Letting questions guide you into a new year with clarity and kindness

What happens when we allow holy curiosity to lead the way?

In writing A Soulful Revolution I seek to be as clear as I can be about social change and spiritual transformation as I understand them, and as transparent about my own story as my ever-healing heart is courageous enough to share. As Brené Brown likes to say, “clear is kind.” I take seriously the responsibility I have as a writer to share my thoughts in such a way that they can be understood by you, my gracious readers. At the same time, I deeply appreciate the grace, curiosity and feedback you consistently extend to me when I convey something clumsily or even curtly.

I see this relationship as a dance of fierce vulnerability, with questions acting as the rhythm guiding us into deeper alignment with the life entrusted to each of us. Without questions, life would lose (as we salseros like to say), its sabor. Questions punctuate our days with invitations to move, to respond, to be changed.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

A good question is a gift. Even the most challenging questions, the ones that may make us squirm in our seats and look for the nearest door, are opportunities. They may expand our field of awareness about ourselves and the world, or nudge us to humbly yield, or provoke us to root down in our values and stand tall in the strength of our convictions.

I’ve long cherished this poem from St. Teresa de Ávila (rendered so beautifully by Daniel Ladinsky in his Love Poems from God), which speaks to me of this dynamic:

I had tea yesterday with a great theologian,
and he asked me,

“What is your experience of God’s will?”

I liked that question –
for the distillation of thought hones thought in others.
Clarity, I know, is freedom.

What is my experience of God’s will?

Everyone is a traveler.  Most all need lodging, food,
and clothes.

I let enter my mouth what will enrich me.  I wear what
will make my eye content,
I sleep where I will
wake with the
strength to
deeply
love

all my mind can
hold.

What is God’s will for a wing?
Every bird knows
that.

I especially love these lines:

“…the distillation of thought hones thought in others./Clarity…is freedom.”

There is a particular urgency to thinking critically in community at this moment in history, as billions of dollars are being pumped into propaganda production by the US military industrial complex. Its aims are to convince us not to question, not to seek clarity, not to distill thought in ourselves in order to hone thought in others. It seeks to numb our humanity and suppress our grief, to render us helpless and isolated.

Questioning is as good for the freedom of our respective souls and it is for collective liberation.

So with 2024 on the horizon, here are a few of the questions that are guiding me into the future:

• When I am acting from my integrity with both courage and humility, what does that feel like in my body? How do I expect my community to hold me accountable when I am not acting in alignment with my core values?

• What does a rigorous commitment to fierce vulnerability require of me in terms of my spiritual practices and political praxis?

• What themes, conversations and questions am I uniquely situated to bring to the table, including here at A Soulful Revolution?

I’d like to invite you to join me in a communal practice of fierce vulnerability:

• I wonder what questions you are pondering, and how they may be drawing you into the future.

• What questions do you have for me?

• And I wonder, did a particular essay or podcast resonate with you this year, and why? What themes would you like to see explored in 2024?

I encourage you to share your questions and reflections in the comments — I’ll engage with them in next week’s essay. Then I’ll be taking a couple weeks off for the holidays to enjoy time with loved ones.

Together, let’s hone thought in one another. Clear is kind. Let’s get free.