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 are many different ways of praying, many different techniques that we can learn that will enhance our prayer life. But there is great value in keeping things simple and uncomplicated in our prayer life.
If we look on prayer as basically a conversation between us and God, we may be inclined to focus on our part of the conversation—what we say to God. But if we can learn to listen to what God has to say to us, we might find our prayer life taking on a new dimension. And this can be very important for the right question to emerge within ourselves. If we can simply be in God’s presence and not worry about what we are to say, we can hear what the Lord is asking of us. But this is not easy. We are so busy and there are so many distractions around us, that it takes practice to simply sit in the Lord’s presence and listen to what He might say to us or what He might be inviting us to. What I mean by this is exemplified in a story about an old peasant and St. John Vianney, the Cure d’Ars. It seems as though this old peasant would simply come into an empty church and just sit for hours. One day, the Cure d’Ars decided to ask him what he did during all these hours in church. The old peasant replied, “nothing. I just look at Him and He looks at me.” This old peasant understood what listening as a way of praying was all about.
That is one of the ways that learning how to listen in our prayer life allows our right question to emerge. This is not a matter of frantically praying for answers to anything in particular but is open to all possibilities. Emily Dickinson wrote: “I dwell in possibility,” and so do each of us as we try to discern what the Lord is asking of us. Very often, our right question is not something monumental. Rather, it is often something that has to do with the more, with generosity. For some of us, the more might be about our careers. For others, the emphasis might be on relationships and how we can become more loving. For still others, like the rich young man, the Lord may be asking us to give up something, some dimension of our lives, so that we can follow Him more closely. Perhaps we are being invited to give up our jealousy, envy or some grudge that we are holding. Even the idea of acceptance or surrender can be associated with the idea of generosity. Maybe the right question for some of us is to accept something in our lives that we can’t change. This certainly requires a great deal of courage, faith and trust. Whatever the particular area of life is that we are concerned about—if we have as a basic stance in life that we want to be more generous, to give the more in whatever ways the Lord asks of us, then as we listen more in our prayer, the right question will come to us.
St. Paul understood what prayer as listening is all about. In his Letter to the Romans he wrote: “The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God” (Rom 8: 26–27).
E. Learning to Be Courageous
We might not ordinarily associate the idea of courage with learning to ask the right questions about our lives. But it can be a very important element in the process. Why? Because it takes courage to be open to new ideas, new ways of thinking about things, new questions that might open up new possibilities in our lives.
Several years ago, I retired from a career of over thirty years in counseling and teaching at several universities. One of the things I remember reflecting on and praying about was what I would do with my time. How could I best use it? I remember praying about wanting to be open to all possibilities. I thought I wanted to spend some of my time doing volunteer work but was not sure what kind of work, or how I could best use my talents. As I prayed more about this, I discovered that this was an important right question for me at the time. I wanted to live with this question so that I could live into the answer.
Gradually, I began to think that I would like to help the poor in some way. Although I had done this in a variety of ways in the past, I felt this time I was being invited to work with the poor in a direct way—to be on the front line, so to speak. At this point in my discernment process, I mentioned this desire to several of my friends, and they wondered if this was the best way to use my talents. After all, they said, you have your doctorate, have owned a very successful counseling practice and have taught at several universities. Would it not be a better use of your talents to try and become a member of some organization and influence policy development on a larger scale? Valuing their feedback and wanting to be open to where the Lord might be leading me, I began to incorporate this question into my own prayer life. However, as I did this over the next several months, I kept coming back to a desire to work directly with the poor. Eventually, things became clearer for me. As I tried to live the question, I lived into the answer. I have always had a special love for St. Francis of Assisi, who loved and served the poor, and I knew there was a place in Baltimore called the Franciscan Center. I felt called to contact them and eventually began volunteering there one day a week. One of the many things we do at the center is to feed the hungry, and this is what I ended up doing. I am one of the many volunteers who feed a hot meal to between 400 and 500 people, five days a week. This has allowed me to be on the front line in serving the poor. Maybe at another time I will be called to be on the board of an organization or invited to develop policy or strategy, but for now this seems to be a right answer to a right question for me.
Courage comes from the French word coeur, which means heart. In order to ask the right questions or to make changes in our lives requires that
