As part of the Questions of the Heart sermon series, I asked if you had a question of the heart that you wrestle with. I suggested that you live the question by asking God about it (making it a matter of prayer and meditation), looking to the scripture for insight and guidance, and talking about it with trusted friends.
Today, I want to tell you more about the phrase, “live the question.” It’s part of the insightful advice Austrian poet Ranier Maria Rilke gives to a young poet he is mentoring. As part of living the question, Rilke also encourages his young friend to love the questions themselves. In other words, there’s no need to disregard or reject questions of the heart. Hold them in high regard and welcome them as a companion on your journey. In his book Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke writes on July 16, 1903:
You are so young, so I would beg you, dear sir, as best I can to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books penned in a language most foreign to you. Don’t search for answers now that cannot be given because you could not live them. And it is about living it all. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, at some distant point, without realising it, you will gradually come to live yourself into the answer.
I got an email from someone last week who attached an essay based on Rilke’s advice. In part, the author says that living the questions is the only way to come to your own answers. Finding meaning and even knowing God “otherwise than by hearsay” takes time and patience. There are “questions no one else can properly answer for us; they must be asked again and again; we must not evade them or shunt them aside. Life is a deeply mysterious business; beware the [one] who claims to know too much. The wisest [person] is the humblest. Instead of seeking answers from outside yourself, cultivate your patience, learn to live in your questions, trusting that gradually perhaps even imperceptibly, your answers will emerge, real answers that you can live. (Arthur Foote, Taking Down the Defenses).
Indeed.
My prayer for you today is this: May you love and live the questions of your heart. May you welcome them as God’s gift. And may you be compassionate and patient with yourself along the way.
Much love to you,
Pastor Gregg
