By Way of Questions

by Anna A. Friedrich

I went out for coffee with a friend the other day. He’s a screenwriter. He’s been in the slog of years of upset in his industry—from the agent-firing frenzy that was followed by Covid that was followed by the writer’s guild strike—a financial famine for him and his family. Then his house got robbed. His wife’s heirloom jewelry, their fancy speakers, sports gear, cash, even his boxer shorts were all taken. But he keeps writing. He keeps discovering new things he wants to write about, keeps finding his earnest pursuit of storytelling compelling. He can’t not write as the saying goes.

We talked about literary agents and book deals and submitting poems to journals while sipping our caffeine in a cool coffee shop in Boston’s Brookline. I asked what he was working on. He mentioned a couple of pilots, and how in one particularly stuck moment in his writing, someone asked him a question, related to the main character—“What has he suffered that brought him to this point?” This question opened the locked doors in my friend’s mind. He let that question hound every sentence as he looked back over the work he’d done until he was writing again, fruitful and on his way to finishing the project.

A good question is a powerful thing.

What is a question? I’ve been asking this for years. I know that might sound a bit esoteric, to ask questions of questions. It’s not something for polite conversation (“I hear you asking how my weekend was, but what does that question really do in the world?”) and yet it gets right down to something essential, I’m convinced. My philosophy-trained husband tells me I’m after a “phenomenology of questions.” I had to go look up that word, and even now, I don’t totally know what it means, but I do know there is this “to the things themselves!” mantra of phenomenologists. And yes, that is what I’m after. To the thing itself—What is a question?

A question is a hook. A shepherd’s crook. The dough-kneading attachment on your KitchenAid. They’re all the same shape, after all (?), and serve a similar function. With some kind of life and energy, a question reaches out and grabs ahold of the one being questioned. It gathers in and mixes up. It seeks a reply, an answer. Questions take you somewhere new.

At 19, I was drowning in questions, so I dropped out of college and ran off to Europe. Having read a sentence in a book about a place I could visit that “cared as much about the Reformation as about Rock ‘n’ Roll,” I examined my life—a zealous and struggling Christian raised in the Reformed tradition, a freshman music major, feeling lost at Virginia Tech—and I followed this sentence to Switzerland.

The place was L’Abri, a study center born out of the lives and missionary endeavors of Edith and Francis Schaeffer in the 1950s-1980s. It is a place that welcomes questions. They welcomed my questions, and I was hooked.

L’Abri (“The Shelter,” in French) is a combination school/Christian retreat center/modern monastery/intentional community. It defies easy categorization, but its mission is straightforward. The folks who work there seek to offer “honest answers to honest questions.” And when I arrived, a little depressed and a little cynical, I found a place that filled my lungs with air again. I felt something of the wind of the Spirit.

Having my personal and particular questions welcomed, listened to, dignified, and then being offered resources with which to continue to honestly explore these questions and potential answers, changed my life. A community of question-askers reoriented me to God, to myself, and to my neighbor. L’Abri changed the trajectory of my whole story.

So, given that, it makes sense that I’m kind of obsessed with questions. Granted, questions don’t always literally take you across the world, but they can, and they might. It’s now been more than 20 years since I stepped off the bus stop platform at L’Abri, with my guitar case in one hand and my suitcase in the other. I never did finish that music degree but eventually found myself drawn into and swept up in the old and luminous river of English poetry. I have become a poet. I now spend my hours and my days writing poems.

Poetry found me while taking a graduate course at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. Professors Loren and Mary Ruth Wilkinson included a Denise Levertov poem titled “Flickering Mind” in the syllabus for the famed Boat Course (an elective I could not believe I got into! what a dream!). Here was a poem that spoke with such simplicity and energy about conversion, distraction, prayer, longing. I was poleaxed by this poem.

In his excellent book, Word Made Fresh, Abram Van Engen writes:

Poems have been written and published that will catch you entirely offguard . . . suddenly a poem will touch you, stir you, make you smile, make you laugh.A poem you never saw coming might cause you to catch your breath. Another might move you to tears. The world overflows with poetry, and if you keep reading, you will find poems that cannot be ignored.

“Flickering Mind” was that for me. And guess what? It ends with a question. A vibrant, echoing, shimmering question that has never left me, and I don’t think ever will:

How can I focus my flickering, perceiveat the fountain’s heartthe sapphire I know is there?

That last little mark, the punctus interrogativus, got a hold of me, sent me back to the beginning of this poem, along its river-winding ways, to this beautiful final question. It sent me “away—and back, circling.”

One potent question set me on a path that led to my vocation.

Recently, I read a newsletter by Austin Kleon about questions that help him when he feels stuck creatively. His charm and Midwestern no-nonsense way of writing was inviting and helpful, as always. I’m a big fan of his book Steal Like an Artist. In this particular newsletter, he asked his readership to share a question in the comments that has helped them. Given my interest in the topic, I scrolled down, eagerly imagining what a feast of beautiful questions I would find. I’m not throwing shade on Kleon or his brave-enough-to-comment readers, but the majority of the questions people offered were less than inspiring. Questions like:

“What if this was fun?”
“Do I need this?”
“Does this occur for me as an opportunity?”
“What do I want to bring?”

I can see how some of these questions might awaken a new awareness of what’s being squashed or silenced in the individual—and how that can unblock certain things for creative flow to begin again. But it hit me that so many commenters were reaching for something that could surprise them, upend them, create a volta for them in their craft. It seems we know that questions have the strength to open doors, to send us on a whole new path, to take us someplace new. However, we need questions that save us from curving inward, that break us out of the prison of excessive self-reflection and into a broad place.

Can I be so bold as to claim that I know where such questions reside? We don’t have to invent them or search through self-help guru books to find them. They’ve been collected in one place for us. It’s accessible to every single one of those commenters, and it’s accessible to you and to me.

The most life-giving, surprising, revelatory questions that have ever been imagined and uttered are in the pages of the Old and New Testaments. Is this a ridiculous claim? I challenge you to offer a better question (in the comments below) than can be found in the Bible.

Consider God’s very first question,

“Where are you?”

For many, this first Bible story is obscured by a “film of familiarity,” in the wise words of Coleridge (to which Malcolm Guite introduced me), so let’s peel that back a little, as we’re able. God isn’t looking for GPS coordinates here. He knows where Adam and Eve are. He knows they’re hiding from him. He knows what’s happened. He knows their evening stroll, in the cool of the day, has been lost.

God’s question is less about practical information than it is about relationship. It was a potent question that elicited the truth from Adam. And Adam responded with much more than a simple reply; he heard the real question. Instead of responding with, “We’re halfway between the lemon tree grove and the fig tree orchard,” he said,

God, I heard you in the garden I was afraid I’m naked I hid.

Say you’re at the grocery store with a friend, and you get separated for a moment, and your friend texts you, “Where are ya?”—imagine responding with, “I saw you heading towards the seafood, I was uncomfortable because I hate seafood, so I’m hiding from you now.” This would likely make your friend laugh but also require more questions. “Haha, ok, sorry, didn’t know you had such an aversion. Why do you hate seafood? And where are you?”

If your friend has any sense, they’ll know you’re in the chip aisle (the best spot in any grocery store), but more than that, they’ll know you a bit more. Your answer was an answer in relationship. Though this revelation might make your crustacean-eating friend sad, you’ve revealed more of yourself by your answer. Adam responded to God in kind. He heard the question inside the question, as it were.

Think of all the ways God could have approached Adam and Eve at this point in the story. But he came with a question. God’s “Where are you?” worked like a shepherd’s crook, seeking out and drawing near what had wandered off. We see God here, right from the beginning, seeking an honest, even intimate answer from his beloved humans. And he invited Adam into the dignity of offering a response, in his own words.

For some reason, many of us imagine God’s voice as booming, condemning, with emphases on syllables that the text does not offer us. Here, in Genesis 3, we hear the equivalent of “WhOOO DAAARES distURb my SlumBERRRR?” But why? God’s question can’t have been heard like that in the first instance, as it elicits a generous answer from Adam—an honest answer, an answer with which they can move forward in relationship.

That’s not to say what followed this call and response between God and Adam was harmonious hand-holding on a sunlit Eden hillside. No. Curses followed. Adam and Eve died. They were banished from their perfect home that God made for them (the question definitely took them somewhere). But the question God asked was not a curse. It was a powerful, surprising, true invitation. With it, he grabbed ahold of the truth of the situation, drew his humans back toward himself, and called on them to respond.

Some of the best work a question can do is the work of drawing the other out and then near. Astonishingly, God models this for us from the earliest page of the Bible. He is not unaware of what we suffer, or of our rebellion, and yet he reaches out to us in relationship, “Where are you?”

God’s questions continue throughout the Scriptures, hundreds of them.

Where have you come from? And where are you going? (Gen. 16:8)
Is the LORD’s arm too short? (Num. 11:23)
What are you doing here, Elijah? (1 Kings 19:9, 13)
Have you ever given orders to the morning, or shown the dawn its place? (Job 38:12)
Can these bones live? (Ezek. 37:3)

And when God took on flesh and dwelt among us, Jesus revealed himself to be the Master Question-Asker. With generosity and artistry, again and again God takes his people someplace new, by way of the questions he asks.

Spend time with just this one question—“Where are you?”—Let it be asked of you. What doors open? What fresh wind blows? Do you feel the Shepherd’s crook?

Anna A. Friedrich is a poet and arts pastor in Boston, Massachusetts. You can find more of her work at annaafriedrich.substack.com.

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