September 23, 2012 | 8:00 a.m.

The Blessing of Questions

Victoria G. Curtiss
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 104
Mark 9:30–37
Job 38:1–7, 34–41

I had a thousand questions to ask God,
but when I met him they all fled
and didn’t seem to matter.

Christopher Morley

I once served a church called Collegiate Presbyterian. It is in Ames, Iowa, right across the street from the campus of Iowa State University. My first impression of them was a bit odd. When I got the initial phone call from a member of their Pastoral Search Committee, I asked her to tell me something about her church. She responded, “We like to discuss things.” I thought that was peculiar as the first thing one would say to describe a church. Later it made more sense to me. Their most recent pastor had canceled an adult education class that was to discuss homosexuality and the Bible because he felt there was nothing to discuss. It was black and white. Now for a church whose members were mostly faculty and staff of the university, a church with “Collegiate” in its name, not being free to discuss something was a real slap in the face. People of that church enjoy using their minds. I think people of Fourth Church do, too. We like grappling with issues. And it’s more than intellectual curiosity. We are seeking meaning to life. Simplistic answers just don’t work for us. Why? Because they don’t match our life experience. Life comes along with twists and turns and complexities. It often doesn’t fit neatly into whatever categories we may have previously carried.

The book of Job is for us! It was written by someone who was questioning—and wanted others to question—the popular theology that suffering is punishment from God and if you are so burdened it is because God finds you guilty of sin. And likewise if you are pious and obedient to God, you will be blessed. The book of Job challenges all that. It raises lots of questions.

The popular notion of Job is that he was a patient sufferer, but upon closer examination, this is but one dimension of him. He is actually quite impatient. He loses everything but his life. He rants and raves against God, he bemoans the day he was born, he demands an audience with God. He believed God was just and that he himself was a righteous and innocent man. So Job questioned God. Why would a just God make him suffer?

The author of the book of Job was familiar with the traditional views of his time. He puts these views in the mouths of Job’s friends. They argue for the goodness of God, the moral order of the world, the importance of humble submission to God, and the idea that suffering has a purpose. Job, on the other hand, raises radical challenges. He questions the justice of God, describes the world as moral chaos, depicts suffering as victimization, and stakes his life on the possibility of a legal-type of confrontation with God (see “The Book of Job,” introduction by Carol A. Newsom, The New Interpreter’s Bible). But even with these differences, both Job and his friends still held to the view that justice, especially retributive justice, should be the central principle of reality.

When finally God appears to Job, God does not respond to Job in categories of right and wrong, reward and punishment, justice and injustice. Instead God becomes the one asking the questions. God asks Job rhetorically, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” “Can you lift your voice to the clouds, so that a flood of waters may cover you?”

The many issues raised by Job and his friends are not resolved. Yet because Job stayed in relationship with God, stayed engaged with God, took all his honest struggles to God, Job encounters God. God meets Job in the midst of a whirlwind, and Job is changed by that encounter. He is silenced in awe and humility. He repents of speaking of that which was beyond his understanding. He lets go of the view that suffering is punishment for one’s sins and starts to understand God differently.

Fortunately few of us have had to personally suffer what Job did—the loss of all our possessions, our health, our family members, only to be taunted by those we had supposed to be our friends. But we live in an era in which millions of Jews and some of their supporters did suffer such loss, in the Holocaust. What was their experience of God?

Stephen Spielberg created a documentary called Last Days, which follows the lives of five Hungarian Jews, each of whom were exiled in concentration camps in the last year of World War II. In the documentary they recall their horrific experiences. Every now and then, they also mention God. As I watched it, I found myself hanging on each word. How would they see God now, after all that? One woman said she saw two children fall off the train on the way to the camp. A Nazi soldier got out, picked them up by their arms, bashed one child’s head against the train car until you could see the blood, and threw them in the car. She said, “That is when I stopped talking to God.” This same woman said later she realized the Nazis had taken all that she had owned, all her family, her identity, anything that had been precious to her, but she refused to let them take her soul. Years later she began to talk to God again.

Another, when asked where God was in the concentration camp, said, “God is what is giving you strength.” Another said she didn’t blame God for what happened: “God gave to mankind a mind, a heart, and freewill. It’s up to us what we do with it. I blame mankind.” She now teaches seminars about tolerance. Another man, the only Holocaust survivor in the U.S. Congress, said he could find no place emotionally, rationally, intellectually for a higher authority in what happened. He is devoting his life fighting for human rights.

You may have heard of Etty Hillesum, another Jewish woman who was in a concentration camp. In her journal, she wrote to God:

I shall try to help you, God, to stop my strength ebbing away, though I cannot vouch for it in advance. But one thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: You cannot help us. . . . We must help you to help ourselves. And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of you, God, in ourselves. And perhaps in others as well. . . . You cannot help us but we must help you and defend your dwelling place inside us to the last. (Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life)

Then we have words from the Christian theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who also lived, and later was hanged, in a Nazi concentration camp. He said, “God lets himself be pushed out of the world and onto the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way in which he is with us and helps us.”

The suffering of the Holocaust exploded many simple answers—perhaps any answer. It was a horrific tragedy that has no justification. For some, that suffering distanced God from their lives. But for many, God remained close but was perceived in different ways.

My perception of God changed when I learned that my husband and I could not have children. At the time I had a niece who seemed able to get pregnant at the drop of a hat, who was not a fit mother, and whose children all ended up in foster care—while I, who love children and think I’d make a good mother, couldn’t have any. Why? Like with Job, it felt unfair; it didn’t make sense. I journaled in anger. I cried and I yelled at God. When my emotions were spent, a surprising thing happened. I realized that the god I was upset with was an image of God I no longer held. That image was of a dominating God, who allowed or withheld the birth of children. But the God who came to me in my heartache was God as a Mother, who herself knows the pain of wanting children to love and to love her back and is often left empty. I was comforted by her. My questions were not answered. But I sensed God with me, sharing in my suffering, mending my heart.

When we take our questions to God and stay engaged with God, we can be changed. Listen to what Suzanne Farnham, a spiritual director, wrote:

Twelve years ago I began to study discernment to find out what God wanted me to do. I quickly discovered that God generally refrains from definitive answers to our questions. Instead, God illuminates signs that point the way. [God] imparts insights and shows new perspectives while steering us away from neatly packaged instructions.

What God gives us turns out to be better that what we ask for. I was looking for intellectual certainty about where to go and what to do. God used my quest for such discernment as an opening to draw me into a closer relationship with God and with people.

Certainty tends to make us arrogant and isolates us from others and from God. Uncertainty, on the other hand, leads us to listen and to look for help. It reinforces our humility and challenges us to proceed with confidence that God will help us. . . .

Discernment, it turns out, is not so much about getting answers as it is about being changed by God.

Of course we are going to question and struggle. Miguel de Unamuno wrote, “Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their hearts, without anguish in mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe in the God idea, not God himself.”

Saint Augustine said, “God is not what you imagine or what you think you understand. If you understand you have failed.”

I love the familiar guidance that poet Rainer Maria Rilke gave to an aspiring young poet. Rilke wrote,

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. (Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet)

A lesser-known thought from Rainer Maria Rilke was this that he sent to a friend: “When I saw others straining toward God, I did not understand it, for . . . there was no one blocking the way between [God] and me, and I could reach his heart easily. It is up to [God], after all, to have us; our part consists almost solely in letting him grasp us. (Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke and Benvenuta: An Intimate Correspondence)

Job didn’t get answers. His previous categories for God no longer worked. But God nonetheless encountered Job. And in that encounter Job was grasped and changed by God.

As you seek to make meaning of life, let your questions bless you. Your questions may not lead you to answers, but they can lead you to God. And in that encounter you may discover the truth that God is with you and nothing can separate you from God’s love. That is more important to know than any answers we seek.