Why I Loved Becoming Wise

Krista Tippet's reflections on her twelve years of interviews touched my spirit. So much of what she shares resonates with my own life experience:

• "Until the Wall actually broke open on November 9, 1989 . . . no one imagined that it could fall or the Iron Curtain crumble." (7-8)
•  "New generations . . . instinctively grasp the need for practical disciplines to translate aspiration into action." (9)
• "Naming brings the essence of things into being." (15)
• Elizabeth Alexander: "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?" (19)
• Rachel Naomi Remen: "The world is made up of stories; it's not made up of facts." (26)
• Frances Kissling: "Politics is the art of the possible." (32)
• Frances Kissling: "You've got to put yourself at the margins and be willing to risk in order to make change." (34)
• " . . . the axial question: can human beings come to understand their own well-being as linked to that of others, in wider and wider circles, beyond family and tribe?" (35)
• "Might beauty [or God or love] be a bridge we can walk across occasionally to each other, a bridge that might help humble and save us?" (78) 
• Those who represent "wisdom incarnate" are "an embodied capacity to hold power and tenderness in a surprising, creative interplay." (85)
• "Strangest of all, on this planet, is the way we continue to idealize romantic love and crave it for completion." (107)
• "good questions, generously posed, seriously held, are powerful things." (108)
• "Martin Luther King made one of the most radical statements I've ever encountered: 'At times life is hard, as hard as crucible steel. In spite of the darkness of the hour, we must not lose faith in our white brothers." (113)
• john powell: "Whether it's a community or a nation, there's no such thing as sovereignty. We are in relationship with each other." (120)
• Sr. Simone Campbell talks about "being for 'the 100 percent.'" (129)
• Sr. Simone Campbell: "Having the curiosity to see their perspective allows for finding new solutions." (129)
• "'Deep listening' is a virtue that anchors every kind of love relationship and it is the compass Sister Simone cites again and again as a creative, openhearted anchor to her life of strong passions and advocacy." (130)
• Paul Elie on Dorothy Day: "she thought that we're naturally oriented toward love." (134)
• on Anthony Appiah: "Change comes about in part . . . simple association, habits of coexistence, seeking familiarity around mundane human qualities of who we are." (135)
• on John Paul Lederach: "Here are specific qualities in the lives of yeasty groups he's seen transform realities in places from Northern Ireland to Colombia to Nepal: they refuse to accept a dualist approach -- us against you. They are armed with love and courage, and these things in action are closely connected to creativity." (136)
• "Lovers are artists" (136)
• "Love demands much more" (140)
• On Marie Howe: Art Helps us to let our heart break open." (147)
• "For me now, faith is in interplay with moral imagination." (162)
• Nathan Schneider: "We decided that we were going to stop complaining about the church that we'd experienced and try to become the church that we dreamed of." (177)
• "The very notion of objectivity is an illusion." (180)
• "As uncertain as I grow about some of the fundaments of faith, in a way that would have alarmed my grandfather, I grow if anything more richly rooted in one of the most inexplicable things he taught me: God is love." (181)
• On Anne Lamott: "Faith is a verb, not a noun." (210)
• Reza Aslan: "We have to remember that fundamentalism is a reactionary phenomenon, not an independent one." (219)
• "It doesn't have to be faith in something" (229)
• "Hope, like every virtue, is a choice that becomes a practice that becomes spiritual muscle memory." (233)
• Vincent Harding: "What is needed, again and again, are more and more people who will stand in that darkness, who will not run away from those deeply hurt communities, and will open up possibilities that other people can't see in ay other way except through human beings who care about them." (235) [This is how I feel when I work with for justice for Palestine and BLM]
• "A civic aspiration is a powerful thing -- it gives moral imagination someplace to go." (246)
• "failure and vulnerability are the very elements of spiritual growth and personal wisdom." (247)
• Brene Brown: "hope is a function of struggle." (250)
• "Resilience" is "a shift from wish-based optimism to reality-based hope . . . It doesn't overcome failure so much as transmute it, integrating it into the reality that evolves." (252) 

Some of the book reminded me of messages I share in my work with students, both as a history teacher and a social action leader:

• Xavier Le Pichon: "I would call it companionship, walking with the suffering person who has come into your life and whom you have not rejected, your heart progressively gets educated by them. They teach you a new way of being." (143)
• john powell: "We're constantly making each other . ..  If we do it right, we're going to create a bigger 'we,' a different 'we.'" (119)
• John Lewis: "You have to be taught the way of peace, the way of love, the way of nonviolence." (111)
• "History always repeats itself until we honestly and searchingly know ourselves."(3)
• "We are still, and again, face to face with the unfinished work of love." (113)
• "Love, muscular and resilient, does not always seem reasonable, much less doable, in our damaged and charged civic spaces." (114) [A student once wrote me that "Your passion - genuine, real passion, uncomfortable because of its strength, at times, perhaps, but beautiful, regarless - has taught girls a most valuable lesson."]
• L'Arche represents a "cross section of humanity testing the most paradoxical of spiritual teachings -- that there is light in darkness, strength in weakness, and beauty in the brokenness of human existence." (80)
• On Eve Ensler: "you were held by love." (144)
• Kate Braestrup: "I look for God's work always in how people love each other." (150)
• "Our kids want us to finally get this right. They have injected the language of transparency and authenticity and integrity into our civic vocabulary." (169)
• "we need to be attentive to what our children can teach us, as well as what we want to impart to them because some of this they know and they actually know more immediately than we do." (222)
• Shane Claiborne: "In the south, where I'm from, you know, we have a saying that you're 'the spittin' image' of somebody . . . and it's shorthand for the 'spirit and image,' you know. And it doesn't just mean you look like them but that you have the character of them In a lot of ways, I guess what I hope that we are seeing Christians who are beginning to be, again, the spitting image of Christ, you know, that are starting to look like and do the things that Jesus did and not be totally distracted by those which have proclaimed the name of Christ and done so many other things." (226)
• On Shane Claiborne: "Faith is not a state of mind, but an action in the world" (229)
• "learning to be reflective and activist at once, to be in service as much as in charge, and to learn from history and elders while bringing very new realities into being." (254)

Some of the book spoke specifically to my faith, which is rooted in love:

• "Love as muscular, resilient." (103)
• "Love is something we only master in moments. It crosses the chasms between us, and likewise brings them into relief." (103)
• "We've lived it [love] as a feeling, when it is a way of being." (103)
• "John Lewis asked a 'what if' question as a tool for social alchemy: what if the beloved community were already a reality, the true reality, and he simply had to embody it until everyone else could see?" (110)
• John Lewis: "If you visualize it, if you can even have faith that it's there, for you t is already there." (111)
• John Lewis: "In the religious sense, in the moral sense, you can say that in the bosom of every human being, there is a spark of the divine." (111)
• John Lewis: "You try to appeal to the goodness of every human being and you don't give up. You never give up on anyone." (112)
• Sr. Simone Campbell: All of creation is one body." (127)
• Eve Ensler: "There is the love. The paradise is here." [Kingdom of God] (145)
• Desmond Tutu: "at the center of this existence is a heart beating with love." (181)
• Kate Braestrup: "If someone asks, 'Where was God in this' I'll say, 'God was in all the people that came to try to help, to try to find your child." (182) [Pain, grace, hope]
• Father George Coyne: "faith is love." (209)
• Brother Guy Consolmagno on Anne Lamott: "The opposite of faith is not doubt. The opposite of faith is certainty." (210)
• "Vincent Harding told me about being with young African American men and women in an inner city, telling him they would like to have 'live human sign posts' to helpt hem see and trust in changed possibilities for themselves." (234-5)
• "intellectual life was a form of spiritual survival" (256)
• Maria Popova: "we need to bridge critical thinking with hope." (257)
• On Maria Popova: "both timeliness and timelessness." (257)
• On Emily Dickinson: "hope inspires the good to reveal itself." (258)

I learned so much from spending my summer with people who are very different than I am. Several times in the book I saw reflections of the lessons I learned from that experience: 

• "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." (29)
• "It's hard to transcend a combative question." (30)
• "There is a value in learning to speak together honestly and relate to each other with dignity, without rushing to common ground that would have all the hard questions hanging." (31)
• Frances Kissling:". . . when people who disagree with each other come together with a goal of gaining a better understanding of why the other believes what they do, good things come from that. But the pressure of coming to agreement works against really understanding each other." (32)
• Sr. Simone: "Am I responding in generosity? Am I responding in selfishness? Am I responding in a way that builds up people around me, that builds me up, that is respectful of who I am?" (130)
• Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks: "To be true to your faith is a blessing to others regardless of their faith." (190)
• "Light can be a particle or a wave, depending on what question you ask of it. It's kind of a way of demonstrating something we all experience, that contradictory explanations of reality can simultaneously be true."(212-213)
• "Humility is  . . . a companion to curiosity and delight." (266)