Living with Questions

The Rev. Canon Charles P. Gibbs is an Episcopal priest and poet who served for seventeen years as founding executive director of the United Religions Initiative, working with religious and spiritual leaders across six continents. For the past thirteen years he has served as Senior Partner and Poet-in-Residence at Catalyst for Peace. What follows is a heartfelt insight around living into life's undefinable questions that surfaced in an unplanned conversation.

We Don't Ask Questions Like That Here

I grew up in the church, and it was the most important thing in my life. That sense of deep, intimate connection with the divine — which, in the Episcopal Church, came through Jesus — was just so compelling, so inspiring.

And then a different set of questions kicked in. Questions I couldn't find space to answer there.

I have a very clear memory of being a junior in high school, sitting in Sunday school class. As everyone was released to go into the church service, this dear, sweet, elderly gentleman asked me to stay back a moment. He was probably younger then than I am now, which is its own kind of mind warp.

I don't know what he actually said. But the message I received was: Charles, we don't ask questions like that here.

For me, that was a door closing. Because I lived with questions. And I realized I could ask any question I wanted at school — but this was a place where I couldn't. So I quit going to church. I was seventeen, and it startled everyone, starting with my mother, who was an incredibly devout and service-oriented person.

The day I graduated from high school — 1969, just to peg it in history — I stopped shaving and stopped cutting my hair, and didn't take either up again for several years.

I was probably completely insufferable, in the way you can be in your late teens and early twenties, when you know absolutely everything except how hard life can really be. Some people learn that early. I didn't. Money was tight sometimes, but I had a loving mother and people who cared for me. I didn't suffer the kind of trauma or abuse that so many people do. I have to name that, because I speak from a place of being relatively protected, and I know that isn't the case for far too many.

Consecrated to Ask

Did I come into the world that way — driven by these questions? I think I did, and I've come to understand it through a passage from the prophet Jeremiah, where he hears the voice of the divine speaking to him. It goes something like this:

Before I knit you in your mother's womb, I knew you. And I consecrated you.

In Jeremiah's case, consecrated to be a prophet to the nations. But I believe each of us is similarly known and similarly consecrated. What we're consecrated for is unique to us — and even when the job title is the same as someone else's, the way we live into that title is ours alone.

I think I was consecrated to ask questions.

So when the church didn't seem to be the place for mine, I went into the arts. I was a theater major in college, then went back and took a master's in fiction and poetry writing. All of it was the same search: trying to look more deeply into what was true about life.

An Eye Made Quiet

There's a poem I've now carried with me for over half a century — Wordsworth's Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey. The poet returns to a beautiful natural place after five years away, and realizes that although he hasn't been physically present there, the blessings it gave him have journeyed with him. In hours of weariness, he says, he felt sensations sweet.

I pray each of us has something like that — a thing we can think of, remember, touch, that lifts us out of the difficulty of the moment.

Then he tries to describe the interior space that place created in him:

That serene and blessed mood... in which the affections gently lead us on, until the breath of this corporeal frame and even the motion of our human blood almost suspended, we are laid asleep in body, and become a living soul: while with an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.

To me, that's perhaps the most beautiful expression of a mystical state I've ever come across. When we let everything else fall away, we find ourselves — there.

I say that as though letting everything fall away were the easiest thing in the world. It isn't. The moment you begin, here come the incomings: oh, I forgot to do this, what about that. We're like an airport with too few air traffic controllers and too many planes trying to land.

But if we are blessed, in some moment, to find ourselves in that space — it's ultimately a space beyond words, beyond conventional thought. That's where ultimate unity exists. And there are no questions needed there.

What Do You See There?

Even after I quit going, I stayed connected to the priest I grew up with, who in nearly every way was more of a father to me than my own father, who was largely absent. He had nearly infinite patience with me.

Then one day — I think he'd just gotten a little tired of being patient — he said:

Someday you're going to need to stop wrestling with all these questions you carry around up here. And ask yourself: if you look deeply into the heart of everything that is, what do you see there? When you can answer that, build your life from that.

It took me about five minutes on the drive home to know my answer. Improbable as it can seem, looking at the state of the world or the way individuals get treated, there was no question in my mind about what is at the heart of everything that is.

Love.

I believe we are made in and of love. And all that is asked of us is that we shine that love into the world.

The physicists tell us that everything is energy. Some of it formless, some of it formed — we're formed energy, and all around us is the formless kind, a field of energy that is everything that is. I happen to believe that field is a field of love. There is love everywhere.

So when I'm asked what the meaning of life is — my standard question, the one I'd normally be asking you — the deepest answer I have is that it is ultimately from and of that unity. And in that unity there is no distinction. There aren't different religions. There aren't different anythings. It's one.

And I believe that one is love, in the deepest, broadest, widest imagining any of us can have of what love is.

Inviting It Home

Whatever you may be feeling right now — that you're standing outside a door that hasn't cracked open yet, that you're lost, or that you're home — I hope you can feel a little more of that love in yourself. And I hope you know this:

We can go and meet the homeless part of ourselves, and invite that part home. Home doesn't have to be perfect to be home. And we don't have to be perfect to be home.

Here's to the onward journey, deeper into love, compassion, and service.