Lenten Questions

Who wants to live with questions? Not many of us. Our time really is suspicious of questions. We crave answers desperately. So our best sellers tell us how to fix love, marriage, divorce. We are told how to shed forty pounds, make lots of money, put pizzazz back in the bed-room. We are a hungry people and we have to have our answers. The sooner the better.

And Lent comes again and the whole twisting journey Jesus walked is still with us. Who answers the old rugged cross or how we took out the bravest One who ever came this way and we nailed him to a cross. What? Jesus stumbling under the weight of it all. Why? Why? Why? Watching as his old mother stood there sobbing as he stumbled by. Pilate smirked and asked him a question: “ Tell me Jesus are you really the Messiah?” He never said a mumbling’ word. But we’ve asked it too. Burying a son of a overdose. Hearing the Doctor whisper: “It is stage four.” Or turning off the tv because we cannot stand the horror of babies blown to pieces and a whole country in disarray. Or those almost million who left us much too soon from this cursed virus.

Poor Biden or Trump or whoever have microphones too close asking: “give us an answer.” And we listen closely knowing really they have no answers. Rilke the poet exhorts us all to live the questions. “ Do not seek answers,”he said, “which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far into the future, you will live gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

I remember as a little boy the preachers kept saying: “Christ is the answer.” To what? Because outside those stained glass windows blacks could not even enter those same churches and the rich got richer and the poor may have said piously Christ is the answer. But knowing somehow that answer so self-assured and pious had never even dealt with the hurting questions that first must be addressed. So Lent comes once more beckoning us to follow even if we never ever have the answers. But like those loaves and fishes we will be given just enough to get us down the road.

This is what I want to try to tackle on these 40 days before us.

--Roger Lovette / rogerlovette.blogspot.com