The Gift of Good Questions
Spring is doing its magnificent thing in our part of the world. The daffodils long peeked their sunny, egg-yolk-like faces out, the cherry trees drew crowds to their pinkish plumes all around the tidal basin downtown, and just in the last week or so, the azaleas and redbuds are marching loudly and subtlely across the spring stage. The world is awash in color; the winter browns and grays are gone, replaced by delightful pinks, purples, reds and blues, and the ferocious torrent of green.
I'll admit, when I spotted tiny buds on the trees in late February out our back window, I groaned. I always groan when spring signals its arrival. I'm a huge and unapologetic fan of winter. I like soup. I love to bake. I don't mind the cold or the dark. I like being cozy, which, at times, can tend towards a comfortable dormancy. If I were a caterpillar, I'd be sorely tempted to cocoon forever, never reaching metamorphosis. I'm a big fan of stasis, and I can turn grouchy and reluctant when I notice the ferment of spring is around the corner.
Spring presses in! It demands reply! It invades! Spring doesn't just knock politely at one's door; it bangs wildly. It rings bells! It's loud, demanding, raucous, and convivial. The birds are out, the deer are decimating my hostas, and the weeds! Oh, the weeds! The water has gotten the memo. We run a goodly number of dehumidifiers in our house, surrounded as we are by floodplains and wet woods. Two of them drain automatically but one does not, and the amount of water that I have had to empty from its bin has quadrupled in recent weeks.
Outside is a frantic level of energy, pressing, clamoring, with everything doing the living that it does, without much self-scrutiny and deliberation. One of the things that the hostas, the deer, the birds, and the flowers do not ask themselves is "Do I want this? Do I want to grow? Must I dig for worms another day? Maybe I should do something else today..." They do not lie in comfortable dormancy when the spring bugle blows. They are free, in some ways, to just be what they are and do what they do, relentlessly, persistently, almost fearlessly, without a lot of inner existential groaning. The blessing of our human freedom, the sheer gift of life that God gives us -- "another day to live! what shall I do with it? What do I want to do with it? Why?" -- can be quite taxing. Or, we can try to escape its burden entirely by getting dormant and numb, or staying busy and distracted, driven mad by thin and ambient desires.
I picked up a book recently that I want to flag for you that's related to this point. It's worth seeing if your local library carries it; it would be a terrific book club read with neighbors. It's Luke Burgis's Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life (St. Martin's Press, 2021). Burgis translates well some fairly academic ideas from the work of René Girard, a social theorist whose ideas about mimesis (that is, imitation; copying; consciously or unconsciously modeling the behavior of others) I first encountered many years ago. I have repeatedly seen his theories put to use in very worthwhile ways (including in Ziya Meral's How Violence Shapes Religion [Cambridge, 2018] which I reviewed for The Review of Faith and International Affairs a few years back; and more recently in Jessica Hooten Wilson's award-winning literary study, Giving the Devil His Due [Cascade, 2017]).
The reason I think Wanting is such a valuable book is that it asks questions that are able to penetrate to the background code by which we tend to live: Why do I want what I want? Who do I imitate in life? In reading Burgis, I've also been repeatedly returning to the wisdom that Jen Pollock Michel offered the world in her magnificent and award-winning first book, Teach Us to Want (IVP, 2015), in which she examines how vital our desires are in life, especially in a life committed to following Jesus, as I claim to do. When he says "follow me," we might also hear it as "imitate me. Copy me. Model your life after mine." What's wild about following Jesus is that, by imitating him, we become more ourselves. He hands us our life back to be who he made us to be. From him we receive a greater level of self-possession, the kind of freedom that the birds and the flowers enjoy, not effortful, graceless, and suffocating striving towards self-actualization that characterizes modern life.
In the first part of his book, Burgis tills the earth of our individual and collective wanting through examples from his own life experiences, and in the second, he proposes ways of nourishing and seeding the unearthed soil with questions that prompt reflection and story-telling. Key to his method is asking these questions in a group, with space to listen to the answers. It's quite leisurely work, and it's marvelously contagious. Desires can go haywire, and they also be rewired, and questions that lead to thoughtful life reflection in a shared place of attentive listening can, well, start some seriously minor revolutions of good. Good questions are the spark.
Good questions are a gift. Jesus was a master at asking heart-of-the-matter questions, unearthing and re-seeding questions. These can be painful ones! It's important not to run from questions but to receive them as gifts that may, in fact, bring us to a scary disequilibrium, move us out of our comfortable stasis, shove us into a spring that we may really not want to welcome whole-heartedly. I've been blessed and helped by J.R. Briggs's own cherishing of good questions. He regularly shares questions that he's asking himself and others on various social media platforms. He sees questions as central to the task of leadership, life, and love.
So, today, I give thanks for the gift of good questions, the ones that make me groan and the one that help me grow. I'm also thankful for the gift of good friends and acquaintances and even, at times, opponents and enemies, that ask questions that demand thoughtful and wise replies.
Till next time, friends! I appreciate you reading, I love hearing from you, and I do hope, truly, that you are well.