Oh I’ve learned some things about stuff in this last year during the pandemic. Some of it about myself, some of it about others. Some of it’s pretty and some of it’s pretty ugly. The thing is, a lot of it is COMPLICATED. And if it doesn’t seem complicated, I wonder if that’s because I’m not asking the right questions. Maybe when you’re knee deep in the mud — this is not the best time to be asking how you got there. And you know, this is fair, but I guess what I’m also asking myself is — how can I further my understanding? How can I further my own thought processes? I’m not really at a point, here in the mud of it all, to answer my questions, but maybe right now just formulating questions, as a stance, might be useful. It might be helpful. And wasn’t that something that I’ve always sort of prided myself in being?

So here are some of the questions I’ve been tossing around in my head:

What is it that we owe each other as human beings? When I say, take care, to someone how do I mean it now, and why would I say it if it’s provisional? How far does our empathy stretch? How far, how deep really, are we willing do dig to understand why someone believes what they believe? How can we have quieter conversations with people we disagree with? How can we still be humble and open and resist coldness? How can we continue to be interested in the stories of ordinary people with whom we disagree? In what ways are we obligated to share what we know? How are we obligated to one another? What is happiness? What does it mean to forgive and how does forgiving (or not forgiving) change us? How do we hold our mistakes in our hands? How do we make moral and ethical decisions without succumbing to fatigue?

How can we exercise our moral imagination? How can we tend to our soul? Is it ethical to leverage shame for a common good? What is our relationship to hope now? What are our griefs and how can we help others navigate their griefs? Is our life, though perhaps less wild, more precious now and what will you do with that one life, thank you Mary Oliver as always for that one. If how we live our life is how we live our days, then how can we adapt our pandemic-informed days to incorporate our hopes, dreams, delights, values, our goals? What is our relationship to beauty now? Can asking questions be a kind of spiritual practice? What happens when we consider the opposite?

I could go on, but I’m sure you have your own list of questions!

I read the following tweet/quotation and have been thinking about coming at certain problems through the “standpoint of redemption.” How does that change our thinking?

How can we continue to pose worthwhile, curious questions, kindly, and with good intent?

Please notice that I have absolutely no answers for any of these questions. There was an article that I read in The Guardian by Marina Hyde about how she was being harassed on the street and she ends the article by asking: “Still, good question, all things considered. Why are they so angry? It does feel like way, way, way past time we found out.”

And maybe variations of that question have been asked before, but when I read it, it felt new to me. It’s a short question but it is not a small one. It certainly is a good one. It occurred to me that there are so many questions yet to be posed. And maybe before it’s way way way past time?

So, I don’t listen nearly often enough these days to Krista Tippett’s podcast, but I have her book Becoming Wise, and I took it off the shelf and re-read the dogeared parts.

A month ago I might not have wanted to read about hospitality. Tippett talks about it as “love in action.” She says, “The challenge of standing before open ruptures in civic life is matched, and complicated, by the challenge of standing hospitably before those who offend and harm and drive us crazy in an everyday way. So is standing hospitably with our own, perhaps justified, righteous indignation.” (Written well before the pandemic). She goes on, “I use the word hospitably with intention. Hospitality is a word that shimmers, softly.” And I suppose once we’ve been vaccinated, it will be easier to think in terms of hospitality. I wonder how to be hospitable and at the same time stay safe? Lucky for me, because of my day job, I get to work that out in real ways rather than hypothetically. And when I say, lucky me, it’s with a bit of dryness and a bit of a laugh and and eye roll, but also truly, I am making my way to seeing this circumstance as an opportunity. Because one thing I keep learning is that the practice is never exactly like the theory. I can think about how wonderful it is to be hospitable all I like, but the doing, that’s the tricky part. And I do believe that it’s a privilege to be able to exercise our thoughts, to practice our practice.

Tippett reminds us to “feel how when you extend a kindness, however simple, you are energized and not depleted.” And I want to take that to heart. And I want to remember her words on generous listening, which I’m sure I’ve quoted here in this space previously. She says:

“Generous listening in fact yields better questions. It’s not true what they taught us in school; there is such a thing as a bad question. In American life, we trade mostly in answers — competing answers — and in questions that corner, incite, or entertain. In journalism, we have a love affair with the ‘tough’ question which is often an assumption masked as an inquiry and looking for a fight.”

“If I’ve learned nothing else, I’ve learned this: a question is a powerful thing, a mighty use of words. Questions elicit answers in their likeness. Answers mirror the questions they rise, or fall, to meet.”

It’s, hard, says Tippett, “to resist a generous question.”

In what ways are we responsible to each other? And how can we ask better questions of ourselves and each other? What happens when we do as Rilke suggested in that well-known passage, which I’ll end with here, and love the questions themselves?

“Love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

March 14, 2021