But our capacity to ask such questions is not all there is, profound and fulfilling though these questions may be. There is another aspect to "questions" and "questioning" which often escapes us but which ultimately validates all our other questioning, including those beautiful inquiries of Whitman's. Although this is an area that is difficult to talk about, it must be dealt with in order for "questioning" and "answering' to take on proper depth and become more meaningful to us. 

Let us think about what the art of questioning life has meant. 

Our civilization has developed as something of a Socratic dialogue between human beings and nature - as well as between human beings themselves. Socrates, you remember, is said to have taught by asking questions, getting answers, and then asking other questions that develop the new information that has been revealed. This is a procedure that has been developed into a fine art. It shook humankind loose from the grasp of divine answers and freed us to reason and to doubt on our own. Especially since the Renaissance, we are the inheritors of a scientific method, a method of asking a carefully formulated question and of ascertaining even more carefully the answers through observation and reason. This technique is a keen blade for separating fact from fiction and for identifying the genuine and the artificial - at least where observable phenomena are concerned. It enables us to ask questions about stars and atoms, rocks and birds, weather and gravity, and even about human behavior and then devise a way to observe these things which reveals answers that satisfy or discredit the questions we have asked. 

As a culture many of us are comfortable with questions. We have found that there is always more to be learned - more learning that will give us added power or prestige or production - if we will but ask our questions in an effective way and then set about finding their answers. The universe and its intertwining forces and particles, life and its interdependent creatures and intelligences, human beings and their interwoven desires and intentions - all confront us as fair game to track down with our questions in order to learn ever more new facts for our use and our pleasure. We face the world as a sculptor does his uncarved stone and our questions are our means of chiseling out a form. 

And, in a basic, perhaps unsuspected way, we tend to take whatever urges us into life to be, itself, a form of questioning. There is a strong air of the unknown about what really drives us to be the way we are and to do the things we do. We seldom are quite sure of what we really want or what we really need. Thus, we tend to describe our very living as a search, an inquiry, or a quest. "What are you looking for out of life?" we may ask a young person. Or, we may say to ourselves, "If only I could know what this existence really means!" Even where other people seem less inquisitive and philosophical than we think we are, we speak of them as being driven by a quest for power, a search for prestige, or an inquiry into how to make more things or control ever larger portions of nature. 

In a basic way, our very needs, drives, hungers, and intentions are perceived in an interrogative fashion. We think that by "asking" - asking with our words and our actions and our wishes - we will be given "answers" -- answers that will fulfill our persons and infuse us with meaning. After all, hasn't our tradition born down hard on this declaration, "Seek and you shall find; ask and it will be given to you"? Our preoccupation with finding solutions for our problems, rewards for our efforts, or satisfactions for our hungers - in short, answers for our questions - has led us to act as if our basic function is to place a question mark against existence, to be always inquiring of it for whatever new answers it may reveal. 

In our liberal religious tradition this is especially so. There is a common view among us that the answers we find are not as important as the questions we ask - and the way we ask them. What is important to us is our method of bringing our intelligence to bear upon life's problems and issues, not the particular answers that are found. History, after all, is littered with one inadequate answer after another, and it's a mistake to get so locked into any one answer that we cease to question. We have even refined this approach to a bumper sticker slogan: To Question Is the Answer! 

This, I believe, is a healthy attitude. It is what makes us unique as a religious movement, what keeps us more open than most to the pains and the joys of the human predicament, and what keeps us reassured that human beings have a stake (and a future) in existence. Most of us agree with the humanistic belief that humanity is the universe "come alive" to be aware of itself and to inquire into itself. Most of us believe that the asking of questions is as clear an indication of the existence of hope as can be found. To inquire means the search continues; whereas, to rest content with answers obtained is a sign that search and growth have stopped. 

There is a very suggestive story about a rabbi and his young daughter discussing how to study the body of Jewish law and legend called the Talmud. She wanted to study it and he said, "Talmud is very difficult. It requires that you not only read and memorize but that you think. I will give you a lesson. Now listen carefully. Two men working on a rooftop fell down through the chimney. When they landed on the floor, one had a clean face, and one had a dirty face. Which one went to wash his face?" The daughter thought very hard. Then she said, "I know, Father. The one with the clean face went to wash!" The rabbi said, "And how do you know that is the answer?" The daughter replied, "Because he looked at the dirty face of his friend and thought that his must be dirty, too, whereas the dirty one looked at the face of his friend and thought that his face must be clean!" The rabbi said, "That is good thinking, my child; but to study the Talmud you must think a little harder than that." She asked, "Why, Father?" He replied, "Because if two men fell down a chimney, how is it possible that only one of them would have a dirty face? You did very well but always look for the question behind the question. That is how to study the Talmud." 

Even so, to be only questioning is strangely unsatisfactory -- as if something else is missing. It is strangely unnerving and incomplete to think that we are here just to have our questions answered. To think this is to presume, as Maxwell Anderson said in our Opening Words, that we do, indeed, start in the "mud" only to climb to "the topmost limb of the tallest trees" only to sit there "alone with our stars" awaiting a final answer to our final question. If this is what we think, then it is no wonder that, periodically, a "blight" hits us and casts us down -- for we are expecting too much from our inquiries. We are expecting our interests to be more important than the universe's. 

The rabbi and the Talmud remind us that we would do well to remember that we are called on to do more than ask the obvious. We're also called on to do some "answering" ourselves. For, although this fact often escapes us, not only do we ask questions of life but life asks questions of us. I don't mean that there is some white-bearded, evanescent "god-man" out there playing a cosmic Twenty Questions with us to see if we have learned our creeds as he thinks we should. Neither do I mean that there is some kind of interstellar litmus paper to test us as to whether we deserve to go on living. But I do mean, and mean it in more than just a figurative sense, that human beings as a species and as individual persons are questioned by existence and are under an imperative to make a serious and genuine answer. We are here to do more than to "seek" and to "find" according to our own drives and curiosity. We are, in a very basic way (by virtue of our evolving, existent being), a field within which existence itself is "seeking" and, to this "seeking," it is ours to make answer. This is another way of saying that forces outside our own personal intentions have called us into being, forces that reach through us into a mystery and an unknown much the same as we reach through time and space toward mystery and an unknown. We have a responsibility to respond to questions raised by the factuality of our existence. Simply for us to exist confronts the rest of existence with us and this raises the issue with the rest of existence whether we have a right to be here. 

All this may sound a bit vague and mystical -- that's why it's so hard to talk about. But it is the sense of owing a reply to the fact that we are -- as we are and with the possibilities for development we have -- that makes seeking answers to our own questions worthwhile. It is the sense of being "inquired of" as to what or who we think we are and where we think we are going that makes "being" worth the effort in the first place. For if nothing is asked of us then seeking to develop our potential as human beings is a fruitless exercise. For if nothing is expected of us, there is no reason for us to be anything --or even to be. 

There are many ways in which existence can be said to question us. One obvious way is our physical effect on the world around us. Considering the way in which we disrupt the environment, the world confronts us with the question of how we really think we fit into this world and what we really believe our responsibilities to be. The physical laws which we manipulate to achieve our own desires (i.e. kill bacteria or rocket to the moon) ask what we think the limits of human life and power are. Our own capacity wantonly to kill one another raises a large question, indeed! These three questions have a radical pertinence in today's world. Suffering, death, dignity: all pose questions of us as much as we pose questions of them. Even joy and pleasure pose questions. Just the capacity to experience life raises the issue of what our experiencing means to life itself! 

Ultimately, there is one question basic to all questions posed to us. It is also the one question out of which all our questions arise. That is the question, to use Erich Fromm's expression, "raised by the contradiction within (human beings themselves) -- that of being in nature and, at the same time, of transcending nature by the fact (we are) life aware of itself." The question our very existence poses is: What, Who, and Why are we creatures who exist for a brief span but during that span perceive and question as no other creature seems to do? The question of what it means to be at once within and outside this world, of being able both to feel it and think it, of being bound to it by our nature but free of it in our intelligence -- this is what we must answer. I suppose human beings have had to grapple with this question ever since the first person looked on the world and felt the "otherness" of it -- and felt that he or she was, in some way, both in and out of it. 

It is from this awareness and sense of self that religions have grown. Religions have sought to give an answer and then to teach and transmit that answer. Where the answer has genuinely captured our humanity's deepest response to our sense of our own enigma and our own substance, it has helped people fit into the world fully and well. Where it has lost touch, it has sickened and failed -- often becoming just one more political, coercive structure in people's lives instead of the soul-confirming, soul-expanding influence it could have been. On the personal level, when the individual has answered this question from the depths of her or his own authentic grasp of life's enigma, that person has built a strong faith and a secure sense of reality that accepts, affirms, and participates in life. When we lose touch with our own sensation of "being asked," we slip into illusions and irrelevance, and pursue not life but only one of life's aspects, such as power, or comfort, or happiness. In meeting this question genuinely and head on is wholeness and fulfillment, both for individuals and religions. To neglect or underrate it is to lose touch with reality at best or go mad at worst. 

In our modern preoccupation with ferreting out answers to our questions, we, as a species, have neglected giving a serious answer to the question that existence asks of us. We, as a species, have lost sight of what our humanity means -- both for us and for the world that enfolds us. But we cannot escape dealing with this problem. Whether we wish it or not, the world, through such things as a disrupted environment, is pressing us for a responsible answer; human society, through its pathologies of war, injustice, and alienation, is pressing the individual for a genuine response. 

Perhaps the fundamental crisis of our day is the need for human beings to come to terms with what it means to be human. Perhaps, as a people and a species, we can do this and will be able to persist. But that will happen only as each person in his or her own heart faces this existential question and makes a personal response -- a response that says that we care enough about the value of other people and that we care enough about the integrity of the whole web of life that encompasses us that what we do and (what we) are enhances and does not hurt. Unless our lives are constructive answers to life's questions of us, the questions we ask of life can lead nowhere, because the answers we receive will be to questions that only serve our narrow individual needs and do not fit us creatively into a mutually enhancing whole.