Faith, wonder & a season for asking questions

…be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. 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 now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903 from Letters to a Young Poet

This Sunday marks the start of our new children’s faith & wonder space. Under the guidance of our Faith & Wonder Coordinator, Amanda, and witht the support of a group of volunteers, our children will have their own space to play, explore, and connect. We’ve chosen A Joyful Path as a resource — it’s grounded in the Christian tradition and also includes wisdom from other faith traditions. 

Like every new start, we have no idea how this new season will shape us, but it’s sure to be a seed that sprouts something new.

Wonder tends to do just that. 

Instead of closing doors, wonder flings them wide and opens the way for new possibilities. Wonder surprises, disrupts, and enlivens. It uncovers our assumptions, blind spots, and biases.

Religion, and Christianity in particular, have not always been known for encouraging wonder. Despite the fact that Jesus asked countless questions, we have often tended to use faith as a way to whittle things down — of reducing the Mysteries of the universe into bite-sized beliefs. There have always been those within our religious traditions and beyond who resist that temptation, those who refuse to see uncertainty as a threat and instead see it as an essential part of being human.

There have always been those who value questions as the path toward another, deeper kind of knowing.

We’ve been learning what it means to live the questions since we started, and it’s exciting to create a children’s space that sees wonder - something children already do so well - as a central spiritual practice. We adults could stand to cultivate a little more wonder, too.

Wondering is what we’ll be doing this season. Starting this Sunday, we will be asking questions together. We’ll start with: What’s the point of religion? What are we doing here, and what difference does it make?

It was a series of questions that seeded the idea of The Well: Why does the form of church so often seem at odds with the life that flowed through Jesus? Is there another way? What could church look like free of some of our assumptions and barriers?

We’ve been living these questions together for over 15 years, and I look forward to continuing to embrace wonder as a practice — as a way of seeing, relating, and being more fully alive here.