The Virtue of Curiosity

Love that Keeps Asking

Proverbs 25:2

“It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.”

This verse is spoken by Solomon, who knew something about this long before anthills and space telescopes came along to illustrate it. God hides things, Solomon says, not to shut us out, but as a kind of gift, a door left standing open, an invitation to come looking.

I don’t know if you’ve ever crouched down next to a child at an anthill. If you have, you know what happens. First there’s one question. Then another. Then, just when you think you’ve answered enough, there’s a third: why do they walk in a line? What are they carrying? Where’s their house? Somewhere around question five or six, most of us grown-ups start looking for an exit. But the child hasn’t moved, nose an inch from the dirt, unwilling to let the mystery go until it gives up a little more of itself.

Watch astronomers unveil a new image from a space telescope and you’ll see the grown-up version of the same thing: the excitement isn’t really about the answer they just got, but about the new question it opens up. That is exactly the “searching out” Solomon was talking about.

Last week we let ourselves be stopped in our tracks by awe and wonder, that breath-catching moment when something is too big, too beautiful, too holy for us to do anything but stand still and receive it. But wonder doesn’t stay still forever. Sooner or later, it starts to move. It leans in. It asks a question. And when it does, we’ve crossed into a different but closely related virtue: curiosity.

The philosopher and psychologist William James, more than a century ago, described curiosity as simply “the desire to know what one knows one doesn’t know.” I love that phrase, because it names something both very ordinary and very holy. Curiosity isn’t cleverness, and it isn’t really about information. It’s a kind of hunger, an itch of love that refuses to settle for one glance at what it loves, and keeps looking, keeps asking, keeps wanting to know more.

If our virtues are refractions of God’s love passing through us into the world, then curiosity is love that has noticed a gap between what it knows and what it longs to know, and cannot simply walk away.

And here’s the good news: this is not only a human trait we happen to have. It is something we see, again and again, in the character of God.

In Genesis 3:9, the very first question anyone asks is God’s own: “Where are you?” God is not lacking information. God is love, reaching, searching, refusing to let the distance between us stand. That is the same holy pattern Solomon pointed us to at the start: God hides things in creation and in Scripture, not to keep us out, but to invite us in. Concealment is an invitation.

The first words we ever hear from Jesus, spoken at twelve years old in Luke 2:49, are a question: “Why were you searching for me?” So are the first words he speaks in John’s Gospel. In John 1:38 he asks, “What are you looking for?” Both are about looking for something. Not a lecture, not an answer handed down from on high, but a question that opens a door.

In 1 Corinthians 2:10, Paul tells us that “the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.” Searching is not beneath God; searching is in God’s own nature. And Jesus tells Nicodemus that the Spirit is like the wind, blowing where it chooses, restless, moving, untamed. If that is what God’s own Spirit is like, is it any wonder that when the Spirit moves in us, one of the places we feel it is in a question we can’t quite let go of? Every honest “why” we ask may be one small place where the Spirit is still moving through us, not as some foreign force, but as love itself, awake and looking.

Modern psychology has landed on something very close to this, from an entirely different direction. The researcher George Loewenstein describes curiosity as arising from a felt gap between what we know and what we want to know, almost exactly James’s phrase, arrived at a century later. Todd Kashdan’s research distinguishes two flavors of the drive: joyous exploration, curiosity that delights, and deprivation sensitivity, curiosity that is anxious and grasping.

That’s a strikingly familiar distinction. Scripture never names these two flavors, but it shows them side by side. Herod and the magi asked almost the same question in the same week. The magi asked where the child was, and when they found him they were overwhelmed with joy. Herod asked too. But Matthew tells us he was frightened, and he sent the magi off with these words: “Go and search diligently for the child.” The very language of our opening verse, in the mouth of a man who wanted to find the truth in order to destroy it. Same question, same city. One asked in order to worship, the other in order to control.

It’s worth a caution: people will also sometimes chase an answer even when they know it will hurt them. Curiosity needs a compass. Ours is love. That’s the difference between curiosity that heals and curiosity that only itches.

So if curiosity is this good, this close to the heart of God, why do so many of us let it quietly die out? Partly, I think, because we’ve come to believe that having it all figured out is safer than asking. Certainty feels like armor. Partly because somewhere along the way we absorbed the idea that an honest question is a sign of weak faith, as though saying “I don’t understand” means we’ve failed some test. Partly it’s simply busyness. Efficiency has no time for a wondering tangent. And partly it’s the quiet assumption that curiosity belongs to children and scientists, not to grown adults trying to live a serious life of faith.

But in the opening verse of Psalm 13 you’ll find question after question thrown straight at God: “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” Yet God never once slams the door on them.

Besides, love was never meant to stop asking. Think about what curiosity does when it becomes a posture of love. Toward God, it means staying a lifelong learner of God’s character. We let our picture of God keep growing, rather than freezing it at whatever age we first came to believe, as though we had already learned everything the Maker of galaxies has to teach us.

Toward others, curiosity becomes a form of hospitality. It’s the difference between hearing someone’s opening sentence and deciding we already know the rest of their story. It is asking the second and third question and discovering we didn’t know them nearly as well as we assumed. Toward the world God made, it means treating the ordinary as endlessly interesting rather than background noise to get through on the way to something else: a conversation, a Tuesday afternoon, an anthill on the sidewalk.

So here are three small ways to practice this in the week ahead. First, ask one more question. In your conversations this week, before you offer the first quick piece of advice, pause and ask one more curious question instead. You may find the conversation goes somewhere you never would have guessed. And make it a holier question, which simply means a question you don’t already know the answer to. If you’ve pre-decided the answer, you’re not asking: you’re prosecuting.

Second, keep a small wonder list. Each day, jot down one thing you don’t understand or want to know more about, something in creation, in Scripture, in a person you love, and let it become a prayer instead of an anxiety. Over a week, you may be surprised how long that list grows, and how good it feels to still be growing.

Third, reread something familiar with fresh eyes. Pick one passage you think you already know well, and read it this week as if for the first time, asking, “What am I missing here?” instead of skimming for the lesson you’ve already learned. Chances are, it still has more to say to you.

I think about that child at the anthill again. Somewhere along the way, most of us learned to stand up, brush off our knees, and walk away before the mystery had finished giving up its secrets. But God has never asked us to grow out of that kind of attention. God is not a locked door standing between us and the truth. God is an open field, wide enough for a lifetime of searching, and searching again.

So search. Ask yourself, “What am I actually looking for?” Ask someone else, “Can you tell me more?” Ask God, “Lord, what are you asking of me that I’ve been pretending not to hear?” So may you leave here today not with fewer questions, but with holier ones.