cannot deliver us from our existential angst. And they will not save us, or the planet for that matter.
So, if not answers, then what?
Questions.
Questions like those the contemporary poet and philosopher David Whyte calls, “questions that have no right to go away.” In other words, perennial questions or as Whyte himself described them in 2012 article, Questions, “that have to do with the person we are about to become…. They almost always have something to do with how we might be more generous, more courageous, more present, more dedicated, and they also have something to do with timing: when we might step through the doorway into something bigger, better—both beyond ourselves and yet more of ourselves at the same time.”
These are not problem solving questions, but attention shifting questions. Questions which point toward different and new perspectives. An endeavor another contemporary philosopher, Alain De Botton, suggests is interesting, even inspiring if for no other reason than, “because unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.” Perhaps this is, in part, why Whyte, calls them, “questions that can make or unmake a life.”
What are some examples of such questions? If you’ve been wondering that since the reading and come up empty, take heart. They’re not questions generated on the spot by conscious effort of thought. Rather, they tend to emerge, often unexpectedly along the paths of our inner landscape, “Sometimes if you move carefully through the forest breathing like the ones in the old stories who could cross a shimmering bed of dry leaves without a sound, you come to a place whose only task is to trouble you with tiny but frightening requests conceived out of nowhere but in this place beginning to lead everywhere.”
Sometimes, they don’t even come as words, but more of a disturbance, not necessarily unpleasant, but something which nonetheless attracts our attention. “Requests”, as Whyte describes them, “to stop what you are doing right now, and to stop what you are becoming while you do it.”
This happened to me just last week on New Years Day, my last night in Paris. My husband Kevin and I were attending a concert at the Madeleine Church. Sometime into the concert I felt my face contort and eyes well with tears as if I were about to cry. It happened several times during the concert. No question constructed of words emerged from this, but rather a simple reminder to pay attention to what moves or stirs me, to observe what is going on in and around me, and to ask what in me or my life might be seeking expression, connection or release.
Paying attention is different than thinking about something. When we pay attention, we notice things the conscious mind misses, wants to censor, or is too anxious or quick to compose a narrative of meaning around. As Rilke advises in his Letters to a Young Poet, “Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart…Don’t search for the answers…Live the questions.”
Still, and I often find this true for myself, it can be helpful to have a starting point. Fortunately David Whyte has given us examples of questions, ten to be exact, that have no right to go away. Questions to live.
In fact, he offers no less than ten such questions. The first,
1. Do I know how to have a real conversation?
“Real conversation”, says Whyte, contains an invitation to another to reveal something of him or herself or their needs to you. An act requiring vulnerability. If we were to ask ourselves if we know how to have a real conversation, we might begin by observing or noticing how we invite people to be vulnerable and the ways we build and maintain, inhibit or destroy trust and safety in our relationships.
Next Whyte poses,
2. What can I be wholehearted about?
This is a question for everyone, but perhaps of special interest to those who feel lost about what they’re meant to do at any given time in life. In an article Whyte recounts a time early in his career when he held a job that left him stressed and exhausted. He consulted Benedictine Monk whom he admired for advice. The monk told him, “The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest. The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.” Getting to know what we care about most in every part of our life, what we’re willing and able to give ourselves to wholeheartedly is the first step toward living the life we’re called to into being.
Next,
3. Am I harvesting from this year’s season of life?
With this question Whyte invites reflection on where we are and what is happening in our life here and now. Are we living in a familiar or comfortable rut that is keeping us back, “behind the curve of our own transformation.” as Whyte puts it.
This question concerns being in touch with ever changing opportunities and challenge over the course of our lives.
The fourth question Whyte proposes is,
4. Where is the temple of my adult aloneness?
This question concerns our home. Quoting the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, Whyte defines home as, “a place where you can dream about your future, and that a good home protects your dreams; it is a place where you feel sheltered enough to risk yourself in the world.” It need not be a literal dwelling place. It is recognizable, Whyte notes, by the “sense of spaciousness with the horizon and with your future” you feel when you’re there. The route to which Rilke reminds us is beyond the conscious mind and arrived at in our innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge.
Next,
5. Can I be quiet- even inside?
This is something many people struggle with, but has long stood as one of the most essential spiritual practices across religious traditions. For those less inclined toward quiet, start small and be patient. In other words, as Rilke counsels, live the question, literally.
The sixth of Whyte’s questions that have no right to go away is,
6. Am I too inflexible in my relationship to time?
Here Whyte invites us to observe how we interact with our past, present and future, reminding us that, “We are never one thing. We are a conversation—everything we have been, everything we are now and every possibility we could be in the future.” This question invites us to notice the way our history is interwoven with our essential, sacred wholeness.
Number seven,
7. How can I know what I am actually saying?
“We need to overhear the tiny but very consequential things we say that reveal ourselves to ourselves,” says Whyte. Some people do it through poetry, journaling, making art, singing or talking to themselves aloud.
The pop-star Taylor Swift describes having an obsession with knowing the answers to things. “When I don't know what happened”, she says, “It just bothers me, gets under my skin, and I need to write about it.” Living this question is about discovering how we can go around our inner censor to hear the real story of what’s going on in our lives and even ideas on how to change course or deal with issues as they arise.
Eight,
8. How can I drink from the deep well of things as they are?
Whyte describes this as a question rooted in our human tendency to stay at the surface level of our problems. The deep well of things as they are is a place or way to deepen understanding, and to offer and accept forgiveness, including of ourselves.
Next,
9. Can I l live a courageous life?
Over the holidays I had a chance to catch one of my favorite movies, “The Wizard of Oz.” When, near the end of the movie, the time comes for the Wizard to give the cowardly lion an emblem of courage, he observes that the lion has confused courage with wisdom.
With his question about living a courageous life, Whyte reminds the two go hand in hand. The root of the word courage - Cor - means heart. And so, Whyte notes, “‘courage’, is the measure of your heartfelt participation in the world.” Which, he also notes, inevitably means risking breaking or having our own hearts broken. The question challenges us to accept this inevitability and risk living a heartfelt life.
Lastly, Whyte asks,
10. Can I be the blessed saint that my future happiness will always remember?
With this question, its language rooted in the tradition of religious and spiritual pilgrimage, Whyte is asking, “What could you do now for yourself or others that your future self would look back on and congratulate you for—something it could view with real thankfulness because the decision you made opened up the life for which it is now eternally grateful?” It invites us to watch for opportunities here and now that we will be proud or grateful to recall later in life.
Questions, questions. All of us carry questions like these, forged out of the materials of our experience and framed by our own vocabulary. Questions which reflect, in Rilke’s words, “our beautiful anxiety about life” and for which, “no one anywhere can answer for us.”
Questions for which ready answers do not exist and “could not be given to us now, if they did. For they require not that we be smart, but wise. And wisdom comes from living. Living questions….living life itself…patiently, lovingly as if it were, as Rilke suggests, “a book written in a very foreign language.” For in a very real sense, it is.
And for which full immersion is the surest route toward fluency.
Amen and Blessed Be
Sermon given at the Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
January 6, 2019
by The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
Sitting in a hotel lobby reading the New York Times while waiting for a car, I became aware of a conversation between two women seated near me. The pair, perhaps a mother and daughter, were discussing something related to the younger woman’s career, which from the way they were talking was reaching a critical juncture. I try not to listen to other people’s conversations to which I have not been invited, but I’m blessed…and cursed…by quite sensitive hearing and often my attempt or intention to not listen to something often proves unsuccessful short of removing myself from the room.
As the conversation progressed, the older woman began to press the younger woman about the importance of playing up her STEM education, which focuses on science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and being aware of her strengths and weaknesses in each area. Clearly whatever career this young woman was about to begin, it had required a significant body of knowledge. The attainment of which, presumably will enhance her marketability in the workplace. And, more generally, will undoubtedly brand her a “smart” person.
When I was a kid a smart person was someone who had all the answers. This was usually a person others would describe as “good at school.” The person with the best grades. The highest test scores. An honor roll student. Smart people were those who seemed to know something about almost anything. Perhaps this describes you or someone you know.
Somewhere along the way I gained a reputation for being a smart person. Which admittedly, provided some small consolation for a kid always picked last for any activity that might call for anything even remotely resembling athleticism. For when it came to picking teams for games where having a broad store of information and the ability to recall it as needed was a competitive advantage, games like Trivial Pursuit, I was often picked first.
When playing such games having the answers all but assures success. Yet, in so much of life, having ready answers, or worse, thinking we have all the answers, does not necessarily assure success and even risks denying it to us.
I’m reminded now of a conversation I witnessed at a Christmas party just a few weeks ago where a young man in his early twenties, fresh from an internship but not yet graduated from college, was pontificating on the realities of the workplace to a man more than twice his age. A man who, incidentally, had just recently regained employment after being laid off from a job he had held for more than a decade. Fortunately for the young man, coming across as a “know it all”, was greeted with knowing amusement at his naivete rather than offense by the older man. A potential employer may be less forgiving if the young man were to repeat such a performance at an interview.
On a broader scale, having or thinking we have all the answers courts disaster. History reveals when we’re “too smart for our own good”, as the saying goes, economies collapse, nations fall, and a planet is hurtled toward demise.
What we seem not to realize or be able to accept is that ready answers are not THE answer. Such answers will not and cannot fulfill us for very long. They cannot deliver us from our existential angst. And they will not save us, or the planet for that matter.
So, if not answers, then what?
Questions.
Questions like those the contemporary poet and philosopher David Whyte calls, “questions that have no right to go away.” In other words, perennial questions or as Whyte himself described them in 2012 article, Questions, “that have to do with the person we are about to become…. They almost always have something to do with how we might be more generous, more courageous, more present, more dedicated, and they also have something to do with timing: when we might step through the doorway into something bigger, better—both beyond ourselves and yet more of ourselves at the same time.”
These are not problem solving questions, but attention shifting questions. Questions which point toward different and new perspectives. An endeavor another contemporary philosopher, Alain De Botton, suggests is interesting, even inspiring if for no other reason than, “because unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.” Perhaps this is, in part, why Whyte, calls them, “questions that can make or unmake a life.”
What are some examples of such questions? If you’ve been wondering that since the reading and come up empty, take heart. They’re not questions generated on the spot by conscious effort of thought. Rather, they tend to emerge, often unexpectedly along the paths of our inner landscape, “Sometimes if you move carefully through the forest breathing like the ones in the old stories who could cross a shimmering bed of dry leaves without a sound, you come to a place whose only task is to trouble you with tiny but frightening requests conceived out of nowhere but in this place beginning to lead everywhere.”
Sometimes, they don’t even come as words, but more of a disturbance, not necessarily unpleasant, but something which nonetheless attracts our attention. “Requests”, as Whyte describes them, “to stop what you are doing right now, and to stop what you are becoming while you do it.”
This happened to me just last week on New Years Day, my last night in Paris. My husband Kevin and I were attending a concert at the Madeleine Church. Sometime into the concert I felt my face contort and eyes well with tears as if I were about to cry. It happened several times during the concert. No question constructed of words emerged from this, but rather a simple reminder to pay attention to what moves or stirs me, to observe what is going on in and around me, and to ask what in me or my life might be seeking expression, connection or release.
Paying attention is different than thinking about something. When we pay attention, we notice things the conscious mind misses, wants to censor, or is too anxious or quick to compose a narrative of meaning around. As Rilke advises in his Letters to a Young Poet, “Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart…Don’t search for the answers…Live the questions.”
Still, and I often find this true for myself, it can be helpful to have a starting point. Fortunately David Whyte has given us examples of questions, ten to be exact, that have no right to go away. Questions to live.
In fact, he offers no less than ten such questions. The first,
1. Do I know how to have a real conversation?
“Real conversation”, says Whyte, contains an invitation to another to reveal something of him or herself or their needs to you. An act requiring vulnerability. If we were to ask ourselves if we know how to have a real conversation, we might begin by observing or noticing how we invite people to be vulnerable and the ways we build and maintain, inhibit or destroy trust and safety in our relationships.
Next Whyte poses,
2. What can I be wholehearted about?
This is a question for everyone, but perhaps of special interest to those who feel lost about what they’re meant to do at any given time in life. In an article Whyte recounts a time early in his career when he held a job that left him stressed and exhausted. He consulted Benedictine Monk whom he admired for advice. The monk told him, “The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest. The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.” Getting to know what we care about most in every part of our life, what we’re willing and able to give ourselves to wholeheartedly is the first step toward living the life we’re called to into being.
Next,
3. Am I harvesting from this year’s season of life?
With this question Whyte invites reflection on where we are and what is happening in our life here and now. Are we living in a familiar or comfortable rut that is keeping us back, “behind the curve of our own transformation.” as Whyte puts it.
This question concerns being in touch with ever changing opportunities and challenge over the course of our lives.
The fourth question Whyte proposes is,
4. Where is the temple of my adult aloneness?
This question concerns our home. Quoting the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, Whyte defines home as, “a place where you can dream about your future, and that a good home protects your dreams; it is a place where you feel sheltered enough to risk yourself in the world.” It need not be a literal dwelling place. It is recognizable, Whyte notes, by the “sense of spaciousness with the horizon and with your future” you feel when you’re there. The route to which Rilke reminds us is beyond the conscious mind and arrived at in our innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge.
Next,
5. Can I be quiet- even inside?
This is something many people struggle with, but has long stood as one of the most essential spiritual practices across religious traditions. For those less inclined toward quiet, start small and be patient. In other words, as Rilke counsels, live the question, literally.
The sixth of Whyte’s questions that have no right to go away is,
6. Am I too inflexible in my relationship to time?
Here Whyte invites us to observe how we interact with our past, present and future, reminding us that, “We are never one thing. We are a conversation—everything we have been, everything we are now and every possibility we could be in the future.” This question invites us to notice the way our history is interwoven with our essential, sacred wholeness.
Number seven,
7. How can I know what I am actually saying?
“We need to overhear the tiny but very consequential things we say that reveal ourselves to ourselves,” says Whyte. Some people do it through poetry, journaling, making art, singing or talking to themselves aloud.
The pop-star Taylor Swift describes having an obsession with knowing the answers to things. “When I don't know what happened”, she says, “It just bothers me, gets under my skin, and I need to write about it.” Living this question is about discovering how we can go around our inner censor to hear the real story of what’s going on in our lives and even ideas on how to change course or deal with issues as they arise.
Eight,
8. How can I drink from the deep well of things as they are?
Whyte describes this as a question rooted in our human tendency to stay at the surface level of our problems. The deep well of things as they are is a place or way to deepen understanding, and to offer and accept forgiveness, including of ourselves.
Next,
9. Can I l live a courageous life?
Over the holidays I had a chance to catch one of my favorite movies, “The Wizard of Oz.” When, near the end of the movie, the time comes for the Wizard to give the cowardly lion an emblem of courage, he observes that the lion has confused courage with wisdom.
With his question about living a courageous life, Whyte reminds the two go hand in hand. The root of the word courage - Cor - means heart. And so, Whyte notes, “‘courage’, is the measure of your heartfelt participation in the world.” Which, he also notes, inevitably means risking breaking or having our own hearts broken. The question challenges us to accept this inevitability and risk living a heartfelt life.
Lastly, Whyte asks,
10. Can I be the blessed saint that my future happiness will always remember?
With this question, its language rooted in the tradition of religious and spiritual pilgrimage, Whyte is asking, “What could you do now for yourself or others that your future self would look back on and congratulate you for—something it could view with real thankfulness because the decision you made opened up the life for which it is now eternally grateful?” It invites us to watch for opportunities here and now that we will be proud or grateful to recall later in life.
Questions, questions. All of us carry questions like these, forged out of the materials of our experience and framed by our own vocabulary. Questions which reflect, in Rilke’s words, “our beautiful anxiety about life” and for which, “no one anywhere can answer for us.”
Questions for which ready answers do not exist and “could not be given to us now, if they did. For they require not that we be smart, but wise. And wisdom comes from living. Living questions….living life itself…patiently, lovingly as if it were, as Rilke suggests, “a book written in a very foreign language.” For in a very real sense, it is.
And for which full immersion is the surest route toward fluency.
Amen and Blessed Be
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