"...[I]f I hadn't believed it, I'd have never seen it."

It is my experience that a good question is a wonderful traveling companion. A good question leads to seeing the world anew. It's amazing how each time I develop an answer to a good question, the next good question opens before me.

As we step into every next moment, always looking about, there is a lens of hope or faith (or doubt), and a different lens of possibility, and they need to interchange to make the search potentially fruitful. If all we carry along is certainty, we feed the status quo and kill the questions. Anne Lamott writes, "The opposite of faith is not doubt. The opposite of faith is certainty." That is, if you're already sure about something then you don't need faith. Or doubt. Or questions.

I am uncertain, suspicious, often critical, about so many things. I do not trust the gift horse, I want to look in its mouth. I laud the Missourian who says, "Show me." I am a doubting Thomas. But I am willing to pursue the experience of a question, watching out for possibilities. As a result, sometimes I am given the gift of some new way of seeing; a new perception opens, widens, deepens my understanding.

By the way, the title quote for this blog entry comes from an interview broadcast on March 10, 2011; Krista Tippet, host of OnBeing, interviewed astronomers Fr. George Coyne, and Br. Guy Consolmagno.

George Coyne is director emeritus of the Vatican Observatory and president of the Vatican Observatory Foundation. His books include Wayfarers in the Cosmos: The Human Quest for Meaning.

Guy Consolmagno is curator of meteorites at the Vatican Observatory. His books include Brother Astronomer: Adventures of a Vatican Scientist and The Heavens Proclaim: Astronomy and the Vatican.

During the interview, Br. Consolmagno said, "I come from an earth science background. And while there's a lot of places where we can put measures and write equations, an awful lot of it is still being able to look at a road cut and saying these layers came before those layers and I can see it. And either you see it or you don't. There's a geologist friend of mine who came back from one of these trips saying, "You know, if I hadn't believed it, I'd have never seen it." " (Italics added.)