The Sauntering Pilgrim

In 1883, Thomas Edison noticed a black dot that would sometimes appear inexplicably near the filament on the inside surface of one of the light bulbs he was examining. It wasn’t a scratch or a spot of soot or dust, and the problem puzzled Edison so much it kept him awake at night. He wanted to investigate further, but his assistants were reluctant to help, and he was overwhelmed by other issues. “I was working on so many things at that time,” he said, “that I didn’t have time to do more.” He was too busy to pursue the question of the black dot, so he eventually gave up.

It’s been called the biggest mistake of his life. Other researchers began working on the problem, and fourteen years later, in a pivotal moment in science, one of those researchers who looked into that black dot, Joseph John Thomson, discovered the electron, the first subatomic particle to be found. Its discovery paved the way for modern technologies in electronics and computing. For his discovery, Thomson won the Nobel Prize in Physics.

The disadvantages of being too busy are well known. It caused Edison to miss an opportunity to see more deeply into the mysteries of creation. For us, being too busy can lead to increased stress; burnout and decreased productivity; anxiety, depression, heart disease, obesity, and a host of other symptoms of poor mental, physical, and social health.

Being less busy, on the other hand, can help us sleep better, improve our overall health, and sharpen our listening skills and mental clarity. It can help us make better, more life-giving choices. It improves our ability to handle challenges and adversity in healthy ways. And it gives us energy and availability to wrestle with life’s deepest, most challenging questions – not to answer them, for the most important questions in life are the most difficult to answer, but to learn to live with them creatively.

When Jesus was on trial for his life, he said the reason he was born was to testify to the truth. Yet when Pilate asked him, “What is truth?” he didn’t answer. Rather, he answered by standing there in perfect stillness. He answered in the only effective way possible, by being the truth, and by allowing Pilate to wrestle with his own question.

When at the ford of the river Jabbok, Jacob wrestled in the dark with an unknown assailant, the stranger never told Jacob his name, though Jacob asked for it. But in the wrestling, Jacob was given a new name: “Israel,” one who wrestled with God and prevailed. He left that place limping but blessed with a new identity and a new heritage (Gen. 32:22-32).

Give Pilate the benefit of the doubt. He may have been already wrestling with his own questions about what truth is. Maybe he felt a deep spiritual hunger that his position of power didn’t allow him to admit, even to himself. And maybe he was so busy with the responsibilities others placed on him, he didn’t have time or energy for any but the most superficial and easily resolved questions before turning to the next pressing issue that would confront him. Maybe Pilate feared deeply that if he discovered what truth is, he would also discover how far from truth he had been living.

Why do bad things happen to good people? What is the life in me that is trying to express itself, and what’s keeping me from living fully for it? What would I give in return for my life? What is truth? The great psychotherapist Carl Jung observed, “The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble.” For the questions that mean the most, we’re least likely to find answers.

But finding answers is not as important as how we live with the questions, how we wrestle with them, and how living with the questions shapes the way we live. Arthur Brooks, writing last week in The Atlantic, said he believes the dramatic rise in anxiety and depression is not caused because we’re thinking too much about life’s hard questions but because we’re thinking too little about them.

Brooks wrote, “we pass our hours and days hypnotized by the trivia injected into our lives via our tech devices, and are less willing to delve into deeper matters. The elevated levels of sadness and fear are, [he believes,] at least in part the result of our philosophically sedentary lifestyle.” In other words, we’re not suffering because we’re overwhelmed by hard questions; we’re suffering because we’re avoiding the hard questions and are hiding from them in all the busyness and distractions that affect us.

When life’s hardest, most difficult questions come, it’s natural and important that we hunger for answers and that we take time to wrestle with them desperately, even though wrestling may cripple us. For out of it, God may give us a new identity as people who’ve wrestled with God and prevailed.

And when others recognize our new identity as the body of Christ today and come to us seeking answers to their questions about truth, we need to respond to them not by speaking words about truth but by being the truth they seek. We need to leave room for them to wrestle with God themselves and come to their own unique recognition of truth.

Years ago, after what must have been one of my particularly open-ended sermons, a parishioner asked me, “So, what’s the bottom line?” She was looking for a definitive answer to her questions or concrete instructions to follow, and I couldn’t give her those things. I don’t know what the future holds, and I don’t have the answers to life’s questions; I have only a commitment to wrestle with them – and to wrestle with them with you in a community of faith, one that’s also a community full of questions, as we make our way home together. ▪