"Why can't reason give us greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer?" — Piscine Molitor Patel, narrator of The Life of Pi
With respect to the author, Pi's question isn't really a child's question. The child's question would be more like, “When I throw this question over the horizon, where will the answer pull me?” When we asked questions as children, we expected to be drawn across new landscapes towards the answer. Just think of that question, “Where do babies come from?” Who could have anticipated the answer to that one? Who understood it? Who could imagine where it would lead us? When we asked questions as children, the questions pulled us, and our changing lives became answers.
Children live in the constant knowledge that they are “on the way.” Where things break down for adults is in our identification of the onset of adulthood as a destination rather than as another landmark in a journey. It is out of this misdirected sense of adulthood as destination that we ask the question that is not the child's question but our own: “How can I stand here, secure and stationary, and reel in answers?”
In Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, a powerful question drags the frail, determined, solitary Santiago from one end of the ocean to the other, almost killing him, before yielding an answer – the transformed Santiago . The relentless question weighs enough—is powerful enough—to bring into being a new self.
The answers to our real questions, the few that we dare hurl over the horizon, will likewise be occasions for movement and transformation. By the time they pull us in, we will be very different people. We will have new words for the hunger at the heart of our lives and for the food that addresses that hunger. We had thought our adulthood was a stable perch from which to demand of the universe its answers. We will have discovered that the universe has instead demanded of us our questions, has pulled us by the insistent threads of those questions across a God-haunted landscape and deeper into our humanity.
A child still has an expansive anticipation that, if there is not grammar or vocabulary enough to make sense of today, there may well be enough tomorrow. If that feeling, that sight, that taste, that direction doesn't have a name, cast your question over the horizons of language and follow where it pulls. There is always another word, calling a changing, growing new self into new being.
We grownups, though, grazing on the cold literal leftovers of modernity, sense the horizons of language closing. We butt against the end of imagination, against the fraying into nothing of the string of new words (and the new worlds that they brought to life by naming) that once seemed endless, against the impossibility that anything new can emerge, against the aching certainty that all the combinations have been tried and found wanting.
Does the ballast of safe familiarity make it all but impossible for our questions to pull us over the horizons into some new possibility? Is the apparent absence of any new reality simply a matter of weighing too much for our questions? Have we settled so firmly in the places where adulthood has set us that we hardly bother any more even to give voice to the questions that haunt us?
Into this sure—if stifling—existence there may come a question or two—an illness, a grief, a crisis in workplace, family, or neighbourhood—an interruption that cracks the shell of numbing sameness that has contained our lives. Or perhaps the question comes as what Walter Brueggemann calls the “testimony to otherwise” – a hint that beyond the smooth sameness is the dramatic topography of wonder, mystery, and surprise. The birth of a grandchild, a few bars of music, the sun at one of its extremes of rising and setting, or a smell or taste or sound from another time, a time of less close and crowded horizons.
Birth, song, light, scent—these are not experiences that can be said to mean any “one-and-only” thing; their meaning comes not because they establish and defend a proposition, but because they push towards us questions that outweigh our stability. Through them we enter another landscape; they draw us in motion across it, they call us to action out of our own newfound or long neglected longing. They invite us across a boundary, through a portal and into a journey. These “testimonies to otherwise” are not certain in the manner of death and taxes, or inevitable in the way of mortgages and markets. Their certainty is in the echo they find where we cannot find it without them, in the hope they stir against the hard shell of the inevitable, in their capacity to awaken what we had forgotten, lost, or laid aside when we allowed our feet to be planted in what passes for reality.
There is a rich and dependable source of such testimonies in the life of the world, and in the life of the church. Deaths and births, memories and hopes, a chance encounter with some strand of the depth of things, a loss, a regret, the powerful pounding of desire in our bodies and our souls – the world often enough, and sometimes insistently – bears witness to otherwise. And, often enough, our tradition adds the name of “holy” to that witness.
The first five books of the Bible—Torah—tell a story of otherwise, of a landscape shot through with the reality of God. Torah – the mother tongue of Jewish faith and imagination, traces the journey from Creation to Exodus by means of four journeys—the shell-shocked journey out of Eden , the improbable journey of Abraham and Sarah out of Haran , the desperate journey of Joseph's kin into Egypt , and the long ambivalent journey out of Egyptian bondage toward a God-promised future of freedom.
Torah comes to an end with the death of Moses and before the Hebrew people cross the Jordan into the land of promise. This mother tongue of faithful imagination comes tellingly to an end before the wandering God-nation arrives at its destination. In Torah, the people of Israel throw the question of freedom over the horizon of the wilderness and allow that question to drag them through the wilderness for 40 years, until they stand at the brink of fulfillment, and, transformed, become—for a moment—the Answer. Torah ends at this point. The crossing of the tribes across the Jordan is another story, a story in which the people of Israel achieve what they think is their heart's desire, to be “a nation like other nations.” It is another story that will tell of the closing in of the horizons until hopeful imagination is all but impossible, and only a marginalized, mad, prophetic few still dare to throw questions over the narrowing boundaries of current arrangements, and still fewer believe there is, beyond that edge, a Question with the strength to pull them out of the rut of the way things are into the dream of the way things might be.
Those who stand on the wilderness side of Jordan are themselves, of course, a marginalized, mad, prophetic few, whose only reason for trusting that Question is that its Answer—their own transformed life—has turned out to be true and evident. As they stand there at the boundary of a dream they didn't even have until God made them restless with it, they bear witness. We tell their story not primarily because of the destination they achieved, but because they tell our story, and because into that telling the Holy One crashes, bringing muted questions into words, hidden by the horizon of history, but weighing enough to tow them towards their heart's desire.
Another One will stand at the edge of this river, sure of the call to faithfulness, though perhaps less than absolutely certain of the details of transformation that faithfulness will work in his life. Bearing witness to the forgotten heart's desire of the people, he will interrogate the universe with the Question that only a marginalized, mad, prophetic few will even understand. In the end, he will allow his Question to outweigh even his human instinct for security, for survival; it will be the ballast that pulls him over the last and most terrifying horizon. So, for Christian people, asking the Question—“Who is God?—the answer is a Person transformed, glorified and lifted beyond even the power of death. And when, in rare moments of courage or clarity, we allow his Question to echo in our lives, it pulls us through strange borderlands into the very presence of God. We now discover two weighty Questions meeting in this one Life: “Who is God?” “What is a human?” And when we shudder at the foot of the cross, or gape at the rolled-back stone, we agree for a moment that these questions, dangerous as they are, are the questions that will draw us towards the answer of our own transformation, the Answer we have seen in the lives of saints and neighbors.
To be towed by a Truth that pulls from beyond the horizon of our knowing, is not, of course, a comfortable thing. To be towed in the direction of our heart's desire, when our sin-bounded heart does not itself know that desire or have a name for it, is at least disorienting—more likely frightening. If in the Bible we expect to find confirmation of what we can know and embrace from within the shortened horizons of business as usual, we must choose either disappointment or deception. Choosing disappointment, we lay the book down and restore our attention to things as they are, to what we will, from that moment, call “the real world”. Choosing deception, we will pretend to read the book, pretend to take it seriously, all the while busy with scissors and paste to bring its expansive holiness into conformity with our sober self-regard. Choosing either, we step prudently aside while the wind of Truth—truth about the world, about God, about our very lives—blows (where it will) through the empty corridors of our all-but-abandoned lives.
Such prudence leaves us the safe dignity of familiar horizons; however, it robs us of a world of possibility and imagination that are the divine testimony against apparent inevitability. The world's necessity is not God's necessity. The inevitability of “things as they are” is swept away by a Spirit that blows where it wills, and things that cannot be—beauty, holiness, healing, peace, justice, communion—spring to life where the imagination of God touches the barren ground of necessity.
To have in our hands a book with such power, to have access to a God-shot landscape that turns out to begin in own back yard, is a rich endowment. To have that gift and not know what to make of it is a correspondingly profound impoverishment. To plunder this mystery for propositions by which we can do battle with those who are, or see, or behave or believe “otherwise” is to strip-mine the biblical landscape for the fool's gold of fundamentalism—a fundamentalism that ignores the fundamental reality that God's freedom, not our fundamentals, sets down the rhythm of Truth. To place its odd or dangerous texts under house arrest on the authority of the current or accepted version of what is “reasonable” is to colonize the biblical landscape under the flag of liberalism—a liberalism that ignores the extravagant liberality by which possibility is founded, not in what we can understand, but in what God chooses. To do either is to refuse the freedom and cost of a life with God, a life illuminated by biblical testimony, a life in which closing horizons break open and inevitability yields to the holiness of God.
Such a refusal is understandable. This freedom of a life with God is neither safe nor sure; it is life with One who is beyond our capacity to manage. It is a life in light of a witness that cannot be reduced to rules or bent to business as usual. It is a life that allows itself to be outweighed by God and God's ways. That life is more than any of us can endure without (at least) occasional retreats to the more stable – though less hopeful – ground that we can define by our power, our wealth, our status, our mastery. But when we call such retreats “biblical” or “realistic,” we are in danger of misunderstanding God's business with us and with creation. Whatever god we cobble together out of our failure of spiritual nerve is not the God of the Bible, but a small god dangerously inflated by our need for a safe perch from which to cast our insubstantial questions.
We know all this. We know that such a lightly certain god cannot either name or address the weighty question of our insistent hunger. A god as the answer to our demand for an answer is not the God who meets our humanity in Jesus. The living God is more like a question that draws us over the frontier of the familiar, accompanies us across the patchwork landscape of discovery, draws us towards the encounter that transforms us, and holds us open to the possibility that we will find our true and full humanity only by asking the Question who asks us into existence. As we struggle to know and love one another, as we probe and wonder at the witness of our ancestors, as we allow our frailty, fear and flaws to be outweighed by grace, will we have desire enough to ask such a Question? Or will we settle for an answer we already know to a question that doesn't matter—for anything, that is, that will relieve us of the uncertain beauty by which we journey home?
Rev. Michael Thompson is principal secretary to Archbishop Michael Peers.
