Questions

Buechner gives us something to think about... as usual.

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 by 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 one of us, whoever we are, the one question that (though for years we may have been pretending not to hear it) is the central question of our individual lives. Here are a few of them:

• For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? (Matthew 16:26)

• Am I my brother's keeper? (Genesis 4:9)

• If God is for us, who can be against us? (Romans 8:31)

• What is truth? (John 18:38)

• How can anyone be born after having grown old? (John 3:4)

• What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun? (Ecclesiastes 1:3)

• Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? (Psalm 139:7)

• Who is my neighbor? (Luke 10:29)

• What shall I do to inherit eternal life? (Luke 10:25)

When you hear the question that is your question, then you have already begun to hear much. Whether you can accept the Bible's answer or not, you have reached the point where at least you can begin to hear it too.

- Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Peace

I love how Buechner talks about peace in this excerpt.

Peace has come to mean the time when there aren't any wars or even when there aren't any major wars. Beggars can't be choosers; we'd most of us settle for that. But in Hebrew peace, shalom, means fullness, means having everything you need to be wholly and happily yourself.

One of the titles by which Jesus is known is Prince of Peace, and he used the word himself in what seem at first glance to be two radically contradictory utterances. On one occasion he said to the disciples, "Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword" (Matthew 10:34). And later on, the last time they ate together, he said to them, "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you" (John 14:27).

The contradiction is resolved when you realize that, for Jesus, peace seems to have meant not the absence of struggle, but the presence of love.

- Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Kierkegaard talks about decisons and age

Søren Kierkegaard:

The path of an honest fighter is a difficult one. And when the fighter grows cool in the evening of his life this is still no excuse to retire into games and amusement. Whoever remains faithful to his decision will realize that his whole life is a struggle. Such a person does not fall into the temptation of proudly telling others of what he has done with his life. Nor will he talk about the “great decisions” he has made. He knows full well that at decisive moments you have to renew your resolve again and again and that this alone makes good the decision and the decision good.

Making decisions is often dangerous, or rather, talking about them is.

Source: Provocations