The Question I've Been Chasing for Thirty-Four Years

what is the secret signature of your soul?

One of the first things you learn in teaching school is that anyone worth their weight in gold designs their lessons, their curriculums—heck, their entire years—not around answers to be found but around questions to be fallen into.

These questions are called ‘essential questions’ and they are the chief wonderings that tie everything together. They are the connective tissue between biology and poetry, between the American Revolution and Jackson Pollock and the proper usage of an exclamation point. They reverberate off the walls while kids listen to their first reading of Charlotte’s Web, and they knock around the hot top while they play four-square. They are the driving force for learning, and they are designed in such a way that they cannot be answered with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ They ask about the nature of things, the necessity of things, the relationship between seemingly unrelated entities, and the point is that as you go about your day you never know when you’ll overhear a bit of conversation or read a line of a book that makes you say, Oh—now there’s a missing piece to that puzzle! You squirrel it away for later. You know it matters. You’re just not sure how it all comes together yet.

I turn 34 years old in a few days, and I always think it’s fun to do a birthday post.

Last year I turned 33 and that felt poignant, because Jesus was 33 when he died. The year before that I was 32, and I wrote all about reaching my prime, because apparently after that age a woman goes downhill (ha!). And at age 31 I wrote a snappy little listicle about my top 10 learnings at that point. You know. Important stuff, like stay away from MSG.

What will I write about this year? I asked myself in the shower as I detangled my hair. A letter to my younger self felt stale; everyone’s already taken their inner child out for coffee this year. Putting out 34 tidbits of something clever would be pretty click-able, but coming up with that many witticisms felt like a reach. I even considered making a list of my favorite products from this year, but then I realized that besides the Viking skin cream I discovered, everything else would just be books.

And so instead, I’ve decided to write about just one thing.

That is, I want to take a moment to try to define the Essential Question—the bold red thread—that has been running all throughout the curriculum of my life and that, year after year, has only become more pronounced and demanding.

This could be a fun exercise for all of us, because I think we’ve all got an Essential Question. Maybe we haven’t been able to articulate it yet, but if we sit still for a moment and lift the edges of our souls we won’t have to look too hard: we all have some sort of curiosity simmering beneath the surface that is at once desperate and insatiable. It is desperate because it is insatiable. It is desperate because our entire ability to accept being human depends on it.

C.S. Lewis has some words that come to mind¹ and I do hope you’ll forgive me for writing them in their entirety; they are just so spot on that nothing else will do. He seems to also be talking about the idea of an Essential Question and how each individual goes on their own, unnamed quest for answers:

You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw—but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of—something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat’s side?

Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it—tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear.

But if it should really become manifest—if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself—you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “Here at last is the thing I was made for”. We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.”

Lewis says these secret signatures, these Essential Questions, are incommunicable and to a degree that has got to be true; they are part of our very essence and in each of us there is something precious and unnameable that lies beyond the bounds of words, or pictures, or movement, or even song.

But oh, doesn’t it torment us, to be always looking for something we can’t even define?

I know it has tormented me.

But also! It has propelled me forward. It has made me single-minded. It has been like a game of Warmer/Colder: when I have wandered from the Essential Question, my soul has cried, COLDER! But when I have ambled near it the Deep has roared to the Deep, YES! HOTTER! That’s the way. Keep at it. Onward and upward, Dee.

And now, on the threshold of thirty-four, I am peering backwards and forwards and up and down and all-around and feel this tremendous sense of relief, because for the first time ever I feel like I can almost get my lips around the words, can almost begin to name the Essential Question which has brought me here, which is always right beside me when I wake in the night and when I rise in the morning and when I talk and move and breathe. The one which is sending me only-God-knows-where next.

My Essential Question is this:

How do we live with the knowledge that we’ll die?

I know now that when I was eight years old, hanging upside down on our old blue swing set and listening to Baz Luhrmann’s Wear Sunscreen² speech on repeat, I wasn’t just letting the blood rush to my head and killing time. I was mining his words for answers to my secret question. What did he know about life that I didn’t? Was taking care of our knees and wearing SPF 50 our best hope? Was the goal to preserve our bodies as long as possible, to wage war against the natural process of wearing out?

And when I was sixteen years old riding in the middle seat of my boyfriend’s³ pickup, kissing his hand and shoulder and neck and that delicious spot under his ear, I was testing the hypothesis that being young and in love is some sort of antidote to death. Could I keep this terrible business of being mortal at bay if laughed in its face, pretended I was too carefree to notice?

A couple years later I nearly lost my cool one afternoon in English class when a classmate said with her triumphant sneer, God is not real. We were in the middle of a unit on existentialism, and I’m pretty sure we had just read about Gregor Samsa waking up as a ginormous bug⁴, and the cavity of my chest was beginning to feel like it would buckle under the weight of all that nothingness. It was not that I was some passionate defender of the faith; it was that I was terrified what it would mean if she was right. So I argued with her: If God did not exist, she should not be smiling. Did she not feel the gravity? It is a precarious place to be standing, there on the edge of meaninglessness.

At twenty-two I worked deep into the belly of the night, planning complicated lessons and organizing detailed service projects for my classroom of students. I loved the work and I loved the kids, yes. But I also was trying to find out whether life becomes less terrifying if you give it away—like taking a ticking time bomb and saying, Here, you take it, and hoping it will defuse in someone else’s hands.

I became a mother for the first time at twenty-seven. People told me that this was my life’s purpose. I thought this might ease the burden of the ever-present Question. Perhaps this is how we become okay with the idea of death: we outsmart it by putting a piece of our old selves into someone new, someone who will outlast us.

And last year when I sat down for my first seminary class, I looked around at the other students—ministry leaders who had good, sensible reasons for being there—and bumbled over my own answer when the professor asked, “Why are you here?” Because why was I there? Why, now I sense it was because the Holy Spirit had been breathing in my ear every step of the way, “Warmer. Warrrrrmmmer! Yes, keep going. You’re really onto something now.”

So what?

This morning I was letting all these thoughts roil around in my brain, struggling to figure out how to tie them all together for you (and me) in a way that felt both punchy and clear. It felt fluid, slippery. Maybe Lewis was right. Maybe our secret signatures really are incommunicable.

This is me saying that I didn’t end up with a tidy bow. But I do have one thing to offer: this parable—a single red thread—that came, like manna from heaven, into my mind on this morning’s commute:

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.⁵

I never gave that parable much attention, and so I was surprised when it came to me this morning. But then again, isn’t that what I told you happens with Essential Questions? We never know when a line from a Book will come to us, and we’ll understand it’s something we should pay attention to, something we should tuck away for later. It will all make more sense later, we have to let ourselves believe.

Anyway, this morning, that parable, for the first time in my life—it suddenly did make sense, in the tangible way that goes beyond the measured reason of our brains. My jaw opened a little, my eyes lit up. That was it!

All my life I have been harboring this Essential Question, and all my life it has been leading me toward this field. And the thing about fields is that they are so unassuming, so commonplace, so vast—it’s easy to think nothing of them at all, especially when compared to the glitz and glamor of city living.

In the parable, the man finds the treasure in the field, and it is so valuable to him that he sells everything else he has just to have it. I’ve always understood this to mean that the kingdom of heaven is the greatest treasure in the world. But what I never considered before today is the relief that this man must have felt. Because not only did he find treasure—his Essential Question had also been answered. He followed the single red thread that had twisted throughout his entire life and it had led him there. It had always been leading him here.

As I stand on the edge of age thirty-four, it is like I am standing on the edge of such a field. My Essential Question has led me here: somewhere near the kingdom of heaven. And though the field is sweeping and open and there’s still a lot of territory to comb over yet, I sense that I am circling the treasure. And my prayer for this year and for the rest of my life is that the Holy Spirit will continue to lead me along, crying, “Warrrrrrmmeerrrrr!”

What is your Essential Question?

1. From The Problem of Pain

2

3. Ethan. It was Ethan. We’ve been married twelve years now.

4. The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka

5. Matthew 12:44 NIV