Learn to love questions

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote to a young poet:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.

Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Loving our questions is a great act of charity, and humility. By doing so we learn to love and trust God. For, if we can learn to at least sit with questions, we begin to discover that we do not put our faith in certainty, or a system, but in a God who gives answers when we are ready to live them.

What the spiritual life is not