What If There Is No Answer?

In praise of mystery

“Make something no one knows what to do with.” —Shannan Mann

I used to know all the answers.

I don’t mean that in a know-it-all-fifteen-year-old sort of way, although I’m sure I was a know-it-all-fifteen-year-old.

I’m talking about divinely-inspired knowledge, like God Said It and I Believe It and That Settles It. Answers to the Big Questions like Why do I exist? and What happens to me when I die? and Why do bad things happen to good people? and What is all of this for, anyway?

Growing up in an uber-fundamentalist Baptist church and school, I was taught that the Holy Bible had all the answers. Not just answers, but the right answers. Because the Bible (King James Version only) was the literal Word of God Himself, God Who Knows Everything, God Who Created the Heavens and the Earth and the People Crawling Upon It, God Who Can End Us All at Any Time He Sees Fit to Call It Quits on This Whole Experiment and Start Over With Some Other Planet.

How was the earth formed? God made it.
Why are there people here? God made them, too.
Why are the oceans salty? God planned it.
Why are strawberries sweet? God, again.
Why does the sun rise in the east? God.
What gives my life meaning? God.
Why is there war and famine and disease? Oh, okay, so the bad stuff is Satan’s purview but also kind of God’s because God technically made Satan and could, like, snuff him out of existence, but doesn’t and also God is probably testing your faith with all these horrible things but, like, don’t worry because he won’t give you more than you can handle! He has a wonderful plan for your life. Don’t fuck it up.

So yeah, I had all the answers but the answers were pretty limited because they were circular in reasoning, like: The Bible is true because God said it’s true, and you can read that he said that in the Bible.

For a long time I was too small to see the circle that enclosed me, so I just swallowed the answers whole, like vitamins. Like safety. Like a good girl.

I had to grow into my questions. Had to chase my tail around those Because God answers until I clanged myself up against them enough times to hear how hollow they rang. Until I let myself ask Why? And chase that Why with another Why? And another, and another.

Questions became a breadcrumb trail I dropped like some poor lost Gretel through the dense maze of trees until the thicket got thin, and thinner still, and at last I stepped out of the forest.

It took me years to walk that trail. Lifetimes.

I am well on the other side of it now, and every time I look back, the forest looks smaller. The questions, though, they get bigger. Not in a bad way. The questioning is a gift, the wondering a revelation. The answers were never the point, it was always the asking that mattered.

My horizons blew wide open when I began to embrace mystery, when I allowed myself to be okay with not-knowing. There was no path I could not wander, no question barred and banned. Where before the world was a thing to be feared and kept out of reach, now it opened itself to me. Invited me to ask.

The Cromlech of the Almendres — a megalithic circle of standing stones about an hour from my house.

It’s not that I never felt a sense of mystery under God. I did. Head titled upward at the unfolding sky. Heart in my throat at a dusk suddenly dusted with deer. My arms prickled in gooseflesh every time the choir sang that soaring part of O Holy Night: “Fall on your knees! O hear the angel voices!” A thrill of hope. The weary world rejoices. Yonder breaks a new and glorious morn. My throat still tightens when I hear the song, and I have not been a believer for a very long time.

But then, I get goosebumps when I hear the One-Day Choir singing Radiohead, too: “she’s running out the door” and I’m openly weeping in the middle of the day when a busker hits that soaring Dilegua, o notte! Tramontate, stelle! in Nessun Dorma. So perhaps it’s not the event of Christ Is Born so much as the music itself that moves me. Not an exercise of biblical faith but a depth of human feeling.

“We are creatures of constant awe,” wrote Ada Limón, “We, too, are made of wonders, of great and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds, of a need to call out through the dark.”

I am not bereft of belief. I believe in so much more than I ever did when the boundaries of my understanding were enforced on all sides by Chapter and Verse. Even as I pulled my faith apart, clawed it to shreds from the inside out—even at my lowest, my angriest, my most bewildered—I’ve never been able to deny the possibility of the existence of some inscrutable sentience. A presence real but unseen. I just haven’t attached a name to it. Another mystery I am content to sit within.

For me, awe decoupled from divinity is more potent than any worship service ever was. And since I no longer feel beholden to trace a direct line from Great Wonder to Great God, I find myself able to better hold silence. To watch and to wonder and say:
I have no idea.
I do not know.
There is no name for that.

I’ve been thinking a great deal about certainty lately because there is, as

Shannan Mann

says, “so much explaining happening and so little wonder. So many frameworks, so few mysteries. We need less thought leadership and more people losing their minds in public. Less branding. More hauntings. Make something no one knows what to do with.”

Everywhere you look, on every blue-lit surface, there is something being analyzed, interpreted, defined, justified, broken down into its most quantifiable parts and packaged up again for re-sale.

I get so sick of knowing, sometimes. Don’t you?

So tired of pontificating and what-abouting.

The world is going all to hell faster than ever—or maybe at the same rate it always has. But it feels worse because we’re all yammering at each other 24-7-365.

School in Portugal ends next week and my calendar is full with all the activities and my phone keeps feeding me death, devastation, and drama. More and more I crave a bit of space and quiet. An hour of barefaced wonder. A stillness as the light shifts. A page full of words that make sense to no one else but me.

Not to hide from the devastation but to be able to face it, head on. To fill myself to the tips and toes with wonder so in the dark I remember why it’s worth carrying on.

The world is at least fifty percent terrible, Maggie Smith wrote in her poem Good Bones, and I’m not here to disagree with that except perhaps to up the percentage.

Meanwhile, Ellen Bass is over there saying The thing is to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it.

And then there’s Mary Oliver, patron saint of wonder, who wrote:

Mysteries, Yes

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds will
never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.

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Look, my friends.

Turn your head to the sky, put your face to the window.
Take off your shoes and press your toes to the dirt. Look.

We’re not looking for answers. We’re looking to wonder.

And then we’ll all go out and carry on a little longer.

In looking for Nessun Dorma, I fell down a rabbit hole of flashmob orchestras performing Ode to Joy, all over the world. Here are the rabbit holes if you want to fall down them, too:
In Germany // In Spain // In Japan // In Minnesota // In Illinois // In Azerbaijan // In Italy

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Copyright © 2025 LaDonna Witmer • {all photos by author}