Redtree Times

In the Revealing

“Why do you pray?” he asked me, after a moment.

Why did I pray? A strange question. Why did I live? Why did I breathe?

“I don’t know why,” I said, even more disturbed and ill at ease. “I don’t know why.”

After that day I saw him often. He explained to me with great insistence that every question possessed a power that did not lie in the answer. “Man raises himself toward God by the questions he asks Him,” he was fond of repeating. “That is the true dialogue. Man questions God and God answers. But we don’t understand His answers. We can’t understand them. Because they come from the depths of the soul, and they stay there until death. You will find the true answers, Eliezer, only within yourself!”

“And why do you pray, Moshe?” I asked him. “I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions.”

― Elie Wiesel, Night

The passage above from Night, the memoir of the Holocaust from the late Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, has stuck in my mind for a long time. Decades. It has informed my life and outlook as well as my work.

Life comes down to being a matter of not what we know but rather a matter of what we want to know.

A matter of the quality of our questions and how willing we are to accept the answers.

I think, as Moshe says above, that the true answers are only found within ourselves. And while we can’t always understand the answers to our questions, we sometimes refuse to accept those answers we do comprehend because they reveal us to be less than we hope.

They are not the answers we wished to receive.

But these may be the most important answers we ever receive because to know fully yourself you have to be able to recognize every aspect of your being, good and bad.

After all, each day contains about the same amount of darkness as it does light. You can’t know a day without knowing that there is both.

Hmm…

The painting shown here is from about a dozen years back, a 30″ by 40″ canvas that is titled In the Revealing. It’s a favorite of mine, reminding me of this passage from Wiesel. Reminding me to ask questions and accept answers when they are revealed. It hangs in the studio where I can see it from my desk and has never hung in a gallery. Nor will it ever.

It is in its home, where it belongs.