ON CONFUSION AND LIVING THE QUESTIONS
“I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are 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.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)
Sometimes the circumstances of our lives leave us filled with questions — our minds swirling with doubt, uncertainty, fear, grief, sorrow, confusion.
In such times it can be tempting to try to circumvent or bypass the questions, to insist on answers when there are none. The psalmists and the poets remind us that sometimes the only way out is through, that it is necessary for us to enter into the questions — to live them.
The season of Lent also reminds us of the necessity to live the questions. It’s natural for us to want to avoid the painful parts — to look for something sure and steady when we’re surrounded by chaos and confusion, to search for another way when the only certainty is the difficulty that lies directly in front of us.
In the garden of Gethsemane Jesus even models this for us in bringing his honest and painful petitions to the Father, pleading that there might be another way than the suffering he’s about to endure.
Take a moment to listen to the song in the video below and allow yourself to get lost in the images that accompany it. As you listen try to let yourself ask honest questions — any question, no matter how difficult or scary or inappropriate it may seem. Resist the urge to seek out answers, just speak the questions — out loud or silently, maybe even write them down — and let them be.
It’s important for us to reflect on these things, even if it makes us uncomfortable.
Can you offer these questions up to God in prayer? Can you acknowledge their existence knowing that they may remain unanswered?
