Curiosity Killed the What?
Why are we so afraid of hard questions?
By Anni Ponder
“I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.”
When you were growing up, what did you learn about curiosity? Was it a trait your family encouraged, always modeling the spirit of inquiry and inviting your questions? Or were you taught not to ask too many of those, because, as everyone knows, curious kitties end up dead?
My upbringing provided me with some of both. My family encouraged and modeled healthy curiosity, showing me it was the pathway to discovery and growth. I knew I could ask them anything, and this provided me with a great deal of freedom. However, there was another voice in my formative years that largely discouraged asking too many of the deep, probing questions I had.
The church I was raised in, a very conservative denomination within Christianity, did not invite much curiosity. At least, not the sort I have always been interested in expressing. Sure, we kids were encouraged to ask questions about the Bible, but only within certain bounds. We could wonder what it was like in the Garden of Eden before the crafty serpent tricked us into the mess we’re in, or we could let our imaginations go wild, speculating about how beautiful heaven will be. But if we started to ask too many questions about, say, the nature of God and why there’s not a Goddess, or whether or not God the Father is happy being a Single Dad, or if God is so good and wise, why did He make the serpent in the first place, well then we would be met with a trite scripture or two about not putting the Lord your God to the test, and we would all move on.
Since I was such a pleaser back then, (I’m now in recovery but will always have to be vigilant and remind myself it’s OK to disappoint people if it means being truly myself), I learned not to press, but rather to go along with the accepted doctrine and not ask too many hard questions.
But you can only keep a lid on a boiling pot for so long. After a while, the pressure will just be too much, and so one day in my early 30s, all the questions burst out of me like a dam had broken.
I was sitting at church in the mother’s room, rocking a sleeping babe, when all of a sudden I began to sob. “Why is there so much suffering in this world? Why doesn’t God stop it?” I wailed. “Why are there so many children who are unloved and abused? Why do so many people suffer heartbreak and loneliness and disease and famine and war and rape and . . .” I couldn’t hold it in. It was like my heart had swollen to maximum size, and all at once everything that hadn’t ever made sense came pouring out.
I’ll write about what happened next another time, because it’s a long story that deserves to be told properly. In short, though, I’ll say this: that dam bursting was the beginning of my awakening to a much deeper reality than I knew was possible. It was the start of a whole new way of being for me. Or rather, it was an undoing of many years of false being, and the rebirth of me as myself.
One of the many things I am reclaiming is my curiosity. I’m listening in and learning that the questions that bubble up in me are gifts—treasures, even—and they are here to teach me something about God, about people, about myself. I’m discovering that there are no bad questions (although sometimes there are bad motives, and that deserves careful consideration), and that anything I want to understand is worth pressing into.
I know what some might caution: “Remember, curiosity can be dangerous. After all, it’s what enticed Eve to go near the forbidden tree to begin with.” They would remind me to be careful with my questions, because time and time again, as our great myths and stories often show, following curiosity can be deadly. (If you’re a fellow CS Lewis fan, I bet you’re thinking of how Digory’s curiosity is responsible for awakening Jadis and letting evil into Narnia on the day of its birth.)
I do respect that curiosity without wisdom can lead us toward destruction (after all, Polly did try to warn Digory, but he wouldn’t heed her wise counsel). I’m not here to say anything goes, just do whatever you want, and there will be no consequences.
But I am pushing back against what I believe has held many of us in fear too long: the idea that asking hard questions is dangerous. I am pointing my spotlight on the all-too-familiar mantras we repeat that keep us from probing deeper (can I get a “God said it, I believe it, and that’s that”?). This is no time to shrink back from our squinty-eyed inquiries, our yeah-but-why-for-realsies queries, our wait-a-second-this-doesn’t-actually-add-up realizations. Now is the time to press in deeper. We need to examine why things have gotten so bad here on Earth and take a serious look at the structures that uphold the way we have been operating.
Let us not shrink back from the questions that come from deep within. Those are the golden guides here to teach us. Let us listen, seek wise counsel, and wonder with pure childlike insistence that asking is necessary. After all, didn’t Jesus tell us to “ask, seek, and knock” with the promise that the door will be opened?
I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to find whatever’s on the other side of the door. And the next time someone tells me that curiosity killed the cat, I think I’ll take a deep breath, smile, and say gently: “I’m curious . . . who told you that?”
