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Introduction

Tulaine: Our guest today is none other than Krista Tippett: a renowned, pioneering, Peabody award winning broadcaster, and New York Times bestselling author. Now you may recognize her voice from her podcast, On Being, where she has engaged in profound conversations about spirituality with global leaders over the past two decades. Now, when we talk about spirituality, we are not in this conversation confined to the boundaries of organized religion. As Krista eloquently puts it, spirituality is about befriending reality. Now that’s not meant to imply that we’re saying satisfaction with the status quo, never that in the Say More community, we are always working on evolving the quality of the systems in which we live. It’s about embracing the world as it is, understanding each other as we are, and then evolving together from that place of authenticity and connection. Are you ready? Here is my interview with the incredible Krista Tippett.

Moment of Laughter

Tulaine: One of the things I like to do, Krista, on Say More, it’s really a community of folks who are committed to social change and justice. And one of the things I really believe is that the way that we can make change happen is through a lens and experience of joy and connection, right? But the thing to help get us there, is to reflect on something that cracked you up lately. I’d love to hear if you have a memory of something recently that just made you laugh out loud.

Krista: This is so – [laughs] – We just had a meeting this morning, I’m cracking up again.  So we all had to go through this process of redoing our passwords together. And for some reason, it was just hilarious.  It’s like everybody’s personality came out in terms of how they were reacting and what issues they were having. And, I also think we were just happy to be together.   I mean, this happens, but just falling in love with my colleagues, and, actually to this point of joy, just really loving it, that we could enjoy something that our colleagues who had organized the meeting were worried that it was a chore for us and that we would have to endure it. 

Tulaine: I love that. Those are the best moments, those are the best moments. And, you know, another mutual relationship we have is Marshall Ganz.  He was also talking about the importance of joy and how and his work with Cesar Chavez that, you know, they were doing hard, difficult work and meeting a lot of resistance, but they had theater and comedy and just lots of laughter. So, it just makes sense to me that people who are trying to create something, build something, heal something, that they would have a close relationship with laughter.

Krista: It’s a mark of wisdom. [It is] Something that can’t be taken away from us, our capacity for joy. I think we have to support each other sometimes to create space for that capacity, right? But it’s a birthright and it’s fuel, right, it is resilience-making fuel. And this connection between joy and justice is really kind of counter-cultural here, but this theme has just risen up so loud and clear.

The Modern Fear of Joy

Tulaine: Well that’s encouraging that you’re seeing it emerge because the counterculture aspect of joy and the work of change making, it’s real. It’s very present for me because while I also, you know, I get the blessing of coming in contact with kindred spirits like you, where we believe the same thing about joy, right? But I also, Krista, am in relationship with people who are so weary from the impact of the pandemic and the conflict, and who are really afraid.  And this is true for people across all walks of life as part of my work with New Profit. You know, I talk to people who live and look very differently from one another every day, like you. And whether it is somebody who has a lot of economic resource and power, or somebody who is on the edge of trying to figure out survival day-to-day, the sort of sense of fear is shared.  Have you seen that?

Krista: I think I see the same thing. And I think there are also just so many layers to it, right? I mean, there’s the way this culture has kind of made exhaustion kind of a badge of honor. Right? And then this one’s a little more complicated, this feeling that there’s so much suffering in the world that somehow it would be to disrespect that, or to not be morally responsible to be joyful. And in fact, like joy is the resistance, right?  But that’s not really training that we’ve gotten.  Brian Stevenson says, like, you know, hopelessness is an enemy of justice, right? He says that the hopeless activist, the hopeless lawyer, the hopeless politician is not going to get us anywhere. And I think those things are close side by side because joy, also, the capacity to reach for joy and to know that as actually part of the struggle, it also keeps other things like hope alive.  Hope is a muscle, right? And there’s a hope to me that is like wishful thinking, and that is too easy and too simple. Well, you know, to me, when I think about this hope that we’re talking about, it has nothing to do with idealism really or this kind of faith that somehow everything will work out alright. That’s not, it’s like if that hope is what allows you to kind of push your shoulder against that world you want to see instead, and keep walking, keep moving in that. 

What Drives On Being

Tulaine: What was your mission when you started [the On Being project], and how has that mission evolved or shifted as of today? 

Krista: I ended up turning my back on church and all that, you know, when I went to college, which is a very common story. And for about ten years I wasn’t religious at all.  I got very political. I really thought that’s where the interesting and important, that’s where the power was. And I ended up in Cold War Berlin in the 1980s. And so it was really this, you know, this global canvas of good and evil and the super power politics and all of that.  So I ended up  having a spiritual homecoming and just kind of realizing there were questions that weren’t being asked and an attention to human life and how human beings find meaning in their lives.  What always astonished me is like, it really wasn’t about what side of the wall you landed on, like, people managed to create a life of dignity and beauty and intimacy or not. And so that was a mystery to me. Like, what is it? And I ended up going to seminary! 

I went to seminary not because I thought I would be ordained, but because I found that theology and religion was the place in the human enterprise where these questions of what it means to be human and how people find meaning [were addressed]. But I came out of that just like having this great theological education. And I didn’t… There was no obvious thing for me to do then.  And I just felt like this whole experience I’d had of missing an entire world of questioning and of perspective, it was like this black hole in the middle of our life together, where we could talk about everything else but this. And, you know, all the voices we had representing Christianity or Islam, like, didn’t represent most Christians or most Muslims.  So to your question, you know, the way I sold the show, and this was true, is like I was saying, in a public radio newsroom, I know that we don’t know how to talk about this in public, but it’s too important not to try to find new ways to talk about it. The conversation, if you’re really speaking with and to the depths of religious life, of spiritual life, if you’re like, honoring theology, that it is so fascinating and, and, and has such richness and it has a life of the mind, and it’s creative and  it’s loving in a complex way. And so that was the beginning.

 I think another way I’ve evolved and the project has evolved over time is just really starting to see and get very, kind of insistent on the fact that this matter of being human drives everything that we take seriously. And we don’t tend to it directly.  Our collective nervous system, our collective brain stem is distressed, but we don’t actually ever, like, turn and face fear and face human pain and actually treat it as a dimension of, like, actually the kind of foundational dimension of all these other things that we analyze.  I think I realized, and this was a kind of in renaming the show On Being that, that like this basic or ancient question of what it means to be human is really the question that animated the creation of our religious traditions, and it is also just the universal human question. And in this century, I think the question of who we will be to each other, like, what does it mean to be human, how do we want to live, who will we be to each other, that has become inextricable.

How We Can Use Spiritual Infrastructure

Tulaine: As a society, you know, there is a lot that we have to do in the material world to function. You know, and we’re accustomed to focusing on tangible societal needs, things we can easily lay eyes on and touch like schools, hospitals, and housing. But in order to truly thrive, we need to delve deeper, be more expansive. We have to ask ourselves questions that guide us to define the elements of our shared lives that are harder to touch. Easier to feel, but perhaps harder to see. 

Krista: It’s about being whole. It’s about taking all these things we now can learn about being a whole human being and what does it mean to be a whole institution or a whole society? All of our traditions say that words make worlds, right? Words make worlds. Like the words we use, It’s just like, if we constantly tell this story that you and I are talking about, of dysfunction and disarray and catastrophe, that’s the world we’re walking into, and we start to limit our imaginative possibility and therefore our agency in making something better. So really, holding our aspirations and giving them muscular language and, you know, using these incredible powers of our minds to imagine. 

Tulaine: The other thing that I was that I felt like it was confirmed in listening to you is, and I will acknowledge you, Krista, that I learned this more recently, that I am in most, not all, but in most cases, and increasingly, I am completely willing to be completely wrong about something. And once I started to try that on, man, does life just open up. So I do think that as I listened to you, I was thinking, what are the sort of tactical, practical things that I can do that the listeners of Say More can do to embody what you’re describing?

Krista: So sometimes I say that my definition of spirituality at its best, spiritual life at its best is befriending reality, because what you’re talking about is just seeing reality straight on, right? Because nobody’s perfect, so it’s the expectation that anyone should be that is throwing us off that is skewing things.  What you just said really echoes another piece of that conversation that I keep hearing everywhere. Like you’re adding to it for me, which is: if our calling has something to fight and it has struggle in it, we still have to be healthy for ourselves and to actually, in the long run, bring into being the world we want to live in. We have to be orienting and keep reorienting around what we love.  And I do think again, that’s spiritual discipline, because we are going to get caught up in the fight.

To listen to the full episode click here.