The Importance of Questions

A few months back I was sitting at a picnic table with a couple of friends of the congregation. One friend had been to a training, but she wasn’t sure she was going back- she had asked a question and been told the answer was “too complicated for her to understand” Ugh. Another friend told the story of a time she asked her boss a question about her job, and was called a trouble maker. All of us had been told at one time or another that “we ask too many questions.”

Perhaps this has happened to you? I know some of you have told me it happened to you in Sunday school -- and you told me that in fact you were here in a UU church today because you asked a question that was shut down somewhere along the way.

So I just wanted to say; Unitarian Universalism is a place where your questions are welcome. Where questions are important.

Where do ducks sleep? What makes some clouds look flat on the bottom? Why is it so hard to see the crescent moon where I live? What is gender, really? Every research project, every scientific discovery, starts with a question that someone decided was worth the investment of time, resources and curiosity. 

Questions help us fix things that are broken- Why is my car making that rattly noise? Does trickle-down economics really work? Do the musicians you listen to on Spotify get any money for their work? What can we do about all the plastic in the ocean? How does human activity impact climate change? Where can people who are unhoused go on freezing cold days?

One of our 7 guiding principles is the “free and responsible search for meaning” and this has been part of who we are from the very beginning.

When the printing press was invented, folks who had never read the bible were able to read it themselves for the first time. Servetus, a physician who discovered pulmonary respiration – the way air moves through our lungs -- wanted to understand where the idea of the trinity came from, and found it didn’t come from the bible! He got in big trouble for that question- We UUs have been getting in trouble for our questions for a long time.

Back at the picnic table, we wondered why a presenter might have shut down my friend’s question. Most likely they didn’t know the answer or weren’t sure how to explain it. I shared a story from when I was in high school -- our chemistry teacher was teaching us about fire, and I wanted to understand “what IS fire.” He was very cross with me and I didn’t get the answer I was searching for. I learned much later in life that fire is a PROCESS, and moreover, that there are things we just don’t know.

You can understand why a frazzled high school chemistry teacher in an unruly class might be cross about a question he didn’t have the bandwidth to answer, but my friends and I had all felt the impact of having a question shot down by someone in authority- having our curiosity nipped in the bud. Those memories stay with you.

We talked about how hard it is, especially when you are new in your job -- as a teacher, a presenter, a minister -- to say “I don’t know” when that’s the case. What a relief it is to realize you can simply say “I don’t know” - it opens the door for other folks to figure it out together. This was the guidance when I was parenting a child in the “why” phase of life -- “let’s go look that up together”.

I’m grateful to have been raised UU, where questions were appreciated, and mostly welcomed. I was, of course, the child who asked a million questions, and even my mom, who loves a good question herself, would occasionally have to say “that’s enough questions for today, I’m tired” I asked so many questions in yoga class that the teacher would sometimes have to say, “let’s talk about that after class.” Not that it was wrong to ask the question, just that there were other people in the class who needed the teacher’s attention too.

The friend who asked her boss a question- she noticed that sometimes when we ask questions, it feels like a threat to authority, especially questions like “why do we do it this way?” Those who fear such questions are not wrong; a good question, a really good question, can be destabilizing, it might lead to change.  

When I was about to head off on my sabbatical last year, I wondered what resources the UUA had to help us navigate the time. There wasn’t much on the website, so I emailed the head of the department to ask “Who is working on sabbaticals?” I asked the same question at the minister’s association. Crickets. I asked and asked that question, until one of those people I had asked, heard someone else asking the same question, and set up a meeting with folks from both organizations. We confirmed that there was no one else who was in charge, and we agreed that together we would make a space to resource sabbaticals. A new task force emerged with all kinds of great new questions … what is a sabbatical really? And if sabbaticals are important, what are we going to do about community and interim ministers who don’t get sabbaticals? The Task force is now revising the handbook and has other projects in the works. A simple question leading to real change.

But a question, like any tool, is something we must learn to use with skill.

Unitarians have sometimes used the same wonderful skeptical questioning that helped us figure out that the earth rotates around the sun, and trickle down economics does not work, and applied that same skepticism to the life of the spirit and the heart. Do you love me? Do you really love me? Prove it! Did you really have that life -changing numinous experience, or was it just endorphins at the end of a hike and the thin air at the top of the hill? Sometimes UUs have mis-used their right to ask questions in a way that disrupts community, harms relationships, “just asking questions” when in truth they already believe they know the right answer.

That’s why we say a free and “responsible” search for meaning. Because questions are powerful, we must use that power responsibly. I’m proud that in our congregations we treat each other’s beliefs with great care and respect. When a friend tells us about the visit from a cardinal to her bird feeder, that felt like a visit from her beloved who had died, we just enjoy that good feeling with her, that she had a meaningful experience. In spiritual direction we try to ask questions that help people know their own hearts, know their own spirits “What did you feel? What did you notice? What is your desire?” We’ve noticed that some questions shut people down, or limit their freedom, and other questions help them follow their own inner truth more closely.

Some questions poke us in tender places. I’m sure you’ve experienced a question that was unkind, or at least clumsy. I remember standing in a long line for a potluck many years ago when someone asked “are you going to have any more children?” This was a tender and active question in my own family, ouch. I don’t remember what I answered, but I remember asking “how about you guys, are you going to have children?” “That’s personal!” She returned. Yes. When we ask questions about someone else’s life, their heart, their body, their tender places, our questions can be like a weapon that cuts down, or like an open hand that invites. We can offer our questions with great respect and care, or sometimes just ponder them quietly in our own hearts. It can be good when getting ready to ask a question, to consider “Who or what does this question serve?”

I think, if you ask a question that makes someone mad, or nervous, it might be because you’ve found a really good question. The reason that question felt tender to me, was because that was a powerful, alive question for me and my family at that moment. But that was a question for me to explore with my therapist and my partner, not an acquaintance in a potluck line.

Questions have an important part in my spiritual life. I often bring questions into my spiritual practice. Perhaps I start out with a general feeling of things being unsettled. It might take a while to find the right question, some of the ones I’ve been wrestling with lately are: Who am I now? How can I, an adult who grew up in a humanist home, learn to pray authentically? Do I have something more to contribute in this next chapter of my life? Why would a loving God allow suffering? I know I’ve found the right question because it has a deep, clear resonance. If it doesn’t ring like a bell, if it sounds a bit muffled, I keep refining it, I keep molding it like a piece of clay, until I find a question that gets to the heart of things. I might write it in my journal, and I find that sometimes just getting the right question means I’m in the home stretch for understanding what I most desire to know.

Some questions we ask ourselves can be challenging, destabilizing. In recent years the leaders of our church in Athens were tired after years of faithfully steering us through the challenges of Covid, and we wondered- does what we do here matter? And once you’ve asked a question like that, really wondering, really looking for a true answer, you have to be open to the possibility that it doesn’t, that maybe it would be enough for there to be churches in neighboring towns, and communities of UUs online. Does it matter that we have a space here; do we offer something different than a coffee shop, a library, or one of the many other churches in the Valley? And when we asked that question, people told us how this place mattered. New members told us they couldn’t believe a church would say they were welcome just as they are. It matters that we create a caring community together, when we are lonely, when we are sad, when we are worried. And when we saw the standing room only crowd at Transgender Day of Remembrance and Resilience that Sunday of 2024 eyes shining with tears, hearts full, people gathered in community for something important, something that mattered, we had our answer.

Our Cortland congregation asked a hard question about their beautiful historic building- it is a lot for a small band of dedicated volunteers to maintain. Was it time to let go of that beloved building and find a new place to meet? You could feel the tender power of that question in the room when it was asked. We sat with that question for over a year, until we were all clear that the old cobblestone church was a unique sacred space, important to the history of Cortland and to each of us, and we were ready to fight to save it. We also asked “does this space have a calling?” And since that time, our building with the hard work of our volunteers, has been a home to all kinds of wonderful gatherings, from farm workers, to coffee houses, to the masked activity collective, to our Community Meals. “Yes”, we learned. The building does matter, and it does have a calling.

Questions have power, so I invite you to nurture those Questions that come out of your own curiosity, your longing to know things more deeply, your desire to discern what is at the heart of things. Questions have power, so I invite you to use them responsibly, with respect and open mindedness, at the service of what is most precious. Questions have power, and your questions are welcome here.