Here Comes My Question

“If you can face and accept and even rejoice in the experience of darkness, if you can accept that God is more than an idea which keeps your religion or philosophy or politics tidy – then you may find a way back to religion, philosophy or politics, to an engagement with them that is more creative because you are more aware of the oddity, the uncontrollable quality of the truth at the heart of all things. This is what ‘detachment’ means – not being ‘above the battle’, but being involved in such a way that you can honestly confront whatever comes to you without fear of the unknown; it is a kind of readiness for the unexpected, if that is not too much of a paradox.”

― Rowan Williams, Open to Judgement: Sermons and Addresses

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Dear Kate,

If a person doesn't ask the right questions, she probably shouldn't expect any meaningful answers, right?

By "right," I hope you will agree it doesn't mean the kind of questions that would give us answers we deem right.  If we already know what is "right," why question at all?

Yet this seems to be the kind of questions we like to ask exclusively, that I truly couldn't recall the last time a genuine question was raised.  (And for that I've come to realize very early in my life that I could bullshit my way through this darn thing, no question.)

When I say to you I have a question, I mean your position is open to judgement, mine.  I am questioning you, that's my question.  I don't really care about what is ultimately true and wise and beautiful and worthy of my first and final devotion, only that I don't really like what I am hearing from you and feel the need to right your wrongs by exposing the weakness of your argument.

No, I don't really have any question that kinda stands alone as a bona fide conundrum and keeps me up at night; I am only interested in interrogating you so that you can stop interrogating me.  I want you to leave me alone by me not leaving you alone.

So I keep talking, babbling, bubbling foam at the corner of my mouth, edge of my words.  And please don't feel bad about my treatment of you: I do that to myself all day long.  The last thing I want is I questioning Me.  Thou shall not judge means to me Thou shall not be judged.

Naturally the thing I do most is to collect: ideas, data ("facts"), friends, sayings, Bible verses that speak for me, about what I deem right, my cellphone my Poké Ball to catch them all, ready for battle.  I am fair, don't take sides.  I am naturally situated on the side of truth; the right stuffs just kinda gather themselves around me.

An example.  We don't know how to read the Bible, we say.  We have questions about it, we mean.  Too many questions, none remotely satisfactorily answered.  We can't get ourselves to open it unless it makes itself answerable to some pretty obvious troubles we have with it.  Such as How the hell can we believe in a heaven in this day and age?  Or, more fundamentally, for every bit of useful information I can glean from the most (i.e. bearably) readable parts, there are a million butt-numbing, attention-killing words and just plain dumb falsehoods that I need to suffer, ignore, explain away.  Why bother?

It's just an example, one that doesn't even resonate with churchgoers, I know.  Churchgoers have more meaningful troubles to trouble themselves with.

When I said no one is really listening, I wasn't cynical.  I was only giving out a piece of statistic.

Yours, Alex