(Originally posted March, 2007).
In Hebrew class this morning, we were talking a little bit about "mystery" and how sometimes letting there be no clear answers is okay.
Then in the car on my way back from the pharmacy, the radio station played "Closer to Fine." As many times as I've heard it/sung the song, these lines struck me: "There's more than one answer to these questions, pointing me in a crooked line. And the less I seek my source for some definitive, closer I am to fine."
NOW, I'm reading Velveteen Rabbi (I'm supposed to be reading Augustine's "On Christian Doctrine" but come on, wouldn't you make the same choice?), and she quotes Rilke:
I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very 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.
-- from the letters of Ranier Maria Rilke
Huh. Mystery, questions, seeking...What does that mean, to live the questions? Another little bit of niggling to add to my Lenten pondering?
