Peter Russell has corrected a philosophical misconception related to telephone “answering” machines. His telephone message states, “This is not an answering machine. This is a questioning machine. You already know the questions. Who are you? and What do you want?” The message continues, “Before you answer, please remember that these are not trivial questions. Many people live a lifetime without ever finding an answer to these two questions.”
A defining difference between conservative and liberal religion involves the way questions and answers are valued. One conserves answers while the other liberates questions. As Elie Wiesel rightly observed, “We tend to lose our humanity when we forget that there are no ultimate answers, only ultimate questions.” The liberal path (guided by a belief in revelation as a continuous process) is strewn with answers that are provisional, tentative, and evolving. There is an essential ongoing dialectic between questions and answers. Each transforms the other. Questions are the means of wresting answers and meaning out of the mystery of life. In religious terms this requires being comfortable with a theology of the unknown. The invitation, as phrased by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, is to both love and live the questions so that we may eventually live into the answers.
Our questions of life grow out of our search for meaning. As Victor Frankl has said, "The human search for meaning is a primary force in life. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by each individual alone...." Within a religious community there is also a collective search for meaning. This takes us back to Peter Russell's two questions, the answers to which will shape our collective life: "Who are we?" (or even more provocatively, "Whose are we?")and "What do we want?"
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