Yesterday I followed a green minivan with a license plate that simply read "ANSWERS". It seemed to me a very bold statement to display on your car. Since I was following it for quite some time, I began to imagine what kind of answers the owner of this car might have. Was the driver a palm reader, fortune teller, a reader of tea leaves? Was the car being driven by a mathematician or scientist or maybe a Sudoku enthusiast? Or perhaps the person behind the wheel was religious professional of some sort-like myself- one who was certainly clearer about what they know than I am. Whatever the "answers" this person claims to have must be important….important enough to pay the extra cash for specialized license plates.

Are you a person more comfortable with answers or with questions? I’ve always been more a "question" person myself. I love questions. I love entering into the ebb and flow of questions, the process of thinking through all the possibilities that a questions poses. For me, questions and mystery go hand in hand and most often I find the sacred within the mystery.

One of my favorite quotes, which I come back to again and again comes from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. "Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart….Try to love the questions themselves….Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given 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 answers."

These words always remind me of the times I have tried to force the answers to the questions I am carrying….trying to make answers fit, rather than relaxing into the search, allowing a deeper truth to flow out of the Mystery. All the energy,the struggling, the pushing and pulling, trying to beat the answer out of the question, so I can "get on with my life"  Rather than just holding the question gently, trusting Spirit to walk with me into some greater experience of understanding,some deeper knowledge, I end up frustrated and exhausted with my own impatience.

Answers? Questions? Questions? Answers? The point, after all, is to live everything.

"For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part;then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. I Corinthians 13:12