Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions. Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.
This has always been one of my favorite Rilke quotes. Well actually one of my favorite quotes. I found it when I was young and wanting to know right that minute what my profession should be, and who I should marry, and where I should live. And someone gave me this quote and it calmed something in me. It made me realize that answers are not born into us full grown, that life is a process of finding our answers. It allowed me to patient with myself, to relax a bit which was a very useful thing. I often see with my clients this same urgency to find the answers to know RIGHT NOW, to be off the uncomfortable spot of not knowing and uncertainty. That desire to leave the uncomfortable spot of unknowing is yet another way we avoid our questions and the spiritual process. And yet is even clearer when viewed from the outside that sometimes we need more experience in order to find the right answer. What would we learn if we stayed with the discomfort? Can we open to that learning?
It is also true that we can find answers from a head place (e.g. I should eat this because it healthy. I will earn more if I have this profession. I like this location better). But finding answers from a spiritual place is a different process. A spiritual process requires submitting our questions to prayer (as addressed in earlier posts) and learning how to "hear" the answers which by its very nature sort of means living into the answers. God's timing is often different than our timing and yet perfect. Sometimes we are held in waiting that seems unbearable and unfair only to realize later that what would have ensued had we moved more quickly would have been disastrous. Sometimes we are pushed into something that feels too quick, too fast, that we feel unready for...only to see later that very important or precious things could not otherwise have happened except quickly. Part of the spiritual process therefore is letting go of our own preconceived ideas to hear God's promptings and to act within that timing. It maybe some comfort to realize that when we feel stuck that we may not yet be ready and to wait with patience and faith. This is true within a spiritual process, but is not true within a "head" process.
There are many questions that arise in spiritual life: who is God? How do I pray? What happens after death? Why do we suffer? These are also questions that people can feel sometimes very urgent to know the answers too or very concerned about finding the "right" answer. I think that again the anxious holding of these questions makes it harder to find the answer. The fear of wrong answers can hold us back from exploring possible answers. Can we brave enough to try on all possible answers and listen for whether they resignate as Truth? Then we may live into our answers.
