Reflection #105 (1st June 2025 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)
Questions, questions! We Unitarians tend to think of ourselves as people who love the questions – people who like to question everything – perhaps people who aren’t satisfied with easy answers. So I don’t imagine I’m going to have to do a particularly hard-sell on the virtue of asking questions! But our service today is focused on beautiful questions. What makes a question beautiful, I wonder?
We just heard from Andjelka Jankovic, who said: ‘A beautiful question always enlarges the context in which you’re living – deepening the horizon – and taking you out of yourself and into yourself at the same time.’ She goes further, saying this: ‘A beautiful question is a gamechanger; a question that calls you to take notice. It opens a door to articulate your deepest longings and truths and wakes you up in a sea of how are yous? Bringing you to a frontier where deeper intimacy is possible with yourself, the person asking, and the world.’
Here’s another take, from another contemplative blogger, Kim Manley Ort, who says: ‘A beautiful question is ambitious [that is, it’s challenging] and actionable [that is, it’s doable]. It has the potential to shift our perceptions [and serves as a catalyst] to bring about change.’
The premise of our service today is pretty simple: it’s to encourage us all to intentionally develop this practice of asking beautiful questions. It’s a practice – a skill and a habit – which can help us to grow in self-awareness, to cultivate deeper and more authentic relationships with others, and ultimately to bring about social change, and help build a better and more beautiful world. As such, I’d say that beautiful questions are an important element of a life well-lived. And as the poet David Whyte has said: ‘If you want a beautiful life, start asking beautiful questions.’
There are four different domains I want to highlight, in which we can ask beautiful questions (and of course we can also respond to those questions if we find ourselves on the receiving end of them). We can ask ourselves; we can ask other people (both friends and strangers); we can ask them of the groups we belong to (from particular communities, or institutions, to the wider society or even the nation we are part of); and we can ask them of God (or you might ask the Universe if you prefer).
So, let’s take each of those domains in turn, starting with the questions we ask of ourselves. We already heard from Sam Keen at the start of the service; he said: ‘Our minds, bodies, feelings, relationships are all informed by our questions. What you ask is who you are. What you find depends on what you search for. And what shapes our lives are the questions we ask, refuse to ask, or never think of asking. The question is the helmsman of the consciousness.’ He goes on: ‘The first questions we must ask ourselves are “What’s my life about?” and “What gives me meaning?” Only after that should we ask “How do I make a living?” and “How do I provide for myself?”… And we all have great mythic questions to answer… “Where did I come from?” “Where am I going?” “What is of value?” “How am I wounded?” “How am I healed?” “Who are my people?” “What is my place?”’
I wonder how often you take time to stop and ask these sorts of questions of yourself? These are big questions – quite challenging questions – but they can enable us to zoom out from all those day-to-day concerns and responsibilities that tend to occupy our brain space – such questions can help us to take an overview of our life, where we’ve been, and where we might be headed. They can provoke us into life-changing insights and perhaps even liberate us from self-limiting stories.
One question I return to regularly is: ‘what one thing can I do today to make my life a little bit better?’ (or sometimes ‘what one thing can I do this year to make my life a little bit better?’). I find that helpful in moments where I’m feeling stuck, or overwhelmed, it helps me to move forward. Sometimes the answer I settle on is mundane – it might be ‘tidy your room’ or ‘deal with that admin task you’ve been putting off for months’ – but I remember a time some years ago (when I’d left my old job, didn’t have a clue what I was going to do next, and was in a bit of a state about it all) when I asked myself that question and it led me to come up with a speculative ten-year plan for all the courses I wanted to go on which would culminate in me putting myself forward for ministry. There’s something in asking these questions of ourselves which can invite us to think brand new thoughts. For some people the way to do this is through journalling; others don’t get on with writing as a practice so they might take the question for a walk, or use some form of artistic expression.
There’s another form of self-questioning that various wise people have encouraged me to practice down the years. When I’m telling a story about myself, or others, or the world, it is important to pause every now and then to check: ‘is that true?’, ‘is there something I’m not acknowledging?’, ‘might I be wrong?’ David Whyte has also spoken about this, he says: ‘One of the most beautifully disturbing questions we can ask, is whether a given story we tell about our lives is actually true, and whether the opinions we go over every day have any foundation, or are things we repeat to ourselves simply so that we will continue to play the game. It can be quite disorienting to find that a story we have relied on is not only not true – it actually never was true – not now, not ever… [but] one of the interesting mercies of this kind of questioning is that it is hard to lose by asking: if the story is still true, we will soon find out and can go back to telling it. If it is not we have turned the key, worked the hinges and walked out into the clear air again with a simple swing of the door.’
If you like the idea of working with such questions but you’re stuck for inspiration there are plenty of prompts out there. Andjelka Jankovic has collected loads of beautiful questions from David Whyte, I’ve put just a few in the order of service, and I’ve linked to her original article on the website too, but as I read them out see if one leaps out as a question you could respond to in the week ahead.
What’s the question you don’t want to ask?
What’s on the other side of the question you’ve refused to ask?
What helped you to get here that you need to give away?
What small thing can you do today that your future self will come back and thank you for?
What is on your to-do list that was put together by the person you were yesterday?
What promise did you make sincerely that you now need to let go of?
How can you be friends with your longings? With what you want?
In whose presence do you come alive?
What is your particular way of loving?
What is your next coming of age?
Maybe one of these questions speaks to your condition – you can sit with it in the week ahead – or perhaps another beautiful question has bubbled up, one that is more meaningful, and all your own.
It’s not all about asking questions of yourself, of course; asking questions of others is a wonderful way to get to know and understand other people better, and to nurture meaningful connections. When I’m trying to get to know people – and be known by them – I don’t want us to stay on the surface too long. I’m not that all that interested in small talk, exchanging run-of-the-mill opinions, and idle chit-chat. Those beautiful questions get us into the depths, talking about what’s real, the stuff that really matters. They’re an invitation to share something of our personal story. And, as Andjelka Jankovic said, sometimes we have to actively stop the flow of a conversation to interrupt it with a beautiful question – even if that feels a bit awkward or eccentric – if we want to take things to a deeper level. Like she said, ‘we often don’t have time or space in a conversation to pause and really be present with what question wants to be asked. When I overhear myself asking the same boring thing to a friend mid-sentence; I try to stop and recalibrate. Often I even say out loud, ‘Wait, let me ask a more beautiful question’ and then I try to [do so].’ And we can do that too. Asking such questions of others, with care, can draw out the heart and strengthen connection. Though of course we need to give similar care and attention to listening to the response.
There’s another category of beautiful question we mustn’t overlook: those questions that we address to the wider society – at the level of the state, or the institutions or groups we belong to – questions which arise out of critical thinking, a willingness to challenge authority, a refusal to take things at face value – and all in the service of truth and justice. Questions of ‘why?’ and ‘why not?’, ‘How could we do things differently?’, ‘Whose interest is this in?’ I was interested to recently hear of an organisation called ‘The Right Question Institute’ which aims to promote ‘microdemocracy’ and civic engagement by coaching young people to ask better questions. On their website it says: ‘The transformational skill of asking questions enhances learning, promotes empowerment, and strengthens democracy. People—including those furthest from power—can use this skill to think and learn independently, participate meaningfully in decisions that affect them, and advocate on behalf of themselves, their families, and their communities.’
There’s one more domain I want to mention. We can ask beautiful questions of God, in prayer. Or you can think of it as casting questions out into the Universe if God-language doesn’t work for you. We might ask for guidance or direction – maybe in the spirit of ‘help! What do I do now?’ – maybe moral guidance in a thorny situation – or seeking direction regarding our calling and purpose in life. I’m in the habit of praying in bed for five minutes or so after the alarm goes off and before I get up, and my prayers often include something along the lines of, ‘right then God, what are we doing today?’ Or sometimes ‘What am I meant to be doing?’, or ‘What’s the right thing to do in this situation?’, or sometimes looking at the bigger picture and the longer term, ‘Where are you calling me next?’ Articulating these questions helps me to discern where best to put my energy, what my priorities should be, and also what burdens I can lay down and let go of (or at least park for another day).
I want to close by returning to those words of Sam Keen (which, by the way, have been up on our Wayside Pulpit outside the church for quite a while): ‘What shapes our lives are the questions we ask, refuse to ask, or never think of asking.’ I really believe that to be true. And I’ll share just a few more words of wisdom from David Whyte to encourage us in adopting this practice: ‘The ability to ask beautiful questions, often in very unbeautiful moments, is one of the great disciplines of a human life. And a beautiful question starts to shape your identity as much by asking it, as it does by having it answered. You just have to keep asking. And before you know it, you will find yourself actually shaping a different life, meeting different people, finding conversations that are leading you in those directions that you wouldn’t even have seen before.’ So let’s keep asking those beautiful questions, for the greater good of all. Amen.
Reflection by Jane Blackall