Saturday 20 April 2013

Living the Questions: about this blog

Just over a week ago I attended a TEDx conference on the theme of 'Living the Question'. This is inspired by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke in her poem, Letters to a Young Poet:

'...I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.'

The motto behind TED, and TEDx (independently organised conferences under its name) is that of Ideas worth spreading.  Conferences are filled with interesting and inspiring talks largely based around creating a better world.  I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone who wants to be challenged intellectually and morally at the same time.

I have wanted to write a blog for many years, and the TEDx conference was what inspired me to actually get on with it.  It also gave me a theme - that of living the questions - which fitted perfectly with everything already in my mind, and hence I have shamelessly stolen it for this blog.

I love exploring the questions.  Sometimes, I come up with tentative answers, but often these lead to more questions in themselves.  I firmly believe that we shouldn't underestimate the difficulty in answering a question.  When talking to people, I meet many with differing opinions, faiths and beliefs to myself, but what bothers me most is when someone has an opinion and they've never thought why.  How we arrive at a conclusion is often just as important as the conclusion itself.

Having said that, I do believe in objective truth and I do have a faith in Jesus Christ, who died for me in order to pay the price for my sin.  For some people, having faith in a God is completely incompatible with the open, intellectual and questioning mind.   And yet for me it is fully compatible with a respect for the complexity of the truth and the difficulty in truly knowing the answer.

It is my belief that we cannot only act on that which we are certain - that would be foolish.  Sometimes I find myself paralysed because I do not know the answer because it is so complex, and I therefore do not act when I probably should. No one is certain regarding the exact nature of the degradation of our planet, for example.  Yet if there is a risk that we are damaging resources for future generations then surely we should act?  Faith actually goes further than that - it is not just a case of weighing up the risk.  I am not a Christian 'just in case'.  I cannot explain faith - it is a deep conviction of God having acted in my life.

All people have faiths - not just the 'religious' or the theist.  This is something that will no doubt enter into future posts.  The atheist has faith that there is no God, for example.  Everyone has a worldview which they will hold onto: 'it is right to love your children and look after them' - that is not something we've arrived at through intellectual debate. 

What is important is knowing what is faith.  If  you have faith in something, fine. But accept that it is faith and you cannot win others over to that faith by intellectual arguments.*

Furthermore, I believe my faith and Christian life is one of living the questions.  Living the questions rather than searching for just the answers.  The Bible is full of people questioning God, and yet after all: 'Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, or with the breadth of his hand marked off the heavens?  Who has held the dust of the earth in a basket, or weighed the mountains on the scales and the hills in a balance?'  (Isaiah 40:12)   But never fully knowing is not the same as wrestling with the questions.

So, this blog is one of posing questions, and sometimes offering tentative answers.  It is a blog of deconstructing narratives, myths and attitudes and grappling with questions that are important to us.  If we are to move forward to some answers, we must know what the questions are and why we are thinking them.

Happy reading and questioning!


~

Thank you to the organisers of TEDx Exeter for putting on the event which was the final catalyst for putting me into blogging action.  Click here to find out more about TEDx

*Disclaimer: this does not mean that as a Christian I am against verbal proclamation or apologetics - far from it.  We just have to know that in the end it is the Holy Spirit who convicts, and intellect alone will not win people's hearts.

No comments:

Post a Comment