THE QUESTING SPIRIT [T, 2-10-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—THE QUESTING SPIRIT [T, 2-10-26]

 

In my old age, I find that it is the questions, not the answers, that keep me going.

That seems upside-down. As old and wise folks, aren’t we supposed to be past the questions? Shouldn’t we have the answers by now?

I’m thinking about this because I am culling my library yet again. In doing so, I pulled The Questing Spirit off the shelf.

I never actually read The Questing Spirit, the way we normally read a book, starting at the beginning and going forward. But I used it often, as a source of material for sermons and worship services, because it has such a broad array of spiritual poems and stories.

The editors of that book, Halford Luccock and Frances Brentano, knew that what is most important for spiritual growth is good questions. The poems and stories in that book pose those questions well.

I bought The Questing Spirit at a used book sale sixty years ago. It had been published 20 years before. A quick riffle-through told me that it had a lot of good, short poems that I could use to start Wednesday night communion services at The Wesley Foundation at Illinois State University. It has the name “Newkirk” stamped in the front.

I like new books. They are so pristine, so beckoning, so promising. They have a great smell. But there is something special about a used book, including, in The Questing Spirit, the mystery of Newkirk.

I used The Questing Spirit again, twenty years later, when I did the daily telephone devotional, “Dial Good News.”

It was an interesting juxtaposition. The Wednesday night communion was almost entirely young people. “Dial Good News” was almost entirely old people. But they responded to the voices in The Questing Spirit in the same ways.

Young people and old people seem to have a common willingness to deal with questions more than answers. They have questing spirits. I suspect I’m the only one, though, who has The Questing Spirit.

John Robert McFarland

“Those who believe they believe in God but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, not in God himself.” Unamuno