BLOGGING TOWARD SUNDAY…

“I heard of a woman who, finding herself drifting toward the middle of a dangerously feminist conversation, stopped the group in the midst of the process. ‘I don’t want to hear any more about any of this,’ she said, ‘because if I did, I would have to change my life.’

A wise woman. It is always so much easier to assuage pain than to cure it, so much easier to accept a thing than to question it. “The ability—the commitment—to question, to examine every aspect of the human journey, is the only form of fidelity worth the price of admission to this sojourn called life. … It is the questions we ask that move us from stage to stage of growing, that take us from level to level of our thoughts, however simple the questions may seem. …”

“ ‘Everything that deceives,’ Plato said, ‘can be said to enchant.’ I have been enchanted by far too many falsehoods in life. I would rather go on living the struggle than go comatose in the face of answers that are not true, were never true, cannot possibly be true. Most of all, I have indeed found that the process of examining them has made my life worthwhile.

—from “Afterword: The Power of Questions to Propel: ARetrospective,” in Mary Hembrow Snyder, ed., Spiritual Questions for the Twenty-First Century: Essays in Honor of Joan D. Chittister (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001

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