Sermon by the Rev. Charles J. Stephens
September 1, 2013
Opening Words: Mahfauz, the Egyptian Nobel Laureate said, “You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.”
Albert Einstein said, “The important thing is not to stop questioning.”
Readings: Spiritual Literacy by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat
The point of questing is to polish our souls, to come to terms with the shadow, to explore what naturalist Loren Eiseley calls “the ghost continent” within. This ongoing endeavor takes discipline, courage, and perseverance. As the Indian philosopher and poet, Sri Aurobindo reminds us, “The spiritual journey is one of continuously falling on your face, getting up, brushing yourself off, looking sheepishly at God and taking another step.”
Psychologist Jacquelyn Small notes, “At certain points along the journey, people begin to crave a larger context….They long to be in the supportive and joyful company of others who are seekers like themselves. Companions who can share our experience and insights are essential on the inward quest. …”
“A very powerful question may not have an answer at the moment it is asked,” social activist Fran Peavey observes. “It will sit rattling in the mind for days or weeks as the person works on an answer. If the seed is planted, the answer will grow. Questions are alive.” And we are more alive when actively involved with questing and questions. Keep moving. Keep crossing inner and outer borders. Keep asking.
Reading: From Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1903 classic, Letters to a Young Poet, a beautifully articulated case for the importance of living the questions, embracing uncertainty, and allowing for intuition.
“I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Sermon: Why Are There Always So Many Questions Left at the End of the Answers?
Here is an interesting question, “If you built a rectangular house with all sides facing south and a bear walked past the house, what color is the bear?” The answer is white, because if all four sides face south, the house is at the North Pole. In that region, the only bears are polar bears. Polar bears are white.
Anyone who has been around young children can appreciate the children’s story this morning. WHY often becomes the favorite question of children since everything seems so new and wonderful to them. To be sure some of us as parents have either said or thought that the best answer is, “Because I said so!”
Why are there so many questions left at the end of the answers? We never really seem able to come to an end to questions. Over the years, a service that I enjoy leading is a “Question the Minister Service.” That is when people are given 3 x 5 cards and invited to write down their questions for me. Then during the sermon time I answer or attempt to answer as many of the questions as I can. I have never run out of great questions. I will do that service here in Castine sometime.
I agree, you can tell whether a person is wise by his questions. That being so, Unitarian Universalist congregations are full of very wise people. To be sure, people like to tell jokes about our UU propensity to question everything. Like the joke about a Unitarian Universalist who died, and to his surprise discovered that there was indeed an afterlife. The angel in charge of these things told him, “Because you were an unbeliever and a doubter and a skeptic, you will be sent to Hell for all eternity — which, in your case, consists of a place where no one will disagree with you ever again!”
On the opposite side of the continuum are those religious, philosophical and political orientations where people are put down for asking difficult questions or disagreeing with the given authority. There will always be those, within all religious groups, even our own, who will insist that there is one and only one correct answer to certain questions. Much of the violence in the world is justified by the belief that those who believe differently about religion, politics or social issues are not only wrong but also dangerous. As justification for such rigidity they claim the authority of some inerrant scripture or document; a theological, philosophical or political doctrine or even a personal revelation.
It would be good for people in general to heed Bertrand Russell who said, “I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn’t wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.”
On my flight out to Minneapolis for the Interim Ministry training the week before last, I sat next to a man who spent most of his time sorting through an envelope of mail. Then about an hour before we arrived he seemed interested in talking so I engaged him. He made a comment about some social issue, which in my way of thinking was fairly conservative. I listened to him for a bit longer then thought it best for me to let him know that I was a bit left of center when it came to social issues (I didn’t tell him how left of center). That only encouraged him. He was in for a discussion.
He was a good talker and had a mastery of statistics. He indicated that he didn’t like all the regulations the government inflicted on businesses and he was against so much tax money going to support people on welfare. I countered with an argument about how five percent of Americans owned the majority of our country’s wealth and my assumption that those Americans who were well off owed it to the American system and the rest of their fellow citizens to share of some of the wealth which they were able to accumulate because of living in a country that enabled them to do well. He admitted that he was part of that five percent (I credit him for riding in coach) and said that he had recently given a million dollars to a charity in his hometown. I think we both were able to make our points and ask each other plenty of questions. It seemed like we both left feeling as if we had shared a good conversation of give and take with plenty of unanswered questions.
I like to think that neither of us held to the belief that there was only one right way to think about social issues. We remained far apart in our concepts of such things as establishing a safety net for the poor, whether there was a need for regulations when it came to business practices, etc. I do wish we could have moved on to religious and theological questions, but who knows, we might have been in total agreement there.
I have heard many stories from people who found their way into our UU movement. Quite a few have described how, when they were a young, they asked a religious leader they respected a probing question about a religious issue and were told in no uncertain terms that their question was inappropriate. They got the clear idea that they should just believe what they were taught and keep quiet. Maybe you had such an experience, maybe not. I was fortunate that my Lutheran mother, after hearing a sermon or a biblical reading that she happened to disagreed with, would simply say, “Well I don’t believe that part.”
One of the refreshing things about some of the Psalms in the Hebrew Scripture is that they contain strong questions, directed to their God. Like psalm 10:1(ESV): “Why, O Lord, do you stand far away? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble? In arrogance the wicked hotly pursue the poor; let them be caught in the schemes that they have devised. …”
Yitzchok Adlerstein wrote that while Voltaire said, “Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.” Jews could easily offer a third option: judge the faith of a people by their ability to live with unanswered questions. To read more of Adlerstein’s views, go to http://www.cross-currents.com/archives/2013/08/11/living-with-questions/#ixzz2dNSJXlRm.
Clearly not all traditional religious leaders condemn the asking of difficult questions. The Jesuit political activist Father John Dear, wrote a book, “The Questions of Jesus.” In it, he pointed out that Jesus asked many questions, some inconvenient for religious authorities. Father Dear went through the gospels and made a list of all the questions Jesus supposedly asked. He found three hundred seven instances of Jesus asking questions. And at times it got him into trouble.
The persistence of asking questions is also what got Socrates in so much trouble with the religious and political authorities of his day. The Socratic Method, after-all, is centered on the asking of open-ended questions. So, clearly, we Unitarian Universalists find ourselves in pretty good company. It can be said that questioning and questing is really about delving into life to find greater meaning and purpose as well as clearer direction. Asking probing questions of yourself is a good way of coming to terms with your own shadowy interior which one of my favorite writers, the naturalist Loren Eiseley, called “the ghost continent” within.
This relates to what Gertrude Stein’s brother, Leo Stein said: “The wise man questions the wisdom of others because he questions his own, the foolish man, because it is different from his own.”
Educators know that their students comprehend more from what they are reading if they ask themselves questions before they start reading, during and after they read. They ask questions like, “What is happening? Why is it important? “What is this story about?” “What does the main character want?” “Will she get it?” “If so, how?”
Unlike those who teach that there is one and only one right answer to most questions, we as religious liberals posit that not only is our knowledge of the world changing, but the very world we live in is alive and evolving. So, it is good for us here at UUCC to be open to asking questions and finding new answers and even more new questions. Our religious perspective encourages us to remain alive and actively involved with the many questions of life. Your life is a never-ending and often meandering quest for meaning and direction. We keep moving and exploring both within our inner borders but also concerning our ever expanding exterior borders.
For UUists, Life Span Religious Exploration is best when it continues throughout our lives.
Doubtless, on your spiritual exploration you will occasionally fall on your face. This does not mean that your approach is wrong or that you are destined for damnation. It may mean that you had thought, said or even believed something that was or is wrong. Nevertheless, we are encouraged to never give up the search for truth. Rather we are called to get up, brush ourselves off, look even deeper into the immense wonder of reality, then take another step, and ask another question. It is healthy for individuals and congregations to know that we need to learn and grow from the mistakes we make in trying to explore and answer life’s most difficult questions.
This means that we don’t stand still in our understanding of life. On the contrary we need to remain actively involved with life’s quests and its many questions. We keep moving and gaining in our understanding and in our wisdom about crossing our inner and our outer borders, always asking for more and deeper answers.
Of course, there are things we should learn to accept as reality, like the law of gravity. And there are some sound theories about things like evolution and climate change that we can accept as sound scientific assumptions about how things probably work. However, there remains much in nature, in culture, in politics and especially in religion that we, Unitarian Universalists, approach with the advice of the bumper sticker: “Honk If You’re Not Sure.”
Physician and author, Rachel Naomi Remen, in My Grandfather’s Blessings, wrote about a woman with cancer telling her how the woman discovered a basic truth about life, through an experience with her illness. She said, “There are only two kinds of people in this world – those who are alive and those who are afraid.” She then smiled when she said to Dr. Remen that many of the people she had met who were afraid were doctors.
“Perhaps,” writes Remen, “such fear is a natural outcome of the wish to be in control.” She went on to tell of a patient whose physician told him several years before that he had three months to live. The patient said that the doctor “…seemed sorry to be telling me this, but he seemed pleased that he had the information to give me, almost as pleased as if he had told me that he had the right drug to eradicate my cancer.”
The patient then said, “I was angry for a long time, but I now think he was as out of control and vulnerable as I was. Too bad we could not have talked man to man on that level instead of reaching for a false certainty.”
Remen posits, “…the most basic skill of the physician is the ability to have comfort with uncertainty, to recognize with humility the uncertainty inherent in all situations, to be open to the ever-present possibility of the surprising, the mysterious, and even the holy to meet people there.”
That is good advice for all of us, not just physicians. Most of us have a desire for some control of our lives and for a bit of certain knowledge.
Remen writes: “But mastery is always limited. Sooner or later we will come to the edge of all that we can control and find life waiting there for us.” That which is important in life, is not so much the answers we come up with, as it is the understanding that we never need to stop pursuing the questions.
We are pleased as Unitarian Universalists that our Religious Education program for children strives to plant seeds of questing for truth that is alive and ever expanding. We as adults need to remember that we adults also continue to quest for truth that is alive and ever expanding in all of us throughout our lives.
Are you at a point along life’s journey where you crave a larger context in which you can find the caring and joyful community with others seeking a similar community where together you can (as Rilke wrote) live your way into the answer? This I believe is the faith community that you are seeking to build here at the UU Congregation of Castine. A place where you are able to share your life experiences, your values and your vision for your own inward quests and also your desire to build a better more just and joyful world.
If we strive to do that, we will truly have done our jobs. We really are more alive when we are actively involved in the important questions of life.
Closing Words:
If on your quest for meaningful answers to life’s important and changing questions you find that you really do desire the company of other seekers, know that you are welcome here. Our community strives to be a welcoming and a vital community where we can share our experiences and insights, growing to be ever more alive to the mystery of life.
