Krista Tippett

“I’m a person who listens for a living.  I listen for wisdom, and beauty, and for voices not shouting to be heard.  This book chronicles some of what I’ve learned in what has become a conversation across time and generations, across disciplines and denominations.”
 
Peabody Award-winning broadcaster and National Humanities Medalist Krista Tippett has interviewed the most extraordinary voices examining the great questions of meaning for our time. The heart of her work on her national public radio program and podcast, On Being, has been to shine a light on people whose insights kindle in us a sense of wonder and courage. Scientists in a variety of fields; theologians from an array of faiths; poets, activists, and many others have all opened themselves up to Tippett's compassionate yet searching conversation.
 
In Becoming Wise, Tippett distills the insights she has gleaned from this luminous conversation in its many dimensions into a coherent narrative journey, over time and from mind to mind. The book is a master class in living, curated by Tippett and accompanied by a delightfully ecumenical dream team of teaching faculty. 
 
The open questions and challenges of our time are intimate and civilizational all at once, Tippett says – definitions of when life begins and when death happens, of the meaning of community and family and identity, of our relationships to technology and through technology. The wisdom we seek emerges through the raw materials of the everyday. And the enduring question of what it means to be human has now become inextricable from the question of who we are to each other. 
 
This book offers a grounded and fiercely hopeful vision of humanity for this century – of personal growth but also renewed public life and human spiritual evolution. It insists on the possibility of a common life for this century marked by resilience and redemption, with beauty as a core moral value and civility and love as muscular practice. Krista Tippett's great gift, in her work and in Becoming Wise, is to avoid reductive simplifications but still find the golden threads that weave people and ideas together into a shimmering braid.
 
One powerful common denominator of the lessons imparted to Tippett is the gift of presence, of the exhilaration of engagement with life for its own sake, not as a means to an end. But presence does not mean passivity or acceptance of the status quo. Indeed Tippett and her teachers are people whose work meets, and often drives, powerful forces of change alive in the world today. In the end, perhaps the greatest blessing conveyed by the lessons of spiritual genius Tippett harvests in Becoming Wise is the strength to meet the world where it really is, and then to make it better.

An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living

Becoming Wise

Laura Mei

Our physical selves, as we're learning, are so much more than merely physical. They carry trauma and joy and memory and our capacity for opening or closing to life and one another. We are matter, kindred with ocean and tree and sky. We are flesh and blood and bone. To sink into that is a relief, a homecoming. There are deep connections between beauty and pleasure and wisdom, and we are relearning these. Mind and spirit are as physical as they are mental. Our capacity to reach beyond ourselves — experiencing mystery or being present to others — is dependent on how fully we are planted in our bodies in all their flaws and their grace. Emotions and memories, from despair and gladness, root in our bodies. Our bodies are longing and joy and fear and a lifelong desire to be safe and loved, incarnate. I taste, touch, smell, see, and hear, my mind entwines with my senses and experiences. I live and move and have my being. Therein, I become.

The word 𝘴𝘰𝘶𝘭 is one of those overused words of which some of us are understandably wary. But almost everyone has a story to tell about the spiritual background of their childhood. This simple inquiry invites an open-hearted recollection that honors all the nuance and improvisation and clarity we've gathered around whatever 𝘴𝘰𝘶𝘭 or 𝘴𝘱𝘪𝘳𝘪𝘵 means. It stirs a part of us where certainties are leavened by experiences, by hopes, and by fears. It's a place that remembers questions as vividly as answers — questions we may have followed our whole lives long and which, with the right encouragement, we may take up with different others. Just as importantly, this question plants the entire conversation to come in a stance that us softer and more searching than we usually present as adults to the world. And it leads organically, along straight or meandering paths, into the roots of the curiosity that becomes, in adulthood, passion and vocation.

The whole human race is here because we are born 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. It's a very important story for our times. It's the restoration of the world. And this is, of course, a collective task. It involves all people who have ever been born, all people presently alive, all people yet to be born. We are all healers of the world. That story opens a sense of possibility. It's not about healing the world by making a huge difference. It's about healing the world that touches you, that's around you. The world to which you have proximity. 

Listening is an everyday social art, but it's an art we have neglected and must learn anew. Listening is more than being quiet while the other person speaks until you can say what you have to say. Generous listening is powered by curiosity, a virtue we can invite and nurture in ourselves to render it instinctive. It involves a kind of vulnerability — a willingness to be 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. Generous listening in fact yields better questions. The measure of the strength of the question is in the honesty and eloquence it elicits. We all have it in us to formulate questions that invite honesty, dignity, and revelation.

There is something deeply built into us that needs story itself. Story is such a source of nurture that we cannot become really true human beings for ourselves and for each other without story — and without finding ways in which to tell it, to share it, to create it, and to encourage younger people to create their story. We should also encourage younger people to find the elders, those folks who nobody else knows have lived such magnificent lives. Find them and then sit with them and learn how to ask the right questions so that an opening can take place.

Our bodies tell us the truth of life that our minds can deny: that we are in any moment as much about softness as fortitude. 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 toward disorder and surprise. How we open or close to the reality that we never arrive at safe enduring stasis is the matter, the raw material, of wisdom. Grief and gladness, sickness and health, are not separate passages. They're entwined and grow from and through each other, planting us, if we'll let them, more profoundly in our bodies in all their flaws and their grace.

Becoming Wise quotes

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