Is Questioning Enough?

January 1983
Lakeland
Port Charlotte

February 13, 1983
Tampa

Comedian Mort Sahl said satirically, “If you’re a bigot and want to drive a Unitarian Universalist out of your neighborhood, burn a question mark on his lawn.” In another area of the country it is reported that in response to many bumper stickers proclaiming, “Honk if you love Jesus,” some Unitarian Universalists adorn their bumpers with “Honk of you’re not sure.”

We Unitarian Universalists place much reliance on the right to question any proposition offered for our consideration. We take as basic propositions that no creed is sufficiently authoritative that we may not challenge it; no doctrine so hallowed that we may not question it; no principle so pure that we may not investigate its foundation. “To question is to answer” is another of our bumper stickers. “Living in the Questions” is a fine book written by Ralph Helverson (W. Palm Beach). We are in the tradition of Socrates, who pursued constant questioning as a means of sifting truth from falsehood; the logical from the illogical, the important from the trivial.

We have also designated our religious approach as “the religion of the inquiring mind.” As Ed Ritchie so ably developed a couple of weeks ago, “the search shall make you free,” Duncan Howlett, one of our distinguished ministers, in his superior book, THE CRITICAL WAY IN RELIGION, writes (p. 12),

“... experience has shown again and again that the supposed certainties of one generation of religious leaders are frequently modified and often abandoned outright by the leaders of the next. Much as we may yearn for certitude, continuous inquiry, not finality, seems to be our lot when it comes to the ultimate questions.

“While the critical way in religion has never really been identified, its presence has been sensed by many writers. Its essential character has sometimes been grasped, but for the most part it has been misunderstood and very often caricatured. Ideas associated with the critical way in religion include heresy, nonconformity, infidelity, dissent, protest, skepticism, positivism, liberalism, rationalism, agnosticism, atheism, humanism, secularism, ..., freethinking, the Enlightenment. Many of these terms originated as epithets. Many are epithets still. Consider, for example, the fact that ‘thinker’ is an honored designation to apply to anyone. ‘Free’ is one of the most precious words in the language. Yet, ‘freethinker,’ a term often applied to those of an independent mind in religion even today bears within it the sting of opprobrium and derision.

“The critical way in religion is not encompassed by any of the foregoing terms. Each is too narrow, and most involve elements the critical tradition could not tolerate. How, then, is it to be described? It involves concepts like the following:

Freedom, tolerance, and self-reliance.
Inquiry, experimentation, and testing;
Change, progress, growth and evolution
Uncertainty and probability
Unity and universality.
Consistency, integrity, and objectivity.”

I believe that summary; have said it many times in my own way, although not as clearly or concisely.

Nevertheless, this topic today “Is Questioning Enough?”.... Some 31 or 32 years ago I attended a gathering of Universalist ministers (before merger) at a resort hotel in Western Pennsylvania (the off-season). It was a time when what we now call “group process” was in its infancy. [CJW note: only a few had experience with it “Beth-el”. Carl Rogers’ methods in counseling – non-directive] A qualified resource person from a large N.Y. university was engaged to facilitate the involvement.

He used the question method, and succeeded in stirring us to many inquiries about our profession, our churches, our angers, complacencies, goals, values. The leader was more concerned about our descriptions of ourselves and our roles than he was to provide us with prescriptions to achieve more effective ways of churchmanship. His style, a good one, but unappreciated by many at the time, was to respond by turning the question back to the questioner.

At the concluding session, one of our older ministers who had not been pleased with the process got to his feet, face hostile in posture, and in his thunderous pulpit bass, “I came with questions, I’m going away with questions, all I’ve heard is questions when what came for and what I need is answers!” It didn’t help his blood pressure at all when the professional group leader replied, “you are saying you need answers – that is a rich and fruitful suggestion.”

Is questioning enough? In a Unitarian Universalist group, in the sense that you will be presented with certainties, you will not be handed them on a doctrinal, revealed, religious, political, psychological platter. I trust that will never happen. You have to be exposed not only to inquiries but also convictions. But those inquiries and convictions are not a handed down edict or a party line. Thus, in what you hear and experience in a Unitarian Universalist group, yes, questioning is enough.

But in an important way, questioning is not enough. That way is for my/your own self. I, you, have a need to come to some functioning conclusions of our own, conclusions that may hardly ever be certainties. Such conclusions or choices must be open to new insights and experience that will arrive later. But for an integrated self, a maturing self, a growing self, or an autonomous self, each needs to respond to the questions – at least to oneself, if not publicly proclaimed.

It has been my experience that occasionally through the years I will encounter a person who is a neurotic questioner.

By that I mean that I have observed such persons over a period of time asking questions, the same questions, usually with no indication that the questioner has wrestled with the question. It is as though they were permanently halted at the red light of their own questions and never saw the green light which would permit them to advance.

Charles Dickens, that keen and sensitive observer of his life and times, illustrates this in the character Mr. Dick in DAVID COPPERFIELD. Mr. Dick, a gentle but hapless man, is befriended by Aunt Betsy Trotwood. Mr. Dick has been working on a manuscript, a “memorial” as he calls it to Lord somebody or other, but is stymied by King Charles’ head, the monarch who was executed in the Puritan Revolution. Every time Mr. Dick sits down with his quill pens and ink, he makes no progress because of his obsession with King Charles’ head. Mr. Dick asks, but never can answer, what happened to King Charles’ mind when he was beheaded? “Do I now have King Charles’ mind?” Mr. Dick asks continuously – never gets the manuscript finished – never makes progress on it. He was blocked by his own irresolute and irrelevant questioning.

As Charles Morris (THE OPEN SELF, p. 13) reminds us, we all have to deal with our own irrationalities – anxieties, drives, passions, dislikes, joys, and he writes, “To be rational is simply to accept ideas and ideals after critical reflection, after careful consideration of what would follow from the acceptance of a given idea or ideal.”

I respond to the way Frances Wicks described the process (THE INNER WORLD OF CHOICE, xi),

“There is a cycle which we all experience:

1)the maintenance of an established system of values and of action (commonly implanted by parents), which, if prolonged beyond its limited season of utility and fruitfulness, will not uncommonly result in zestless repetition, rigidity, stagnation, apathy, and discontent;
2)the emergence of a new potentiality, value, opportunity, or challenge, which, being opposed by the established system, generates
3)an internal conflict, a conflict, the author insists, that should be faced and settled by a conscious choice for which the chooser takes personal responsibility. As a rule, only a choice that favors the embracement and incorporation of the new potentiality will result in
4)a beneficial enlargement and reconstruction of the self ... that is attended by an illuminating extension of consciousness.

“In other briefer terms the successive phases are

a restricted sameness (thesis)
a birth of novelty (antithesis) – causing conflict, temporary or prolonged, of which the happiest issue is
synthesis – establishing a new level of being.

“Seldom is this process easy or comfortable. With the poet’s insight and imagination, May Sarton writes:

‘We must go down into the dungeons of the heart,
To the dark places where the modern mind imprisons
All that is not defined and thought apart.
We must let out the terrible creative visions....
Return to the most human, nothing less
Will teach the angry spirit, the bewildered heart,
The torn mind, to accept the whole of its duress,
And pierced with anguish, at last act for love.’”

We act out many roles in society – occupational, parental, political, religious, friendship. Inevitably we have responsibilities to others because each of us is a human among humans. Because I am a self (and you), I am responsible for my self. You are responsible for your self. Socrates said, “Know thyself.” But also that can be extended – trust thyself. Be thyself. And just questioning is not enough to struggle to that level of being.

Michelangelo was a poet as well as, perhaps, the most gifted sculptor and painter of them all. He wrote about the task of the sculptor, lines which are also a powerful insight into knowing and trusting ourselves:

“The best of artists has
that thought alone
which is contained within
the marble shell;
The sculptor’s hand only
can break the spell
to free the figures
slumbering in the stone.”

(Quoted by Rene Dubos)

[CJW note: Picture of self – the sculptor is you – me.]

If I had to put briefly all I have been trying to say I would quote the Zen master who said,

“Not knowing how near the
truth is
People seek it far away:
What a pity.”

And also, Langston Hughes:

“When you turn the corner
And you run into yourself
Then you know you have turned
All the corners that are left.”