lenten journal: the question is . . .

My little school is imploding.

I have much the same feeling as I did when I worked in my first restaurant which was a small tea house owned by a woman who had always wanted to own a restaurant, so she found an empty space, took out a second mortgage, spent a lot of money, and lasted six months because she didn’t really know what she had gotten herself into. Though my school has been here six years, it is still trying to find its identity, which has proven to be quite illusive leaving us with predominant daily question of “How do we survive?” which is not a question that fosters growth and learning.

Our foxhole perspective sent me back to something I read in Art and Fear a few days ago.

It is an article of faith, among artists and scientists alike, that at some deep level their disciplines share a common ground. What science bears witness to experimentally, art has always known intuitively – that there is an innate rightness to the recurring forms in nature.

Science advances at the rate that technology provides tools of greater precision, while art advances at the pace that evolution provides minds with greater insight – a pace that is, for better or for worse, glacially slow. . . . [a]nd while a hundred civilizations have prospered (sometimes for centuries) without computers or windmills or even the wheel, none have survived even a few generations without art.

[I]n art as well as in science the answers you get depend upon the questions you ask. (104)

To give some context to the passage, the authors weren’t out to foster a divide between science and art as much as they were using the distinction to say some things about the way art tells the truth by contrasting with how science tells the truth. More about that in a bit. First, I want to go back to the statement in the last sentence: the answers you get depend on the questions you ask.

During one of my first units of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), where I worked as a hospital chaplain, I read an article that talked about how we could help our patients cope with what was going on by helping them to ask better questions. Those who faced difficult diagnoses, for instance, might find more hope in turning from “Why did God let this happen?” to “What will this mean for my life?” The first ends up in blaming or patronization; the second offers room for discovery and growth.

When I read the line about the quality of our questions, I made a note in the margin: what would Jesus ask?

My mind jumped back to the healing stories in the gospels. On the one hand, the disciples saw a blind man sitting at the gate and asked, “Who sinned that this man should be born blind?” On the other hand – and thank God for other hands – Jesus met the man at the pool who had been there for years and years waiting for his chance and asked, “Do you want to get well?”

The answers we get are only as good as our questions.

Instead of asking how we are going to survive or what else could go wrong, I keep asking for the grace to remember that the kids in the building need more from me than fear, bitterness, or resignation. They need me to act like this matters so they can do likewise. They need me to ask questions that call us together and help us figure out how to make meaning of these days, regardless of how much it feels like I’m teaching at Titanic High. I must, therefore, go back and pick up art as a metaphor for life and faith and then reread the following passage:

There is a moment for each artist in which particular truth can be found, and if it is not found then, it will never be. No one else will ever be in a position to write Hamlet. This is pretty good evidence that the meaning of the world is made and not found. Our understanding of the world changed when those words were written, and we can’t go back . . . any more than Shakespeare could. . . . The world thus altered becomes a different world, with our alterations being part of it. (106)

One of our teachers left this week because he got an offer that he was right to take. We had a goodbye party for him on Wednesday. He had been here for almost three years teaching in the middle school, so the eighth graders were only in sixth grade when he arrived. He asked a great deal of himself and the kids and he got great answers from all concerned. At the party, one eighth grade boy said, “You’re the greatest teacher I’ve ever had because you helped me learn to be myself.” That teacher changed the world for the boy and helped him make meaning of the cultural hell we call middle school, which ranks right up there with writing Hamlet.

In a school on its last legs, in a culture built on greed, in a political climate of rage and cynicism, in a world that is broken and hurt, what would Jesus ask?

What will I ask? And then, how will I answer?

Peace,
Milton

capitulating to can't

During the middle of my junior year in high school, my family moved to Houston, Texas and I became a student at Westbury High School. I knew no one in the building and began as a new student in January. It was the worst transition of any of the several transitions I made from school to school as a missionary kid.

I don’t remember if it was that semester or the next, but I do remember it in was Algebra II where I encountered the worst teacher I ever had. (I also remember her name but am choosing not to write it here.) During the middle of class, as she was explaining something, I raised my hand and asked a question because I didn’t understand.

“I don’t have time for stupid questions,” she said, and went on with the class.

In that moment, I decided I wasn’t good at math. I limped through the semester with a C and, since I had completed my requirement for graduation, never took another high school math class, convinced it was an equation I could not solve. Then came the ACT, which I needed to take to get into Baylor, and the math section. The scores came in the mail, and I opened the envelope to find I had made a 32 on the math section, enough to place out of my B. A. math requirement at Baylor. I never had another math teacher after her and I have spent most of my life convinced I don’t know how to do Algebra, which, for a guy who went on to major in History and teach English, is not the end of the world, but it’s not the truth.

For all the things that teacher did wrong, I have to come to terms with the choice I made under those circumstances. I decided I was no good at math. I capitulated to her bullying, if you will. And I continued to buy the lie, even when more reliable information came in after her time had passed. I’m not sure I would have turned in to the Texan forerunner of Good Will Hunting, but I sold myself short.

As a teacher, I remind myself of her most everyday not only because I don’t want to do the same kind of damage, but also because I imagine what she said to me was an incidental comment. She wasn’t gunning for me; it just felt that way on the receiving end. I know what it feels like to get to the end of the day and feel tired and exasperated, which is actually when I try to remember her most. I won’t feel any less exhausted or exasperated by unloading on one of the young people trapped in the room with me in my hour of darkness. Let it be. let it be.

I teach now in a school aimed at students who, as we say, have not been able to thrive in a conventional classroom. Most of them have either names or letters to identify their learning issues. Sometimes we speak of them in technological metaphors, talking about their processing abilities. The information matters and is often helpful, and I also wonder if it has unintended consequences. Even today, I handed out composition books and asked them to open to a fresh page and free write, as we say in English classrooms.

“I can’t write,” said the young man sitting to my left. And I was back in Algebra.

He struggles with writing, particularly by hand – that is true. He finds it easier to talk than write. Also true. His handwriting could be confused for hieroglyphics. Oh, yes. But he can write, and write pretty well when he chooses to step beyond belief in the limitations he has been handed. I’m not trying to push him to be a poet, still I don’t want to capitulate to “can’t.”

The other thing I have noticed about my students is they appear to be passionless. I am struggling to find something they are interested in doing, and I don’t mean just in English class. I asked them to fill out an interest survey intended to help me learn how they learn best, and several of them hardly checked off anything.

“I’m not interested in much,” one of them said.

“Why not?” I wanted to reply, but didn’t know how to do it unaccusingly. How can an eighth grader already have the curiosity kicked out of her? How can a ninth grader feel that life at his age has already peaked in interest? I can’t help but wonder if the lack of confidence is connected to the lack of curiosity. In my own experience, we seem most willing to fail at that which captures us.

I gave up on math, but not on writing. I don’t remember any high school teacher gushing over my prose or poetry, but I do remember feeling confident enough to keep playing with the words, asking questions, and writing and failing and writing again. The words mattered enough to me to be willing to fail.

And to find great pleasure.

It’s hard to talk about failure and not talk about the Red Sox. As September comes, those of us in Red Sox Nation stand poised to have our hearts broken once more or to have another story for the ages. This year’s team has been besieged by injuries, the nightly lineup looking more like their Triple-A farm club than their normal roster. Even the young ones know the story, it seems, because they keep showing up and giving their best. Wherever we finish in the standings come the first of October, we will talk about this season and the heart of this team.

And so I point to grown men playing a boy’s game to say to my young students who are old before their time, don’t lead with your limitations; feed your passions; ask questions; fail gloriously, more than once.

And I will listen to my own advice.

Peace,
Milton

one more time

I've been trying to think about what to write off and on all day. Tonight, after the Durham Bulls game, they had fireworks to "patriotic" music -- Springsteen's "Born in the USA," Lee Greenwood's "I'm Proud to be an American," Ray Charles singing "America," Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World," and Toby Keith's "I am a Soldier -- played sequentially without any hint of irony. The songs made me think of my post last year at this time and, at the risk of being either redundant or self-indulgent, I'm re-posting it tonight, mostly because not a whole lot feels different between then and now.

________________________________

I do a fair amount of listening to country music, but I’m always a little gun shy of my radio this time of year (no pun intended) because the closer we get to the fireworks the more often they play Toby Keith singing about putting a boot up anyone’s ass who disagrees with our government, or – inevitably – I’ll hear Lee Greenwood sing about being proud to be an American.

I’m not proud to be an American.

I can’t be since I had nothing to do with my being an American. I can take pride in things I’ve cooked or written because I did those things, but I’m an American by circumstance, by geography, by fortune. I feel grateful. I feel responsible. But I’m not proud.

Another way to think about pride is to define it as arrogance: rather than it being a sense of accomplishment, it is a sense of entitlement. I’m concerned for our country because I think the latter is the image we project to much of the world, whether we intend to or not. We come across as though we see ourselves as The One Who Know Everything or The Ones Who Are Convinced Everyone Wants To Be Just Like Us.

The analogy that comes to mind is a scene from The Breakfast Club after all the kids (Brian the science nerd, Andrew the athlete, John the angry kid, Allison the outcast, and Claire the popular girl) have become vulnerable with one another:

BRIAN: Um, I was just thinking, I mean. I know it's kind of a weird time, but I was just wondering, um, what is gonna happen to us on Monday? When we're all together again? I mean I consider you guys my friends, I'm not wrong, am I?
ANDREW: No...
BRIAN: So, so on Monday...what happens?
CLAIRE: Are we still friends, you mean? If we're friends now, that is?
BRIAN: Yeah...
CLAIRE: Do you want the truth?
BRIAN: Yeah, I want the truth...
CLAIRE: I don't think so...
ALLISON: Well, do you mean all of us or just John?
CLAIRE: With all of you...
ANDREW: That's a real nice attitude, Claire!

The scene continues:

BRIAN: I just wanna tell, each of you, that I wouldn't do that...I wouldn't and I will not! 'Cause I think that's real shitty...
CLAIRE: Your friends wouldn't mind because they look up to us...

Brian laughs at her.

BRIAN: You're so conceited, Claire. You're so conceited. You're so, like, full of yourself, why are you like that?

To turn the world into a high school detention hall may seem simplistic, but hear me out. We are a lot like Claire: she’s not mean or vindictive; she is uninformed and arrogant. She has been taught she’s better than others and has not heard voices telling her otherwise until that Saturday in detention. (Wouldn't that make a great Security Council ice-breaker: OK, if your country was a character in The Breakfast Club, which one would it be?)

When we were in Greece and Turkey last year, almost every hotel had CNN International on the television. The same alleged news organization that fills our homes with endless teen drama queens and pontificating pundits has an international channel that is informative and articulate. I can only assume they don’t want us to see it lest we become informed and realize the world is not what we think it is. We are being taught not to question, not to act, even not to care.

Almost twenty five years ago Little Steven Van Zandt, of E Street Band and Sopranos fame, wrote a song called “I am a Patriot,” which I first heard on Jackson Browne’s wonderful 1989 record, World in Motion. In the video clip I found of Little Steven, he makes an impassioned and linguistically colorful introduction to the song, imploring his audience to question everything and then he sings:

And the river opens for the righteous, someday

I was walking with my brother
And he wondered what was on my mind
I said what I believe in my soul
It ain't what I see with my eyes
And we can't turn our backs this time

I am a patriot and I love my country
Because my country is all I know
I want to be with my family
With people who understand me
I got nowhere else to go
I am a patriot

And the river opens for the righteous, someday

I was talking with my sister
She looked so fine
I said baby what's on your mind
She said I want to run like the lion
Released from the cages
Released from the rages
Burning in my heart tonight

I am a patriot and I love my country
Because my country is all I know

And I ain't no communist,
And I ain't no capitalist
And I ain't no socialist
and I sure ain't no imperialist
And I ain't no democrat
And I ain't no republican either
And I only know one party
and its name is freedom
I am a patriot

And the river opens for the righteous, someday

I love the honesty of the song: “I am a patriot and I love my country because my country is all I know.” Van Zandt names our love of family and want of security right along with our call to question what is going on and work for justice. My friend Gene pastors a church that talks about Life Mission Questions, which I find wonderfully resonant. The answers we find, my friends, are only as good as our questions. In that spirit, I have a few I think we need to ask more emphatically.

• How can we hold people indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay without telling them or anyone else why and then talk about human rights to other countries?
• How can we complain about countries seeking nuclear power and/or weapons, even threatening war if they continue, when we have them and intend to keep them?
• How can we continue to staff military bases in countries all over the world when we would never let anyone set up a base on our soil?
• How can we spend a billion dollars a week on war and not have universal health care our citizens?
• How can we work to end terrorism without working passionately and relentlessly to end poverty?
• Why do our presidential candidates have to raise millions of dollars to get elected?
• Why don’t we think of the other countries of the world as colleagues rather than subordinates?
• Why aren’t the voices of healthy dissent louder in our country?
• Why are all our issues described as polarities?
• Why must everything be either red or blue?
• Where are the courageous leaders who are willing to do something other than raise money, worry about being electable, and pander to multinational corporations?
• Where are the real journalists?

Feel free to add your own.

I am a patriot and I do love my country, even though it’s not all I know. I do think the river will open for the righteous someday and, as Martin said, justice will roll down like water. Liberty and justice for all – all the world.




Peace,
Milton

out in the eye of the storm

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been listening to Mark Heard as I’ve gone about my business here in Durham. For those of you who don’t know of him, Mark was a wonderful songwriter, thinker, and singer who died way too young and left an enduring legacy of music (much of which is available at emusic). For those of you who are familiar with him, then you know it does a heart good to tune in to his songs from time to time.

The record I’ve given the most play is Eye of the Storm, which I can remember buying while I was doing my CPE training and dealing with grief and death on an almost daily basis. The title track opens with a wonderfully infectious acoustic guitar lick and Mark begins to sing:

when it’s dark outside you’ve got to carry the light
or you’ll stumble and fall like stumbling dice
it takes a steady step, it takes God-given sight
just to tell what is the truth, what is wrong, what is right

in this world thunder throbs in the darkness
out in the eye of the storm
the friends of God suffer no permanent harm

when the night sky glows with the red fires of war
and the threat of annihilation pounds at your door
you don’t have to pretend you’ve got nerves of steel
to believe the love of the Lord is actual and real

in this world thunder throbs in the darkness
out in the eye of the storm
the friends of God suffer no permanent harm

when the daybreak comes with a trumpet blast
and the true fruit of faith is tasted at long last
when the darkness dies and death is undone
and teardrops are dried in the noonday sun

in this world thunder throbs in the darkness
out in the eye of the storm
the friends of God suffer no permanent harm

The irony that the person singing those words dropped dead at 41 is not lost on me. In fact, as much as the song pulls me, it causes me to question. As the friends of God, do we really suffer no permanent harm? Is the thought that our suffering is ultimately temporary truly comforting when the passing pain we live with carries such a wallop? How do I learn to look beyond today’s pain to grasp life’s larger promise?

Ginger and I went exploring in Carrboro, North Carolina this afternoon – “the Paris of the Piedmont” it’s called, we were told. We found a couple of great coffee shops and several restaurants to come back to. We also found one of those card shops/art galleries that had all kinds of magnets with cute sayings that included:

My life has a wonderful cast, I just can’t figure out the plot.

Everything will be OK in the end. If it’s not OK, it’s not the end.

The quote made me smile – and hope – and then wonder if the end would be OK. We’ve had two deaths in our parish this week. Since North Carolina is next in the primary line, we are being inundated with all the things that don’t matter and being told that they do, leaving me to think that even at the end I will still live in a very broken nation that squandered its gifts and resources. I got home and spent some time reading my copies of The Nation that were delayed in their arrival due to our address change. I read about the tragedy and pain of the food shortages around the world and the painful reality that one in three of our military personnel returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are coming home with brain injuries and/or psychological trauma. And then I found this quote in one of the book reviews in which Martin Luther King Jr. called us to live in “divine dissatisfaction”:

Let us not be satisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort from the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice. Let us be dissatisfied until those who live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security. Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history and every family will live in a decent, sanitary home.

He spoke those words in August, 1967. It appears we have yet to hear them and take them to heart. I moved from paper to screen to get caught up on my blog reading. Bobbie at Emerging Sideways led me to this post by Clarrisa Pinkola Estes, which contained the following poem:

Refuse to fall down.
If you cannot refuse to fall down,
refuse to stay down.
If you cannot refuse to stay down,
lift your heart toward heaven,
and like a hungry beggar,
ask that it be filled,
and it will be filled.

You may be pushed down.
You may be kept from rising.
But no one can keep you from lifting
your heart toward heaven -- only you.

It is in the midst of misery
that so much becomes clear.
The one who says
nothing good came of this,
is not yet listening.

Her words were still ringing in my heart and head when I began reading The Official Thomas Bickle Blog where Sarah, Thomas’ mother has faithfully shared all that is painful and not OK as her little boy lives with a brain tumor. The end is approaching and it doesn’t feel OK, yet Sarah knows something about the eye of the storm because she writes about more than her world turning to shit. She is someone who has refused to stay down and continues to lift her heart – and mine – heavenward. You see, I first met Sarah leading a youth camp when she was in high school. Neither of us knew we would find each other again so many years down the road, me with my depression and her coming to terms with watching her little boy live his short life in unspeakable pain.

I’ve spent my share of Southern Baptist Sunday nights singing about the roll being called up yonder and just passing through this world that is not my home and I never really took to the idea that our days on this planet were the equivalent of sitting in a cosmic Greyhound station waiting on the Big Bus. If these days don’t count, then the pain and suffering that it takes to live them feels like a cruel joke. There was one other hymn that I loved --

but I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that he is able
to keep that which I’ve committed unto him against that day

because it told me hope lived in the truth that we were created to do more than wait and hurt; we are called to make meaning of these days with the help of our God who lives in the middle of the pain – in the eye of the storm -- with us. Pain is real and hard and even deadly, but it is not the final word.

However long the pain may last, Love lasts longer.

Perhaps, as one who has food to eat and is not having to help my child face pain and death, I run the risk of sounding like I might find a career writing magnet slogans. But understand I’m sharing what I learned from Paul and Martin, from Mark and Clarissa, from Sarah and Thomas, all of them friends of God, all of them out in the eye of the storm, so I’ll say it again:

however long the pain may last, Love lasts longer.

Peace,
Milton

algebra

Brilliance with numbers is a curious thing. Paul Erdos, a Hungarian who died in 1996, used to travel the world and stop briefly at the offices and homes of fellow mathematicians. “My brain is open,” he would announce as, with uncanny intuition, he suggested a problem that, without realizing it, his host was already halfway to solving. Together they would find the solution. (“Let’s Talk About Figures” The Economist, March 22, 2008)

When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight. They asked each other, "Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?" (Luke 24: 30-32)

algebra

I got lost when the numbers changed
to letters and Mrs. Gibbs refused to give
me directions: “I don’t answer stupid
questions,” she said, and closed my brain.
I can still hear her shouting down
my attempt to understand algebra,
or seeing it as a way of understanding.

I was on the other side of the desk
when a student said of Shakespeare,
“This is like algebra,” without closing
her brain or her heart. She was right
and I was already on the way to seeing
that “to be or not to be?” was not
a stupid question, nor a solitary one.

Jesus walked the Emmaus Road and
asked, “What are you discussing?”
and they began explaining the algebra
of resurrection, even though most
of the equation was still unsolved.
Jesus broke the bread in two and
their hearts open and on fire.

Conventional wisdom would assume
a poem should be a bit more algebraic
than this one, I suppose. It reduces
rather quickly to wonder what we
might find when we see questions
as serendipitous rather than stupid
and answer, “My heart is open.”

Peace,
Milton

a question

What’s the point of pain?

That’s the question that ran through my mind last night as I drove home from work. When I wrote about remembering a few posts back, one of the lines from the clip of Jerry Orbach singing, “Try to Remember” was

deep in december it’s nice to remember
without a hurt the heart is hollow.

Why is that nice to remember? What if we remembered when we were whole, not hollow, before we ever started hurting? Right now I have folks I care about who are in deep pain: one’s father is dying at a time when the family is fractured; one’s young child is dying because there seems to be no other option; Ginger’s father’s mind is being slowly erased by Alzheimer’s. The pain appears to be eating them up, rather than making them whole.

What’s the point of their pain?

After mentioning them, I must say the cause of my question is something less earth-shattering and still difficult. When it comes to relationships, I can more quickly move to talk about the meaning of suffering, or at least making meaning of suffering. In living with my depression, I’ve learned a great deal about how pain informs hope and strengthens it. I have heard the words of those who know about suffering much more than I and who have passed down songs which give melody to the meaning they know in their lives. We just got the latest Mavis Staples record and when she sings

we shall not, we shall not be moved
we shall not, we shall not be moved
like a reed planted by the water
we shall not be moved.

The second time I heard the song, I began to wonder when a reed became so immovable. Like a boulder, or a mountain, maybe, but a reed? The melodic truth is there is an uncomfortable vulnerability to being human.

Now that I’m treading in such deep theological and philosophical waters, the reason for my question is almost hard to articulate: our house in Massachusetts has still not sold. We have never been in a financial situation to be interstate landowners, so things are getting pretty serious. Sometimes it feels as though our options lie between desperate and humiliating. I think the reason the whole thing raised my question is I don’t see some grand theological swirl to what we’re living through. The whole struggle feels pointless. And Mavis is still singing:

got my hand on the freedom plow
wouldn’t take nothing for my journey now
keep your eyes on the prize – hold on.

When I hear those words, I feel humbled long before I feel hopeful. She knows pain far deeper than anything in my life and she’s still singing about standing strong and holding on , while I would take most anything for this part of the journey.

One of the book reviews at Journeys with Jesus is of Stanley Hauerwas’ commentary on Matthew in the new Brazos Commentary series. In the review, I found this quote from the book:

The problem, after all, is not belief in the resurrection, but whether we live lives that would make sense if in fact Jesus has not been raised from the dead.

Even though their words make clear the difference between a gospel singer and a religion professor, they both articulate something that feels a bit out of reach to me right now, as do Paul’s words from Romans 8:28:

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. (RSV)

Life, for me and even more so for many more around me, feels more like the verses Paul quotes a little farther down in the same chapter:

For your sake we are being killed all the day long;
we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.

If Mavis and Stanley are right, I need to hold on to Paul’s finishing words:

For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Lent is a little over a week away; my journey appears to be already beginning.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. -- Here's Mavis.

q and a

Ginger and I had a conversation with our friend Jay over coffee Saturday afternoon as we talked about the questions that shape our faith. Often, when people talk theology, the vocabulary centers on issues, which is ultimately polarizing, I think, because they end up doing things like taking a stand and defending a position. Neither of those verbs facilitates discussion or relationship, both of which are crucial to faith. Questions, on the other hand, are invitations to conversation, if they are asked honestly.

As someone has said, our answers are only as good as our questions.

Maggi Dawn has a great post asking about the word “missional” as an adjective churches use to describe themselves. The growing list of comments shows how important it was that she framed her thoughts as a question rather than an issue. She was clear about her thoughts and feelings, but in a way that invited others to do the same where we could all learn from one another.

My friend Gene pastors a church in Plano, Texas. One of the ways they choose to talk about faith is with “Life Mission Questions,” which they describe as follows:

• How do I live as a Christ-follower?
• How does your life express your worship of God?
• How do you partner with God to rescue those around you?
• What have you done to strengthen your core relationships today?
• How do you act more like Jesus than when you first met him?
• How do you invest your time, talents and treasures to serve God and others?

Though I understand the value of our creeds has they have been handed down, I find much more resonance in faith expressed as interrogative rather than declarative or even imperative. Several years ago, my friend Billy and I wrote a song in which we tried to ask questions that matter. Here are the lyrics to “The Question Pool”:

where did I leave my plastic halo
why can’t I speak to my good friend
am I sleepwalking through the best years of my life
how long is too long to pretend

what do I owe my parents’ generation
what do I want and who would know
can I live on answers that were handed down to me
do I just hold on or just let go

I am drinking from the water blue
down at the question pool

what is lying over my horizon
what am I afraid of going through
if whatever happens come to push me past the edge
will all I believe in still be true

I am drinking from the water blue
down at the question pool
I wonder what it all comes to

why am I moved by stories of Eden
what does its lovely sadness mean
am I a traveler who cannot remember home
why do I cry sometimes in dreams

I am drinking from the water blue
laying down at the question pool

The final lyric took shape as we poured over page after page of questions we had written down or solicited from friends or read along the way. When life is distilled to a set of principles, we begin to set as though we were made of plaster of paris, becoming more and more rigid and brittle as time passes. If our faith is fed by questions, we have the chance to keep growing and changing as we learn more about our God, our world, and ourselves. My seminary ethics professor began the semester in the fall of 1978 by saying, “The issues that will be at the forefront during your ministry are probably not even in sight right now. Therefore, you have to learn how to think and question so you will have a framework to deal with what is to come.”

Our answers are only as good as our questions.

In The Return of the Pink Panther, Clouseau sees a man on the street with a dog next to him. “Does your dog bite?” he asks.
“No,” says the man.
Clouseau reaches down to pet the dog and the pooch almost rips his hand off.
“I thought you said your dog did not bite,” Clouseau exclaims.
“It’s not my dog,” the man replies.

Let me say again, our answers are only as good as our questions.

As we talked together on Saturday, the question that intrigued me most was, how do we live out our faith without it exhausting us? We know we are called to live out our faith in our world. We don’t know how to deal with life in both the micro and macro. How do we ask questions about Darfur that will energize us to creativity rather than futility? How do we do church in a way that feeds the community instead of church life being an endless stream of committee meetings? How do we learn to say, “This is the day our God has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it” and really mean it? How do we live so that when we are asked how we are doing we can answer something other than “I’m really busy” or “I’m really tired”?

When Billy and I came up with the metaphor of the question pool, we imagined a place that fed and invigorated us: to drink from the question pool would be to drink the Water of Life. If we really asked what we owed our parents’ generation, or what the Eden story really had to say beyond the creation wars, or how our faith was changing as it was tested, we thought we would be on a journey worth taking. Over a decade later, I still feel that way.

Truth grows in the face of questions the way my tomato plants are responding to the summer sun. Questions cause love to grow: that’s how the uncharted territory or a relationship becomes a home. Faith grows with questions because the point was never the answers anyway.

“I will give you water and you will never be thirsty again,” Jesus said to the Samaritan woman as they stood by the well in the heat of the day.
“What kind of water is that?” she asked.
“Exactly,” Jesus replied. And then he smiled.

Peace,
Milton