On her deathbed, Gertrude Stein is said to have asked, “What is the answer?” Then, after a long silence, “What is the question?” Don’t start looking in the Bible for the answers it gives. Start listening for the questions it asks.
We are much involved, all of us, with questions about things that matter a good deal today but will be forgotten by this time tomorrow – the immediate wheres and whens and hows that face us daily at home and at work – but at the same time we tend to lose track of the questions about things that matter always, life-and-death questions about meaning, purpose and value. To lose track of such deep questions as these is to risk losing track of who we really are in our own depths and where we are really going. There is perhaps no stronger reason for reading the Bible than that somewhere among all those India-paper pages there awaits each reader whoever he is the one question which though for years he may have been pretending not to hear it, is the central question of his own life.
Listening to Your Life, May 17, p.124
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