Redtree Times

“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 and survivor 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, even when the truth in them disappoints us. 

I think, as Moshe says above, that the true answers are only found within us. 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 wish to receive.

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

Both good and bad. Light and dark. Weakness and strength.

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…

Things to do this morning so I am replaying a post that I like from a few years back, especially the passage from Night. What it said was a big part of some of my new work this year, such as the painting at the top, The Answering Light. So often the answers we seek are answered yet we are not able to recognize or understand them. It is only when we find them within ourselves that these answers become apparent. 

Sometimes we find those answers, sometimes we don’t. 

I’ve added a song from the Moody Blues that deals with the frustration that comes with seeking answers to difficult questions, answers that sometimes do not come. This was written and released in 1970 and primarily deals with the frustration of the younger generation and the anti-war movement of that time in getting real answers to their pleas. This is Question.