There are no Right Answers to Wrong Questions. Peter C. Wilcox
be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength” (Isa 30: 15). “For you I wait all day long” (Ps 25: 5). “My soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning” (Ps 130: 6). “If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay” (Hab 2: 3). “But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Rom 8: 25). Sometimes, I wonder if waiting is the missing link in our spiritual growth, the lost and forgotten experience crucial to becoming fully human, fully Christian, fully ourselves.
One day, while reading the Gospels, it occurred to me that when important times of transition came for Jesus, he entered places of waiting—the wilderness, a garden, the tomb. Jesus’ life was a balanced rhythm of waiting for God and then expressing the fruits of that waiting.
We can easily view waiting as mere passivity. However, the words passive and passion come from the same Latin root, pati, which means to endure. Waiting is both passive and passionate. It’s a vibrant, contemplative work. It means descending into the self, into God, into the deeper labyrinths of prayer. It involves allowing our questions to emerge, listening to disinherited voices within ourselves, and facing the wounded and broken parts of our lives. It means struggling with the vision of who we really are in God and developing the courage to live that vision.
A retreatant at St. Meinrad Archabbey tells the story of how difficult it was for her to quiet herself and become still. One day she noticed one of the monks sitting perfectly still beneath a tree. He was the picture of waiting. Later she sought him out. “I saw you today sitting beneath the tree—just sitting there so still. How is it that you can wait so patiently in the moment? I can’t seem to get used to the idea of doing nothing.” He broke into a wonderful grin. “Well, there’s the problem right there, young lady. You’ve bought into the cultural myth that when you’re waiting you’re doing nothing . . . . When you’re waiting, you’re not doing nothing. You’re doing the most important something there is. You’re allowing your soul to grow up. If you can’t be still and wait, you can’t become what God created you to be.”15
One time, Jesus told a parable about the ten maidens waiting for the bridegroom (Matt 25: 1–13). Five came prepared with extra lamp oil to wait through the night. The other five didn’t plan on having to wait, so they brought only the oil that was in their lamps. Naturally, their lamps gave out. When they left to go buy more oil, the bridegroom showed up, and they missed him.
On one level, the point of this story is that we should always be prepared. But it is also a story about the importance of waiting—waiting through the dark night of our questions. The idea is that waiting precedes celebration. If you don’t show up prepared to wait, you may miss the transcendent when it happens.
It is also important to see in the Scriptures that we have a God that waits for us. The parable of the prodigal son could also be named the parable of the waiting father. It tells us much more about God than anything else—a God who watches and waits with a full heart for us to make our homecoming.
Henry David Thoreau wrote at the age of twenty-five, “nothing can be more useful to a man than a determination not to be hurried.”16 He decided to turn away from the lives of quiet desperation he saw all around him and march to his own different drummer. On February 8, 1857, Thoreau wrote this in his journal: “you think I am impoverishing myself by withdrawing from men, but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature.”17
What has happened to our ability to dwell in unknowing, to live inside a question and coexist in the tensions of uncertainty? Where is our willingness to incubate pain and let it bring something new to birth? What has happened to patient unfolding, to endurance? These things are what form the ground of waiting. And if you look carefully, you will see that they are also the seedbed of creativity and growth. As Thomas Merton observed, “the imagination should be allowed a certain amount of time to browse around.”18 Creativity flourishes not in certainty but in questions. However, security is always very seductive. For most of us, it is much more difficult to venture out of our comfort zone. We prefer instant knowing rather than deliberate waiting. When we learn to wait, we experience that where we are in the moment is truly what is important and precious in life. We discover, in T.S. Eliot’s words, “a lifetime burning in every moment.”19 Through our journey of waiting, we come home to live out a new, more authentic vision of who we are. As Eliot also wrote: “we shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and to know the place for the first time.”20
God is offering each of us an invitation. A call to waiting. But we have to be patient. We have to let go, tap our creative stillness, and let the right question emerge. Most of all, we have to trust that the Lord is always present to us helping us live into the answer.
C. Learning to Become Still
Another factor that is important in asking the right questions in life is learning to become still—quiet—reflective. Why? Because it’s only when we are still and reflective about life, that we can allow those right questions to emerge. Without reflection about the issues in our lives, we will often jump too quickly to the wrong answer or never get to the right question.
One of the best known but least observed verses in the Bible is this: “Be still, and know that I am God” (Ps 46: 10). The verse tells us something so powerful that we scarcely recognize it. It informs us that in the act of being still there is a knowing, a transcendent knowing that is available to us at no other time. The counselor Helen Luke cautions that without significant times to be still, we “extinguish the possibility of growth and walk backwards.”21 Here is the paradox: we achieve our deepest progress standing still.
The story of Bartimaeus in Mark’s Gospel (10: 46–52) is a wonderful story about waiting in stillness. He waited along the side of a country road. He lay on a roadside outside Jericho, waiting for Jesus to come and heal his blindness. But he also waited with hope and trust. He possessed an immense faith that Jesus was coming soon. We don’t know how long he waited—only that when Jesus finally passed by, Bartimaeus filled with faith, asked for his sight and received it. The gift of sight, the gift of being able to truly see what our important questions are in life, comes when we are still, filled with hope, faith and trust.
Jesus seemed to always have a soft spot for the marginal people in life, including beggars. He touched, healed and blessed them. He spoke highly of a beggar named Lazarus who lay under a rich man’s table, begging for crumbs. Can it be that beggars know how to open their hands, trusting that the crumbs of grace and mercy will fall? Is it because they have faith in something beyond themselves? Beggars are reduced by necessity to the sharp knowledge of their utter dependence. They have no bank accounts, no investments or stocks or any of those things we think give us security and in which we place so much of our hope. Beggars must simply trust, moment by moment, that somehow they will get fed. They live off hope. They live, not with clenched fists but with open hands, ready to receive. Henri Nouwen wrote, “when you want to pray, then, the first question is: how do I open my closed hands?”22 Prayer is a way of life which allows you to find a stillness in the midst of the world where you open your hands to God’s promises, and find hope. Bartimaeus can teach us about prayer where we are sitting ragged in our need with our hands wide open, trusting that the Lord will give us the grace to allow the right question in us to emerge.
D. Learning to Listen
Sometimes, we have a tendency to make things much more complicated than they need to be. That’s the way it often is with prayer. Now, we all know that there