If you are like me, you have more questions than answers, once you get to a certain age. Notice this last, once you get to a certain age. Before that you are always working on having the answers or seeking them. I work with junior high and high school boys every week. They, of course, have all of the answers. If you don’t believe that, just ask them and they will tell you exactly how things are, with great confidence and earnestness.
Ah, to be young again and know everything. As a therapist, I very quickly learned that I did not have all of the answers and often could not even figure out the question. That is how life is, when you have all of the answers, it means you know nothing about living because you have already received all that you have room for in your heart. This is the meaning of the Buddhist idea of “emptying your cup”. We have all met someone with a full cup, they know all that there is to know, there can be nothing to add. Life lived this way is but a shadow of all that life really is and can be.
I am learning to live in the moment, to get all that there is out of each moment, sometimes that is nothing. Why do we always have to be seeking, looking, squeezing life? It is really okay to sit and do nothing. In the immortal words of Satchel Paige, “sometimes I sits and thinks and sometimes I just sits”. It is okay to just sit. To just be. To not seek. To let life happen. This is true prayer, true lectio divina. To just be. At our deepest place, we encounter the Eternal by doing absolutely nothing. The Japanese call it mushin, “no mind”. It is not mindlessness, it is total mindfulness but total passivity, letting the moment unfold without directing it.
Oh, I get it, I truly do. I work in a profession where I am supposed to have answers and be seeking more and more knowledge and therefore more answers. I have learned that reading my own press is a huge mistake. I am not “all that and a bag of chips” as my students might say. I simply am and I am learning that is good enough. Rilke is a fine poet and writer and I love this notion, “live the questions.” Too often I push past the question in search of an answer, yet life keeps teaching me that the answers are secondary, it is the question that matters. Rilke also says that if we live the questions, we might, eventually live into the answers.
This, I think is faith, when we live the questions. Faith because we are filled and inhabited by the One who already has all of the answers. It is time for me to live the questions and let the answers just happen. To trust that within me, all that I ever need to know already exists. Scripture says ask and it will be given. So, I think I will just keep asking, keep living the questions and explore the questions without looking for the answers.
TMM