Lesallan | June 16, 2025
The Question With No Answer: Embracing Life’s Open Ending
This essay examines the philosophical and theological aspects of the enduring question of life’s meaning. Drawing on poetic tradition, biblical scripture, and existential reflection, it challenges the assumption that life requires resolution. Instead, it argues for a reverent posture toward mystery, framing ambiguity as an invitation to deeper living rather than a deficit to overcome. It concludes with a poetic coda that reinforces the central theme: life’s path is not a riddle to solve but a sacred narrative to inhabit.
Some questions endure not because they defy logic, but because they reach beyond it. Among them, the question of life’s meaning, its purpose, its trajectory, and its end is perhaps the most haunting and persistent. It lingers not as a riddle to be solved, but as a melody without resolution, where humanity is both the audience and the instrument. In this unresolved score, we are invited not to decipher, but to dwell.
Modern culture conditions us to crave resolution. We seek closure, answers, and narrative arcs that transform chaos into clarity. This desire echoes in our tendency to treat life like a thesis awaiting defense: tidy, reasoned, and complete. Yet some truths resist such treatment. Life is not a formula, nor is it a finished manuscript. It is an open-ended composition, a wandering ballad where beauty often lies not in its conclusion but in its unfolding.
The difficulty may not be the presence of the question, but the expectation of an answer. In a society that prizes productivity and solutions, sitting in ambiguity can feel like failure. However, embracing the unknown can be an act of profound humility and courage. Theologian and poet alike have long affirmed that not knowing is itself a kind of sacred posture—an openness to wonder rather than mastery.
Rainer Maria Rilke offers a tender admonition in Letters to a Young Poet: “Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer” (Rilke, 1934, p. 35). In this vision, wisdom lies not in resolution but in attentiveness—a patient immersion in the unresolved that reframes uncertainty as holy terrain rather than barren wilderness.
This perspective finds harmony in the biblical narrative, which rarely shies away from tension. Scripture is not a manual of answers, but a story steeped in paradox. In Ecclesiastes, the Teacher voices the disorientation familiar to every generation: life is fleeting, its patterns elusive, its meaning shrouded. Yet even in such disarray, the text speaks of something transcendent: “He has set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end” (Ecclesiastes 3:11, New International Version, 2011).
This verse suggests a divine imprint of infinity etched into finite lives yearning for completion, paired with the impossibility of grasping it. It points not to resolution, but to presence. We were not tasked with solving life, but with stewarding it: listening deeply, loving courageously, and learning to live in the tension between what is seen and what is hoped for.
To live, then, is to accept the open-endedness of existence. Life is not a math problem, but a sacred mystery. Not a riddle to be solved, but a story to be inhabited. And that story is always in progress—written in candlelight, whispered between doubts, and lit with the kind of faith that holds space for questions.
We walk not by compass,
but by candlelight—
each flicker revealing
just enough to take the next step.
And in that faint glow,
we learn
that perhaps the path
was always the point.
Blessings,
Lesallan
References:
Rilke, R. M. (1934). Letters to a young poet (M. D. Herter Norton, Trans.). W. W. Norton &
Company. (Original work published 1929).
The Holy Bible, New International Version. (2011). Zondervan.
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