Darkness

Paul Corrigan stated in class, "our faith is not based on how well we answer questions but on how authentic our questions are." I do not know how other people took this but, when I heard this from him, I took a lot of truth from it as I considered the world that we live in.

When I read Professor Corrigan's article, Darkness, Questions, Poetry and Spiritual Hope, what stood out the most to me was how when we go through times of darkness, we do not want the cookie cutter answer from Christians informing us that everything will be alright. Instead, we need the authenticity from people to not just come up with what they assume to be the right answer for our given situation, but rather reflect in what this dark moment creates us to question. In the article Corrigan gives credit to Laurence Freeman by quoting an idea from which holds a firm stance on what authentic questions are. Freeman's quote was, "We should make sure we have truly heard the question before trying to get the answer right... Important questions create silence."

Between these two quotes and many more that were in the article, I saw a major connection from the two and how they coincide with each other. By asking authentic questions, instead of trying to come up with the single right answer for everything, perhaps silence and meditating on the question is more important than actually answering it. Through this meditative process, we learn how to address things from different angles and confront things with a different though process. Going through darkness, I believe is the time when people feel the urgency to answer questions for rapidly, blurting out what I have called, "the cookie cutter response". Maybe, through darkness, is not when we should be answering questions but in replacement meditate on the question. In the end, we might realize that answering it might not have been what was important, but rather allowing ourselves to see beyond our circumstance through the meditation and silence that the question created.