A strong sense of your inherent worth will welcome questions. When we’re centered in our worth and are asked questions, it won’t be a threat, and when we ask them, the hint of not knowing something won’t chip away at our sense of self. The converse is true, too; if our sense of worth is low or fragile, we’ll feel we’re supposed to know already. What a shameful thing to not already know, right? And the terror of being asked to explain something we believe without much support beyond habitual patterns can be terrifying.
There’s something about questions that makes us vulnerable. When we’re asked them, we have to explain our assumptions or our less than well-constructed reasoning. We might reveal our narrow biases or weaknesses we’re protecting.
While we might have been led to believe that displaying our knowledge holds power and strength, it often reduces the size of our world. The ability to be curious and ask questions of ourselves and others expands life’s possibilities.
Krista Tippett, of the show and now podcast On Being, has been asking questions for over 30 years. In her book Becoming Wise, An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living, she discusses the countercultural act of what she calls generous listening, which is activated by questions.
Listening is an everyday social art, but it's an art we have neglected and must learn anew. Listening is more than being quiet while the other person speaks until you can say what you have to say… Generous listening is powered by curiosity, a virtue we can invite and nurture in ourselves to render it instinctive. It involves a kind of vulnerability—a willingness to be surprised, to let go of assumptions and take in ambiguity. The listener wants to understand the humanity behind the words of the other, and patiently summons one's own best self and one's own best words and questions.
In American life, we trade mostly in competing answers—and in questions that corner, incite, or entertain.
My only measure of the strength of a question now is in the honesty and eloquence it elicits.
If I've learned nothing else, I've learned this: a question is a powerful thing, a mighty use of words. Questions elicit answers in their likeness.
Answers mirror the questions they rise, or fall, to meet. So while a simple question can be precisely what's needed to drive to the heart of the matter, it's hard to meet a simplistic question with anything but a simplistic answer. It's hard to transcend a combative question. But it's hard to resist a generous question. We all have it in us to formulate questions that invite honesty, dignity, and revelation. There is something redemptive and life-giving about asking a better question.
Here's another quality of generous questions, questions as social art and civic tools: they may not want answers, or not immediately. They might be raised in order to be pondered, dwelt on, instead. The intimate and civilizational questions we are living with in our time are not going to be answered with answers we can all make peace with any time soon.
How’s that going?
Yes, but Rob, you must correct, rebuke, convince, and persuade. Let me ask a question I know the answer to: How's that going? I realize our instinct is to impress, speak down to until folks know they're lower, and flex our resume, degree, or acumen until someone accepts our rightness. However, the outcomes of this are predictable, well-worn ruts.
Tippet offers the idea of strength in apparent weakness. Our questions can display the biblical idea. She asks if we have
"the courage to be vulnerable in front of those we passionately disagree with”
What questions would Jesus ask?
Jesus, knowledgeable in all ways, employed questions far more than his followers today. In the Gospels, Jesus asked more questions than he answered, asking 307 questions and only answering 3 of the 183 questions asked of him.
We see when Jesus sat near a well and talked to a Samaritan woman. He asked her for water. Picture Christ, present at water's creation, being willing to ask for a cup of H2O from a woman he culturally was allowed to view himself above talking to. A vulnerability that softened her heart.
If we shore up our worth, realize and live it, questions become less scary. They become the open terrain of possibility upon which to meet others with whom we might disagree and share a meal of conversation that leads to new paths.
Be well, friend.