On Being host Krista Tippett reflects on her career and tells stories never before heard on air. She contemplates her grandfather’s spirituality, what she was looking for when she decided to come to Yale Divinity School, the need she saw for intelligent public conversation about spirituality and religion, and the birth story of Speaking of Faith (later On Being) during the Cold War. We consider how religious traditions can open up to the world’s pain and, finally, encourage imaginative, muscular hope.
48: The Subversive Fireside with Krista Tippett
Hosts: Brandon Nappi and Hannah Black
Guest: Krista Tippett
Production: Goodchild Media
Music: Wayfaring Stranger, Theodicy Jazz Collective
Art: E. Landino
Instagram: @theleadersway.podcast
berkeleydivinity.yale.edu/podcast
You can support our work at https://tinyurl.com/support-transforming-leaders
Hannah: Well, welcome to the Leaders Way podcast, Krista Tippett.
Krista Tippett: Well, thank you!
H: This is a dream. I mean, it really is a dream. We’ll get into it a little more later, and Brandon will actually join us to do some gushing of his own. But for a long time, On Being was the only podcast I was really into. And it traveled with me to grad school, it was in my ears while I was doing little crafts and things like that. So, this is really … it’s a joy. And I wonder if we can get to know each other as people before we really jump in.
K: I believe in that. Yeah.
H: So, I mean, tell me about your trip to New Haven.
K: Oh. Here we are. Well, I got this lovely thing called the Chubb Fellowship. And so, I just had a really busy day yesterday with, class and, lunch with people who are there’s not a journalism program at Yale, but people who are doing … journalism students, hosted by the Journalism Initiative. And then the lecture, which I don’t really do anymore, is a conversation Which was fun, with Michael Beth, and then just really a conversation with the room. And I like every side of a conversation, so that’s great. And then, dinner last night, a little more conversation … And here I am, and I’m gonna go rest after this.
H: Sounds like that’s much needed.
K: Yeah.
H: Oh my gosh. I need to learn from you how you get around the lecture to do a discussion because … Always in my teaching, if I can lead a discussion instead of lecture, that is what I will be found doing.
K: You know, I feel like pandemic did us, you know, did us some favors. And one of them was getting rid of –you know, because on Zoom, to give a lecture or a speech was just deadly. And I feel like … I love it that we came out of it and just understanding that a conversation has such a better energy. And so, where I can, when I get invited– what it previously would have been to give a speech, I just feel like also now, you know, I don’t wanna go into any room and give a … you know, just say what was on my mind, you know, pronounce. But I love kind of engaging what questions are alive in any given room with people in their bodies.
H: Yeah. How do you manage that with more than 10 people in a room?
K: Well, I mean … last night, it worked. I mean, I don’t have to … so I mean, I find it relaxing to be on the not asking the question side. Because really, like, as the question asker, you’re, you know, you’re managing the situation. You know? And I take that really seriously.
H: Going like a million miles an hour …
K: That’s much more work. But when I just get to kind of be there and take things in and we creatively work with the questions that come at me, I like that.
H: So is this, like, a normal day for you? Are you usually … have the tables turned today? Or …
K: Well, it’s … I’m doing more of this.
H: Okay.
K: Yeah. Because we’re not … you know, I left the weekly radio production two years ago. You know, so there, I was constantly on deadlines and doing a lot of interviews. And then we’ve you know, I’ve pared back kind of. I don’t have a big team anymore. We’ll be doing more live events and then just making podcasts from that. I don’t exactly know what that rhythm is gonna be right now.
H: We’ve done that once, and it was very cool. It’s just … It’s different.
K: It’s different.
H: Yeah. It’s different. And the questions in people’s bodies are just very much in the room. Whereas when you’re doing this … all the hundreds or thousands of people listening are—I don’t know what they’re feeling. They haven’t even felt it yet. I don’t know if they’re driving their car, if they’re on a treadmill.
K: That’s right. But it is like time travel, you know, because you’ll put it out and then they will be in the room with us right now.
H: That’s really true.
K: Which I I think is very cool. Now. Yeah.
H: Yeah. We’ve done it, Krista. We are we have invested time travel. We have. Well, I’ve done it.
K: We’ve crossed the space-time continuum.
H: That’s it. That’s the one we are time travelers. Oh my goodness. Okay. Well, speaking of time travel, Brandon is gonna have a question for us. But before Brandon time travels, let me kind of introduce you to our audience.
So, Krista Tippett is a Peabody Award winning broadcaster, a national humanities medalist, and a New York Times best-selling author. She grew up in a small town in Oklahoma, attended Brown University, and became a journalist and diplomat in Cold War Berlin. After studying theology at Yale Divinity School in the early 1990s, she saw an opening where intelligent public conversation about the religious, spiritual, and moral aspects of human life might be. She launched “Speaking of Faith,” later called “On Being,” which is more what I know it as, as a weekly national public radio show in 02/2003. It grew from two radio stations to over 400 across the US, and it has received the highest honors in broadcasting the Internet and podcasting. One of these honors that you have received was that President Obama awarded you a National Humanities Medal.
K: Yeah. That was very exciting.
H: Wow. Amazing. Yep. Wow. And then I just wanna quickly mention, because this community of listeners are readers, Krista Tippett has published three books, Becoming Wise, An Inquiry Into the Mystery and Art of Living, Einstein’s God, and Speaking of Faith. So we’ll put links to those in the show notes for those of you who wanna read.
K: You know, I was interviewed recently by “The Bulletin,” which is a Christianity Today podcast. And I was very moved when the host, when he said to me, he said, when I think about the people who listen to this podcast, I think they are people who feel, to some extent, spiritually and to a large extent, politically homeless. And he said, the options that are available to them don’t represent them well. Yeah. And I actually think that’s a statement about most of us right now.
H: Yes. Gosh.
K: And it’s really stayed with me, being spiritually and politically homeless. And that the options don’t represent any of us well.
H: Right. Right. Right. Gosh. That’s so true. Oh, yeah. There was a panel during a conference last spring that William Barber’s team put on where some journalists like Sarah McCammon and Joy Ann Reid were talking about the need in the media for little kind of grassroots media type things to exist. Because that’s where these questions can be asked, and these things can be said.
And I think in a culture where increasingly there’s fear of asking your honest questions because there’s canceling, there’s reacting. You can pop a little podcast in your ears and ask your real questions about gender and sexuality or spirituality or civic duty, and nobody even knows that’s the question that you’re asking at that moment because it’s in your ears.
K: The subversive fireside.
H: That’s it. The subversive fireside. Yeah. Wow.
Brandon: Hi. I’m Brandon Nappi.
H: Hi. I’m Hannah Black, and we’re your hosts on the Leader’s Way podcast.
B: A Yale podcast empowering leaders, cultivating spirituality, and exploring theology.
H: This podcast is brought to you by Berkeley Divinity School, the Episcopal Seminary at Yale. Hello, Krista.
B: I’m Brandon, and I’m so, so sad that I can’t be there with you at Yale Broadcast, having a conversation that I was hoping to have for a really long time. I mean, we don’t often get to meet many of the people who have profoundly shaped our lives, and I thought this was going to be one of the moments. But alas, I am with nearly 20 students from Yale Divinity School on retreat at Holy Cross Monastery, up in the Hudson Valley. And so just be, be assured that we are we are there with you in spirit, sending you prayers and vibes from this beautiful little, monastic community overlooking the Hudson River.
And I just wanted to share that for so many years, I think most of my adult life, that your voice, and the sound of “On Being” and “Speaking of Faith” were the first sounds that I would hear with my morning cup of coffee on Sundays. And your gracious hospitality showed me the kind of path that I wanted to walk in my life. And when I think about the three most influential figures as I became a spiritual teacher, and a retreat leader, and a writer, and a teacher, you know, I think of Thich Nhat Hanh, who I know you had on your show. I think of Mister Rogers, as a little kid, just wanting to be… the same space of welcome and curiosity that Mister Rogers was. And Krista Tippett. I wanted to be Krista Tippett when I grew up. So, I didn’t wanna let this opportunity pass without sharing my great gratitude for you. And I wanted to be a person to ask you, the first question for our conversation today.
And it’s a question that you’ve asked everyone in the last decades of your work, and it’s a question of spiritual autobiography. So, Krista, I wonder if you can share a story from your childhood that captures the religious or spiritual landscape that you grew up in.
K: Oh. You know, that’s such a nice variation of my question too–a story. So, so that’s so interesting. So what comes to mind is, my grandfather was a Southern Baptist preacher, evangelist, really. He like, he … well, he did have a small church in his later years, but he tended to kind of travel around to small country churches and be an interim or be there. So there was one time in my childhood, I feel like, I don’t know, 09/10, ‘11, ‘12, where I was just hanging out with him, and he was at one of these little tiny little mission churches, and he was, like, mowing the lawn. Right? He’s the pastor, the preacher, you know. And the lawnmower. And the lawnmower.
And he’s mowing the lawn, and I’m in … I go, I wander into this shed, a little wooden shed, and I’m standing there kind of poking around, and I look down at my feet, and there’s this huge–this is Oklahoma in the summertime. There’s this huge snake. It’s like coiled. I mean, I don’t know how big it really was, but in my memory, it’s like a python. You know? Like, it’s massive, and I’m little. Yeah. And I look down, and it’s coiled there looking up at me. And I go out. I kind of run out screaming, and I think it again, like who knows if this is really how it happened, but in my memory the snake follows me.
H: Oh no!
K: And my grandfather, he’s kind of working in the yard, He gets a hoe, and I don’t know if the snake followed me out or he went into the shed, but anyway, the snake, like, rears up and my grandfather chops his head off.
H: What?
K: And I used to tell my children this story. They love this story, this real-life drama. But somehow, it also … you know, my grandfather had a second-grade education. He had a big mind, but … and he loved his Bible, but he had not been invited to bring his mind to his Bible or like ask critical questions. He was full of contradictions, which I think was really important in my theological development. You know, I think this is really important, because on the one hand, he was the funniest adult I knew; he was playful, he was really passionate, and on the other hand, you know, when he preached, it was hellfire and brimstone, the world was full of danger, everything was a slippery slope to having sex.
H: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
K: Right? And … but so there was this sense in his theology of, like, this evil lurking around every corner. And to me, like, him, you know, killing the snake, and of course the snake being the symbol for Satan in Genesis, it was just so perfect. It was like, that’s my grandfather. You know, good versus evil. And there’s a sadness to me in that too because I –because he was a person who knew such joy, but his theology was just all so scary. The world was so scary. And yet, there was a way in which he, you know, his life was a triumph over that. And he’d like … his family had grown up … You know, I did as I grew older, I came to appreciate, actually, and I got much more respectful of that. All the–because I just felt like his faith just had so many don’ts. Don’t do this, don’t do that, don’t drink, don’t … don’t have sex, don’t, you know, don’t wear shorts because then you might have sex, don’t dance because you might have sex. But then I realized, like, you know, no playing cards because it might lead to it might lead to gambling. But I started to realize he grew up, like, in the dust bowl. You know, his family came to Oklahoma to cover a wagon. They were literally dirt poor. And I realized like, there was a lot of danger in that era, you know? Sex outside marriage could be catastrophic. There was no 12 steps, you know? You were addicted, it devastated you and everybody around you.
So I started to realize there was an intelligence to all that, And, and I loved him. And somehow that kind of just, you know, epitomized how–what a hero he was to me.
H: It’s so funny that you’re framing it that way because I was just doing some reading about Jonathan Edwards’ sisters and all of their parents. And this biographer was talking about how, actually, this really strict fear-based spirituality was super practical.
K: Super practical. Yeah.
H: If a kid went out and slipped on the ice–They’re dead. Yeah. But it’s interesting that that, like, you know, makes its way into the spiritual life and into a theology that that’s a perfect word, the scary theology.
K: Yeah. And, you know, I think he knew people who had just lives were wrecked by gambling or by drinking, or by, you know, out-of-wedlock births. Women too. It wasn’t–this is just not, again, you know, anti-women. It’s like, you got pregnant. It was, you know, you were soiled forever.
H: Another question that I’ve really liked asking people, and if it’s too personal, we can skip it. Do you have any either early experiences of God or spiritual experiences that kind of changed your path in life?
K: I mean, that world that I grew up in was full of, like, spiritual mountain tops. You know? It was … I, when I describe it to people, it sounds evangelical, but it– and it was kind of evangelical charismatic. But actually not in any box, you know? And it wasn’t … it wasn’t the politicized evangelicalism or the even just like politically engaged evangelicalism of the late twentieth century and now, it wasn’t … it didn’t have a, like, strong evangelical identity. But also, as I say, there was a lot of charismatic Christianity going on. You know? Like, I knew people who spoke in tongues. And there wasn’t a lot … there was a little porousness because, also, the Southern Baptist Convention is very populist. You know? So it’s–every church is different. I don’t know if this is still true. But … so yeah. I mean, there were … I was in a lot of situations, whether it was church whether it was summer camp or, you know, Wednesday night prayer services. You know, there was a lot of like walking down the aisle to, like, commit your life to service. And those were, you know, those were, like, you know, these peak experiences of feeling you know, having an experience of God. And I don’t know that I’ve ever talked about this, but did you grow up in one of these traditions?
H: I did. Yeah. As you’re talking, I’m like, yes to all of this. I had so many mountaintop experiences on mountaintops at church camp.
K: There were no mountains in Oklahoma.
H: I’m in Southern California at this point.
K: Yeah. You had real mountains. You know, I remember go to this we’d go to summer camp, Christian camp, I can’t remember what it was called. But, and every night, there’d be kind of a sir you know, a service that would whip you up. And it’d be very moving, and then there’d be this altar call. And I feel like there were, you know, there was, like, there was there was a profession of faith. So you went down for a perfect to make a profession of faith. You wanna be baptized, or you were gonna commit your life to service. And I remember once I like, did that. I went down and committed my life to service. And I’ve thought about that because I actually think I did, you know? I mean, I think this is not the service that my grandfather or I imagined that I would do, but there was a reality to it. And it, you know, it was decades before it kind of showed what, you know, unexpected form mine took.
H: Yeah. Well, no. I mean, who could have imagined this format? Like, we were just saying, this podcast studio probably didn’t exist!
K: Or public radio for, you know, for that matter when I was growing up. Yeah.
H: Absolutely. Yeah. That’s really interesting.
K: But I think I felt that I experienced God all the time. Right? Often with music involved.
H: Do you think that has changed a lot for you as your form of service has developed, as your places of ministry?
K: I now my life partner is a kind of secular Jew. I mean, although he’s kind of less secular than he thinks he is. But, you know, he’s asked me this question, like, do you have an experience of God? And, I mean, what I’ll say is, first of all, I think that’s just in me. You know? There’s a place in me that has a feeling of calling it that, and so it’s still there. I, you know, you live a while, and the word God is just so small and inadequate for … and I think so as I grow as you go through life, you know, what I understand that word to be pointing at is much more expansive. There’s probably more mystery to it that I you know, part of the problem with that when I one of the things I grieve for my grandfather, I feel, because it was so rules based, I actually don’t think he could get I don’t think he had much of a sense of mystery. He had a lot of answers. And they really you know, it was about conviction and certainties. And the certainties, like, you know, you were gonna go to heaven, were kind of cosmic and mysterious in themselves. But I don’t feel like there was a lot of room in there because some … to some degree, standing before mystery means holding questions that are not gonna have answers. You know?
And I think for him, the existence of religious others, of admirable, you know, religious others could have been seen as a mystery rather than “they’re not going to heaven.” Which and, you know, that was the thing as I got older that, that I couldn’t I just couldn’t reconcile. Like, that why are they going to hell? You know?
H: Right. Right. Right.
K: To have called that a mystery would have been to let in a certain amount of uncertainty that would have been unsettling for some of the other certainties. Yeah. And I think So for me, it’s, like, just full of mystery, and I just delight in that.
H: Yes. I think something that I’ve discovered as my spirituality has matured has been wonder. And mystery and wonder at mystery and curiosity. Yeah. And for a different format of spirituality, that would probably be named as doubt, which would be scary. And I think there’s really something …
K: Exactly. Even though doubt is actually an orthodox quality of New Testament Christianity.
K: Yes. Yeah. And not something to be labeled as scary or bad. Right. But a fact of life. Then I think this is where my grandfather, you know, not having any education and just not feeling invited to because if you if you’re standing for doubt, then you’re invited to think things through and think unthinkable thoughts. And he didn’t wanna go there.
H: Right. Well, and I think part of it is the way that religion and spirituality is presented from the top down. If you’re a spiritual leader who says, there are answers, these are the answers.
Everybody who says something else is incorrect, or worse, not saved. You know? That’s different from somebody who’s gonna stand up in front of a room and try to lead a discussion instead of giving a lecture, or gesture toward the great mysteries of life, the world, and everything.
K: Yeah. At some point, I started to feel for my grandfather that he walked around with this burden of seeing everybody who was gonna go to hell unless he intervened. And it was an incredible, incredibly heavy responsibility.
H: The thing about hell and then the thing about sex, it sometimes feels like there’s been … mistakes were made in not keeping the main thing the main thing. And if one’s spiritual life is dictated by fear of hell or fear of sex or maybe just fear …That’s a real missed opportunity.
K: Yeah. Yeah. But I do, you know, when I look at, it seems to me that … you know, the history of Christianity and of denominations is, so much kind of like any given reformer or leader kind of seeing something that has been lost. Right? Something that is not being emphasized that feels core, but then tending to err on the side of making an idol of that, you know, time and again.
H: That’s a really good point. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I’m really gonna be mulling that over, especially as I keep teaching this course that has so much to do with the English reformation. Yeah. Gosh.
Okay. Well, speaking of curiosity, Brandon has another question for you that has to do with curiosity.
B: Krista, confession. My wife Susan and I have this pet peeve. When we’re with friends or with new people that we’ve met, one of the things that will really, it will really rub us the wrong way, is when we are the only people to ask questions about the other folks that we’re with.
And sometimes we might be out at a dinner party, a cocktail party, spend a whole evening with a couple, and neither one of them has asked a single question about our lives. And I guess we’re kind of curious by nature, and we really care about others and wanna know. You know, we wanna know about other people and their lives, and what makes them tick, and you know, what brings them joy, and where their struggles are. And this is something I think we have a certain natural amount of, but I think it’s just such a value of ours that we’ve cultivated it, this curiosity, over time. And I think part of this I learned from you, in fact, over all these years, as we watched or listened to you having such deep curiosity with your guests. And you’re so good at asking questions, and I wonder if you can just reflect on the role of curiosity in your life. Have you always been this curious? And maybe you can reflect a little bit about what do we as humans lose in our lives when we lose curiosity?
H: Another great question. Mhmm.
K: So thank you across the space-time continuum, Brandon. So this is such an interesting way to come at something that I think about a lot. I think that listening and curiosity obviously go hand in hand–real listening. And I actually think it’s a basic social art, but it actually gets trained out of us in this culture because we get, like, we get certain muscles that like hyperflex. Like, we’re taught to have opinions and be able to make an argument and be advocates. Right? We’re … everybody’s trained to be an advocate now. And we’re trained to present ourselves and to represent …
H: Create a personal brand.
K: Yes. But all of that is coming from us. And … I think, so to the question of where I think I actually came to this through a frustration with the absence of it. I think in my family and the world I grew up in, there was very little curiosity. And, somehow I missed it, you know? I always felt like the most important things were not being spoken of and you couldn’t ask about them. And so I think as I grew up, like I was this person who wanted to ask the questions. I wanted to talk about the things that would otherwise go unspoken. But I think what I learned, what I internalized, like what essentially I was taught about listening was just that it was about being quiet while the other person spoke, so that then I could say what I had to say. But the real emphasis is what I would have to say.
H: It’s waiting your turn.
K: You’re waiting your turn. Yeah. And in that sense, being quiet is actually real listening. Generous listening is about, you show up with curiosity. But, really, that cultivation of curiosity is inner work. And because it gets trained out of us, I actually think it’s something that that we– just like Brandon said, we you have to cultivate it. So having cultivated it, then it then it becomes muscle memory. Right. But I also think, you know, I don’t know if people don’t have some curiosity somewhere, but I just think people … because we get trained to have opinions and share things about ourselves. But I sometimes feel like people simply don’t know. Also, because it’s such a hyper-reactive time. It’s … you know, we’re respectful of other people’s privacy in a way. I feel like people are more nervous about asking the wrong question. You know?
I had this interesting experience. It’s also … you know, when I lived in Germany for a long time. And, in German in Germany, the rudest thing you could ask somebody if you just met them is what they do, which is the first question and maybe the only question. Right? So Americans are trained to say, “What do you do?” But then are a little bit scared to go farther than that. And it became this creative challenge in Germany because you couldn’t ask that question, but of course, you wondered about it.
And so you would have to, like, talk about all kinds of other things, and aside, like “In my work in my work as an engineer,” and say, “Oh, you’re an engineer!” Right? Right. Or they’d say something that would kind of make you guess what they do, and then you could do that. But, so it actually, like, made you be cleverly curious.
But, yeah, that’s what I … but I think of curiosity as a moral muscle, you know, because if you–real curiosity makes a lot of other things possible. And I think it’s … there’s a mystery to this too or there’s something, you know, deep and kind of subtle to this, which is, I think that, you know, you can ask a curious-sounding question, but if you’re not actually curious? I mean, like, we can get we can learn how to ask us curious on a question. But if you’re not actually curious, I think we meet each other at a bodily level too. And I think that you will sense that, and then you will make polite conversation, but you won’t go there. You won’t be nothing revelatory will happen. So, you know, I think curiosity–developing curiosity– is kind of inner work. I think that is … in these days, we have so many opinions about other we think we know so much about another person based on who we think they voted for or some identity they have.
And then we think we know everything. And we know very little. But that is a real conversation curiosity-stopper. And curiosity, though, is the thing … real curiosity is the thing that wants to see somebody as complicated and, you know, expects and hopes they will surprise us.
And that we can be, you know, kind of in awe of something that we learn about them that we couldn’t have guessed. We need more of it.
H: Mhmm. Agreed. Firmly agreed. Yeah. Could you tell us a little bit about how you went from this Baptist, Oklahoma upbringing to … I forget if Germany was before or after Yale Divinity School. How did you end up …
K: It was before.
H: That’s what I thought. How did you end up here?
K: Yeah. So, you know, I grew up in that it was just I feel like that Southern Baptist world and that small town I lived in, it was really a contained world and everything made sense. And then when I left to go to college, it’s like, you know, it wasn’t a contained world anymore.
And it I never had a kind of rejection of it or hostility towards it. Okay. Yeah. I never I didn’t become atheist. I just wasn’t sure. It like, it was … that world was nowhere to be seen in the world I entered, and I just kinda put it to one side. It just didn’t feel relevant. Or I wasn’t sure how it was relevant. I mean, you know, I stopped following all the rules for sure. And so that … you know, because the rules had been so central, that was, you know, to some extent, alienating. But then, so then I got interested in … I got really interested in politics. I got really interested in, like, the cold war, which when I look at it now, the cold war was just another canvas for this battle between Christian good and atheist evil.
H: Oh, wow.
K: It really was. I mean, it’s hard to it’s hard now to … if you didn’t live through that time. There was such a moral dimension to it. Right? I mean, Reagan called it the empire of evil. And there was this, you know, it was in those years that the language “under God” made its way into the pledge of allegiance, which children said every day, because a dimension of that, you know, good-versus-evil was, you know, they were atheists, we were religious; Christian. And so I feel like I transferred a lot … you know, directly transferred a lot of that theology. Or it– I felt like I was moving in a familiar moral way.
H: Yeah. The language is the same. Yeah. Yeah.
K: I didn’t know that at the time but looking back. And … But it was secularized, and I went to Berlin and, you know, it was such a big social experiment, that division of the world of people, you know, divided into these competing economies and systems and worldviews. And then I was, you know, I was working, I mean … I think I was still kind of operating also, like, on, like, what do we do to save the world? You know? And nuclear weapons were the things that were … they were the great existential threat. And so I ended up working with diplomats in this with the state department, and with I worked with this ambassador who was a nuclear arms expert. And I end up, like, sitting around these tables where they’re, like, moving these missiles around on a map of Europe, and it felt like that should be life and death. And they were so completely disinterested in humanity.
H: Oh my gosh.
K: I mean, they were … you know, it’s this thing we’re talking about and how you make an idol of what where, you know, with you like, the how we orient is so important, so defining, and it’s so easy to orient to get lost. Yeah.
H: Well and there’s, like, an implicit answer to what does humanity mean at … in a room like that.
K: Yeah. It was really but it … well, it was a room full of huge egos and power plays. Yeah. And, and then on the ground, I’m, like, having this, you know, moving experience of seeing people, especially on the Eastern side of the wall, like craft lights of dignity with not–with terribly raw materials. And then kind of that brought me back to this the, in some ways, the world of my childhood and a faith that was precisely about what does it mean to craft a life of dignity and meaning, and worthiness. And so there was just such a disconnect between that experience on the ground and the experience up high, and I left there really confused. I didn’t … I was so fluent in German, and I could have had a conversation with, you know, a president about nuclear arms in German. But I did not have a–I went to church once, because the church became a center of political resistance in East Germany as the wall was about to fall. But I you know, there was no religious dimension to my life. There was very secularized.
But when I left, I just … I was so, like, morally confused by this experience and also really feeling like I needed to know what my next move was. And it looked obvious that I should pursue this political path because I had such great networks and great credentials. You know, I had a great resume to do that. And, but … it … I nothing in me wanted to go back to Washington and keep doing that. And so I, you know, I kinda started having a spiritual awakening. I just got quiet. I started praying, not calling it praying at first, and ended up moving to England, and getting married. I mean, these are–this was all in a very short time, but a whole long story, which I won’t tell here. And my husband was–had studied theology, and so he had this whole library of theological books. And I was and so getting into that, and, like, my mind was engaged in a way that my mind had never been engaged when I was growing up. So all of that, and then we ended up coming to Yale Divinity School together.
H: Oh my gosh. Yeah. Do you feel like there was something you were looking for when you came here?
K: First of all, I started feeling religious again. Right? And looking for religion in the world and really, I was very, at this point, really disillusioned with this political, geopolitical process. I just I had lost my faith in that as a place that was about saving anything or really about life, really about life and death, even though the nuclear weapons at some, you know, literal level threatened life and death. So I start coming back to religion, you know, not just in myself but in the world and but I you know, finding that I could engage my mind that the, you know, that the life of the mind was involved, there’s an intellectual as well as a spiritual component. I really needed that. And I needed to know that this that the complexity of the world as I had experienced could be addressed. And so I think that’s why I came to divinity school. I didn’t think I was gonna be ordained. I thought, you know, maybe I’ll get there, but it was, like, ten minutes–I knew that’s not why I was here. But it absolutely you know, it was thrilling. It was thrilling. And then I came out, and I was so … I was like, where is–where is all of this inheritance, human … this –what this part of the human enterprise has contributed, where is this in our civic imagination? Like, in our collective imagination? In our collective imagination.
H: Nobody’s accessing it outside the divinity school.
K: Nobody’s accessing it. And also, they’re not accessing it in church … In large part.
H: Right. Enter …Krista Tippett. So that I mean, that’s kind of the origin story.
K: Yeah. And then it was … but it was, you know, I had–I got pregnant when I was at divinity school, which wasn’t in the five-year plan. And, you know, so I’m, like, you know, the … I … was it …I graduated in ‘94, but it was, you know, six years before I was really pitching this and really? Starting to do it. Yeah. Because for a while, I had the idea. I mean, so I’m mulling all this over. Right? I come out with an MDiv that qualifies me to do nothing. Because I wasn’t ordained …
H: Right. Because I wasn’t -I think to myself, like, if I had grown up in a different context where I was really, like, pushed to think about my career, I’m not sure I would have been, like, wow, theology. That’s gonna be the bills.
K: Well, so what I ended up, you know, because you if, you know, there are people who go into the academy and there are people who get ordained. And then, and I think what happens a lot of times is people who’ve had some kind of career before, that’s still your profession if you’re not ordained or you’re not heading to scholarship. So that’s kinda what happened. I ended up doing things that were more related to my Journalism. Journalism, my international stuff. But then I was … there was an amazing–there’s an amazing benediction monastery in Minnesota, in the middle of Minnesota where I landed. And these monks had been just leaders in liturgical reform and ecumenical movement when that was a revolutionary thing. And, you know, they were brilliant and creative. And so they had an ecumenical institute, which was really impressive. And I always say my favorite definition of ecumenism was from this Paulist priest who was a really formative figure there, a brilliant guy. And, he said ecumenism is that which if we had a better word for, we would have more of.
H: It’s true.
K: Because it’s such a terrible word. I mean, I actually think interfaith also is just kind of dry and clinical. I mean, the experience of these things is not. But the language just … So it doesn’t sound exciting to founded an ecumenical institute, but it was a really exciting place. And, and that was kind of a gateway to getting back into bringing these parts of myself together.
H: Wow. Yeah. So how did I mean, how did you end up where you are now? Is it like, looking back, does it feel like a series of accidents, or does it feel like you were really strategic and–or maybe like a … combo?
K: I wouldn’t say accidents, but it feels you know, when I like …the credentialing you read. You know, to me, it was a long, plodding, you know, one foot in front of the other. If things went wrong sometimes, the things that went wrong, you know, pointed in the right direction. There was just I had to really struggle and fight to make this happen. I think that this– that in some ways, the needing to struggle and fight made me that much fiercer.
H: That makes sense.
K: I had a … you know, if I hadn’t been able to raise money, I it wouldn’t have happened. Yeah. But I found that I could do that. And, but it was very slow. To me, it was very slow. I think you know, now you, like, read those credentials and it looks like this great accomplishment, but it was just, you know, it was a really messy, not easy for a lot of the time process.
H: I mean, it’s heartening to hear in an age of, like, TikTok and overnight fame and instant gratification. It feels like … I think for a lot of spiritual leaders, whether they be professors or priests or laypeople or mothers or whatever. Like, it … I think there’s an expectation that if you try something and it doesn’t immediately succeed then it was a failure.
K: Yeah. And that’s just terrible because that’s not how time works. It’s not how life works. It’s not how change happens. And yeah. I feel now, again, all of this in hindsight, I look at it and I feel like what has been built has a lot that’s enduring to it. And I think that has to do with building in slow time, even when it was slower than I wanted it to be. You know? I don’t know what’s enduring about sudden TikTok fame. I mean, I guess we’ll see. But that’s the question.
H: That’s yeah. It’s a really good point. So I’m thinking back to that feeling of existential threat in the Cold War. And the last episode of On Being that I listened to was with Adrienne Maree Brown. And you were talking about the existential threat that global warming has kind of posed. And I think a lot of people are feeling that deeply and spiritually, and possibly quietly. It doesn’t always feel like there’s a good outlet for that. I’m not sure people totally know how to feel those feelings because they’re so big. But there is a spiritual dimension of this reality that’s largely spoken about in geopolitical terms. And I just … how are you processing this moment that we live in? And are there spiritual questions that are coming up for you either about that or about other things?
K: Yeah. Well, I like it that you start with the ecological because I … there are a lot of things we could name and point at that are stressful right now.
H: Yeah. We were just talking about polycrisis. Yeah.
K: Polycrisis. But I believe that the, you know, the biggest, the underlying stressor now, which is really below the level of consciousness, is that our … in our bodies, and I kind of feel like this is more acute for the young, for people being born into this world that are you know–we’re not, as much as we’ve pretended, especially for the last few hundred years, that we’re separate, you know, I mean, how Genesis was interpreted as “dominate and subdue,” we are part of this distressed planet. We … our body, we’re, you know, at a cellular level. And I think we are feeling the distress of, you know, the ground we stand on, the air we breathe, and that that’s making everything else worse. And I think that that distress, like that just our distressed nervous systems may in fact be what underlies how we’ve made chaos of politics and chaos of education.
And of course, the distress of the planet, the distress of the ground we stand on, the air we breathe, is sending us into our fear place. Right? And if you, you know, there are all kinds of ways to analyze what’s going on. But one way is to look at, basically, our collective response to ecological crisis as classic fear response. So you–we’re denying, we’re fighting, and we’re getting paralyzed. That’s, like, the human condition level of our life together.
So I guess what I’m trying to ask and focus on is that level, like, what would happen if we actually addressed fear, you know, rather than issues? Like the issues are symptoms. The fights are symptoms. And the fear is in our bodies and, but we are so word and argument oriented. You know, facts are problematic because our distress is not a level of rationality. And it’s not cognitive. And facts are flimsy. And I think for a long time, in this culture, we have con-we have conflated facts with truth. But truth–facts, first of all, have never been able to convey all kinds of truth, which you know at divinity school. But also, truth is felt in human bodies and hearts. And there’s work, you know, there’s a statement of fact and then there’s how it lands inside a human being. Whether it lands as truth, whether it lands as trustworthy or suspicious, you know, which it … you know, the way people take in facts as truth has to do with whether they feel like the person delivering the facts actually cares about them or sees them. And we don’t attend to that as real history. And so we end up having these dueling facts and absolutely no possibility of resolution in that way.
H: Gosh. Just yes. Yes. I so …
K: But on the other hand, like so it doesn’t like, what I just said doesn’t make anything simpler. But I feel like it gives another angle in. That’s right. So what do we do? It’s do we keep fighting, or do we say, are we are we working with symptoms? How about if we work with the cause?
H: Right. Well, it it’s one of those things that feels so clear if you’re trying to have a discussion with a toddler and the toddler is unregulated.
K: Yeah. And we’re all unregulated right now. Right. Exactly. Exactly. And we’re throwing temper tantrums.
H: Right. And there’s a mysterious truth larger than ourselves, larger than our propositional knowledge that’s at war. And I think we’re … yeah. Unregulated is what I wanna say. Maybe spiritually, emotionally. Yeah. Like, physically, we’re out of touch with the world around us.
K: And I’m one of the things I mean, I ended up talking about it here in these last couple days. I’m just one of the things I think, you know, again, we make everything so complicated.
Like, I actually think the first thing, if this is true, which I believe it is, the first thing we get to do is extend–first of all, we get to like, we have to name this. There’s something actually calming about naming our reality even if it’s a distressing reality, like, literally calming in our bodies. So I think we … you know, naming this, oh, we’re dysregulated. I’m dysregulated. Of course, depending on how solid the ground is beneath your feet, you’re more or less so. But I don’t think that anybody’s immune. And I do think that those of us who have more solid ground have a responsibility to be that much more generous. You know, that much more compassionate. But I think the first move is to first, like, say this out loud and just get really gentle and tender with yourself.
And then if you can get tender with yourself, then I think you start to be able to get more tender with others and maybe start ignoring words and actions that just set you off and want you make you hate them even though you don’t need them. And try to see the distressed humanity behind it and maybe be present to that. Find a way to be present to that.
H: I mean, I’m reminded of a bunch of things. My nerdy theological brain is like, yes. Yes. This is Kierkegaard saying that anxiety is the source of all of our …
K: Yes. Exactly.
H: Yes. Damaging behaviors. And then I’m thinking of TS Eliot’s four quartets, distracted with distracted by distraction with distraction or something like that. We’re just so far oftentimes from, like, the center, the heartbeat, yeah, of everything. And as I’m sitting here thinking, like, well, what can we do? I think maybe the answer is, like, breathe.
K: Yeah. Exactly. Slow down.
H: Pay attention to the breathing. Do something that may or may not be called prayer.
K: Yeah. Right. And that’s a t… hat’s a thing. We have such an action, such a “do” mentality, and that and that just keeps us on high alert and distressed.
H: Mhmm. Yeah. And I think in addition to regulating ourselves, it’s being curious about the other rather than …
K: Yes. Right. You’re right. So then I think if you get calm in yourself and you start to get some tenderness to yourself and you start to feel some tenderness towards others, then that becomes a seedbed for curiosity. And that opens up all kinds of possibility for you to be a healing force. And also to shift the dynamic.
H: And I think motivated by love, instead of fear. And that’s where the curiosity is coming from in a best-case scenario. If you were kind of starting your … if you were graduating right now from Yale Divinity School, do you think you would go out and do the same thing? Would it be the same project?
K: Somebody asked me a similar question yesterday. I haven’t thought about … I mean, I … no. I don’t. I don’t I don’t think I’d go to public radio. You know? Back then, public radio just looked to me like a place where you could have this kind of intelligent, imagination-opening conversation. And, you know, public radio is having some of this is having its own version of the turmoil that media organizations are having. So, you know, I don’t think I would have felt that it was kind of the refuge that it seemed in the nineties. Podcasting didn’t exist.
So I’d probably be thinking about a podcast, but podcasting is such a wild west too. Right? And, you know, I mean, the thing is to start to be heard in the ’90s, pre-podcasting, if you cared about audio, which I just always was such an audio person, you needed to get into one of these big gatekeepers. Right? Like, the only way I could get out there or have these conversations on air was to get inside a kind of legacy organization. \It was a very restricted entry.
H: Nobody’s standing there in their garage …
K: Even once I got in, you know, it was years and years kind of getting on the air weekly and raising the money. And yeah. So podcasting on the one hand is very democratic, and you can do it, and we could just decide to push pause right now and start a whole new podcast right here. But, you know, the gatekeepers distributed. And because it was rare, you would get heard.
H: You would automatically get the audience.
K: Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, it’s … I think it’s daunting, starting a podcast, for different reasons. You know, also, what’s so different–and this I just point this out to people. I mean, it’s another source of … not just it’s like the pace of change in general is so destabilizing for us. We’re not set up for this pace of our technologies or the pace of change. The scale of change, all it’s all of a sudden, you know, to be the generation of our species that is not just, like, inhabiting this digital world, but redefining marriage and family and gender, you know, and, like and I think …
H: It seems like most things are up in the air.
K: Yes. And things are up in the air that nobody ever imagined could be up in the air. That’s what people and there’s no memory of that for new generations. Like, this is what they’re navigating. But it’s profoundly destabilizing. I mean, you know, good change is destabilizing. Yeah. But it’s destabilizing. And, you know, part of wanting to have some tenderness is, and I understand if you’re, you know, people are endangered now and that’s not that’s not what I’m not talking about being tender towards somebody who’s endangering you. But on the other hand, just having a sense of the reality that these kinds of change shifts are going to be stressful, and different people are gonna be able to come to them at different paces. And that’s just true. And that’s not about them being stupid or necessarily cruel and hateful. It’s just … it’s just that change is not something that we’re physically or that we’re physically you know, we’re … we adapt at different stages. This is seismic shifts that’s happening. And then there’s all kinds of seismic shifts all at once. Yeah. Yeah.
H: And kind of to go back to the quick technology side of things, which is one of these big shifts I think we’re undergoing. You know, we had down to ask you about the middle of the night spiritual questions that are keeping you up. And that’s something I … it’s language I use with my students too, like, the two AM questions. Theology class is the place, if there is ever a place to bring those two AM questions with you in your body. Kind of let it be vulnerable. We can hold these questions together if there’s ever a place to hash them out, it’s theology class. Yeah. But I was reflecting on even this language of the middle of the night, keeping you up at night question because I think a lot of us now are in bed on social media, until we are passed out. There’s actually no room. Like, we’ve squeezed out the 2AM questions. And I’m kind of back to the TS Eliot. But, I mean, even TS Eliot is imagining, like … It’s when the tube stops, and everything goes dark for a second. Like, that’s a weird moment.
K: During … I used to be a great you know, for me, it was more like 3 or 4AM. You know, waking up in the middle of the night with just something gnawing, and not being able to turn my brain off. But during pandemic, I got so overloaded. But I had to … like, I stopped–you know, I used to have NPR on twenty-four/seven. This is my kids’–the background of their childhood. But I knew that to stay sane, I couldn’t take in all that much at any given time. Right?
And I … that I actually had to create some boundaries between myself and the bad news, not because I didn’t care, but because it would just overwhelm me.
H: Yeah. It’s almost like a survival tactic at this point.
K: And so I started sleeping. I mean, I also learned that if I didn’t … I had to get outside every day. I exercise every day. I had to go to bed at a certain time. But, like, I sleep because I – if I … that 3AM worrying would just be … would just slam me. It would be out of control.
There’s just too much. It’s not sustainable. And I kinda feel like people are… I don’t think that’s unusual. I mean, people might have different ways of describing how they handled it or whatever.
H: But you’re right.
K: Or even exhausting yourself online as a way to not, because you can’t take it all in. But I think, you know, I wanna circle back because your question was about, what I would do differently. And maybe this also gets at the 2AM question. Because the … another change that I find that’s paradoxical of, like, at the same time that we’re navigating all this existential territory collectively and in our personal lives, you know, between the time I graduated from Yale Divinity School in 1994 and now, religious identity has just, is just rapidly falling away. Right?
And these inherited religious identities. I don’t know if the n o n e s language had been coined yet in ‘94. And, you know, I remember in the early 2000s when I first started the show, that’s the I think that’s when those Pew polls started coming out. And at that time, it was, like, much smaller percentages, you know? I mean, it wasn’t– it’s now, I don’t know what it is. Thirty, forty, 50 percent under 30. It was yeah. I remember when it was, like, 10%, 20 %.
It’s been this rapid–again, this is a massive shift. I mean, you–of course, Northern and Western Europe have been secularized for a while, but I think it’s also different because those places have state religions. And yet, a lot of the values of the Christian backbone are absorbed into the government and into human rights. You know? All international human rights is all based on, like, Christian principles. And so I feel like there’s a way in which they, like, they’ve retained some of the like, the values are more embedded. And here we have, like … Everybody goes to church, but our government, you know, could not look more secular in its values. And really kind of pretty … our laws and our structures are very dehumanizing. That’s really … It’s partly behind the, you know, support for tearing it all down. You know? So it’s complex.
H: It is.
K: But in this country, you know … still thirty years ago, I think most people, like, inherited some religious identity. It was starting to break down. But that’s huge. To go in thirty from twenty, thirty years to most people having some identification with a religious identity to most people not … Or not having one that is very meaningful. And then just at the moment where we need the things that these traditions have to teach us at their best, right?
And I think my question for this world moving forward is I mean, we’re not gonna go back to that. We’re not gonna go back to people being born into something. And of course, you know, those experiences weren’t always good. And sometimes they were catastrophic. But I think for most people, even if they were, you know, bad, they were just, you know, they were often just boring. But they gave people something to work with. Yes. Like there was some kind of moral formation, there was some kind of moral vocabulary, there’s some sense of the place of ritual. So my question is, this is part of … it’s a massive part of the human enterprise. It is the place that has cultivated certain practices and virtues that we desperately need now. So how do we, like, respectfully like, how do those … how do the traditions open up to the world’s pain? In a new way without … and I’m not you know, I’m really … I’m very critical of fluffy, superficial spirituality or, you know, what looks like appropriation. I’m not interested in that. So I don’t like, I don’t know. This is a big question. How do we do this right? How do we avail ourselves, and how do I think that people who really reside in these traditions find ways to open up their riches more generously to the world without sacrificing something.
H: Yeah. That’s the perfect question. Yeah. That’s the perfect question. And I think especially for this community of listeners who are either already in positions of leadership or will likely end up in positions of ecclesial leadership. That’s the question. And I think it has to go beyond what do the people in this room need, whether that room is a classroom or a parish or a house even. It’s … how do we share the riches of these traditions without using them to do violence to others or exclude others.
K: Yeah. Or completely detaching them from their bearings. Yeah. Right? I mean, you know, I was talking yesterday in a class, in the life worthwhile class, and you’re studying Buddhism. And, you know, Buddhism is … it’s pretty stark there in the sense that there’s, you know, there’s a cosmology. There’s this whole world of practice and many worlds of practice, and then there’s meditation, which practitioners themselves, I think, have very fruitfully offered up to humanity. But on the other hand, there’s a way in which it gets totally extracted from its … from its heart and its spirit, and it becomes a productivity tool.
H: That’s interesting.
K: It gets totally removed from its spiritual context
H: A productivity tool. Yes. This is another one of my gripes that I … This is … it’s a hill. It’s a hill for me where I’m like, we are not just utilitarian beings!
K: Yeah. And so, like, you can do that with deep spiritual practice, and that’s not what should happen. That’s not the answer.
H: Brandon has stories of being asked to go to companies to give them the spiritual tools to then be happier, more productive employees. And he’s like, oh Yeah. God.
K: Yeah. That’s … I told this story in this class of, Sharon Salzberg, who’s one of the, you know, one of the Westerners, actually, mostly young Jewish people who went to India and Thailand and Burma in the sixties and then brought back, kind of offered up Buddhism to Western people. And she tells this story about being at this event in Silicon Valley, and, you know, they were they were doing … she was, you know, presenting or leading meditation or something, and this and this, like, tech leader, you know, said sat down with her and said, this thing you have is amazing. Right? Meditation, mindfulness, this is amazing. But you gotta drop the suffering talk.
H: Like, this is not gonna sell.
K: Bad, Brandon. Yeah.
H: Oh my goodness. Wow. Well, I wanna be sure to ask you one final question, and it’s a question that we hold dear. And it’s a question of what brings you hope in light of all these things we’ve been talking about.
K: Yeah. Well, I would say hope is a muscle I have cultivated. And it’s not optimism, and it’s not idealism, and it’s not any kind of simple belief that everything will turn out alright. But I think what I … I’ve been very inspired. I think that, you know, I’ve looked for … I’ve looked for people who are wise. And I’ve and I’ve interviewed a number of wise people who’ve really shifted the world on its axis, you know, people like Desmond Tutu or Thich Nhat Hanh, and Wangari Maathai and, you know, and in quieter ways, you know, other people. They all are hopeful.
But what I’ve … how I understand how that hope works, which really has a meaningful effect on the world, is, it’s like I think hope, muscular hope, is in some ways an act of imagination or the power of human imagination to insist that things don’t have to be the way they are. Right? To, like, be told this is reality and–but these people say, I’m just not gonna accept that. And, actually, that’s the only way. That is always there when anything is built in human society, when something is changed, when there’s, you know, genuine progress or transformation. Some people, you know, throw their lives behind something that everybody else can’t see in the beginning. And so it’s an act of imagination with real world consequences. You know? So you believe in something. You believe that something is possible or that, you know, that that what you’re being told must be, does not have to be, and then and then you throw your life behind that conviction.
I qualify that now in our world of individualism. I think, you know, what I what a wrong move we make then still, I think, is to put people like that up on pedestals and see them as heroes and lone individuals. I think that in this time where we have all these civilizational like, we’re all facing issues that are both civilizational and intimate. And we that we can’t, I don’t think that in the traditions, the–a virtue like hope is or anything is meant to be carried alone. Right? Love, like, what we’ve done with privatizing love, you know, that’s not how it works. And so I think it’s making that move in yourself and then surrounding yourself with people who can help you carry that and who can carry that for you on the days when you can’t feel it. It’s not really a feeling. So that …so I have, I live in hope. But having said that, I’m … I direct my hope where it is reasonable. I’m not especially hopeful about our entire political process. I and I, you know, I can say that, and some people say, well, that’s reckless. You know, it’s like–it’s such a dangerous moment. Well, there are people who are called to pay attention to that. You know? I’m not called to attend to that. And I am not very hopeful. I’m not gonna throw a lot of energy in that direction in any place on that spectrum. But I do …you know, we live in a time where there’s a lot of destruction and that means there’s a lot breaking. There’s a lot that was already breaking. There’s a lot that was already not serving us. Now we have sledgehammers and wrecking balls everywhere, which is gonna have terrible consequences for human beings who are gonna be on the wrong side of all that. So some of us are gonna be called to be there for them.
What I also know in human life is that where there is death, you know, life comes in, where there is destruction. There’s … I mean, all the things that are breaking, that were breaking already, that are being broken on the other side of this. And even through it, like, that, it’s space for creating something new. And so I, you know, I tend to kind of take this generational view of time, which I think is more of a biblical view of time. It’s not–it’s not an every-four-years view of time Which is really messing with people’s minds. And I do think that the social creativity is happening all over the place, but people feel very alone with it. So that’s what I kind of wanna say.
Like, how can I … how can I be present to people feeling like they’re more of a landscape, seeing that they’re not alone? But I just think in any given community, in any given, you know, discipline, whether it’s the academy or law or medicine or, you know, a school, like, a lot first grade teachers are social creatives right now. You have people who are saying, what I’ve been given to work with is so flawed, but I’m gonna make something new. And then I think the question is, how do we connect that up? Like, how do people not be alone with it? How do we share what we’re learning?
H: It’s imagining. It’s imagining together.
K: And it’s sharing … it’s like finding ways to, you know, I think, like, podcasting actually is like community radio. But not for a geographic community, but for a community of, you know, lay leaders or people in a sphere, but they may be far flung. So that’s actually one of the beautiful things I think about podcasting. So that’s where I place my hope.
H: We’re across time and space in all 50 states plus, like, 50-plus countries. Right now.
K: Exactly. I mean, it’s just amazing.
H: Okay. Yeah. I have been terrible at keeping track of time because I’ve been so in the moment. Could you share your poem?
K: My poem? Okay. Yes. So, you know, again, like, it for me, it’s a little bit disorienting that people see me as being such a success story. Because, again, for me, it’s like it’s been a long hard one foot after the other. Episode after the other. And so on my fortieth birthday, which was 11/09/1960, the wall came down on my birthday, which is very sweet. I was in the middle of creating some pilots, and I’d been assigned these producers really, it’s like they so to such a degree, didn’t understand what I was trying to do that I felt like they were gonna sabotage it. Oh, wow. And I was just meeting resistance everywhere. And I was pretty sure I … on that day, I read this poem by Rilke, which I’m gonna read to you. And I’ve … I like basically; I was sitting in a coffee shop. I don’t know how I had this, but I basically made peace with the fact that this just wasn’t gonna work, that I just wasn’t gonna be able to pull it off. But this poem helped me. I decided it’s not gonna happen, but I’m gonna see it all the way through. I’m gonna take it as I felt like my calling is to take it, as far as I can, and it will have been time well spent. Yeah. And I may not understand why now, but, you know, somehow, this is what I’m supposed to be doing, even if it’s not gonna be a success. So this is the poem that really helped me. And then, of course, you know, I did; I kept going, and then it kept going.
So, by Rainer Maria Rilke. This is from the Book of Hours, and this is the translation of Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows, and it’s just the only translation I would read.
God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear.
You sent out beyond your recall, Go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. Flare up like flame and make big shadows I can move in. Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.
H: Just keep going.
K: Yeah. So this and also, like, “make big shadows I can move in.” “No feeling is final.”
I mean, I have, like, this poem has been my friend all these years. Wow.
H: Well, I’m glad it’s our friend now too. What a pleasure. Thanks so much. And Brandon has a word of thanks too, you won’t be surprised to hear.
B: Okay. Well, Krista, thank you so much for, being with us here at the Leaders Way podcast. There are no words to express our gratitude. Again, I wish that I could have been there, but I’m sure you’ve had a rich amazing conversation with the wonderful and brilliant Dr. Hannah Black. I just wanna thank you, for being such a gift to the world. I think there are probably moments where we all wonder if what we really do in the world matters. And for me, and for my family, and for my children, I just wanna say what you do has mattered so much to us. It’s been so vitally important. And you’re like, a fifth member of the family, and I look forward to sometime in the future when I’m not in a monastery that our paths can cross, and I can thank you in person.
K: Oh. Oh. Well, thank you.
H: Thank you! Thanks for listening to the Leaders Way podcast. You can learn more about this episode at berkleydivinity.yale.edu/podcast. Follow along with us on Instagram at theleadersway.podcast.
B: And you can rate and review us on your podcast app and be sure to hit follow, so you never miss an episode. And if you’d like this episode, please share it with a friend.
H: Until next time.
B: Peace be with you.