1.4

The Why Game

When I was a little girl, my best friend Judy and I would play a game we made up. I now call it the Why Game. We would walk the quiet tree-lined streets of our Queens neighborhood and play this game to our hearts’ content. One of us would take on the role of asking questions and the other would answer them. This was not a typical game where either player had a chance of winning. The Inquisitor always won. The Answerer had lots of fun along the way, making up creative and ridiculous answers but however novel and clever her answers were, all of them were doomed to bite the dust whenever the Inquisitor took aim with her question that struck down every answer it met. There was only one weapon in the Inquisitor’s armory: a single-syllabled word that had the power to ultimately silence all answers, conquer all explanations and end in despair all attempts to justify. This little word was able to expose every answer’s weak underbelly by cutting deep into it’s gut where the inexplicable and indecipherable lay, hidden and immovable. That most humble of words that triumphs over the bravest and brightest of answers, that simple word so well known and practiced by every two year old, that never tires of asserting itself over and over again is. . .why?

Our game would proceed something like this:

“Let’s do something fun!”
“Why?”
“Because I like to do fun things.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s better than boring things.”
“Why?”
“Because boring things bore me and I like fun things.”
“Why?”
“Because when I’m bored I’m just a stupid muddy puddle with nothing in it. Just a dirty, sloppy, lazy puddle with no colors or insects and all it can do is make you dirty and bored. But fun does lots of things.”
“Why?”
“Because fun makes me scream and push you and make fun of you and then you have to run after me and you’ll never catch me cause I’m faster. I’m always faster than you. I can climb trees and I’ll become a monkey and you can never catch me cause I’ll throw banana peels right at you and you’ll keep falling and you’ll never catch me because I’m a monkey and you’re not!”
“Why?”
Why always won

I used to love this game. I felt we were explorers venturing beyond the plain and obvious into unseen depths, peering into those reasons we blindly assume so that we never have to think about them again. When we asked why, we took nothing for granted. Everything had to be explored to be explained. I suspect the origin of myths was inspired by asking this most potent of questions. Why is grass green? Maybe because it was the next color on God’s pallet when He was ready to paint grass on the earth, or because it’s jealous it’s not a river. Each of us took turns imagining whatever reasons we wanted to give things for what they do and are. But we knew that however much fun it was to make up crazy answers, why always had the last word

Questions are the motive force, the first necessary step to understanding. Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel said that “. .an answer without a question is devoid of life” (God in Search of Man, p.3). The very meaning of an answer “presupposes the awareness of a question” (p.168). We cannot take in an answer unless there is a question lurking somewhere inside to hear and receive it. Questions make the necessary room for answers to enter in. They prepare the mind to listen, draw the heart’s and will's attention to face the answer and receive it for itself. Questions are essential to the learning process of school and life

When we assume we no longer need questions because we already know all that needs to be known, our knowledge eventually withers and dies. We always need questions to keep our knowledge alive with new learnings in the same way our body’s blood continually needs new batches of oxygen to keep us alive. The kind of knowing that insists only on what is already known leads to knowledge that ossifies like a fossil, a mere impression of what has long been dead. True knowledge comes from a knowing that is open to growing more by receiving the fresh and new. False knowledge is shut up in its closed system of recycled information that becomes increasingly rigid and depleted of energy the more it hardens and shrinks from the surrounding pulse of life

As essential as questions are to live, there are certain times and places where they cannot enter. There are certain places of the heart and universe where no question is permitted. Such realms will only retreat and seem to vanish when a question dares approach. Their retreat is a mercy and is meant for our protection because these places can only be survived when they are accepted and received in their unknown form. These are places that are found only along paths of trust, in the silence of listening and acceptance of what is given and not given. Questions know at their heart’s core that they are not welcomed into these places, but some of them will often stubbornly insist on an answer anyway. When they find no answer, they invariable invent one of their own. These questions are not at all like those that explore and enrich but are poised to evaluate and tear down, to judge the silence that faces them as emptiness or proof of their fabricated answers. Regardless of the confidence such questions have in their judging and knowing, they can never violate these places. The only hope of entering where faith alone can enter is to wait in a kind of open silence, so that the questions lying deep within our questions can be asked, the ones that must be both asked and answered for us. When exploring places of faith, the only way to proceed is by entrusting our unknowns to what is trustworthy and knows. The need to suspend our questions is most true when we more closely approach knowing God