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

by Krista Tippett

Yes, there are people who have good marriages that have lasted long. But I don’t think you will talk to anybody who will tell you this is the panacea and this is the only person whom I’ve ever loved who fulfilled me. Of course not.

And it was just this moment of, “Oh, my God, my life is so rich.” There is the love. The paradise is here. Paradise is right in front of us.

In capitalism what is engineered is longing, engineered longing and desire in us for what can be in the future.

It’s always about the next product, the n...

All art holds the knowledge that we’re both living and dying at the same time.

If I look at it from another perspective, and this is really the perspective I maintain, I don’t look for God or God’s work in magic or in tricks or in, you know, “this is what I want” and then I get it. I look for God’s work always in how people love each other, in just the acts of love that I see around me.

And you say that most of the time, perhaps, “a miracle can only be the resurrection of love beside the unchanged fact of death.”

And you said, “I think most people, white, black, Latino, and otherwise, would like to see something different. We just don’t know how to do it.

You’ve told one story about Oak Park near Chicago.

And 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 have a feeling that one of the deeper transformations that’s going on now is that for the white community of America, there is this uncertainty growing about its own role, its own control, its own capacity to name the realities. It has moved into a realm of uncertainty that it did not allow itself to face before.

But I would feel all the cells in my body as I sang hymns that connected my little life with the grandeur of the cosmos, the Christian drama across space and time. This was my earliest experience of breath and body, mind and spirit soaring together, alive to both mystery and reality, in kinship with others both familiar and unknown. That’s one way I’d define the feeling of faith now.

Faith is evolutionary, in every culture, and in any life. Even a person who could proclaim, all of their days, “I believe in God” or “I trust in prayer” would fill those words with endlessly transforming memories, experiences, connotations. The same enduring fundamental belief will hold a transfigured substance in the beginning, the middle, and the end of one lifetime. 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.

They are attempts to achieve the “theory of everything” that eluded Einstein—to reconcile the great puzzle that how the world works at the cosmic level does not cohere with how we understand its workings at the micro level, the quantum realm. But quantum physics, whose tenets Einstein compared to voodoo, has given us cell phones and personal computers, technologies of the everyday by which we populate online versions of outer space.

this is the seminal question of my life

The late wise physician Sherwin Nuland, an agnostic born a Hasidic Jew, liked to quote Saint Augustine’s observation that

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. It is an animating impulse the psychiatrist Robert Coles discerned in the origins of a human lifetime—in childhood—and the origins too of faith. I interviewed him in his book-lined home outside Boston in the early days of my radio adventure, and it grounded all that came later.

And this slow emergence of our psychological being and our spiritual being is itself a great mystery . . . I think there is no doubt that a lot of the religious side of childhood is a merger of the natural curiosity and interest the children have in the world with the natural interest and curiosity that religion has about the world.

These were the seeds for the book for which he is now best known: The Spiritual Life of Children.

Now, both in Judaism and Christianity, of course, there are rule setters, and at times they can be all too insistent, some would say even a bit tyrannical. But the spirit of religion, I think, is what children connect with—the questions, the inquiry, the enormous curiosity about this universe, and the hope that somehow those answers will come about.

Mystery is such an important part of it. And mystery invites curiosity and inquiry. You know, Flannery O’Connor—talk about a religious person, she was Catholic in background but she was beyond Catholicism; she was a deeply spiritual person.

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.

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.

the Anglican Book of Common Prayer drew me with its poetry and its vigorous description of the vexing human condition. “We have done those things we ought not to have done,” Thomas Cranmer penned for King Henry VIII, who was as vivid an embodiment of the vexed human condition as ever walked the earth. “And we have left undone those things which we ought to have done”—naming the ordinary, everyday failure to join inner aspiration with outer reality. A failure to take in beauty and let it put things in their place. A failure to be grateful, as a habit. A failure to take the time to attend to the hurting stranger. A failure to be my best self with those I share life and work with. A failure to forgive others for not being their best selves with me.

So much of what we orient towards in culture numbs a little going in and helps us avoid the reckoning we actually long for—the push to self-knowledge and deeper lived integrity.

Maybe this is another way to think about original sin—the ingrained lure of the possibility of going numb, a habit of acquiescence to it. 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.

On the one hand, when I became a Roman Catholic, I was drawn in by this medieval contemplative tradition as well as this tradition of courageous social witness—exemplified by something like Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker, and many other examples throughout history and around the world. 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.

The Nones of this age are ecumenical, humanist, transreligious. But in their midst are analogs to the original monastics: spiritual rebels and seekers on the margins of established religion, pointing tradition back to its own untamable, countercultural, service-oriented heart.

After visiting a refugee camp in Syria created by a group calling itself the Islamic State, the Harvard-educated, South Korean–born, Buddhist-raised UN secretary-general called it “the deepest circle of Hell.”

But I apprehend—with a knowledge that is as much visceral as cognitive—that God is love. That somehow the possibility of care that can transform us—love muscular and resilient—is an echo of a reality behind reality, embedded in the creative force that gives us life.

I mean it pretty literally that God is, if nothing else—and that’s a big if—but if nothing else, God is that force that drives us to really see each other and to really behold each other and care for each other and respond to each other.

As the brilliant physicist Brian Greene explained to me,

This is not a question physicists might pose, but it is a question they plant in me: might our evolving insights into the laws of physics eventually fill in for what our imagination and our words have always called God? Or to turn that question at an angle, might science, as it evolves, actually point at “God” in a way the classic scientists like Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton—who believed their inquiry into the natural world would reveal the personality of its maker—could not have dreamed?

I remember a statement of a very intelligent, excellent American journalist after September 11, 2001—that what those events demonstrated was that in order for the three monotheistic religions in particular to survive and be constructive members of society in the twenty-first century, they would have to relinquish their exclusive truth claims.

The extraordinary thing we now know, thanks to Crick and Watson’s discovery of DNA and the decoding of the human and other genomes, is that all life, everything, all the three million species of life and plant life—all have the same source. We all come from a single source. Everything that lives has its genetic code written in the same alphabet.

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.

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.

The story emerged when I asked him about some poetry of William Blake that he quoted in his writing as important: “He who binds to himself to joy doth a winged life destroy / He who kisses the joy as it flies lives in eternity’s sunrise.”

In so many ways I see the new dynamics of spiritual life in our time as gifts to the wisdom of the ages, even as they unsettle the foundations of faith as we’ve known it for what feels like forever.

Our greatest aspirations and virtues have always relied on a measure of inner equanimity.

I thought, there’s this great undiscovered terrain that Henry David Thoreau and Thomas Merton and Emily Dickinson fearlessly investigated, and I want to follow in their footsteps.

You said something that night—all these years I’ve been looking forward to the day when I would be able to discuss it with you. There was a question about the difference between religion and spirituality. You said that spirituality is like water, and religion is like tea. But I wondered—what if spirituality is water, and religion is the cup which carries it forward in time, although it may be flawed, and we may drop it and break it.

love that notion of the cup. And if you had just asked me that question now, I would say that spirituality is the story of our passionate affair with what is deepest inside us and with the candle that’s always flickering inside us and sometimes almost seems to go out and sometimes blazes.

And religion is the community, the framework, the tradition, all the other people into which we bring what we find in solitude. So in some ways, I would say very much exactly the thing that you just said. And I should also say when I talked about water and tea, I was probably stealing from the Dalai Lama. Because what he often says is that the most important thing, without which we can’t live, is kind...

But you can survive without tea, and you can’t survive without water. And so everyday kindness and responsibility is the starting block for every life. It’s a nice reminder to ground ourselves in the people around us before we st...

The argument goes something like this, that since the 17th century, mechanism and matter have dominated. From 1900 to 1925, physics went through a revolution where we began to realize, well, to a certain approximation, we can neglect the observer. But we can’t neglect the observer if we look carefully, if we do our science carefully. We are always implicated. We are always implicated in quantum mechanics and relativity. There is a subjective dimension—subjective not in the sense of arbitrary or capricious—but there is an observer or an imagined observer everywhere. And the universe requires this.

There is no objective view from outside the system, where you’re looking at the whole thing play out according to some universal story. So it’s always a story to me.

Our experience, our story, is in some way the only real thing? Exactly that. It’s odd, but it throws us back on experience, throws us back on subjectivity, not in the sense of, again, capricious or arbitrary. But in the sense that reality is connected to my person. From that standpoint, subjectivity becomes, rather than the enemy, the friend.

I think one of the joys of being a Catholic is that we’ve got this rich intellectual tradition at the same time that we’ve got the smells and bells, and the hymns and all of the other emotional part, that are all responses to the awareness that there is this God and I want to do something about it.

Educated ignorance.

I can remember, when I was maybe 6 or 7, lying on the grass and staring up at the sun. We’d just had a lesson at school about Pi, the number embedded in circles. And I thought, Is Pi real? What does it mean that there is this sort of mystical number at the heart of the sun or in a hubcap or any circular thing that you see? And the more you study physics, the more astounding are the examples of that—that math is everywhere in the world. How do we interpret that? What is the meaning of the fact that there are these incredibly complex equations that describe phenomena like lasers?