Why so Many Queries?

by Carol

Queries before meeting for business, queries before worship, queries for worship sharing – sooner or later you may begin to think Quakers are obsessed with queries. In fact, we are -- and with good reason too.

Dogmatic answers are imposters, never more than partial, never anything but incomplete, while queries can function like guideposts helping us find our own road to transcendence.

Think of the Zen Kone about the sound of one hand clapping. When there is no obvious or even possible answer, why should you even try to find it? Maybe because trying can illuminate the everyday thoughts and emotions of being alive – and even if it doesn’t, the effort might be worthwhile. Like most of Quaker process, this whole query thing takes practice, practice, practice.

Ancient Chinese wisdom says that every third person you meet is a teacher. Sometimes when a query doesn’t immediately speak to my condition, I think that only every third query I hear has something to teach me. But maybe I’m just not ready; maybe every query, every person, every experience has a lesson worth learning.

It is helpful to remember that Quakers use queries to guide worship because we rely on individual experience. George Fox wanted no mediator between him and the divine, no institutional, tradition-bound church telling him how it felt to be him. For him, only the Christ Spirit could speak to his condition.

For me, connecting to the Christian narrative is more difficult, but I’m beginning to realize that individual experience may not be quite enough; it may be useful to find
religious myths which can speak to my condition, being careful to remember that no myth will ever be anything but an analogy, never the destination.

And so, we are left with queries. Since we simply don’t know, and probably can’t know the ultimate answers, dogma can only get in our way. Open-ended queries are fruitful, however; they lead us step by step to a closer connection to Spirit.

Photo credit: David