Andy Harrison
Rainer Maria Rilke
On May 22nd, actor Andy Harrison movingly presented The Way at the Sanctuary Church. Based on the story from Luke’s Gospel about two followers of Christ as they walk the wild road to Emmaus, The Way confronts life’s big contradictions – suffering, injustice, betrayal, death. Near the beginning of Murray Watt’s 2002 monologue, the protagonist quotes from the fourth of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (1903), “Do not seek for answers, try to live the questions. And then, one day, without noticing it, you will live on into the answers.” I am reminded of Voltaire’s quip, that one should “judge a man by his questions, rather than by his answers.”
If the stream of Evangelical / Neo-Pentecostal / Charismatic Christianity in which I have swum since my youth, and from which I continue to drink, has a great weakness it is the instinct to reach quickly for the certainty of a superficial answer without ever hearing the questions. Evangelicals, who embrace the Bible as a book of answers, tend to eschew mystery and often that means not being good at dealing with reality. Now, perhaps more than ever, we must embrace Rilke’s challenge. To quote him more fully, from a variant translation:
“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.”
The Bible is full of questions. Some admit clear unequivocal answers; others elicit only more difficult questions; others terminate in silence – a silence that can only be lived.
Did God really say…?
Where are you?
What have you done?
Why are you angry?
Where is your brother?
Am I my brother’s keeper?
Why didn’t you tell me?
God, what will you give me?
How am I to know?
Where have you come from?
Where are you going?
Lord, will you destroy innocent people?
What were you thinking of?
What troubles you?
What does it all mean?
Who are you?
What is your name?
Is there no blessing for me?
How can God know?
What can God do to us?
How long will you chase lies?
Why have I bothered being wise?
What use is work?
What use is pleasure?
Can anyone be of use to God?
Does God care if you are righteous?
How can you be righteous before God?
What are human beings that you even think about them?
What is the greatest commandment? This admits a clear answer: Love God and love your neighbour. But still it raises a new question, an answer to which can only be lived, for it cannot be defined: Who is my neighbour? Only a story, an encapsulation of life will do: “A man was travelling…”
What must I do to be saved? Repent and Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ – follow him. But what does it mean to follow? How do I believe? How do I repent? How do I keep following that narrow road? The question still must be lived.
Jesus, the condemned prisoner, stands before Pilate, who asks, What is truth? But Pilate’s question receives no answer; the condemned prisoner continues to stand before him – living the question.
Then comes the hardest question of all – one that haunts all time and space; it is the agonized question of the crucified God, in answer to which there is only silence: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
The Jewish tradition is good at questions. Evangelical Christians prefer answers, because they would rather avoid contradictions. But contradictions will always come and when they do many lose faith or find it strained to breaking point; that is, unless we have learned to embrace the questions. As Nick Baines, Bishop of Bradford, puts it: “spirituality isn’t divorced from reality.” Intriguingly, and quite unexpectedly, I heard him say that in a radio broadcast today celebrating Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday.
I have been a Dylan fan for 40 years. I have listened to his questions and heard the answers blowin’ in the wind. I have shared his mixed up confusion. I walked with him as the former Robert Allen Zimmerman was “saved by the blood of the Lamb” and embraced the jubilant and sometimes judgmental certainties of Born Again Neo-Charismatic Christianity. A few years later, less certain that he was right, but more at peace with life’s mystery, he sang:
In the fury of the moment I can see the Master’s hand
In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand.
Dylan has walked down many roads. He “Ain’t talkin’. Just walkin’”. But there are contradictions along the path:
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone
Sometimes life is hard because:
In the human heart an evil spirit can dwell
I’m trying to love my neighbor and do good unto others
But oh, mother, things ain’t going well.
But behind all of this there is another presence:
I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me
I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand.
Bob Dylan
I will always retain great affection for this septuagenarian son of Israel. He has stumbled, walked and crawled down many roads and highways. He still has a voice. He is still living the questions.
Happy Birthday, Bob! I hope we meet one day – perhaps on some other shore. If not before, it is there that we will live right on into the answers.
