Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living ~ Krista Tippett (66 of 2023)

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

She is the host of the public radio program and podcast On Being and Curator of the Civil Conversations Project. As the host of the On Being podcast, Krista Tippett gets to have conversations with some of the most inspiring artists and spiritual teachers in the world – from the Dalai Lama to Anne Lamott, Mary Oliver to Eckhart Tolle, and most people in between.

'Becoming Wise' is a distillation of some of her most memorable conversations, and acts as a kind of guide to living – how to be. The richness of the book is almost overwhelming – it's sumptuously written, full of wisdom from some of the greatest thinkers of our time, ambitious in its scope. It encomposses all that Krista Tippett has found to be most crucial in the "art of living." Don't expect roadmaps, but expect questions and soft direction.

In Becoming Wise, Krista Tippett has created a master class in living for a fractured world. Fracture, she says, is not the whole story of our time. The enduring question of what it means to be human has become inextricable from the challenge of who we are to one another. She insists on the possibility of personal depth and common life for this century, nurtured by science and “spiritual technologies,” with civility and love as muscular public practice. And, accompanied by a cross-disciplinary dream team of a teaching faculty, she shows us how.

Book is divided into six parts beginning with Introduction i.e. the Age of us. 

Words are the poetry of creatures

Flesh is the Body's grace. 

Love: A few things learned. 

Faith: The Evolution

Hope : Reimagined. 

So many excellent and eloquent quotes. Some from Tippett, Some from those she has interviewed over the years.

On tolerance:

"We chose too small a word in the decade of my birth—tolerance—to make the world we want to live in now. We opened to the racial difference that had been there all along, separate but equal, and to a new infusion of religions, ethnicities, and values. But tolerance doesn’t welcome. It allows, endures, indulges. In the medical lexicon, it is about the limits of thriving in an unfavorable environment. Tolerance was a baby step to make pluralism possible, and pluralism, like every ism, holds an illusion of control. It doesn’t ask us to care for the stranger. It doesn’t even invite us to know each other, to be curious, to be open to be moved or surprised by each other."

On admiration and love:

"When you admire people, you put them on pedestals. When you love people, you want to be together."

On the Miraculous and Love:

"What do you do about evil that swoops down completely at random? I suppose that’s where the issue of miracles comes in, that so many things had to happen in the right way, or the wrong way, depending on how you put it, for this particular young woman to meet this particular guy in the parking lot at 7:00 in the morning. That is as improbable as any miracle. And because of that, a miracle to me can’t just be something that was providential, that everything had to line up just right in order for it to happen. Bad things happen that way too. Really bad things happen that way too. 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."

God is bigger than Religion:

"The Bible is saying to us the whole time: Don’t think that God is as simple as you are. He’s in places you would never expect him to be. And you know, we lose a bit of that in English translation. 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."

On Resilience:

"I’m glad for the language of resilience that has entered the twenty- first-century lexicon, from urban planning to mental health. 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."