Contemplation Corner: We are closer to God when we are asking questions . . .

“We are closer to God when we are asking questions than when we think we have the answers.”  – Abraham Joshua Heschel

by Pastor Donnie Brooks
Marcellus United Methodist Church
pastordonnieb@outlook.com

   Abraham Heschel was a famous Jewish scholar and rabbi. He was a Jewish mystic: not quite comfortable in any particular school of Jewish thought. He was a civil-rights activist. He was and is an inspiration to Christians as well as Jews (and certainly others) even today. It is because he asked questions. He was open to not having absolutely settled answers. He sought communion and relationship with God. He sought the same with others in his life. Both are the font of true wisdom and the key to true life.

   We don’t grow in love in our relationship with others simply by knowing things about them. We tend to pigeonhole. We tend to stultify the person with our knowledge of them. We seek to manage when we “know” in a settled and scientific way. Sure, we get there by asking questions too, but when we ask the way Heschel is referring, what Gabriel Marcel (Christian-existentialist/neo-socratic philosopher) called “second reflection.” It’s a different kind of questioning. It’s an openness to God, to being, and to life that always end with a question mark not a period.

   In our relationship to God, we are always and ever to ask questions. God wants us to be in a dialogue. It’s never a monologue from God or from us to God, but rather a relationship, a two-way street, one where we are comfortable addressing God and one another as a “Thou” and not simply as an “object” (to use Martin Buber, another Jewish mystic philosopher’s, words). Like our human relationships, too, they are open to change just as we are open to one another’s thoughts, feelings, wants, desires, dreams, and fears, etc. The mindset of the questioner is one of openness of the continually expanding horizons of knowing and of love. It is not settled answer nor great certainty. It is mystery. It is faith. It is hope. It is the vulnerability of love. 

   This is the path that Heschel leads us on. A path where surely we will find a God who will surprise us and expand our hearts as well as our minds with greater mystery, majesty, glory, and love than anything we could conjure up in the certainties of the answers that our minds might construe.

Sabbath on the Sabbath
Saturdays at 10:00am
July 12 through August 2
Marcellus United Methodist Church, 197 W. Main
Open to all who are looking for  “a quiet, serene beautiful sanctuary to spend time with God”
For more information, email Pastor Donnie at pastordonnieb@outlook.com

###