Sermon given by Rev. Frank Clarkson, April 28, 2024.
One of the things I love about parish ministry is getting to hear the stories of people who are new here, or checking us out, looking for a spiritual home. Over the years, I’ve noticed something that a number of us have in common. You’ve said something like, “When I was young, in parochial school, or in church, the teacher or the minister said to me, ‘Why do you ask so many questions? Can’t you just have faith?’” One of the things we have in common, it seems, is that we have questions. We wonder about things.
It was this Unitarian Universalist faith, and a particular church I walked into back in 1991 or ‘92, that set me on a path I could not have imagined. I was young then, and the church of my childhood didn’t quite fit any more, and it was in that UU congregation that I felt permission, and not just permission, but welcome and encouragement, to ask spiritual and theological questions and follow where they led. And this set me on a path that eventually led to you.
This month we’ve been reflecting on comfort and discomfort, and asking questions can take you out of the comfortable place you’ve established for yourself, and draw you into some uncertain and uncomfortable places for a while. On the other hand, it may be a place of discomfort that causes you to question why you are living this way, that fuels your courage to make a change. To say yes to life, as we just sang. Like the prophet Isaiah asked, “Why do you spend your money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy?” (Isaiah 55:2).
Have you noticed that the Bible and other sources of spiritual wisdom are full of questions? Full of invitations to look at our lives and our choices and see that there are other ways, other possibilities. Today I want to celebrate this act of questioning, and invite you to see that asking questions—questions of yourself, and your companions, and of God—can be a spiritual practice.
Elie Wiesel asked, “Could it be… that questions are more important than answers?… Could it be that questions are the remedy for solitude? After all, we have learned from history that people are united by questions. It is the answers that divide them.”
Early on in my spiritual searching my friend Curtis encouraged me by quoting Rilke’s words to a young poet, some of which are at the top of the bulletin today:
“I want to beg you, as much as I can.. 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.”
It’s uncomfortable, isn’t it, to “be patient with all that is unsolved in your heart”? But a good kind of discomfort. We want answers, and certainty. Which is not how life works, most of the time. And it is people’s insistence on answers, isn’t it, that creates many of our problems? There is so much that is ambiguous and multifaceted and multilayered. It is possible, isn’t it, to protest for justice for Palestinians without demonizing Jewish people? It is possible, isn’t it, to proclaim Black Lives Matter and still support the good work our police are doing and trying to do?
What if we saw asking questions, and living the questions, as a way toward a deeper and better life, for ourselves and for others? As curiosity and wonder, as spiritual practice? Isn’t it going to go better and be more fruitful if you feel comfortable and confident asking questions you don’t know the answer to? Isn’t this a way to invite help and generate new ways of being? What if our leaders would spend more time asking questions and less time pretending that they have all the answers? How would that change things?
In our reading today we heard Mary Oliver asking about the soul:
Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of an owl?
Who has it, and who doesn’t?
I keep looking around me.
The face of the moose is as sad
as the face of Jesus.
The swan opens her white wings slowly.
In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.
One question leads to another.
Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?
Like the eye of a hummingbird?
Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?
Why should I have it, and not the anteater
who loves her children?
Why should I have it, and not the camel?
Come to think of it, what about maple trees?
What about the blue iris?
What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?
What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?
What about the grass?
I have questions these days, not all articulated, often swirling around my head and heart. Questions like
How is our world so beautiful? And why is there so much suffering?
What can I do about violence, anywhere but especially against Palestinians, especially children, in Gaza?
What does it mean to be faithful?
Oh God, what do you want me to do?
Even in my quiet prayer time, questions swirl around. Thoughts and worries, distractions. But some days, I drop down into God, and reach that “point of rest at the center of our being,” as Dag Hammarsköld described it, and abide there. Blessed stillness, blessed peace.
Do you know what I’m talking about? The peace beyond our understanding. I wonder, what are the questions that you’re carrying in these days? What questions have been with you for years? This might be a good day to take notes, to write them down. Feel free to use the little pencils and cards in front of you!
This is a place where you can share your questions—whatever they are. This is a tradition where we are invited to seek the truth—we say that every Sunday. Where we are invited to be asking big and deep questions of ourselves, and one another. And we could do more of this, couldn’t we?
Who are we called to be in these days? As individuals, and as a congregation? Where and with whom should we be showing up, and helping out? How are you going to live out your faith in this time and place?
You know in church we have meetings—this is something we know how to do. Sometimes in a meeting you’ll hear someone say, “You know what we ought to do?” I wonder, and sometimes I ask, “Who is this we you’re talking about?”
I think of Marge Piercy’s poem about what people can accomplish when they join together, these lines:
…it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again after they said no,
it starts when you say We
and know who you mean,
and each day you mean one more.
Elie Wiesel said people are united by questions. Asking questions helps you to know who your companions and allies are. So when you say “we” you know who you mean.
What if we made a practice of lifting up our questions, and chewing on them, alone and with each other? What if we really live the questions, and practice being “patient with all that is unresolved in our hearts?” (Teilhard de Chardin). What if we embody the best of this faith tradition, which makes room for questioning, and honors seeking; trusting that this is a way into the depths and toward a better world: deeper connection with ourselves, with one another, and with the Holy?
And what if we also find time beyond words and thoughts and questions? Time to rest in what is; in the presence of that Mystery which is all around.
What if, dear spiritual companions? What if?
Amen.