The first semester ended on Friday. As I said goodbye to the Advanced (mostly Sixth Form) students in my Introduction to Epistemology class, I wonder if I left them less confused or more confused about Religion. And I realize I hope I have left them more confused: more confused, more at peace with that confusion, and significantly more articulate about their own personal journeys through it. Perhaps someday they will come to love that generative and salvific “unknown” as much as I have.
For every class I teach, I choose a parting thought. For this class it was from Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet:”
I beg you to have patience
with everything unresolved in your heart,
and to try to love the questions themselves,
as if they were locked rooms
or books written in a very foreign language.
...The point is to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps then, someday far in the future,
you will gradually,
without even noticing it,
live your way into the answer.
--The Rev. Barbara Talcott
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