Exercise Your Soul
What are the questions you are living with right now?
Life is about the questions.
In our world today, it is much easier to just “google” something, rather than just being patient, having conversations with actual people and being curious about what you don’t know and living with the questions. Will you allow these words by the very wise Rainer Marie Rilke to go down deep into your soul?
One of the most beautiful things about children is that they are wildly curious and ask a million questions. My daughter Emma has always been interested in asking questions, and I have never tired from her insatiable desire to learn and to grow through the practice of asking questions.
Questions are how we exercise our souls. They are how we stretch and build our muscles for discovering what a mentor of mine once called, “the thing beneath the thing.”
What are the questions that are stirring in your soul right now?
A few weeks ago I was on retreat at Bellarmine Jesuit Retreat House in Chicago and one of our guides on the retreat is a man who has blessed my life incredibly. Drew Jackson is someone I have gotten to know more in the last two years and he has two books of poetry that you should get - they will change your life. They are poetic storytelling about the book of Luke in the Bible and written from the lens of liberation and recovering voices in our world that have been silenced by those on the side of power and empire.
When we began on the first afternoon of the retreat, the question Drew asked us was this. How are you arriving?
I took a few minutes to reflect on this question and fortunately I did not have to go first. When it was my time to share, I said these three words that described how I was arriving into this place.
Cluttered
Curious
Hopeful
This is how my soul was arriving and over the next 3 days I began to unpack those words and the questions they awakened in me. I remember in my journal I wrote this phrase after reflecting on my three words I shared.
“May I leave my hubris and embrace humility.”
These words have now become my prayer for myself and I am still sitting with the questions.
Drew challenged us to go deeper in our pursuit of living and loving the questions. He said, “We shelter in what we know rather than step out into mystery.”
Over the last 13 years, mystery has become a welcome companion to me. I think as people we are addicted to certainty and we want to control the outcomes of our lives so we get a certain result. This is the easy path and the one that will limit your growth. God has breathed life into your lungs and given you a heart, soul, mind to live the questions and hold mystery, at the same time and in tension, with what you learn in life.
The early church mystic, Meister Eckhart once said, “Be willing to be a beginner every single morning.” Could you imagine what transformation we would see in our world if people actually did this. The hubris would decrease and the humility would increase.
Poetry invites us into the questions. One of my favorite poets, besides Drew is Mary Oliver. This one will stick with you a long time I hope.
Mysteries, Yes by Mary Oliver
Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.
How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds will
never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.
Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.
Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.
That day, Drew encouraged us to do three things that I want to invite you to do today…
Love the questions like locked doors
Live the questions with a sacred mystery
Linger with the questions and discover the thing beneath the thing
What are the questions that you are living with right now?
One of my favorite sections of the Bible is found in a letter to the churches of Ephesus, which today is modern day Turkey. The Apostle Paul writes to them and says these words -
“For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us new in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.” (Ephesians 2:10)
That word you see, masterpiece, is the Greek word POIEMA.
You have probably already figured out that from this Greek word comes our English words POEM and POETRY.
You and I are living poetry by the Divine Creator of all things.
We are those on whom the edge of the ages meet. We have one foot in this world and one foot in the age to come. This is what Jesus was talking about when he talks about the Kingdom of God or Kingdom of Heaven (they are interchangeable in his words). This is the rule and reign of God that is both now and not yet. We have it living inside us and something that still will come fully someday.
We live in tension of holding the joy and delight in one hand and the suffering and brokenness of this world in the other hand. It is unresolved and that is where we can practice the exercise of the soul by living the questions and discovering the thing beneath the thing.
Have patience with what is unresolved in your heart and in the hearts of others.
Live the questions my friends
Grace and Peace
Matt Nash