"Life's Nagging Little Questions"

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Rev. Suzelle Lynch
November 2, 2003

The young woman in the hospital bed looked tortured - dull eyes in a swollen face, hair falling out in clumps, body both bloated and skinny. When I took her hand, she looked up at me and said, "Suzelle, why am I even alive?"

Her name was Ann, and she had just begun her first year at an out-of-state college. She was feeling a bit tired, a bit worn out, and went to the health center to see a doctor. The next thing she knew she was being flown home to Dallas, Texas for emergency surgery on a tumor the size of a grapefruit in her chest.

Ann had lymphoma. Her parents were in shock. The church was in shock. We wondered if she would live. I was the intern minister at the Dallas church then and I volunteered to go and be with her, as one who was closer to her age than any of the other ministers.

At first she was simply weak, and grateful to be alive. But then she suffered setback after devastating setback - endured more surgery, more chemotherapy, horrendous pain, and a prognosis that was grim.

And so came the morning when she looked up at me and asked the question I could not possibly answer "Why am I even alive?"

Life's nagging little questions.

A young mother went to speak to her pastor one afternoon to pose a question she'd been asked her by her three year old. "Mommy," the child had said, "where was I before I began growing in your tummy?" Rev. Forrest Church, senior minister of the Unitarian Church of All Souls in Manhattan, and the pastor in question, told it this way. "It was," he said, "among the best questions that I've ever had the privilege of pondering."

Life's nagging little questions.

I remember a man named John who was coming close to the end of his battle with AIDS-related illnesses. He was a former Catholic, and now a member of the Humanist group at the Dallas church. He was serene about the nearness of his death, and intensely curious about what it would be like to die, and what would come after. "All through my childhood," he said softly, "I could not make any sense out of heaven and hell. Why would there be another place to go to after this life? Being a Humanist made it all seem so irrelevant. But now that I am dying I find myself exquisitely entertained by the question of what comes next. What will happen when I die?"

Life's nagging little questions.

And then there was Judy, a former prostitute, a former Unitarian, the mother of a child with severe disabilities. I met her in a women's support group when I lived in Seattle. Judy's brother had saved her life. He had helped her break away from prostitution, find new work, a supportive husband, and a good school for her son. Given the chance for a new life, Judy wondered, perhaps for the first time ever, "What do I want? Who am I?"

Why am I alive? Who am I? What do I believe in? What do I want? What is the meaning of life? What will happen when I die? Does God exist? These nagging, not-really-so-little questions are human questions. They are religious questions. Questions human beings ask, because we know we are alive and that we'll all have to die one day. Questions human beings often look to religion to answer. Questions that truly only faith or experience can answer.

Forrest Church says, "Knowing that we are going to die, we question what life means. We ponder the creation, studying nature and human nature. We try to make sense of all we see, think and feel. Though people may reject it as a false science, for me theology is instead the highest form of poetry. Projecting our experience of love and power onto a cosmic screen, we create God in our own images." (www.allsoulsnyc.org/publications/sermons/fcsermons/where-who-where.html)

Those nagging little, or not-so-little questions often come to me most strongly in the Fall, when the earth's changes make me aware of my own mortality. The approach of tonight's Installation ceremony also brings up deep questions, as you and I covenant with one another to engage in the ministry of this church with hope and faith, courage and compassion.

Hearing the news about the raging fires in Southern California brings up the questions, too. What would I do if my home were in the path of the inferno, if my life and the lives of my family and friends were in danger? I've heard various news interviews with people who have had to flee - often the reporters wanted to know what the person took with them when they fled their home. One took only underwear. Another regretted leaving behind her diplomas and credentials. I caught the tail end of a radio interview on Friday evening - I think it was on National Public Radio - with a man who survived the Nazi concentration camps. He was talking about a little statue of a naked woman - I believe it was something he had grabbed when he ran from his home, fleeing the fires. He grabbed it, not because it was valuable, but because it was precious. It was something that had survived his concentration camp experiences with him. It symbolized life, endurance, survival - the spark that had allowed him to overcome tremendous odds.

When I was in my first year in seminary, in 1991, the Oakland Hills fires in Northern California were raging. I lived in Berkeley, very near the school, and when I stood on the roof of my apartment building, I could see the red glow of the fires on the horizon. It was only a twenty-minute walk to where the devastation was apparent. I was terrified. It wouldn't take much for the fires to sweep down in our direction. I began to put things into my car - my computer, some photographs, clothes and food, some water. I began to try to figure out how I would get my cat into her carrier and out of the building quickly if the time came. I didn't know what to do, or where I would go, or even if the things I wanted to take were the right things. I didn't know what my neighbors were planning, or if they needed my help.

Luckily, the fires were contained, and I did not have to flee. I did not have learn from experience whether my strategies would save me, whether I would try to help my neighbors, whether they would try to help me; whether my questions were the right ones.

Just before I went to seminary, one of my friends had given me Rainier Maria Rilke's little book, "Letters to a Young Poet," with the following section highlighted: "You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now 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 questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

Try to love the questions. Live the questions now. Those admonitions have stayed with me for many years. But do they apply when we are poised for flight, when the building is burning and all before us is smoke and chaos? Again, I do not know. And I hope I never have to find out.

What I have found out is that it is hard to love the questions or to live them when your heart is breaking.

Four years ago this Fall my best friend died. She had been diagnosed with a fast-moving kind of brain cancer eight months earlier. Her death was heartbreaking for me -- I could not fathom why death would snatch her away just as I had finally become a mother to my beloved daughter. Why would death take my friend just as I had so much joy to share with her? Why? I demanded to know. Why my friend? Why me? Why now?

Like most human beings, I want to believe that I am in control of my life. When my friend died, I demanded that Life, the Universe, God, whoever, listen to me, and give me back my position at the steering wheel. We human beings always want to know why when something terrible has happened. We demand to know why and how, for the questioner always controls the conversation. Our questions help us deny our powerlessness, our helplessness and cling to at least the illusion that we have choices. Our questions make us believe that life is rational, orderly, knowable.

But the powerful human questions, the ones about the meaning of life, about death, about why we suffer - have no easy, concrete answers. Instead, they drive us more deeply into our lives.

Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist who survived the death camp at Auschwitz, wrote these words at the end of his book, "Man's Search for Meaning,": "We had to learn… that it really did not matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life - day by day and hour by hour. And our answer had to consist not in talk, but in action; not in thought, but in conduct."

A couple of years ago I led a daylong spiritual retreat at my previous church. It was called "Living and Loving the Question." The aim of the retreat was to aid people in discerning the question for which their life was the answer. To try to make more clear the central question or questions they were living from. Hard to believe we thought we could even begin this process in a day - truly, it is the work of a lifetime. Few of us will have to survive a concentration camp, few of us will find ourselves fleeing a wildfire, yet even without crisis and horror, I believe that Life is questioning all of us. Life wants to know what we believe we are here for, how we shall live so that when our lives end, we will know that they have been worth dying for.

These are the kinds of questions Jesus asked his disciples, and the people in power. "Who do you say I am?" he asked. "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his soul?" "Do you want to see?" he asked the blind man at the pool of Bethsaida. "Do you love me?" he asked Simon Peter, three times. His questions shaped his reputation as a great moral teacher. His questions were the kind religion helps us answer, but not in the way many people think.

Here's the truth: no Bible or scripture or doctrine or guru can answer life's questions, for us, for they are not questions meant to be answered. And yet our religion, our faith does help us with them. For these questions ask us to be silent, to think, to reflect, to sink into the mysteries of life, and contemplate.

I didn't know how to answer Ann, the young woman whose suffering was caused by the medical processes that were supposed to heal her. I didn't know what to say, when she asked, "Why am I even alive?" But I could hold her hand and be a witness, be living evidence that her life had meaning. (And the wonderful news about Ann is that she did survive, and she is now married and has a baby!)

My daughter Grace loves to hear the story of how she grew inside my body, but has not yet asked me where she was before she began growing there. But I know that someday she will ask this. When Forrest Church was asked what to say by the mother of the child who wanted to know where she was before she was born, he gave this tentative answer: We dwell in God before we are conceived, and after we die we return to God. And in between, we hold the key to God's home in our pocket. That may not be the answer I'll choose to give Grace when she asks, but it is a thought-provoking metaphor.

John, the humanist, didn't ask me what would happen when he died. He did say that he wished he'd be able to tell me about it, though. I was honored by his trust, his openness, his willingness to let me live his questions with him until he lived no more.

And the women's support group I was part of lived Judy's questions with her, too. When she told us who she had been, and that she wanted to know who she was now, a web of love began to weave between us, a web of honesty strong and flexible enough to hold all of our questions.

What is the meaning of your life? What is the question that your life answers? Is it a question about faith? About truth? About love? Or perhaps simply the question of how one might live a comfortable life. Or is it the question of what it means to be alive, knowing we will one day die.

I know that the question for which my life seems to exist is always about community, always about how love might overcome evil and fear. It's a question that changes form, slipping into my day and night dreams, perching on the edges of conscious thought to goad or comfort me.

For I believe that somehow, some way, life intended for each of us to be here. I believe that the Universe would not call us into form without something like a love for each of us. Each of our lives brings value and worth into the world, answers to questions never before asked, that never will be asked again. As Mary Oliver put it in her poem, the world offers itself to our imagination, calls to us like the wild geese -- announcing, over and over, our place - our unique place -- in the family of things. As Forrest Church said, we try to make sense of all we see, think and feel - remembering, of course, that we each hold the key to God's house in our pockets.

And so it is up to us to live the questions now, at this moment, this turning point in our lives, whether they are little and nagging or big and overwhelming. It is up to us to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and books written in a language we cannot yet read. And then gradually, perhaps, we will come to see that we, ourselves, are the answers.

As living, growing, conscious human beings, conceived in mystery and carrying its key, we can do no less.

Amen.