Living with the Unanswerable

Realizations from yet another book of questions

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Long ago, in a personal therapy session, I was asked by the counselor, “Are you a spiritual person?” I thought long and hard about that question back then. I grew up Roman Catholic, but after my father argued openly with the priest about what our family had been failing to give as an offering each Sunday, things went awry. Our family never returned to St. Albert the Great, the old church on a hill outside Pittsburgh. I continued to go to Sunday school but found nothing of worth for me at that young age. In the many years after, I gave church and organized religion—mostly the Unitarian approach—another chance or two, but the discipline and the connections never came. I read about and studied Buddhism a bit, but I only dabbled.

So, when answering the question, trying to be polite about what I really thought of organized religion, I said, “Well, I never really liked church much.”

“Is there anything you did like about the experience of attending the Catholic service?” the counselor asked, continuing to probe.

There was only one answer, and it came to me without hesitation. “Yes,” I said, “the part when you say to all those around you, ‘Peace be with you.’ It’s the only thing that seems to make any sense.”

I think about this now as I sit in the early light of morning reading a new book and finding myself already deciding that I will read it a second time, likely a third, and from its passages, I will take many notes in my journal. I am nearly in tears. Are you a spiritual person? I am once again wrestling with the answer to that question. This time, however, I begin to see how the question might be more revealing than the answer.

Pico Iyer’s Aflame: Learning from Silence was delivered to my home late last night. I began reading in bed and had to stop as my mind quickly filled with thoughts and emotions. I put it down and wrestled myself to sleep. In the morning, here I am reading again, in step with every word, stopping to think, to feel, to sigh, to hesitate between paragraphs, all of it as if time has been suspended to allow me to wonder once again . . . Are you a spiritual person?

I have read plenty of Iyer. Falling Off the Map comes to mind. Also, The Half Known Life and his great novel Cuba and the Night. He’s best known for his journalism and travel writing. But he is also a seeker, something I have always believed is a part of my own innerness, continually searching for some divine glue.

Does that make me spiritual if I’m always looking?

Aflame is not the first book that has rattled something deep in me. It starts with Henry David Thoreau and moves through the works of Thomas Merton, the Trappist Monk and mystic, to Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, to Don Miguel Ruiz’s The Four Agreements, to Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, The Alchemist, Tao Te Ching, the Dalai Llama’s The Art of Happiness, Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Henry Miller’s Stand Still Like the Hummingbird and The Wisdom of the Heart, and even a great little memoir by essayist Dinty Moore, The Accidental Buddhist. I’ve also found that my own work, my books—fiction and memoir—and what you might find here at “The Abundance” has been reviewed as the work of a “contemplative writer.” This might be the highest compliment I could ever wish for.

Aflame traces Iyer’s years spent visiting the New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur. He admits that he struggles with how the isolation he finds along the spectacular California coast fits into his life of travel and deadlines, but knows he also requires it. He recalls the thoughts of historian R.H. Tawney on modern-day life: “. . . humans were (once) spiritual beings, who for prudence’s sake, took care of their material needs; nowadays more and more of us are material beings who, for the sake of prudence, attend to our spiritual needs.” Iyer also continually muses on what it is that he gains from this experience, wondering if “conversion”—whatever that means in terms of a spiritual life—is mostly a matter of renewal. “A promise that has to be made again and again, and again.”

Is that the part of me that is the seeker, the promise to myself to keep searching again and again, and again?

I continue to read and come upon a passage that speaks so fully to me that I must stop and close the book to allow it to pass through. Iyer writes about one of the community’s simple “cells”—as the living quarters are called—and how it reveals the Hermitage’s full embrace of interfaith understanding. In one cell on a simple altar is a single candle. Next to this is a Buddha. On the wall, he finds a scroll depicting Jesus in the lotus position and a poster of Kerouac’s On the Road.

I was just a child when my family turned away from the traditions of the Catholic Church, and too young then to have understood this, but maybe what I longed for even in those days was to find acceptance in the seeking, to know and believe that it was okay to search, to wonder and to wander, to contemplate the possibilities.

I finish Iyer’s book and close my eyes to let it settle in. I stand in the silence and make coffee, and through the kitchen window I now see the low winter sun glint off the frozen snow, blinding white, on yet another frigid morning, one of many that have kept me from my writing shed and its inadequate space heater, away from the moments alone where I burn a candle and attempt to write a daily meditative, contemplative poem. I’ve so missed the shed during these recent arctic days. It is my place for possibilities. Still, despite the exile from my silent retreat, I am inescapably reminded that simple revelations come in many places, and that looking for solutions or clarity through our never-ending questions is not the truest path. Instead, as Iyer writes, recalling what he had read about the wishes of Pope Francis, it is far better to believe that there is “courage to live with the unanswerable.”

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David W. Berner is the author of several books of award-winning fiction and memoir. His latest, Daylight Saving Time: The power of growing older is available now. His debut poetry collection, Garden Tools is due out in October, 2025 from Finishing Line Press. His novella, American Moon will be published by Regal House Publishing in 2026.