Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living

by Krista Tippett

Western Christianity lost some of the cleansing power of mystery when it became a bedfellow with empire and later, again, in its headlock with science.

That’s the great tragedy, isn’t it? Because after all, if you stop and think about Judaism, the great figures in Judaism are those prophets of Israel, Jeremiah and Isaiah and Amos. They were prophetic figures who asked the deepest kinds of questions and were willing to stand outside the gates of power and privilege in order to keep asking those questions.

seeking and asking and wondering and reaching out to people and daring to ask questions that others had been taught not to ask or even forbidden to ask. This inquiring Jesus, this

Spiritual life is a way of dwelling with perplexity—taking it seriously, searching for its purpose as well as its perils, its beauty as well as its ravages.

It takes forms profound and banal. It is there in the way I am itching, with each sentence on this page, to heed the background call of technology and head down a rabbit hole of distraction that will scatter my ability to follow this line of reflection to the end.

They have injected the language of transparency and authenticity and integrity into our civic vocabulary. These are fragile words, like all words meant to convey deep truth, at risk of overuse and simplification.

We are among the first peoples in human history who do not broadly inherit religious identity as a given, a matter of kin and tribe, like hair color and hometown. But the very fluidity of this—the

I came into Catholic churches and realized that many of the people who were going to those churches didn’t really know about that stuff. They didn’t know their own tradition. They were kind of keeping on, in many cases though certainly not all, with a kind of inertia.

Don't let generstional inertia be the only thing keeping you in the church

people who have not rejected the faith of their childhood, but grew up allergic to stridency and determined to reform it.

I am unable to state, with conviction, that God exists in any way that sentence would have made sense to me in childhood or makes sense to me now intellectually. I have my eyes wide open to horrors that unfold in my city, and halfway across the world, in any given moment. But I apprehend—with a knowledge that is as much visceral as cognitive—that God is love.

The thing I don't like about the author that disconnects me a bit.

God doesn’t have to be out in the next solar system over bashing asteroids together. It’s plenty, just the God that I work with.

If someone asks, “Where was God in this?” I’ll say, “God was in all the people that came to try to help, to try to find your child.” This helps people, it really does.

In fact, they are clear with me, their current math shows no real room for human will and choice, much less for love to have any ultimate reality, our intuition of these things notwithstanding.

Dogmatic atheism is no more intellectually credible than dogmatic faith. Both presume a certainty in things unproven that a spirit of inquiry, a virtue of investigation, inclines to nuance. In life, in religion, in science, this I believe: any conviction worth its salt has chosen to cohabit with a piece of mystery, and that mystery is at the essence of the vitality and growth of the thing.

When Moses at the burning bush says to God, “Who are you?” God says to him three words: “Hayah asher hayah.” Those words are mistranslated in English as “I am that which I am.” But in Hebrew, it means “I will be who or how or where I will be,” meaning, Don’t think you can predict me. I am a God who is going to surprise you.

By being what only I can be, I give humanity what only I can give. It is my uniqueness that allows me to contribute something unique to the universal heritage of humankind. I sum up the Jewish imperative, very simply—and it has been like this since the days of Abraham: to be true to your faith is a blessing to others regardless of their faith. That’s the big paradox when you really reach the very depth of particularity.

We now know that doing good to others, having a network of strong and supportive relationships, and having a sense that one’s life is worthwhile are the three greatest determinants of happiness.

a person who had been losing his faith was the same person who guided me into mine.

“Father, it must be wonderful that, with all the uncertainties we have in our scientific pursuits, you have this faith, this rock of faith to stand upon.”

When I was a little kid, nine years old, I remember a rainy Sunday afternoon when I couldn’t go out to play and was stuck in the house. And my mom came out with a deck of cards and dealt them out and we played rummy together. Now, my mom can beat me in cards because I’m nine years old. That wasn’t the point of the game. The point of the game was that this was her way of telling me she loved me, in a way that she couldn’t by just saying “Son, I love you,” because I was nine years old. In a way, being able to do science and come to an intimate knowledge of creation is God’s way of playing with us, loving us. It’s as invented as the card game. Is it an act of love? It’s as much an act of love as the card game.

I love this little metaphor for science

When we use the term “reformation,” what we mean is the fundamental conflict that is inherent in all religious traditions, as I say, between who gets to define the faith. Is it the institution? Or is it the individuals?

Violence is a direct result of the reformation, not proof that one is needed.

fundamentalism is a reactionary phenomenon, not an independent one.

“The person who’s in love with their vision of community will destroy community. But the person who loves the people around them will create community everywhere they go.”

I love Bonhoeffer, and I’m struck by something else he said in a letter: that he was often more drawn to atheists. He felt more fellow feeling with atheists than he did with his fellow believers. He was trying to understand that in himself.

God has called us to be in a world without God. “Before God and without God, we stand with God.”

Hope, like every virtue, is a choice that becomes a practice that becomes spiritual muscle memory. It’s a renewable resource for moving through life as it is, not as we wish it to be.

Unlike almost every worthwhile thing in life, cynicism is easy. It’s never proven wrong by the corruption or the catastrophe. It’s not generative. It judges things as they are, but does not lift a finger to try to shift them.

hope is not an emotion. Hope is a cognitive, behavioral process that we learn when we experience adversity, when we have relationships that are trustworthy, when people have faith in our ability to get out of a jam.

To nurture a resilient human being, or a resilient city, is to build in an expectation of adversity, a capacity for inevitable vulnerability. As a word and as a strategy, resilience honors the unromantic reality of who we are and how we are, and so becomes a refreshingly practical compass for the systems and societies we can craft. It’s a shift from wish-based optimism to reality-based hope.

It is akin to meaningful, sustained happiness—not dependent on a state of perfection or permanent satisfaction, not an emotional response to circumstances of the moment, but a way of being that can meet the range of emotions and experiences, light and dark, that add up to a life. Resilience is at once proactive, pragmatic, and humble. It knows it needs others. It doesn’t overcome failure so much as transmute it, integrating it into the reality that evolves.

we need systems that “fail gracefully,” that don’t bring down everything else around them.

There is a fine line between saving the world and manipulating other lives, however well-meaningly, in our own image.

Western civilization at the highest levels has colluded for centuries, by participation or silence, tolerating bullying as an unavoidable rite of passage for the unfortunate few. Seeing bullying and following its effects on the Internet’s oversized, public canvas has made it suddenly intolerable.