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

by Krista Tippett

Our spiritual lives are where we reckon head-on with the mystery of ourselves, and the mystery of each other.

How to give voice to those raw, essential, heartbreaking and life-giving places in us, so that we may know them more consciously, live what they teach us, and mine

It’s time to dare this more bravely in our midst, and dare learning together how love can be practical, creative, and sustained as a social good, not merely a private good.

believed that the noosphere would drive the next stage of evolution—an evolution of spirit and consciousness.

And if we don’t do that with language that’s very, very, very precise—not prissy, but precise—then are we knowing each other truly?

I can disagree with your opinion, it turns out, but I can’t disagree with your experience. And once I have a sense of your experience, you and I are in relationship, acknowledging the complexity in each other’s position, listening less guardedly. The difference in our opinions will probably remain intact, but it no longer defines what is possible between us.

likens the human soul to a wild animal in the backwoods of the psyche, sure to run away if cross-examined.

sharing our stories in the service of probing together who we are and who we want to be. To

believe we can push ourselves further, and use words more powerfully and tell and make the story of our time anew.

with the capacity to find the hidden light in all events and all people, to lift it up and make it visible once again and thereby to restore the innate wholeness of the world.

The world is made up of stories; it’s not made up of facts.

Generous listening is powered by curiosity, a virtue we can invite and nurture in ourselves to render it instinctive.

surprised, to let go of assumptions and take in ambiguity. The listener wants to understand the humanity behind the words of the other, and patiently summons one’s own best self and one’s own best words and questions.

My only measure of the strength of a question now is in the honesty and eloquence it elicits.

Love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything.

Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

“the courage to be vulnerable in front of those we passionately disagree with.”

But you can’t read poetry that way. Poetry slows you down. And anything in our world now that slows us down is to be valued and maybe as a gift and even a calling from God.

incantatory.

like to talk about us “achieving ourselves,” finding who we are, what we’re for and making that possible for each other.

Mind and spirit are as physical as they are mental. The line we’d drawn between them was whimsy, borne of the limits of our understanding. Emotions and memories, from despair to gladness, root in our

Physical, emotional, and spiritual are more entangled than we guessed, more interactive in every direction, and this knowledge is a form of power.

real practice is living your life as if it really mattered from moment to moment. The

And all the scientific evidence is suggesting that when you choose life in

the way I’m talking about, your brain changes in both form and function, your immune system changes, your body changes.

Always in need of care and tenderness. Life is fluid, evanescent, evolving in every cell, in every breath.

Never perfect. To be alive is by definition messy, always leaning towards disorder and surprise.

Being more present, surrendering into the world, feeling more. I don’t mean intellectually. I mean literally having your body as if you’re getting hugged like my son. But your heart feels vulnerable when you let yourself be in the world like that.

So I think beauty in that sense is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life.

what are you doing when you feel most beautiful?

Beauty is visible, palpable, in moments when human beings reach across the mystery of each other. Before he died in 2013, the great sociologist

We don’t know what to do with our own weakness except hide it or pretend it doesn’t exist. So how can we welcome fully the weakness of another, if we haven’t welcomed our own weakness? There

Here’s what it feels like, what I can report: an embodied capacity to hold power and tenderness in a surprising, creative interplay. This way of being is palpable, and refreshing, and in its way jarring, hard to figure out. Among other things, it transmutes my sense of what power feels like and is there for.

There’s a whole new field of interpersonal neurobiology that is studying how we are connected with each other and how a lack of connection, particularly early in life, has devastating consequences on the development of mind and brain.

Trauma, but also our whole experience, our whole experience of the world is never just mental or verbal.

mean, how in our daily lives are we connecting in every single respect with ourselves and everything around us? Because that’s where transcendence comes from. That’s where real energetic transformation comes from.

It is also good to love—love being difficult. 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.

We’ve fetishized it as romance, when its true measure is a quality of sustained, practical care. We’ve lived it as a feeling, when it is a way of being.

We don’t know where to begin to change our relationship with the strangers who are our neighbors—to address the ways in which our well-being may be oblivious to theirs or harming theirs. We don’t know how to reach out or what to say if we did. But we don’t want to live this way. I don’t want to live this way.

It’s like dark matter, she says, this force that permeates everything and yet remains essentially mysterious, something we have scarcely begun to understand and to mine.

My heart cannot be educated by myself. It can only come out of a relationship with others. And if we accept being educated by others, to let them explain to us what happens to them, and to let yourself be immersed in their world so that they can get into our world, then you begin to share something very deep. You will never be the person in

And then she pauses and says, “But 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.

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

New Humanism, which is in dialogue about moral imagination and ethical passions across boundaries of belief and nonbelief. Then there

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

That cultivating it, that thinking about it, worshipping it, working towards it, taking care of it, nurturing it in myself, nurturing it in other people, that really is a life’s work right there, and it doesn’t have to be any bigger than that. God doesn’t have to be out in the next solar system over bashing asteroids together. It’s

the spirituality of the scientist and the spirituality of the mystic: a constant endeavor to discern truth while staying open to everything you do not yet, cannot yet, know. A

But so many of our categories, defined and wrapped in forms and institutions that no longer quite work, had become too narrow. Certain kinds of religiosity turned themselves into boxes into which too little light and air could enter or escape. So did certain kinds of nonbelief. Dogmatic atheism is no more intellectually credible than dogmatic faith.

The spirituality of the mystic and the scientist—a reverence for wonder and the possibility of never-ending discovery—also points a way forward for the orthodox of every tradition to live with the mystery of a world of kinship with the religious other and the nonbeliever. At their orthodox cores, all of our traditions insist on a reverence for what we do not know now and cannot tie up with explanation in this lifetime. This is an invitation to bring the particularities and passions of our identities into common life, while honoring the essential

mystery and dignity of the other—and to do so not as an adjunct to faithfulness, but as an article of it.