Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. 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. - Rainer Marie Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

I was in my early 20s when I first read Letters to a Young Poet. This, Rilke’s most recognized quote, sits near the middle of the little book, and was the gold standard for enlightened spirituality at the turn of the Millennium. We who were trained under the words of Brennan Manning and Henry Cloud were to come of age as a more self-aware and emotionally-attuned crop of leaders, ready to lead the church into a new age of self-actualization.

I’ll be honest that Rilke’s instruction to be patient with the unsolved read like a temporary to-do. Surely I had a limited list of unresolved places, probably solvable by age 35 or so, and if I was really committed, attainable within the decade. I didn’t understand then that learning to “Love the Questions” makes you a different kind of person altogether. One where the line between questions and answers has become blurred past the point of recognition. One where what once was an emptiness to be filled has become a hollow in which to make a home.

The Great Pause

Fast forward 20 years and that same performative grace has taken hold of our quarantine days. We were all going to learn a new skill, get around to meditating, appreciate nature. Somehow silence on the outside was going to silence the world within. But—of course—it never really works like that.

Just like reading all the right books and spouting the jargon of the spiritual growth movement 20 years ago only fed my performance, today’s external dislocation has little power to reset our internal engines. Our rebellion against quietness is as loud as it has ever been.

Instead, we are all on the edge of our teeth. We’re disastrously lonely, upended by the unknowns of next week and next year, simultaneously starved for silence and connection, gaslit by leaders who wish to use these quarantine days as final nails in their enemies’ ideological coffins.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved…

How in the hell are we to do that? No literally, how in this hell of social separation, political poison, financial insecurity, loss of life, societal unmooring are we to find patience toward the questions? What made us believe that a mass uncertainty outside our skin would somehow spur on grace toward the uncertainty within?

Here’s what I think: That thud of our failed attempts to leverage quarantine for our own personal growth is just one more fallen idol in the performative pantheon. One more invitation to acknowledge how gorgeously vulnerable we really are.

Joyous Unknowns

Acquisitive faith, the kind that keeps trying to add on attributes and benefits, offered me nothing but another way to perform for the world. By contrast, the self-made crises, the professional and personal upheavals, the wounds I’ve never been able to heal, have been my greatest gift.

Not because they’ve “kept me humble,” another performative act. No, losing myself, losing my way, losing my religion, all have proven to be entrances into the permanently unresolved places, the endless questions. My adult spiritual journey started out with the attempts to fill the emptiness, the largeness within. Today, I see it differently.

Our highest calling is to embody our emptiest places.

These hollows that at first blush feel like fear or shame or doubt or self-hatred, are actually deep wells, access caverns to our most Christlike selves. We run from them, fill them with the stuff of work and parenting and religion and productivity. But just like no outside force can change your insides, no outside thing can fill them.

We are not empty vessels. We are full of water and wind. Water is the baptism that names us as beloved. Wind is the hollow rush that pulls us into the a life of joyous unknowns. As Gilda Radner once said, “Delicious ambiguity.”

A Reopened World

Be patient toward all that is unsolved…

We are re-entering the world much as we left it.

In a rush.

In a fight.

In a question.

We are all so hobbled and hurting. Perhaps it was never meant to be inside the Great Pause that we found our stillness, but after. After all had been rubbed raw, after all our opportunities to get back to “real life,” after normal resets itself.

All these past chances for quiet have only revealed to me how rebellious I still am. How much I hate the questions. I would choose “solved” over “unresolved” every day. But it has also afforded me the grace to see that even my resistance is a paper tiger. It collapses under the weight of a loving embrace.

I am learning to love my resistance. I am learning to acknowledge its call to de-escalate and under-produce. I am accelerating my free fall in the empty spaces. I am learning to welcome the fierce gentleness of now.

Our fear of the unknown is not a feeling to overcome, but an invitation. We are being drawn into the hollow. Into the water and wind. Let’s go.

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