By retelling this myth John Main addresses the dilemma of a Western culture which has for so many people today become a disabling and barren wasteland: a polluted environment and increasingly unstable ecological system, a sense of psychological isolation and social alienation in urban life, chronic levels of anxiety and increasingly dysfunctional families, shamefully widening gaps between rich and poor, addictive lifestyles and demeaning entertainment, unsupported institutions of democracy and manipulative media, a sense of powerlessness and abandonment among the young, confusion between personal and social morality, the loss of religious authority and the dangers of shallow syncretism. The malaise of the modern soul can be redemptively touched by those timeless myths that remind us of the eternal questions. These are the questions we must return to, not with easy answers but with new reverence. We have reached the point, John Main believes, where we do not need more answers, instant diagnoses and solutions. We need to relearn how to listen, humbly and profoundly, to the redemptive questions.
This does not imply that redemptive questions are in themselves magic solutions. They initiate a process of redemption. This means a conscious process of healing and of liberation from all that blocks joy, compassion and creativity. They liberate us, for example, from the grip of illusion and prejudice, from obsessiveness and fanaticism, from the fear of strangers and the prison of hatred. A redemptive question is not like other mundane questions. It does not expect an ordinary, rational, correct answer. Instead, it opens up a deeper level for experiencing the truth. The well-timed question in psychotherapy can cut the psychological chains of many years–and why do you think you said that? Or simply, what does that mean to you? Such open questions also operate at the root of the spiritual quest and trigger definitive awakenings.
Unlike answers, questions attract and hold our attention. They are irresistible, like a half-open door. Answers, especially wrapped in dogmatic certainty or claiming to be right in this form for all time, soon come either to bore or oppress us. Even the best answers can be as unwelcoming as a door banged in our face when they exclude alternative responses. Rather than giving answers and making rules Jesus called people to experiential knowledge. By asking questions or telling stories he invited his hearers to a personal discovery of truth, a redemptive recognition of reality. Throughout the gospels it is his questions which magnetize and capture our attention. Often they also deftly turn the attacks of his hostile critics back on themselves.11 It is by questions that he leads his disciples into a deeper understanding of who we are and who he is. These are the inseparable twin insights of his gift to humanity.12
Often, however, answers can be fatally attractive. They make us feel we can bottle the truth in a slogan, a dogmatic definition or scientific formula. ‘How many floors does the Empire State Building have?’ has an, easy, once-for-all answer. To deeper questions than this our responses require continuous and deep listening. Philosophy makes no progress but keeps returning to the basic questions asked by the first thinkers. This does not mean that truth is merely a subjective judgement or that there are no simple truths about right and wrong (do not kill, do not tell lies, help the poor). It means that the ways we formulate responses to these questions are constantly changing. Cardinal Newman (1801-90), one of the greatest of Christian theologians, wrote The Development of Christian Doctrine to show that one of the tests of a true answer is precisely that its way of expression evolves over time.
When we stop questioning we die. We only stop asking questions when we have despaired of life or when delusion or pride have mastered us. All the same, we hardly ever give up dreaming that a single definitive formula could solve all life’s problems. The temptation is very strong to cheat on the challenge of the mystery of life by reducing it to the status of a problem. So, people go on demanding absolute answers even to the redemptive questions. It is precisely these kinds of questions, though, that frustrate the ego’s attempt to control the mystery. The right questions constantly refresh our awareness that life is not fundamentally a secular problem but a sacred mystery. Mysteries are not solved. They are entered upon and they embrace us. Responding to Jesus’ question about himself and us involves not a discussion but a way of life. His disciples were first called ‘followers of the way’.
Every spiritual tradition treasures the power of the question. In Zen practice a koan is a question thrown to the rational mind which arrests the ego’s attempt to control reality. Like a key the koan opens consciousness beyond reason to truth as unfiltered experience, pure knowing. Receiving the koan from the teacher, the student’s rational mind may recoil in anger and frustration as it futilely tries one clever solution after another. And the ego’s need for control appears to be endless, even for some would-be Zen practitioners. In a bookshop I once saw a paperback enticingly called A Hundred Zen Koans–and their Answers!
Answers are most dangerous when we egotistically fight to defend them against a broader vision of the truth. Visiting Bere Island in my thirties made me rework some of the answers I had received as a child to questions about my family history. This involved me in both emotional and intellectual change. Ideologically or theologically we can also cling to familiar answers until they seem to be the only answers. Then they can be used to justify the condemnation and rejection of others. Even the most tolerant people cling tenaciously to their views. Listen in to any conversation and you see how quickly people defend their own answers by attacking others. Then, hopefully, we recognise how we are no different! Set answers breed conflict and prejudice. Wisdom and tolerance are found by listening to the important questions, keeping them open, pausing in silence to listen again and again.
Over the past two thousand years there has been no lack of answers to that searching question which Jesus put to his close disciples one day in the village of Bethsaida: ‘Who do you say I am?’ Peter, the impetuous leader of the disciples was characteristically quick to reply. It is the first recorded answer to a question around which two millennia of Christian life has formed. It was brief: ‘God’s Messiah’, he answered. Many church councils subsequently wrestled with the right way of expressing a longer response. In AD 381 the Nicene Creed, as expanded at the First Council of Constantinople, clarified the Christian perception of the divine identity of Jesus. This is the grounding insight of faith embedded in the Creed most universally recited by Sunday congregations around the world to this day. Bathed in biblical language the Nicene Creed can be used as a beautiful meditation on the mystery of who Jesus is in relation to biblical revelation:
We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen. We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternal begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father. Through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his Kingdom will have no end. We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified. He has spoken through the prophets. We believe in one holy, catholic and apostolic church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen
What does this mean and how do we experience its meaning? It can be read and pondered sitting in a library but a quite new dimension of meaning is discovered when this creed is sung by a community of worshippers at the Eucharist. The power of its meaning is then understood to be more than cerebral. It is felt to be reaching deep into the intelligence of the heart.
There have been many other attempts to answer the question of Jesus. In AD 451 the Council of Chalcedon,13 in over three hundred carefully technical words, defined its answer through the dogma of the two natures in the one (divine) person of Jesus: two unseparated but not confused natures. The seminal Councils of Nicea and Chalcedon, and