"What Can I Tell You?"

READING “Some Questions You Might Ask,” by Mary Oliver

Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?
Who has it, and who doesn’t?
I keep looking around me.
The face of the moose is as sad
as the face of Jesus.
The swan opens her white wings slowly.
In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.
One question leads to another.
Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?
Like the eye of a hummingbird?
Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?
Why should I have it, and not the anteater
who loves her children?
Why should I have it, and not the camel?
Come to think of it, what about the maple trees?
What about the blue iris?
What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?
What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?
What about the grass?

MEDITATION

Now let us turn inward in the spirit of meditation and prayer, listening to these words from Howard Thurman, or to the still small voice within.

How good it is to center down.
We look at ourselves in this waiting moment …
The questions persist:
what are we doing with our lives? –
what are the motives that order our days?
What is the end of our doings?
Where are we trying to go?
Where do we put the emphasis
and where are our values focused?
For what end do we make sacrifices?
Where is my treasure
and what do I love most in life?
What do I hate most in life and to what am I true?
Over and over the questions beat in upon the waiting moment.
As we listen, floating up through all the jangling echoes of our turbulence,
there is a sound of another kind –
A deeper note which only the stillness of the heart makes clear.
It moves directly to the core of our being.
Our questions are answered,
Our spirits refreshed,
and we move back into the traffic of our daily round.
With the peace of the Eternal in our step.
How good it is to center down!

SERMON

In retrospect, it wasn’t a very good idea, inviting you to send in questions for me to answer in a sermon. I am humbled by your response: three questions in all. Perhaps it’s a little late for innovation.

I received the first question from a church member several weeks ago. Then she wrote back to say that I had answered her question in my sermon the following Sunday. The other two questions were sent by people who couldn’t be here today.

One asked, “What do you mean by faith? Don’t we really just have shared values?” Then she answered the question for herself. “I guess what I mean is, I don’t think you should use the word ‘faith.’”

The third person asked a compelling question about human nature and evil. But she asked me to answer her by email. I haven’t done it yet, but I will.

So that leaves me with a sermon titled “What Can I Tell You?” Which becomes the question. I also have to think up what the answer is.

So I consulted my favorite lists of questions. One is the poem by Mary Oliver, “Some Questions You Might Ask.” In it she leads the reader to conclude that everything has a soul – and that it is nature./1

Howard Thurman asks us, in the words I offered for our meditation, “what are we doing with our lives?” “Where are we trying to go?” He tells us, when we listen “in the stillness of the heart,” we move “directly to the core of our being,” where “our questions are answered” and “our spirits refreshed.”/2 Howard Thurman and Mary Oliver each ask and then answer their questions at the same time. Their purpose is to teach and to awaken the spirit. How to experience nature, how to “center down” and let eternity come to us.

I have another list of questions too. The author is a twelfth century monk, Adelard of Bath, who had the privilege of traveling abroad, studying advanced science from Arabic texts. When he returned to England, he found people to be crude and unlearned. To educate his nephew at home, he set forth a series of questions about the nature of things, some of which were as follows.

“Whether beasts have souls. Why men are not born with horns or other weapons. Why those who have good intelligence are lacking in memory and vice versa. Why the nose is located above the mouth. Whether the visible spirit is substance or accident. Why the living are afraid of dead bodies. Whether the stars fall, as they seem to fall. Whether the stars are animated. What food the stars eat, if they are animals.”/3 He then answered these and many other questions with an erudite discourse on everything from psychology to cosmology.

I’ve always found Adelard’s list entertaining and provocative, yet it also conveys scientific knowledge well beyond his peers. Some of his questions have been answered by now. Others have turned into very different questions. Still others remain unanswerable. And some don’t matter anymore.

Questions are how we begin a search for truth. Whether at the outset of a scientific experiment or in the midst of a personal crisis, we ask questions to learn. Finding answers requires an open mind and a willingness to adapt new knowledge.

This is the core of our liberal religious tradition. It is an expanding dialogue and a growing curiosity, allowing us to evolve and change. It is tempered by doubt. And it is the courage to look at ourselves in new ways.

This attitude of openness is our faith. Rather than holding fast to belief, it tests everything, holding it up to the truth of our experience, and the voice of our conscience. And letting go of what no longer makes sense.

One hot Sunday evening in July 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson addressed the Senior Class of Harvard Divinity School in a second floor chapel on campus. We’ll be visiting this same chapel when our high school group travels to Boston over the Fourth of July weekend. It will probably be hot then too.

Anyway, Emerson – a Unitarian minister, resigned from his pulpit, had been invited back to give the new ministers a sense of what the future held. But first, he asked questions. “What am I? and What is? asks the human spirit with a curiosity new-kindled, but never to be quenched,” he preached. “Behold these outrunning laws, which our imperfect apprehension can see tend this way and that, but not come full circle. Behold these infinite relations, so like, so unlike; many, yet one. I would study, I would know, I would admire forever.”/4

These words, which capture the spirit of our faith today, were shocking at the time, even for Unitarians. Emerson told these young ministers to find new truth – and to find it within. Trust your intuition. Listen to those who speak from experience, not books. Tell those who lean on religious teachings or social customs, to “hush.”/5 Question authority.

Our liberal religious search for truth has always started with questions. The answers – some personal, others collective – are always open to change. And there is more than one way to go about it.

Sometimes you can start with a dense, opaque question, as Mary Oliver did: “Is the soul solid, like iron?” and let it lead from one question to the next. Before you know it you have arrived at a new place – with the wonder and clarity of all nature before you.

Or you search your own soul, as Howard Thurman instructed. Ask the deep questions, the ones with the hard answers. Let them take you “directly to the core of [your] being,” where the answers will meet you. This is how to renew your spirit. This is how to center down.

Questions awaken us to our surroundings, lead us to truth, cause us to think, and help us to change. They are where our faith begins. That is our gift for everyone who remembers being scolded as a child for asking too many questions in some joyless Sunday School. Questions are for the joy of learning.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was right; don’t get your answers from the minister. Get them from yourself, from the adventure of living, and from the honest examination of everything around you. You may discover that the search matters more than the answers themselves.

As for us, it must be a good sign: no further questions. I’d like to think that we aren’t ending our time together with a lot of unfinished business, things we wished we knew about each other, but never asked. Or, as one beloved church member said to me recently, “I feel I know you as well as I ever will.”

And what about you, what will happen next? No one can say. The future is always the unknown. But it is also where we find new adventures, unexpected joy, and more truth than we thought we could handle. It will be good – probably great. And that is what I can tell you for now.

_________________
 1. Mary Oliver. “New and Selected Poems.” Boston: Beacon Press, 1992, p. 65.
 2. Howard Thurman. “A Strange Freedom.” Boston: Beacon Press, 1998, pp. 306-306.
 3. Adelard of Bath. “Questions on Nature,” in “The Portable Medieval Reader.” New York: The Viking Press, 1949, pp. 622-623.
 4. Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Divinity School Address,” in “The Portable Emerson,” Carl Bode, editor. New York: Viking Penguin, 1946, p. 73.
5.  Ibid., p. 81