John Main9 stresses the importance of the right question rather than the right answer. Get the question right before getting confused or intoxicated by the variety of answers. First of all, to hear the question demands that we pause, pay attention and repeat the question. John Main uses the myth of the Fisher King in the Arthurian cycle of stories to describe the power of a question to transform the world.10
Parsifal, a knight of the Round Table, meets Anfortas, the Fisher King, who has been wounded by a lance through both thighs. The king is restricted to lying down and fishing from the bank of a river. Around him his kingdom languishes, a wasteland of freezing mists. On his first meeting with the Fisher King, during which he actually sees the Holy Grail, Parsifal does not ask any question of the king. This is a mistake whose impact he soon experiences. His failure to ask a question threatens the very existence of the Round Table, the symbol of global order. Realizing his sin of omission, Parsifal swears never to spend more than two nights in the same place until he has found his way back to the King and discovered the meaning of the Grail.
After five gruelling years he finds Anfortas’s castle again. Going straight up to the king, who is still lying prone with pain, Parsifal poses his question: ‘Who serves the Grail?’ Immediately the Grail appears before them. Parsifal falls to his knees and prays that the king’s suffering may be ended. Then he turns again to Anfortas and puts his second question, ‘What ails you?’ Instantly Anfortas rises healed. With the king’s newfound wholeness, the whole land is restored to life and fertility. Trees flower; streams flow; animals breed. Parsifal had simply asked his questions: one about the meaning of life, the other conveying compassion. The story is not preoccupied with the right answers to these questions but simply the caring, mindful way in which they are asked. Questions that can work such wonders just by being sincerely asked are redemptive questions. They must be heard and attended to. Then they change and renew the world.
By retelling this myth John Main addresses the dilemma of a Western culture which has for so many people today become a disabling and barren wasteland: a polluted environment and increasingly unstable ecological system, a sense of psychological isolation and social alienation in urban life, chronic levels of anxiety and increasingly dysfunctional families, shamefully widening gaps between rich and poor, addictive lifestyles and demeaning entertainment, unsupported institutions of democracy and manipulative media, a sense of powerlessness and abandonment among the young, confusion between personal and social morality, the loss of religious authority and the dangers of shallow syncretism. The malaise of the modern soul can be redemptively touched by those timeless myths that remind us of the eternal questions. These are the questions we must return to, not with easy answers but with new reverence. We have reached the point, John Main believes, where we do not need more answers, instant diagnoses and solutions. We need to relearn how to listen, humbly and profoundly, to the redemptive questions.
This does not imply that redemptive questions are in themselves magic solutions. They initiate a process of redemption. This means a conscious process of healing and of liberation from all that blocks joy, compassion and creativity. They liberate us, for example, from the grip of illusion and prejudice, from obsessiveness and fanaticism, from the fear of strangers and the prison of hatred. A redemptive question is not like other mundane questions. It does not expect an ordinary, rational, correct answer. Instead, it opens up a deeper level for experiencing the truth. The well-timed question in psychotherapy can cut the psychological chains of many years–and why do you think you said that? Or simply, what does that mean to you? Such open questions also operate at the root of the spiritual quest and trigger definitive awakenings.
Unlike answers, questions attract and hold our attention. They are irresistible, like a half-open door. Answers, especially wrapped in dogmatic certainty or claiming to be right in this form for all time, soon come either to bore or oppress us. Even the best answers can be as unwelcoming as a door banged in our face when they exclude alternative responses. Rather than giving answers and making rules Jesus called people to experiential knowledge. By asking questions or telling stories he invited his hearers to a personal discovery of truth, a redemptive recognition of reality. Throughout the gospels it is his questions which magnetize and capture our attention. Often they also deftly turn the attacks of his hostile critics back on themselves.11 It is by questions that he leads his disciples into a deeper understanding of who we are and who he is. These are the inseparable twin insights of his gift to humanity.12
Often, however, answers can be fatally attractive. They make us feel we can bottle the truth in a slogan, a dogmatic definition or scientific formula. ‘How many floors does the Empire State Building have?’ has an, easy, once-for-all answer. To deeper questions than this our responses require continuous and deep listening. Philosophy makes no progress but keeps returning to the basic questions asked by the first thinkers. This does not mean that truth is merely a subjective judgement or that there are no simple truths about right and wrong (do not kill, do not tell lies, help the poor). It means that the ways we formulate responses to these questions are constantly changing. Cardinal Newman (1801-90), one of the greatest of Christian theologians, wrote The Development of Christian Doctrine to show that one of the tests of a true answer is precisely that its way of expression evolves over time.
When we stop questioning we die. We only stop asking questions when we have despaired of life or when delusion or pride have mastered us. All the same, we hardly ever give up dreaming that a single definitive formula could solve all life’s problems. The temptation is very strong to cheat on the challenge of the mystery of life by reducing it to the status of a problem. So, people go on demanding absolute answers even to the redemptive questions. It is precisely these kinds of questions, though, that frustrate the ego’s attempt to control the mystery. The right questions constantly refresh our awareness that life is not fundamentally a secular problem but a sacred mystery. Mysteries are not solved. They are entered upon and they embrace us. Responding to Jesus’ question about himself and us involves not a discussion but a way of life. His disciples were first called ‘followers of the way’.
Every spiritual tradition treasures the power of the question. In Zen practice a koan is a question thrown to the rational mind which arrests the ego’s attempt to control reality. Like a key the koan opens consciousness beyond reason to truth as unfiltered experience, pure knowing. Receiving the koan from the teacher, the student’s rational mind may recoil in anger and frustration as it futilely tries one clever solution after another. And the ego’s need for control appears to be endless, even for some would-be Zen practitioners. In a bookshop I once saw a paperback enticingly called A Hundred Zen Koans–and their Answers!
Answers are most dangerous when we egotistically fight to defend them against a broader vision of the truth. Visiting Bere Island in my thirties made me rework some of the answers I had received as a child to questions about my family history. This involved me in both emotional and intellectual change. Ideologically or theologically we can also cling to familiar answers until they seem to be the only answers. Then they can be used to justify the condemnation and rejection of others. Even the most tolerant people cling tenaciously to their views. Listen in to any conversation and you see how quickly people defend their own answers by attacking others. Then, hopefully, we recognise how we are no different! Set answers breed conflict and prejudice. Wisdom and tolerance are found by listening to the important questions, keeping them open, pausing in silence to listen again and again.
Over the past two thousand years there has been no lack of answers to that searching question which Jesus put to his close disciples one day in the village of Bethsaida: ‘Who do you say I am?’ Peter, the impetuous leader of the disciples was characteristically quick to reply. It is the first recorded answer to a question around which two millennia of Christian life has formed. It was brief: ‘God’s Messiah’, he answered. Many church councils subsequently wrestled with the right way of expressing a longer response. In AD 381 the Nicene Creed, as expanded at the First Council of Constantinople, clarified the Christian perception of the
