Sangha of Auspicious Companions

Living with Questions

At seventeen, Charles Gibbs was asked to stay after Sunday school class by a well-meaning elder — and left with a message that would redirect the entire arc of his life: we don’t ask questions like that here. Rather than killing his spiritual hunger, that closed door sent him into theater, into poetry, into decades building the United Religions Initiative across six continents — all of it, he now sees, is the same search wearing different clothes. What emerged from an unplanned conversation is a man who has made peace with living inside the questions themselves. He draws on Wordsworth’s poem, “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” — and the image of “an eye made quiet” — to gesture at the contemplative states where questions finally dissolve, not because they’re answered, but because the one asking them temporarily disappears.

Be The Change

Recall one question you were told — explicitly or implicitly — not to ask, in childhood or later. Write it down exactly as you would have asked it then. Sit with it for five minutes without trying to answer it, and notice what it feels like simply to let the question exist.