Overall Favorite Books of 2016
13.
BECOMING WISE
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“Words are events, they do things, change
things,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her
beautiful meditation on the
power and magic of real human conversation. “They
transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify
it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.” Hardly
anyone in our time has been a greater amplifier of spirits than longtime
journalist, On
Being host, and patron saint of nuance Krista
Tippett — a modern-day Simone
Weil who has been fusing spiritual life and
secular culture with remarkable virtuosity through her conversations with
physicists and poets, neuroscientists and novelists, biologists and Benedictine
monks, united by the quality of heart and mind that Einstein so beautifully
termed “spiritual genius.”
In her interviews with the great spiritual
geniuses of our time, Tippett has cultivated a rare space for reflection and
redemption amid our reactionary culture — a space framed by her generous
questions exploring the life of meaning. In Becoming
Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living, Tippett distills more than a decade of
these conversations across disciplines and denominations into a wellspring of
wisdom on the most elemental questions of being human — questions about
happiness, morality, justice, wellbeing, and love — reanimated with a fresh
vitality of insight.
At the core of Tippett’s inquiry is the
notion virtue — not in the limiting, prescriptive sense with which scripture
has imbued it, but in the expansive, empowering sense of a psychological,
emotional, and spiritual technology that allows us to first fully inhabit, then
conscientiously close the gap between who we are and who we aspire to be.
She explores five primary fertilizers of
virtue: words — the language we use to tell the stories we tell about who we
are and how the world works; flesh — the body as the birthplace of every
virtue, rooted in the idea that “how we inhabit our senses tests the mettle of
our souls”; love — a word so overused that it has been emptied of meaning yet
one that gives meaning to our existence, both in our most private selves and in
the fabric of public life; faith — Tippett left a successful career as a
political journalist in divided Berlin in the 1980s to study theology not in
order to be ordained but in order to question power structures and examine the
grounds of moral imagination through the spiritual wisdom of the ages; and hope
— an orientation of the mind and spirit predicated not on the blinders of
optimism but on a lucid lens on the possible furnished by an active,
unflinching reach for it.
Tippett, who has spent more than a
decade cross-pollinating
spirituality, science, and the human spirit and
was awarded the National Humanities Medal for it, considers the raw material of
her work — the power of questions “as social art and civic tools”:
If I’ve learned nothing else, I’ve
learned this: a question is a powerful thing, a mighty use of words. Questions
elicit answers in their likeness. Answers mirror the questions they rise, or
fall, to meet. So while a simple question can be precisely what’s needed to
drive to the heart of the matter, it’s hard to meet a simplistic question
with anything but a simplistic answer. It’s hard to transcend a combative
question. But it’s hard to resist a generous question. We all have it in us to
formulate questions that invite honesty, dignity, and revelation. There is
something redemptive and life-giving about asking better questions.
BRAIN PICKINGS
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