An aging Hindu master grew tired of his apprentice complaining, and so, one morning, sent him for some salt. When the apprentice returned, the master instructed the unhappy young man to put a handful of salt in a glass of water and then to drink it.
"How does it taste?" the master asked.
"Bitter," spit the apprentice.
The master chuckled and then asked the young man to take the same handful of salt and put it in the lake. The two walked in silence to the nearby lake, and once the apprentice swirled his handful of salt in the water, the old man said, "Now drink from the lake."
As the water dripped down the young man's chin, the master asked, "How does it taste?"
"Fresh," remarked the apprentice.
"Do you taste the salt?" asked the master.
"No," said the young man.
At this, the master sat beside this serious young man who so reminded him of himself and took his hands, offering, "The pain of life is pure salt; no more, no less. The amount of pain in life remains exactly the same. However, the amount of bitterness we taste depends on the container we put the pain in. So when you are in pain, the only thing you can do is to enlarge your sense of things . . . Stop being a glass. Become a lake."
In this parable, questions can slip into the place of salt. Poured into the scale of a glass, they commonly leave an unpleasant, sometimes bitter, aftertaste. "How is it that I didnÕt get that promotion? Why does my son talk back like that? Where is that Second Avenue subway? Why is this happening to me?" And on and on. It takes a larger receptacle, a lake, an ocean, for questions to stretch and play out in greater breadth and depth, to transmute into the larger questions whose span of whatÕs and whyÕs rocks our soul with a vitality that we Unitarian Universalists are presumed to relish. These are questions that hold traces of that unpleasant taste, but are always always fresh.
"Love the questions," preaches Denise Davidoff, past moderator of our Unitarian Universalist Association. For me, Deni is a model of one who can cut through the bitterness of the small stuff with her penchant for jumping right out of that parableÕs glass into an ocean of whitecaps. As she looks on our Journey Toward Wholeness, our effort to dismantle racism in ourselves and our institutions, Deni asks, for example, if itÕs possible "to remain culturally European in the expression of our multiple values and beliefs and attract people of colorÉ." She asks if a racially and ethnically diverse congregation can "still be oppressive." She asks if we can begin a process that we are unlikely to complete in our lifetime. Tough questions all. And then she bids us to "love the questions." Love the questions, for "there are no answers, just the process inherent in living the hard questions." (Denise Davidoff, "Loving the Questions," a sermon preached at Fountain Street church, Grand Rapids, Michigan, September 27, 1998)
There are no clear maps, no straight lines.
Our choicest plans
have fallen through,
our airiest castles
tumbled over,
because of lines
we neatly drew
and later neatly
stumbled over.
—(Piet Hein, Grooks, The M.I.T. Press, 1966, 17)
How well this bit of verse--from the Danish poet, mathematician, painter, and inventor, Piet Hein--describes the inevitable stumbling in our Journey Toward Wholeness and every other grist-ridden journey we undertake. Such quirky wordsmithing served Hein well when he joined the Danish Resistance during World War II and sought a code language to communicate with others who fought back. His peculiar verse, which he termed "grooks," passed far outside the range of Nazi sensitivities in the struggle for liberation. (back cover)
Oppression in any form is burst through in the raising of questions. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the Haggadah, "that which is said" at the Passover Seder. Every year in this congregation and among Jews the world over, we conduct the Passover Seder to celebrate and commemorate the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt and to consider all who seek liberation from oppression. Central to every HaggadahÑand there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Haggadahs--are the four questions, known as the Mah nishtanah. These four questions simply specify the overriding question: Why is this night different from all other nights?
One commentator notes that the very goal of the Seder evening is to provoke questions. A Talmudic story illustrates the point: Abaye, a young student, was attending the seder of his teacher, Rabbah. Early on in the evening, Rabbah had the dishes cleared. Of course Abaye asked, "Why are you clearing the seder table when weÕve barely begun?" RabbahÕs answer? "The question you have just asked, Abaye, serves the purpose of the Mah nishtanah. The four questions do not now need to be asked. (Michael Strassfeld in A Night of Questions, prepared by Rabbis Joy Levitt and Michael Strassfeld, The Reconstructionist Press, 5760/2000, 42-44)
Of course the four questions are traditionally asked and asked by children. Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, describes the Seder as a "lesson to the Jewish people, intended to point to the spirit in which [we must] educate the young." The Seder illustrates education as a religious experience and as training in freedom. (43) In training, children readily cross ceremonial lines.
Why is it only on Passover night
we never know how to do anything right?
We donÕt eat our meals in the regular ways,
the ways that we do on all other days.
Cause on all other nights we may eat
all kinds of wonderful good bready treats,
like big purple pizza that tastes like a pickle,
crumbly crackers and pink pumpernickel,
sassafras sandwich and tiger on rye,
fifty felafels in pita, fresh fried. É.YesÑon all other nights we eat all kinds of bread,
but tonight of all nights we munch matzah instead.— (Eliezer Lorne Segal, from A Night of Questions, 44)
Children are masters of playful questioning and tough questions. Why is tonight different? Why am I here? Where did I come from? Why did you say this and do that? Why is so and so sad all the time? IÕll always be here, right? YouÕll always be here, right Mommy, right Daddy? Why is my goldfish so still?
Is it any wonder that those whyÕs become whines when a big one renders us mute or we spout flip answers out of our mental hip pockets or we become suddenly busy, oh so busy. Of course some of that whining spews forth as "Why canÕt I have it? How much longer Ôtil we get there? Why do I have to go to bed now? Why do I have to share; itÕs mine!" And why did e.e. cummingsÕ man on the moon drive millions and millions of people quite mad with his whyÕs? Why was his "punishment" to fall to earth filled with his whyÕs at the moment of birth? Is it any surprise that e. e. cummings himself was the offspring of a professor of sociology and political science at Harvard, a curious soul who left that institution of answers to become a Unitarian minister? The poor child didnÕt have a chance. Just listen to this theology he probably inherited:
when god decided to invent
everything he took one
breath bigger than a circustent
and everything beganwhen man determined to destroy
himself he picked the was
of shall and finding only why
smashed it into because—(from One Times One, XXVI, 1944)
The tough questions, the big whyÕs, stick with us, from childhood on. Sometimes they go dormant, and it takes an event that shatters us to the core to hear their echo and engage them once again. Sometimes the questions of crisis propel us to search broader and deeper in conventionally conflicting arenas. Such is the story of physicist Evan Harris Walker. WalkerÕs exploration of a physics of consciousness was spurred by the questions that came rushing out when, as a young adult, he
"É.walked down the steps from her apartment. My mind," he recalls, "went back over the years. My mind went back to things that have been and that I have done, the things of my life and the things of this day.
There had been such wonderful moments. There had been then the times of walks to the park, luscious southern summer days, forever summer in my mind--É.. And then this ended. Leukemia came to claim herÉ. She lay there dead. I have spent half a century trying to understand that moment."
— (Walker, the physics of Consciousness: The Quantum Mind and the Meaning of Life, Perseus Publishing, 2000, 1)
Such a moment can render us passive and paralyzed or passionate and activist. Choice is at the heart of loss, every upheaval, every chasm into which "our choicest plans" have toppled headlong and we are vulnerable, so vulnerable to the illusion that we have no choice at all.
Walker resumes his discourse:
"Years have passed, years in which the questions have persisted every day. The pain has given way to the searching, to the quest to find out what we really are and what, if anything, remains when the tissues of the brain and body have ceased their functions. The years have passed, and the questions have persistedÉ.[prodding] me on in my search for answers, answers that are more than just promises and assurances designed to comfort."
—(Walker, 2)
And he delves into an exploration of the physics of consciousness, of the quantum mind and the meaning of life, of reality and our role in its structure. From the core of his search, it was Walker who wrote:
"Everyone worshipsÑeveryone. Everyone worships reality. Each person looks about, listens a momentÑlistens as long as life will permit pause for listeningÑand thenÉfalls down and worships whatever it is that looks like this is what it is all about."
—(Walker, 327)
Sometimes it takes an event that shatters us to the core to hear the echoes of our long-ago wondering and return, however reluctantly, to the big questions. I recall a three-year-old, a sprightly little boy, whose life was snuffed out by a freak accident. He had pulled out a drawer from the dresser that held his munchkin-size jeans and polos and T-shirts, a bulky chest-of-drawers that tipped and crashed to the floorÑjust too much weight for his tiny frame. I recall a young man of brilliance and grace and wit, lauded and recognized in the circles of a great university, who could not take any more of whatever was swirling within him, so he took his own life.
Why? Why did this happen? We are left reeling from the stark reality that someone we were close to, so close to, was rendered mute by a stupid instance of gravity, or that another we were close to, so close to, snuffed out his very own life, a choice that emerged from a place so deep that none of us could know or guess the moment of decision that became irreversible. Why is the question; why is the answer. All we know is that love was there and persists, and we are the richer and poorer because of it.
Our tears and our questions need large spaces, receptive and fluid. We need those large spaces to learn to love the questions, even to play with them and learn the danger of simple answers to not-simple questions. Our bruises remind us how often we have tripped over lines neatly drawn. Mindlessly, unheeding, we draw them again.
We ask Why and are free, no matter what the circumstances, no matter how harsh the oppression. We are ready for the nights that are different because we know when our soul just wonÕt digest "a sassafras sandwich and tiger on rye"Ñnot to mention our tummies. And we hear the whyÕs of young children, because we remember, we remember the child hiding not too far down inside us, the sage fallen from his steeple but still persistent as only a sage-child can be. And we resist the temptation, the oh so slippery temptation to take those annoying, provocative, troubling, and terrifying whyÕs and smash them soundly into becauseÕs, for those whyÕs are just bound and determined to catch up with us. And catch up with us they do when we reel with a loss that shatters all certainty, when we plumb all possible knowledge for answers that last, when presence and absence trade places with no warning signals, and we are the richer and poorer because it is so.
Then we ask once again, Why is it so?
Why love? Why hate?
Why gay or straight?
Why black or white?
Why color-tight?
Why whatever it is we call normal or not?
Why here a comma, there a dot?
Why now? Why then?
Why ever again?
Why me? Why you?
Why spar with who?
Why are some quick to answer, yet fearful to ask?
Why jump to conclusions or short-cut the task?
Why does the why of a child wear us out?
Why do we answer, with grumble or shout?
Why do becauses sometimes offend?
Why are our minds so reluctant to bend?
Why do the wise refuse to cave in,
To "ThatÕs that, and all else is the playground of sin!"?
And why do we fear this curious congestion,
When why is the answer to why, the question?Amen.
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