Every serious life comes, sooner or later, to a question that will not be answered. Why the suffering, why the loss, why the silence. This sonnet does not pretend the question is easily solved. It sits with it, and finds that the unresolved question can itself become a strange kind of ground.
The Sonnet
The question rose one evening and would not Return to the kind places it had come, It stood before me stubborn as a knot, Refusing to be silenced, gone, or dumb. Why this, I asked, and why that other thing, Why grief, and why the innocent brought low, Why silence when the soul begins to sing, Why suffering, why loss, and why the slow. No answer came. The question stayed the night, And was there in the morning as before, And I have learned to live within its light, A guest that will not leave my inner door. Yet even so, I trust the One I ask, The question is not, in the end, my only task.
Reflection
The mature spiritual life has to make room for questions that will not be answered in this life. The problem of suffering, the mystery of loss, the silence of God at the very moments we most need speech. These are not questions we solve. They are questions we learn to live alongside.
The strange discovery of faith is that trust does not require resolution. We can hold a question we cannot answer, and we can also hold trust in the One who has not answered it, and both things can be true at once. This is harder than the easy faith of youth, and truer. The unresolved question, honestly carried, becomes a kind of witness of its own, that we have loved God enough to keep asking.
If you carry a question that will not be answered, carry it well. Do not pretend it is not there. Do not let it drive you away from the One you are asking. Both can be true. Both, over time, deepen the soul.
