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

by Krista Tippett

There’s no utilitarian value to it the way that there is with usefulness. I deeply believe that people want to be good, that more than that, we want to be better, to grow, to ennoble our souls. And I have hope for this medium with that lens.

I think it was William James who said, “My experience is what I agree to attend to, and only those things which I notice shaped my mind.” And so in choosing how we are in the world, we shape our experience of that world, our contribution to it. We shape our world, our inner world, our outer world, which is really the only one we’ll ever know.

Hope inspires goodness to reveal itself. Hope takes goodness seriously, treats it as a data point, takes it in.

This is a prescription for mental and spiritual resilience. This peace of God is what scientists are taking into a laboratory two millennia later and offering up to us as secular spiritual technology.

Reality is a both/and. More to the point, as Maria Popova says, the Internet is in its infancy. It is at a fundamental level a new canvas for the old human condition, salvation and sin, at digital speed and with viral replication.

Like the prophets, Clementa Pinckney used language that shimmers and elevates, to open possibilities for action. He used poetic words when he argued for measures for transparency of police action after the death of a South Carolina man, Walter Scott, in police custody, in what would turn out to be the year of his own murder: “We have a great opportunity to allow sunshine into this process, to at least give us new eyes for seeing.”

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.

The questions that can lead us are already alive in our midst, waiting to be summoned and made real. It is a joy to name them. It is a gift to plant them in our senses, our bodies, the places we inhabit, the part of the world we can see and touch and help to heal. It is a relief to claim our love of each other and take that on as an adventure, a calling. 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.