Q & A (Raphael Saadiq)




photo courtesy David Pham

"Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you."  Matthew 7:7

We need good questions. Questions that help us name our needs and desires, questions that elicit our voice and create space for us to know ourselves better, questions that identify the dissonance and brokenness in life, questions that open us up to dream of something different.

In his book, Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke writes to a young man who is troubled by questions to which he cannot find the answers. Rilke says. “Love the questions themselves; as if they are locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language…live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live you way into the answers.”

In this Advent season one of our needs is time and space to question, and to sit with the questions; to be, to wait, to speak and to listen. There is some grace here, some breathing room to pause, some relief to be had in calling out the disjointed places in this season and in our lives.

                                     

Our song today reminds us, however, that we cannot stop there. As much as we need the space and the practice of questioning, we also need answers. We cannot stop pursuing, hoping for, demanding answers to some of our most important questions.  The catch of Advent is that we tell the truth, and name our needs and ask our questions and we wait and we dwell and we observe; but we do so with expectation, with hope - we need to.

 So we look for answers. We expect answers for questions like Saadiq’s, who will “help that child whose only 4 years old?” We demand answers when we confront injustices in our communities and brokenness in our institutions. We work toward answers for questions that echo across the nations, “How can peace become a reality on our streets and in our world?” And we hope for answers to the questions whispering within us: “Can I be transformed?”

So we come, needy, to this Advent season. We bring the questions that we must ask and the answers that we already have, in the hope that they will talk to each other, sparking among us better questions and deeper answers, for these, we need in every season.

As we enter this Advent season, may we hear, in community, the voices around us and the voice within. May we listen for the deepening questions, and seek together the strength to press on for their answers.

                                                                                                                                              -Lindsey