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

by Krista Tippett

always when I think of beauty think of music. I love music. I think music is just it. I love poetry as well, of course, and I think of beauty in poetry. But music is what language would love to be if it could.

Loving reality in all its imperfection is the necessary prelude to discovering God present and alive. Wonderment in the face of the other is also so beautifully exacting a progression from mere tolerance.

Western culture is astoundingly disembodied and uniquely so. The way I like to say it is that we basically come from a post-alcoholic culture. People whose origins are in Northern Europe had only one way of treating distress: with a bottle of alcohol. North American culture continues with that notion. If you feel bad, take a swig or take a pill. The notion that you can do things to change the harmony inside yourself is just not something that we teach in schools and in our culture, in our churches, in our religious practices. But if you look at religions around the world, they always start with dancing, moving, singing, physical experiences. The more “respectable” people become, the more stiff they become somehow.

what we have learned is that what makes you resilient to trauma is to own yourself fully. So if somebody says hurtful or insulting things, you can say, “interesting, that person is saying hurtful and insulting things.” But you can separate your sense of yourself from them. We are really beginning to seriously understand how human beings can learn how to do that, to observe and not react.

I do not believe that the God who gave me life wants me to live a living death. I believe that the God who gave me life wants me to live life fully and well. Now, is that going to take me to places where I suffer, because I am standing for something or I am committed to something or I am passionate about something that gets resisted and rejected by the society? Absolutely. But anyone who’s ever suffered that way knows that it’s a life-giving way to suffer. If it’s your truth, you can’t not do it, and that knowledge carries you through. But there’s another kind of suffering that is simply and purely death. It’s death in life, and that is a darkness to be worked through to find the life on the other side.

the other face of our pain for the world is our love for the world, our absolutely inseparable connectedness with all life.

Love is perhaps the most difficult task given us, the most extreme, the final proof and text, for which all other work is only preparation.

What is love? Answer the question through the story of your life.

The nuclear family is a recent invention and a death blow to love—an unprecedented demand on a couple to be everything to each other, the family a tiny echo chamber: history one layer deep. None of the great virtues—even this—is meant to be carried in isolation.

we still have the language of the Enlightenment Project. We still have the language of, “You can be anything you want to be, you can control, you’re in charge of your own destiny.” Even the notion of sovereignty is very problematic. Whether it’s a community or a nation, there’s no such thing as sovereignty. We are in relationship with each other.

I circle back again and again to the gap between who we are and who we want to be—and how to open wisely, fruitfully, to it. I’m helped by a gentle notion from Buddhist psychology, that there are “near enemies” to every great virtue—reactions that come from a place of care in us, and which feel right and good, but which subtly take us down an ineffectual path. Sorrow is a near enemy to compassion and to love. It is borne of sensitivity and feels like empathy. But it can paralyze and turn us back inside with a sense that we can’t possibly make a difference. The wise Buddhist anthropologist and teacher Roshi Joan Halifax calls this a “pathological empathy” of our age. In the face of magnitudes of pain in the world that come to us in pictures immediate and raw, many of us care too much and see no evident place for our care to go. But compassion goes about finding the work that can be done. Love can’t help but stay present.

I goof off a lot. Joy is at the heart of this journey. Too often, progressives are really grim. It’s not a very good advertisement: “Come join us. We’re so miserable.”

change begins to happen in the human heart slowly, over time. Only then do the movements and leaders come along and topple the structures.

Anthony Appiah’s prescriptions for the everyday are refreshingly simple. He talks about “sidling up” to difference, not attacking it with a solutions-based approach as Americans are wont to attack what they see as problems. The way to set moral change in motion, he says, is not to go for the jugular, or even for dialogue—straight to the things that divide you. Talk about sports. Talk about the weather. Talk about your children. Make a human connection. Change comes about in part, as he describes it, by way of “conversation in the old-fashioned sense”—simple association, habits of coexistence, seeking familiarity around mundane human qualities of who we are.

I’ve been deeply formed, finally, by a kindred insight of John Paul Lederach, the haiku-writing, globally esteemed conflict resolution and transformation practitioner. He says that imaginations are too narrowly oriented to “critical mass” when we imagine how social change happens. Critical mass—rallies, galvanizing leaders, large numbers of bodies on the street—plays a cathartic role in toppling old realities and making way for the new. But in his experience with people who have transformed conflicted realities across time and continents, new realities are envisioned and brought into being before and beyond those cathartic points—patiently, doggedly, over years and decades—by a new quality of relationship in small, unlikely groups of people. They are not obvious compatriots, at least at first; they represent different places on the societal spectrum and embody divergent passions and perspectives. But they see the dead end of the polar opposite conflict in which their lives have become enmeshed, and they step out of fear and into care. John Paul Lederach calls what they create “critical yeast.”

Love doesn’t always work as we want it to, or look like something intimate and beautiful. There are times and places in human existence when love means life on the line, but most of us need not live that way most of the time. Love as a public good needs yeasty groups of social artists, and it also requires bridge people to stand with, speak for, and protect those whose very identities are threatened by conflict. Sometimes love, in public as in private, means stepping back.

Feel how when you extend a kindness, however simple, you are energized and not depleted. Scientists, again, are proving that acts of kindness and generosity are literally infectious, passing from stranger to stranger to stranger. Kindness is an everyday byproduct of all the great virtues, love most especially.

Love demands much more. Well, yes, and especially if it’s a love with no need to preempt grievance. You know, love that can even do more than tolerate dissent in difference. That can sit with it, can take it in, can listen to it, can let it stand whole and not necessarily feel the need to engage it argumentatively. There are a lot of ways, I think, that people who are aggrieved can be addressed. We all have our grievances. And this we understand on the intimate level—when grievance is really heard on the intimate level, that does a great deal of the work of moving people forward. To living together even if the problem isn’t solved, right? That’s right.

You look at clothes and you always see some hot, sexy, fabulous couple wearing those jeans—the jeans, i.e., the love. Everything’s all hooked into the seduction. And when you wake up you don’t actually look like that, but the reality is delicious in its own messy, human way. I think we’re always comparing the messy, human to that, and to celebrity culture, so whatever this is doesn’t come up right. Come on. What if we actually were content with our lives? What if we actually knew this was paradise? It would be very hard to control us.

the fastest growing demographic in the United States is not Latinos. It’s actually interracial couples and interethnic couples. That’s people who are themselves right now, not tomorrow, trying to imagine a different America, trying to say, “I can love anyone. I can be with anyone.” So if we start looking for it, we see expressions of it all around. Oftentimes, they’re not celebrated. They’re not talked about. There are no structures for them. We have to embrace them and lift them up.

If God is God—and that in itself is a crazy shorthand, begging volumes of unfolding of the question—he/she does not need us craven. He/she desires us, needs us, grateful and attentive and courageous in the everyday.

Wisdom, of the everyday sort, is about how we reckon with the surprises and mysteries that make life life as opposed to stasis. Mystery lands in us as a humbling fullness of reality we cannot sum up or pin down. Such moments change us from the inside, if we let them.

We have come, in our time, to wonder at the mystery we are with a newly adventurous vigor. Einstein saw a reverence for wonder at the heart of the best of science and religion and the arts. Wondering is a useful way to begin to speak of a shared vocabulary of mystery we might embrace across our disciplines, our contrasting certainties, and our doubts.

mystery is a great embarrassment to the modern mind.” And there’s our tragedy, that we have to resolve all mystery. We can’t let it be. We can’t rejoice in it. We can’t celebrate it. We can’t affirm it as an aspect of our lives. Because, after all, mystery is an aspect of our lives. And mystery, you bet—mystery is a great challenge. It’s an invitation, and it’s a wonderful companion, actually.

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.

the very notion of objectivity is an illusion. Simply put, the human participant is always a participant, never merely an observer. Somehow our subjectivity, our presence, our wills matter cosmically, whether we want them to or not. A new puzzle takes shape in my spiritual imagination: if on our end there is no such thing as disinterested detachment, true dispassion, can that be a defining state behind the universe from which we come and to which we return?

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. 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.

I don’t know why it is, how it is, but it’s the authentic, the unique, the different that makes us feel enriched when we encounter it. And a bland, plastic, synthetic, universal can’t-tell-one-brand-of-coffee-from-another-brand-of-coffee by contrast makes life flat, uninteresting, and essentially uncreative.

what the great traditions of wisdom were saying three or four thousand years ago. 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. Somehow or other, against our will sometimes, we are being thrust back to these ancient and very noble and beautiful truths. And we can now do so in a fellowship, awkward perhaps and embarrassed, between religious leaders and scientists

by sanitizing the world of subjectivity, you basically leave out the moral possibilities.

Sometimes I think of this as a kind of idolatry. If you’re pointing at the gods, but you can’t really see the gods, you create a statue. Same sort of things in physics. You can’t see that far, so you create a model. That’s what we call it, right? And then you fall in love with the model, and it becomes a form of idolatry. You end up worshipping the model as opposed to the thing you were trying to understand, which was the human being or the planet or the whole cosmos. So you need to be an iconoclast in some sense, to take those down and reanimate your direct experience, your direct epiphanies and insights into that world of pattern.

We have to remember that fundamentalism is a reactionary phenomenon, not an independent one. It is a reaction to the natural progress of society. And so when I see fundamentalism surge, I know that what is really happening is that the natural progress of society is surging. And fundamentalism is reacting to it. I choose to focus on the progress, not the reaction.

Sometimes the pain of the world seems incomprehensible and unbearable to me. And I think if there’s anything that balances it, it’s wonder at the world, the amazingness of people, how resilient they are, how people will take care of others they don’t know. If somebody falls or someone’s in trouble in a public place, people take care of them. Human beings have that ability. I don’t think they have to learn it. They don’t have to have lessons. I think we’re a companionable species, for the most part. So to be able to look at human beings and say, life is amazing. The sun came up in the exact right place this morning. Celebrate seasons and birthdays and holy days. Here we are again, at another time in another season, and there’s that great cosmos out there to look at. Our ancestors looked at the same stars. I keep in myself a sense of amazement.

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.”

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.

The cartography of emerging wisdom about our world is largely like this: quiet. It’s animated by projects and people you didn’t know to look for. It’s joined by points in space and time that have no obvious reason to be important.

I’ve always felt that one of the things that we do badly in our educational process, especially working with so-called marginalized young people, is that we educate them to figure out how quickly they can get out of the darkness and get into some much more pleasant situation. When what is needed, again and again, are more and more people who will stand in that darkness, who will not run away from those deeply hurt communities, and will open up possibilities that other people can’t see in any other way except through human beings who care about them.

we’re still a bit captive, each of us in different ways, to old arbiters of importance—to the proverbial radar. Almost everything and everyone changing the world now is what we’ve forever referred to as “under the radar.” The radar is broken.

My mind inclines now, more than ever, towards hope. I’m consciously shedding the assumption that a skeptical point of view is the most intellectually credible. Intellect does not function in opposition to mystery; tolerance is not more pragmatic than love; and cynicism is not more reasonable than hope. 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.

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.

failure and vulnerability are the very elements of spiritual growth and personal wisdom. What goes wrong for us as much as what goes right—what we know to be our flaws as much as what we know to be our strengths—these make hope reasonable and lived virtue possible. They are part of our gift to the world.

the wholehearted share in common a profound sense of hopefulness. The literature on hope, very specifically C. R. Snyder’s work from the University of Kansas at Lawrence, shows that hope is a function of struggle. I think that’s one of the most stunning sentences that I saw in your writing. 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.

Resilience is a successor to mere progress, a companion to sustainability. It acknowledges from the outset that things will go wrong. All of our solutions will eventually outlive their usefulness. We will make messes, and disruption we do not cause or predict will land on us. This is the drama of being alive. 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.

I think a lot about the relationship between cynicism and hope. Critical thinking without hope is cynicism. But hope without critical thinking is naïveté. I try to live in this place between the two, to try to build a life there. Because finding fault and feeling hopeless about improving our situation produces resignation, of which cynicism is a symptom, a sort of futile self-protection mechanism. But on the other hand, believing blindly that everything will work out just fine also produces a kind of resignation, because we have no motive to apply ourselves toward making things better. I think in order to survive, both as individuals and as a civilization, but especially in order to thrive, we need to bridge critical thinking with hope.

Hope inspires goodness to reveal itself. Hope takes goodness seriously, treats it as a data point, takes it in. This is a virtue for living in and of itself: taking in the good.

Everyone I’ve cited in this book is a positive deviant, easily written off by portenders of doom as an exception to the distasteful human rule.

Our world is abundant with quiet, hidden lives of beauty and courage and goodness. There are millions of people at any given moment, young and old, giving themselves over to service, risking hope, and all the while ennobling us all. To take such goodness in and let it matter—to let it define our take on reality as much as headlines of violence—is a choice we can make to live by the light in the darkness,

Humility is a final virtue to name and beckon here. It is woven through lives of wisdom and resilience. It’s another word that has acquired a taint of ineffectuality. But my life of conversation has reintroduced it to me as a companion to curiosity and delight. Like humor, it softens us for hospitality and beauty and questioning and all the other virtues I’ve named in these pages. 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.

It is a pleasure to wonder at the mystery we are and find delight in the vastness of reality that is embedded in our beings. It is a privilege to hold something robust and resilient called hope, which has the power to shift the world on its axis.