The use of QUERIES in the Quaker Tradition is something that immediately sparked an interest in me. They seemed a wise way to hold an idea, feeling, or passion in perspective – a gem laid into a secure setting for visual delight.
I had been harrowed with the idea of “questions” being vital to our soul since my senior year in high school. It was then that my youth leader shared pieces of her journal with me to encourage me to write. She spoke about her wrestling with Thomas Merton’s notion that questions are far more important than answers. That has never left me. It sits in the setting of my soul as a gem of great importance and wealth. Questions and queries are vital in our lives.
A query is nothing more than a question that we sustain in us as we sit in silence and stillness; allowing it to ring true and resonate or come to naught for lack of resonance. A query is something we sit with to allow its presence to impact us.
There are times in life when we sit and think about something. There are times when we allow others to interact with us about something as well. A query is a question asked with the intent to settle into us and begin a new work. It is a tool for spiritual direction and formation.
I remember reading a Parker Palmer article years ago in Weavings Journal and it was about a Clearness Committee – a Quaker tool in approaching discernment in our lives. Practice will vary among societies of the Friends, but the aim is to allow a group of Friends to gather to help you ascertain direction and formation surrounding an issue in your life. The group you assemble is tasked with asking probing questions – questions you will not answer but hold within you to help you on the journey of discovery that lay ahead.
As I began to allow the use of queries to enter my life, my silences, and my ponderings, I became convinced of the early harrowing of my soul. Merton was right, questions are more vital than answers. They create space in us to view, and feel and hear – in new ways.
I began to think of the power of questions in relation to social issues. If a well-carved question could impact me within – changing the way I thought, felt, heard, saw and tasted my life and its direction and formation – couldn’t it do the same for a group of people, a team, a family, a society? Couldn’t a well-crafted question wake us up to some deeper truths about who we are and where we are?
This planted a vision in me for presenting images that could call us into the stillness and silence of the inner life and ask us some provocative questions. Questions that could lead us to grope and yearn for wholeness and completeness. Thus, was born the Queries Project.
I would find an image that could call us into the silence and stillness of our inner life and then offer us a well-carved, well-crafted question – QUERY – that could begin a process of discernment within. It became obvious that an empty chair would be the tool. It is the place of sitting for the beginning of the journey of the QUERY in the QUAKER Meeting - a portal to the interior life and the great "ME" or "I". It is an ICON of SILENCE and STILLNESS and THE WAY IN. I then discovered that there could be a thousand and one places that the chair could appear to help us question and discern where stands our heart regarding the issues present with the chair.
I could place it on a pile of trash and garbage and offer a query to ponder. At a climate rally, or a march and offer a query to ponder. Outside of a courtroom, in a prison, along a burned-out forest. I think you get the idea. Let me share with you now, a few of the images from the beginning of the project I am calling The Queries Project.
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