“Sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you.” I heard that phrase surprisingly often at Regent. I can only hope it wasn’t because I looked disturbed or had an air of “you’re wasting my time” about me. I heard this as much as I did because most of my on-campus studying happened in the atrium. My response to this apology, often uttered after an engaging conversation, was always, “If I didn’t want to be disturbed, I wouldn’t work in the atrium.” This probably says lots about my personality and deep respect for procrastination, but I think it also says something about the heart of what makes Regent a valuable place for so many.
When asked to define the “atrium experience,” I once sputtered out, “disrupting questions posed in love.” That is the value I found while working in that communal space. The meaning of this phrase could do with some explanation, especially given that words like “disrupting” can carry negative connotations. I’ll get to that word in a moment, but first “questions.”
"Questions are also how we name our own limitations and with humility seek the guidance of those with more wisdom." I love questions. I love asking them, I love when other people ask them, I love that in Jeopardy you have to answer in the form of one. Questions are not only at the heart of academics, they are also at the heart of faith and life in general. Questions are how we grow and expand our understanding. Questions are also how we name our own limitations and with humility seek the guidance of those with more wisdom. Asking questions, it seems to me, is central to being human.
The reality of questions is that sometimes they make us uncomfortable, they can disrupt us. This doesn’t need to be a bad thing though. In fact, when posed in the right way, disrupting questions are vital for growth. A “disrupting” question is something that shakes us out of our comfort zone. It disrupts our “status-flow.” Questions can also disrupt the whole status quo—which we need at times—but good questions can act on a more personal level to unsettle the comfortable assumptions we’ve settled into.
In developmental terms, 1 “disruptive questions” cause schematic processing. Schemas (or schemata if you want to sound fancy) are patterns of thought we develop to make sense of the world. When we are confronted with new information, we try to fit this information into existing schemas. This is what happens when a child, who has only seen household animals, sees a horse for the first time and calls it a “big dog.” It has four legs, a tail, and it’s running around outside—obviously this is a “big dog” (foolish adults). The concept of “horse” has not yet been introduced to this youngster, who has yet to be indoctrinated in the ways of My Little Pony. As the child learns, the category of “dog” is shifted to be more specifically about what we might call canines, and another category is created: horse (or equine, because the child’s parent is a biologist).
Good questions are “disruptive” in that they help us break out of old schemas and develop new, hopefully more accurate and fruitful ways of viewing the world. But that disruptive process can be, well, disruptive, not to mention anxiety inducing and destructive habit forming—hello rocky-road, my old friend; why yes, I am going to eat this whole container, why do you ask? 2 This is where love comes in, and why it’s so important.
A question “posed in love” can take many shapes, but questions can also be posed not in love. As someone who loves questions, I’ve asked a lot of them. I have also mistakenly assumed that my questions were, or even ought to be, everyone else’s too. I have forced my questions on other people, probably disrupting and disturbing them, simply because I thought they should think it was important. I wasn’t really posing the question because I thought they had a good answer, but because I thought they should ponder the “obviously important things” I was thinking about. This type of question-asking is self-serving, and potentially ego-stroking; that is, this is not done “in love.”
Posing a question “in love” would mean seeking help from those I knew had more wisdom than I did, or those I knew were already thinking through these things. It would mean carrying my questions with a lot more humility. When we are struggling with a question, posing it to others “in love” means considering how our question might impact them. Ideally, we are asking a person our question because we, at some level, love them, are loved by them, and know that the questioning can help us.
"People need to come to questions with genuine curiosity and in loving response we can invite them to maybe live into the answers." We can also ask questions that we ourselves aren’t currently struggling with. These too need to be asked “in love,” perhaps even more so than questions we aren’t actively pondering, because we can assume we already have the “right” answer. As I’ve mentioned, questions help us grow and develop. When we want to help others grow and develop, asking questions is a great tool. But they can become a weapon if not asked “in love.” The questions we want people to ask cannot be forced on them. People need to come to questions with genuine curiosity and in loving response we can invite them to maybe live into the answers. 3
This seems to be the way Jesus interacted with questions. Many people have noted that Jesus seldom gives a straight answer to the questions he is asked. More often, he offers a parable or another question in return.
One remarkable example of this is when John the Baptist sends his disciples to Jesus asking, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?” (Matt. 11:4).4 Jesus responds by selectively quoting Isaiah 61. Though we can read Jesus’s response as an affirmation, it also addresses something deeper: the issue of what John and his disciples were expecting. This isn’t the place to unpack the details of John’s messianic expectations and Jesus’s ministry. The point to make is that Jesus’s loving response was to acknowledge the heart of the question. John had “heard about the deeds” (v. 2) of Jesus, but he still wasn’t sure. For Jesus to simply say “Yes, I am the one,” wouldn’t have addressed the longing in John’s question. Jesus addressed the deeper thing behind the question; that is, he answered the question “in love.”
The above example is about Jesus answering a question rather than posing one, but it’s still insightful for this reflection. We need to both ask and answer questions “in love.” This means considering the heart of the question, and the heart of the one asking/being asked. Questions are never truly abstract things, even if they sound like they are about abstract concepts. Questions often reach into our very souls (or schemas if you want to stick with that language), and address our fundamental being. This might not be true of the question “Where is the washroom?” but even a poor answer to this question can have significant consequences—as anyone with small children knows. 5 We should invite and embrace questions that disrupt and help us grow, but they always need to be “posed in love.” And at the end of the day, love needs to be the guiding principle in all this question asking and answering. Every human asks and answers questions, and followers of Jesus are to be known by love (John 13:35). If we’re not asking a question in love, or if the asking of that question will not help us or others grow in love, it might be worth reevaluating whether it’s worth posing in the first place. This also means that the end result of our question asking must result in love, even when we come to different answers.
I experienced the reality of “disrupting questions posed in love” sitting in the atrium. That might not be everyone’s experience. It’s quite possible that others have been disrupted by questions that were not posed “in love.” Some people have experienced questions as an assault that left them disoriented and lost, which is worth lamenting over and seeking to remedy. It’s also possible that others might not like questions as much as I do, and they got a lot more work done in the library. All that may be the case, so I’ll summarize like this: at its best, the atrium-way-of-life provides an opportunity for us to grow and mature when it’s saturated in the love of Jesus. It is at its best when that love infiltrates our “status-flow,” and even the status quo, moving us into places of deeper connection with one another. It is at its best when the end result of our questions is love, whether we agree on the answers or not. Of course, for this to happen we need to make it that way, by God’s grace and led by the Spirit. So even though I’m no longer a student, I’ll still happily find myself in the atrium (or a coffee shop, or church, or my neighbourhood) and gladly be “disturbed” and “disrupted by questions posed in love.”
