“How can we know the way?”
Often in classrooms when the students are asked after a presentation “Are there any questions?” silence follows. So you can conclude that many were not listening to the presentation or the presentation was so poorly done or the topic so far out that no questions could be asked. (And sometimes that’s precisely what the teacher hopes will happen!) I mean, students wouldn’t want to ask foolish questions and be exposed to ridicule.
In fact being educated in my day almost required that the student sit quiet and not interrupt the teacher. Passivity was the norm. I suffered the embarrassment once of wanting to impress a teacher and my fellow students. The teacher had just said that such a passage in a text was tautological. I raised my hand and dared state that it was also redundant. The teacher (an elderly Irish priest) became immediately red from the neck up and shouted: “That’s just what I said!” Suddenly my desk and chair became a hole in the ground – you could say a shell hole – from which I dared not peer out again without a helmet.
So there have been educational systems where society or the church not only phrased the questions for us but then spelled out the answers in a catechetical way leaving nothing to chance – as when in elementary school we were lined up at the blackboard and Sister pitched a catechism question to us and we bunted back an already memorized answer.
Rote answers (i.e. without thought as to their meaning) have an anesthetizing effect upon our capacity to question. And for all the benefits (?) of requiring rote answers to serious questions, it’s not long before we are bordering on ideological brainwashing. And if the day ever comes later in life when students become aware of that, everything we wanted them to remember goes out the window with the bath water.
I mean, the word question is a variation on the word quest. Life ceases to become a quest (an exodus, a journey to Jerusalem) if questioning ever ceases. Sincere questioning reaches for an ever more adequate response – and such a response sets us up for a new inquiry (or prayer?) – in a step by step process through life until we arrive at that last deathbed question, “And Lord, what happens next?” Even when we have been told the answer to that question many times over – it remains a living question (or prayer) down through time: “And Lord, what happens next in my personal reliving of your own journey along this path called life?”
That’s why I like Thomas in today’s Gospel. When Jesus says he is going away and “my way there is known to you,” Thomas, assuming Jesus is referring to some kind of roadmap, has the courage to interrupt, with some impatience, and say: “Lord, we don’t know where you’re going – so how can we know the way – what route to take? What are you talking about?” Jesus, unlike many teachers, welcomes the question and gives him a straight though not so straight answer: “I am the way . . . I’m not talking about Rand McNally. I’m talking about the way I am, the way I think and see and love as the way you are to think and see and love – a life style – grace.” And so you see, Thomas’ question leads to his discovering his life to be an everlasting quest to arrive at becoming another Christ – a fully human being.