Excerpt from book: 

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Questions

 

“Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart

and try to love the questions themselves…

And the point is, to live everything. 

Live the questions now.”

~ Rilke

 

During the years leading up to that fateful Tuesday night and to my Great Unraveling, I went on a nightwalk.  Walking on the wide concrete sidewalks of southern California, I was trying to feel the night, the wind, the comfort of the dark.  The unrest in me had been getting louder, writhing in my chest—it was serpentine.  Things that had made sense didn’t make sense anymore.  I longed to fall into the fierceness of this unnamable longing, but I did not know how.  As I walked, a knowing took over me.  I understood suddenly that I had been given so many answers without the questions.  I realized that I had been living answers to questions I had never really asked.  Not only had I never been taught to ask them, I had been discouraged from asking them, even as I memorized and recited the answers of my childhood.  I knew in that moment I could no longer continue living this way.  Something in me was breaking open and the questions would become my guides.  

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As I walked, I made a vow, a prayer: I would never again claim an answer to a question I had not asked, to a question I had not lived.  I wanted to fall into them.  Truthfully, I had no choice.  Hovering above the questions and constantly propitiating against them was making me exhausted.  My life could no longer be a walking announcement of The Answers.  My life would become an act of devotion to the questions.  Later, Rilke’s words—live the questions, live everything—would rage across my thirsty heart, carving out a compass where there was no map.

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It still astounds me that some believe the mysteries are afraid of our questions.  I think maybe our honest true questions are one of their deepest delights—a form of true worship, a beautiful communion.   And if the mysteries are not afraid, why should we be afraid?  Is life that fragile?  Are truths that brittle?

 

If what we have based our lives upon cannot withstand a childlike curiosity and a fierce commitment to the questions growing from the depths of our being, maybe we should let ourselves fall through those lives.  Perhaps those are the moments when we allow the questions to do the sacred work of destruction.  Perhaps this is when we reach for what is calling.  Perhaps this is when we reach for what we long for, even if this longing might become a song of grief among the ruins of what we had known.

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This is when we will no longer be named the holy sacrifice.

This is when we name ourselves.