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

by Krista Tippett

In this sense, spiritual life is a reasonable, reality-based pursuit. It can have mystical entry points and destinations, to be sure. But it is in the end about befriending reality, the common human experience of mystery included. It acknowledges the full drama

of the human condition. It attends to beauty and pleasure; it attends to grief and pain and the enigma of our capacity to resist the very things we long for and need.

I admire the perfect, succinct opening line of Reinhold Niebuhr’s twentieth-century classic The Nature and Destiny of Man: “M...

the growing universe of the Nones—the new nonreligious—is one of the most spiritually vibrant and provocative spaces in modern life. It is not a world in which spiritual life is absent. It is a world that resists religious excesses and shallows. Large swaths of this universe are wild with ethical passion and delving, openly theological curiosity, and they are expressing this in unexpected places and unexpected ways.

And as uncertain as I grow about some of the fundaments of faith, in a way that would have alarmed my grandfather, I grow if anything more richly rooted in one of the most inexplicable things he taught me: God is love.

“He understands now that we become closed-minded when we could be investigating.”

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.

The Bible is saying to us the whole time: Don’t think that God is as simple as you are. He’s in places you would never expect him to be. And you know, we lose a bit of that in English translation. 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. One of the ways God surprises us is by letting a Jew or a Christian discover the trace of God’s presence in a Buddhist monk or a Sikh tradition of hospitality or the graciousness of Hindu life. Don’t think we can confine God into our categories. God is bigger than religion.

to be true to your faith is a blessing to others regardless of their faith.

To quote that great line from W. H. Auden, “We must love one another or die.”

I think anybody who travels knows that you’re not really doing so in order to move around—you’re traveling in order to be moved.

“The point of gathering stillness is not to enrich the sanctuary or the mountaintop, but to bring that calm into the motion, the commotion, of the world.”

think it’s exciting to be ignorant and I think our ignorance in pursuing science has something to do with this whole idea of the uncertainties involved in a relationship of love with God that I call faith.

Anne Lamott came out with a few years ago: “The opposite of faith is not doubt. The opposite of faith is certainty.”

Socrates himself says, “I’m wiser than everyone else because I know I don’t know.”

When you say that an individual should be able to interpret a faith however he or she wants to, then of course you are opening up a can of proverbial worms, if you will. What you are saying, then, is that every interpretation is now equally valid, and the result, of course, is not just a cacophony of voices. It’s a situation whereby it’s usually the loudest and most violent voices that tend to carry the day.

Spirituality doesn’t look like sitting down and meditating. Spirituality looks like folding the towels in a sweet way and talking kindly to the people in the family even though you’ve had a long day.

One of the things that Dietrich Bonhoeffer says is, “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 think it’s a perilously difficult situation for everyone to be left on their own trying to choose their spiritual life. I really feel that a whole new language is being created and there are too many people who are struggling with this. Traditional religious language is part of it and will be part of it, but a whole new thing is being created. And it’s going to involve other religions, and it’s going to involve other practices.

Sometimes when I think of all of this energy that’s going on, all of what we’ve talked about, these different people trying to find some way of naming and sharing their belief, I think it may be the case that God calls some people to unbelief in order that faith can take new forms.

Hope is distinct, in my mind, from optimism or idealism. It has nothing to do with wishing. It references reality at every turn and reveres truth. It lives open eyed and wholehearted with the darkness that is woven ineluctably into the light of life and sometimes seems to overcome it. 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.

We are fabulous and contradictory through and through, living breathing both/ands. We’re products of our time and its ever more addictive toys and its alluring images of success and its terrifying chasms for failure. Yet there is room in our minds and hearts and lives—a space more and more of us are honoring and protecting and cultivating—for what is nourishing and aspirational and fun. Hope is an orientation, an insistence on wresting wisdom and joy from the endlessly fickle fabric of space and time.

hope is a function of struggle.

And that 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.

This is another way to talk about the move from intelligence to wisdom—seeing basic realities again, finally, but for the first time with consciousness: evolution reflecting back on itself.

A scientific study had demonstrated health benefits from a simple exercise of gratitude, which was all about registering the good in the course of one’s days, including the bad days. It yielded a remarkable list of measurable outcomes: sounder sleep, a sense of peace of mind, less anxiety and depression, kinder behavior and higher long-term satisfaction with life.

Spiritual humility is not about getting small, not about debasing oneself, but about approaching everything and everyone else with a readiness to see goodness and to be surprised. This is the humility of a child, which Jesus lauded. It is the humility of the scientist and the mystic. It has a lightness of step, not a heaviness of heart.