Good Samaritan. Towards the end of this parable, Jesus asks: “which of these three, do you think, proved himself a neighbor to the man who fell into the brigands’ hands?” “The one who took pity on him,” he replied. Jesus said to him, “Go and do the same yourself.”
So many things in life depend on the way we see things. How we see other people is particularly important, because how we see them will determine how we treat them. There is an old Carolina story I like about a country boy who had a great talent for carving beautiful dogs out of wood. Every day he sat on his porch whittling, letting the shavings fall around him. One day a visitor, greatly impressed, asked him the secret of his art. “I just take a block of wood and whittle off the parts that don’t look like a dog,” he replied.
Each of us is involved in this whittling process. In rather simplistic, yet profound language, this story describes the movement of growth to which each of us is called. We are invited gently to whittle away the parts of ourselves that keep us from seeing and loving our neighbor as ourself. And as we allow ourselves to be drawn into this transformative process and discover each person as our brother or sister, we will find that like the Good Samaritan, we are invited to care for others in whatever ways are possible for us. Moreover, this way of seeing people also allows us to become less selfish and encourages us to be of service to others, like the Good Samaritan. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “life’s most persistent and urgent question is, “what are you doing for others?”9 King knew that what we do for others is what is most likely to fulfill us.
3. Who do the crowds say that I am?
A third right question that is important for our spiritual and psychological growth is contained in Peter’s profession of faith. “Now one day when he was praying alone in the presence of his disciples he put this question to them, “who do the crowds say I am?” And they answered, “John the Baptist; others Elijah; and others say one of the ancient prophets come back to life.” “But you,” he said, “who do you say I am?” It was Peter who spoke up. “The Christ of God” he said (Luke 9: 18–21).
“Who do you say I am?” This is such an important right question because it forces us to move from the general to the particular, from what others say to what each one of us says in our own hearts and with our own lives. Sometimes, it is easy to hide behind what others say, but the Lord wants each of us to personalize this question. Why? Because it forces us to make our faith personal so that we have a chance to own it. And when we personalize something, when we truly own something, we become personally involved and invest ourselves in it so that it means so much more to us. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said that one of the things that troubled him a great deal about Christianity was that so many people claimed to be Christians but did not act like Christians. And so, one of the most important goals of his life was to try to work out for himself what it truly meant to be a Christian. And is this not true for each of us personally? When we invest ourselves in the question “who do you say that I am?” it allows us to take the idea of faith out of some kind of general realm and make it our own. It is then that our faith truly takes on meaning and begins to influence all our attitudes and actions. It is then that our faith becomes the ground work of everything we do. It is then that our faith becomes formative for the way we live each day. Kierkegaard knew that for our faith to become meaningful and have an impact on our lives, we would each need to invest ourselves in the quest truly to become a Christian.
9. Quoted from brainyquote.com/martinlutherkingjr.html.
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Learning to Ask the Right Questions
“The longest journey is the journey inward”
—Dag Hammarskjold
In 1968, Thomas Merton wrote his second diary, which he called Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. He said that this book was completely different in its style and content from his first diary, The Sign of Jonas, which he wrote in 1953. This second diary was “a personal version of the world in the 1960s.” It was very different because Merton’s questions about life, society and issues in the world were very different. He said: “These notes . . . are an implicit dialogue with other minds, a dialogue in which questions are raised. But do not expect to find ‘my answers.’ I do not have clear answers to current questions. I do have questions, and, as a matter of fact, I think a man is known better by his questions than by his answers.”10
Merton had come to realize the importance of asking the right questions that shape us. It is our questions that allow us to grow. How, then, do we get to the right questions for our own lives? The right questions about God and our spiritual lives. The right questions about our own lives on so many levels. The right questions for us to grow spiritually and psychologically. The right questions for us in terms of the more. And how do we assist others in giving voice to their right questions?
For each of us it’s a learning process. We each have to learn how to ask our own right questions. Here are some helpful ideas on how we might accomplish this.
A. Living Your Questions
The first thing we need to learn is how to live our questions. This is what the popular German writer Rainer Maria Rilke tried to encourage a friend to do when his friend was struggling with several issues in his life. In his book, Letters to a Young Poet, he wrote: “I beg you . . . to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the question now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”11
Live the questions now so that at some point you will live your way into the answers. There is an art to living your questions. You peel them. You listen to them. You struggle with them. You let them spawn new questions. You hold the unknowing inside. You linger with it instead of rushing into half-baked answers. The Jesuit writer Anthony de Mello put it very well: “some people will never learn anything because they grasp too soon. Wisdom, after all, is not a station you arrive at, but a manner of traveling . . . To know exactly where you are headed may be the best way to go astray. Not all who loiter are lost.”12 As a matter of fact, those who loiter in the question long enough will live into the answer. “Search and you will find,” Jesus said (Matt 7: 7). I sometimes wonder if this means search long enough and you will find. It is the patient act of dwelling in the darkness of a question that eventually unravels the answer.
Let me give two examples. A woman begins to notice that her work no longer gives her the satisfaction it did in the past, and then she starts having difficulty in her job. It’s perplexing, painful and frightening. At first the only question she asks is what do I need to do to keep this job, to get comfortable in this job again? But as she lives with her question and struggles with its implications, her question begins to change. What might God be calling me to in terms of my vocation at this time, she begins to ask? And, as she lives with her new question, she eventually lives into the answer that she ultimately feels is God’s will for her.
In the second example, a man receives an unexpected inheritance—a large amount of money. The first question that comes to mind for him is what can I spend this on? But as he lives with the question, reflects on it, prays about it, his question, too, begins to change. He now asks, how might this gift that has fallen into my life be a gift to myself and others? In these examples, there is time to take action—to decide about the
