The One You Feed - Krista Tippett (On Being)

Episode Date: July 20, 2014

This week on The One You Feed we have Krista Tippett from On Being.  In This Interview Krista and I Discuss...The One You Feed parable.How modern news feeds our bad wolf.How science and religion ask different questions.How modern society looks for the most polarizing and strident views.Listening as a spiritual virtue.Being open to be surprised and amazed.Not needing to have the answers.Loving the questions themselves.Paradox and ambiguity.A reverence for mystery.Arriving at some of the best places in our lives through mistakes.Depression as a black pandoras box.The things that go wrong for us become part of our gifts to the world.We become great not in spite of the hardships but because of them.The path to spiritual genius is through being fully human.Krista's definition of spirituality- the inner work that accompanies our outer lives.Humor as a virtue.How she has never met a wise person who does not laugh often.Krista Tippett LinksOn Being homepageOn Being on TwitterRead Krista's books Some of our most popular interviews you might also enjoy:Kino MacGregorStrand of OaksMike Scott of the WaterboysTodd Henry- author of Die EmptyRandy Scott HydeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The reality of life is that you get to a lot of the places you wanted to be or you were meant to be but you would never have known it through things that went wrong. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.

But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden and together our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to the show. Our guest this week is Krista Tippett, host of On Being, the Peabody Award-winning public radio show and podcast. On Being opens up the animating questions at the center of human life. What does it mean to be human, and how do we want to live? Krista is also the author of Speaking of Faith, Why Religion Matters, and Einstein's God, Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit. Here's the interview. Hi, Krista. Welcome to the show. I'm glad to be with you. Yeah, thanks so much. I'm really excited to have you on. Your show On Being is one of my favorites, and certainly one of the things that I looked to as we started this show, something that I was hoping to aspire towards. So thanks for the great example. Thank you. It means a lot.

So our podcast is based on the parable of the two wolves where there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson and he says, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks and he says, Grandfather, well, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, first of all, I love that parable, and I'm trying to remember when I first heard it. I mean, I think a few people have shared it with me, and actually when I saw your podcast starting, I thought, wow, what a great title, because it's a wonderful image. And I guess if I think about it in terms of the work I do in public radio and as a journalist and with a background in journalism, I'm aware that the way we in the West defined news in the late 20th century, which was essentially, you know,

the extraordinary thing that happened today, and then generally turned out to be the extraordinarily terrible thing that happened today. Because we've lived in this culture where we are bombarded by this ever-increasing mass of information and news and bad news and the same bad news repeated over and over again, we don't internalize it as extraordinary. We start to internalize as what goes wrong as the norm. And, you know, and that the effect of the way we do news and information is actually to demoralize us and to paralyze us. And, you know, you want to feel compassion, you want to care, and people do feel such anguish and such a desire to be involved in their communities and in making a more humane world. But what comes at us through journalism often engenders exactly the wrong kind of effect. You just shut down and you say, you know, I'm going to take care of my family.

I'm going to do the best I can. I cannot help. And that's wrong. And it's bad for us. And so one of the ways I think about my work and my show is that I try to look for, I want to say, not just good stories, but a fuller story. The whole story of what it means to be human in the 21st century has so much that is thrilling and yes, frightening, but so many ways that we can and must meet the challenges and the questions of our age. And so I try to draw out voices who bring that to the floor. And, you know, not making things simpler, but making things listenable and finding human ways in to wrap our minds around this incredible world we live in. So I guess I'm feeding the good wolf in that sense. Yeah. One of the things that your show is particularly known for is trying to, or at least my perspective, is trying to add a civilized voice to the discussions between science and religion. And you refer to those two things as not necessarily giving contradictory answers to questions, but asking different questions. Could you elaborate maybe a little bit more on that? Yes. And I mean, this is another one of the, this is a form that we're so used to, but that's really gotten us into trouble is that we always set up, we set up

everything to be a debate and we set up competing answers to duke it out. And we draw out the most strident voices on either side of those competing answers. But in fact, when you apply that method and that kind of way of thinking to the role of science in human society and the role of religion in human society, it's a complete distortion of the way these disciplines have worked across time and the way they actually coexist and are in relationship in our lives in so many ways that we think about and that we never think about. it's actually not true most of the time that the way it works is not that you would present one question and that science would give one answer and religion would give another. I mean, I suppose the only question like that, you know, if you wanted to be simplistic about it would be if you ask the question, is there a God? But even so many of the scientists I know would say that it would be unempirical to state categorically

that there is no God. And really, that's not such an interesting question. There's so many amazing things that both science and religion are looking at. And yes, when that happens, what they're doing is looking at something like, you know, what it means to be human, where we come from, where we're going, these great existential questions, these great existential kind of challenges. And science and religion probe these things in completely different ways. And so much of the time, I actually find their different questioning, their different lines of questioning and their different answers to be complimentary, at least to be to me that we realign the way we talk about

this in public with our real intuition and experience. Yeah, our public discourse is not good around that topic, really, or most topics at this point, so. Yeah, that's right, yeah. You mentioned listening as a spiritual technology. So tell us more about the role that, what you mean by that and the role that listening has played in your life and your own spiritual growth. spiritual technology, I mean that it is one of these very essential ways. It's kind of an ordinary everyday virtue, but it's an essential way that we can reach across the mystery of the other. And there aren't many things that we do in our lives that are more important than that. And it can be with our own children or parents, or it can be with that stranger or that very different other in our community or in our world. And in the world we live in now, you know, we are in very real ways interdependent with strangers,

you know, with strangers across the city and strangers across the globe. You know, it's strangers across the city and strangers across the globe. And so listening is this absolutely essential tool that we need to cultivate to live into that gracefully, to live into the reality of our time. I do believe that listening is a spiritual virtue. I think it's something that we have to kind of relearn. We live in a very noisy, busy world and much of that is not bad. It is our reality. Much of that is exciting and full of possibility. But it does force us us if we want to become better listeners to create spaces, um, where real listening can happen. And, you know, listening is not, um, just about being quiet while the other person takes their turn speaking, which is kind of what we've turned it into. Um, listening is about presence. It's about really, really being present. Um, it's about all kinds of wonderful things like being open to be surprised, being open to be amazed. Um, it's also about some frightening things like being vulnerable. I mean, if you really go into an encounter or a conversation with a real intention to listen, you have to open yourself.

And you don't have to set your personality aside or your convictions aside. You know, those are part of you as the person who's present taking that in. But you do have to be open to soften. And in a sense, you have to open to be changed. At least, again, not in necessarily giving up who you are, but making room in who you are and in your sense of the world for the integrity of these other words and this other person. So listening in that sense is a very basic tool, but it's transformative. It's very challenging. I mean, I don't think many of us are very good at it. We had a guest on, Rosalind Wiseman, who's done a lot of work with teenagers, young boys, young girls,

and she describes, I'm not going to get it exactly right, but you alluded to it there, listening is going into a conversation with the openness to be changed. Yeah. At least having your mind open to that idea, whereas a lot of conversation, I think, very much is, I'm going to listen to you, then I'm going to make my point, and then... Yeah, and really listening, you're not listening, you're thinking all the time about what you're going to say next, right? And here's the thing, that's what we've been trained to do, right? Of course, we're not, many of us aren't good

listeners, because it's not a skill that has been cultivated, right? I mean, neuroscience is on our side here because it says that we actually all can keep learning and changing across the span of our lifetimes. But the downside of that is it says you have to practice. You know, the ways you want to change, you have to practice. It's like throwing a ball. You get better at it by practicing it. And if we want to become better listeners as individuals and as a culture, we have to practice it. How do you listen while you're doing an interview? Because I find that to be one of the challenging things is I'm trying to listen and I'm also thinking about where the conversation is going and you're very good at what you do. How do you approach that?

Well, I mean, one thing I will say just following on what I just said is that I've been doing this for 10 years and I definitely have gotten better at that. And that, that really is a, um, part of the skill of being a professional listening, a professional listener, a host, uh, and a conversation leader that you are juggling a lot of things, right? You're, you're not just listening. You're also moving the conversation forward, you know, and I'm thinking about the narrative arc of the conversation. So a couple of things. I mean, we leave about 90 minutes for most of my first conversations. And that's really important.

Now, only about 45 minutes of that makes it into the radio show. But what that means is that I can relax into a space with someone where we don't have to immediately, you know, it takes a little time to warm up, right? And we can do that. So it's often true that the first 10 or 15 minutes of the conversation is not on the air. It's essential time to get to that more intimate place we got to. A real conversation is messy. And if it has a little bit of adventure in it, you know, you may take some risks. And the other thing about having 90 minutes is that somebody can go off on a side road and I can think to myself as they're doing it, boy, this is probably a side road and we may not use it, but it's, you know, it's interesting. And, and, and, and

sometimes, um, those side roads lead to something completely wonderful and surprising that I wouldn't have known, you know, to make happen. So, so there is just this practical thing about creating the right container. Um, and then, uh, you know, the other thing I do, and I do think this is part of the container too, is I do a huge amount of preparation. You know, I read a lot. If people have written, I, I try to take in other interviews they may have done, other ways that I can have a sense of who they are and really not just what they know but how they think. I think that when I come into a conversation with that sense of them, that even if you're talking to somebody across a phone line, somehow that communicates itself. if you're talking to somebody across a phone line, somehow that communicates itself. And so it's, it's, it's, to me, that's like an act of hospitality, creating a hospital hospitable space, you know? And I think that a hospitable, um, uh, presence just communicates itself kind

of palpably. So, and you know, the difference, we all know the difference between sitting down with someone and you feel like you're going to have to explain yourself and you get into a certain mode that is somewhat uptight, or you sit down across from someone and you sense, they get me, you know, and then you can relax. And then that's going to be a different kind of conversation. And then thirdly, I just say, you know, I do take all these notes into an interview. And then thirdly, I just say, you know, I do take all these notes into an interview. But part of the point of preparing is to be so prepared that when the real conversation starts, you can put the notes to one side.

And then they become more of a kind of roadmap and outline. But really, I hope and because I, you know, I can follow better what's happening because of all that preparation. But I hope to be so prepared that I can set the notes to one side once the conversation really starts. And for much of the time, just be listening. So it's a combination of all those things. Yeah. Interviewing you is sort of like cooking for Julia Child. So I'm doing my best here. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.

Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir.

Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really? No, really. Yeah, really. No, really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really? No, really. And you can find it on the iHeartRadio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I noticed that a book that you talk about a lot in one of your favorite books is also one of my very favorites,

which is Letters to a Young Poet. Yes. Yeah. Do you want to share maybe a thing or two from that book that most resonates with you and that might be applicable to what we're talking about? Well, my favorite, favorite line, my favorite thought from Letters to a Young Poet is Rilke's idea of living the questions, of loving questions, of holding questions. And this has really formed me, especially as I think about, not only as I think about what I do, but as I think about being a healing force in this culture that, as you and I talked about a minute ago, is so focused on answers and on competing answers. And in fact, we've kind of been trained and we've been trained to feel like to start getting nervous, you know, if we don't

have an answer to something pretty quickly. And if we have a, if we have questions and we turn it into a debate and the debate ends and someone wins, or if we have some very complex, you know, challenge or development in our society, we try as quickly as possible to resolve it with a law. You know, we take a vote. And but so many of the things that we're dealing with, like we are just living in this amazing moment in time where we are re reposing the big questions. You know, what does it mean to be human?

And the contours of our answer in the 21st century and the ways we, the ways we, what we, how we move through the world, even the practicalities of that are just radically different from previous generations. So I find this idea of Rilke, you know, Rilke said, love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. And don't search for the answers which could not be given to you because you would not be able to live them yet. And so he said, now the work now is to live the questions. And I just, I feel on a very practical human level,

if we would just step back from all the things we think we have to fight about, you know, sometimes just all of us on every side and step back and just take in the fact that these questions we're raising are huge. Even something like, especially something like redefining the meaning of marriage, just like stepping back and saying, wow, this is a big deal. You know, just like stepping back and saying, wow, this is a big deal, you know, that we could all on every side say, what a big deal that in our generation, we're redefining marriage. And in doing that, redefining family and redefining community. And all of those things are huge manifestations of how we pose and answer the question, what does it mean to be human? So to step back and dwell with this, I think, is to also let ourselves dwell with the questions and understand that they have power in and of themselves.

And that on some of these things that we're taking up, that technology is forcing us, you know, technology is kind of blowing up a lot of things the way they've always been, whatever that means for the last 50 years. And I think a lot of this is the big structural changes. You know, we can take votes. We can have winners and losers of debates. We can pass laws. But we are not going to have real deep consensus on a lot of these open questions, you know, maybe in our generation, maybe not in all of our lifetimes. I do think, however, that we could agree that we'd like to live into the questions together. And then it becomes, you know, then we start to honor the questions. And then we start to focus more on how we treat each other along the way while we hold questions. That's kind of, you know,

in my little space, I think that's kind of that's the that's a virtue I'm trying to cultivate. Yeah, that's one of my very favorite parts of that book also. And I like it, taking it to a more personal level with being comfortable with not knowing things in life. And there seems to be such a, people have, I think we have such an innate desire to know, are we doing the right thing or what's going to happen with this? And I, you know, I remember reading that when I was young and it just was so profound to realize, oh, I don't have to, I don't have to know that. And it points to something else that you refer to a lot in your interviews and in your writing, which is two concepts that I think are at the heart of

a lot of spirituality and what we talk about. And those are paradox and ambiguity. So do you want to share maybe a little bit your view on, let's maybe start with paradox and the role that plays in spiritual development? Well, I'll just tell you that in the early days of the radio show, at one point, I think my producers like forbade me to use the word ambiguity. I was using it all the time. But it's a very countercultural thing. And the truth is, so much of what is interesting and meaningful in life has a lot of paradox and ambiguity to it, right? I mean, it's a myth. Like, it's not that we never have certainty or that we don't have moments of certainty,

but they don't last, you know, and that's fine. That's the way life is. So, you know, that in itself is part of the paradox of human existence, that we really are driven to want to know for sure and to want to have ground to stand on and that that calms us. But the only real certainty is that everything will change. And so that's the great, you know, that's a piece of spiritual evolution, taking that in. I actually think, I think, you know, the work you're doing and the work I'm doing and the work that all the people who we're interviewing and the people who are, you know, so many, so many people and all over the place and all kinds of things are kind of moving towards that kind of reality base.

I don't know. I was talking, you know, you can talk about paradox and ambiguity in almost any context to be more concrete about it. context, to be more concrete about it. Yesterday I was being interviewed actually by an evangelical seminary, and what was it? They were asking me about, it was an email interview, you know, it was questions and answers. And I'm trying to think what the question was, but anyway, what I talked about, and this is one of my favorite things to talk about. I was like, the question was, how can our tradition be more constructive in a pluralistic world? And I think that for religious people in particular, that can feel just like a contradiction, right? Or like a tension.

can feel just like a contradiction, right? Or like a tension. You either are secure in your faith, or maybe you have to give that up in order to engage with the religious other. And I just think that's a completely false choice because the paradox of interreligious and really meaningful interreligious encounter, and I think this paradox is there for all kinds of really meaningful encounter with difference. When you really connect and make a connection and a relationship with someone across some divide or some kind of difference. The paradox is that we always, we understand ourselves better. We may even sink more deeply and interestingly into our identity at the very same time that we come to some kind of new openness and appreciation to this different other. You know, if you don't have to give something up, it's a win-win. But it's paradoxical. It's not intuitive.

And it's also this kind of thing that unless you've done it, you can't believe it. It's hard to just present it as an argument. But so many of the great things are like that. And spiritually, I think that this is, you know, the way I think about this is how, you know, mystery, a reverence for mystery is such a huge elemental part of every religious and

spiritual tradition. And so even at the core of our traditions, they ask us to understand that in any given moment, in big ways and small, there will be things we get and understand and are certain about and things we will not understand in this lifetime. and I think it's an enlivening tension and I actually think it's very relaxing that mystery can be honoring mystery can be remarkably calming if you can give yourself over

to that creative tension exactly it's more calming than the work of constantly thinking oh there must be something wrong if I can't figure this out and and how can I pin this down? Exactly. I was going to say it's that letting go of having to know. Yeah.

One of our early guests was Oliver Berkman, and he wrote a really great book called The Antidote, Happiness for People Who Hate Positive Thinking. And it's a really enjoyable book. I think you'd really like it. who hate positive thinking. And it's, it's a really enjoyable book. I think you'd really like it. But one of the things he talks about is that if you could know everything that was going to happen to you in the rest of your life, even if it was all good, that would kind of take all the, all the fun out of it. It would, you wouldn't want to know that you wouldn't want to know everything that was going to happen, even though we often feel like, oh, I wish I knew everything. If that happened, you would lose a big part of being alive, which is exactly that mystery of sort of finding out what happens and, and, and just, you know, back to the, back to the Rilke, enjoying the questions,

living the questions. Yeah. And the other reason that wouldn't work, uh, is that, is that the reality of life is that you get to a lot of the places you wanted to be, or you were meant to be, but you would never have known it, through things that went wrong, right? Through things failing that you thought were right for you. And there's something so magical and beautiful about that. There's something also completely excruciating about it in the moment, usually. But it's not a straight line. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.

Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir.

Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, really. No Really.

Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. You've talked in the past about your battles with depression and

actually one of the things that you said about depression was that it taught you to look for things that you wouldn't have looked for, wouldn't even thought to look for otherwise. You actually had a, you also referred to depression and you were putting sort of a positive spin on parts of it, calling it a black Pandora's box, which I thought was a wonderful way. Can you maybe share how that journey has gone on for you. You wrote about it early on,

shortly after you'd come out of it. I'm curious, years later, how that battle continues to go. Well, so I guess something that's kind of shocking when you experience something like depression and you come out the other end, but you're never going ever again to be somebody who doesn't know that that black place exists and is a possible place for you to go. And that's not so much in letters to

a young poet, but darkness, the darkness that is part of life, is also something that Rilke is great about. And so in that way, I have not had a kind of clinical depression. I have not fallen all the way into that for a long time, but it never, it's always a part of who I am, you know, and I partly have not fallen into that place. I've certainly, you know, I think the thing is I certainly have stood on that precipice. The thing is I know, I know where I'm standing now, right? And it's through a huge amount of self-care and self-knowledge and some of it very practical, just how much exercise I get and how much sleep I get. And I know the cost of overdoing it.

And then, I don't know, I'm in my fifties now and I'm, I'm finding, I, I didn't like the idea of turning 50 at all, but I'm finding, I am finding getting older to be this really wonderful thing where you just more and more can relax into things as they are and calm down. And, um, uh, I don't push myself as hard as I used to. I'm not as hard on myself as I used to and that was a part of my depression. So there's something that happens with age that is healing. But it's huge and in many, I mean, it's made me, this is one of the thoughts that comes through in all of my conversations is, you

know, the things that go wrong for us become part of our capacity to be compassionate towards others. Like, they become part of our gift to the world if we let them. And that's absolutely true of depression for me. I agree. Certainly the struggles and challenges I've had in life are a huge part of who I become. There's another thing that you've talked about that is right on topic with this that I really, I really liked. And you listed a bunch of people we would all recognize as great teachers or leaders. And you say that they became what they became,

not in spite of the hardships that they faced, but because of them. Yeah. Well, I don't believe in saints, and I really love a... No, I don't like the way we use the word sainthood or heroism. There's a phrase I love of Einstein. He talked about spiritual genius and that the spiritual geniuses of the ages are more necessary to the dignity, security, and joy of humanity

than the purveyors of objective knowledge. And he was talking about Gandhi, who was alive in his lifetime. He was talking about Jesus and Moses and Buddha and St. Francis of Assisi. But the thing is, whether you want to list saints or spiritual geniuses, whether it's Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King Jr., you know, or Einstein in his ways, these were all deeply flawed human beings, right? You know, saints aren't born, you know, and that path to spiritual genius is won through being fully human and wrestling with all the things that we all wrestle with. And that's just, it's so important to remember and not to put anyone up on a pedestal in that sense. Yeah, Gandhi has a quote that makes me laugh every time I hear it. And he says that he was exposed to the principles of nonviolence through his

marriage, which is just... And actually, I think the truth is, that's probably where he was least effective. Oh, exactly. Yeah, you read his biography, clearly was not... Yeah. Yeah. But I think that's just, I read that, and I'm sure he hadn't meant that to be funny, because it is really funny. Probably not his wife, though. No, she may not have thought that was so funny.

The other thing, you just led into this idea of spiritual genius, I'd like to ask you, what, spiritual is an interesting word that I never can find a better one, and yet I'm always curious as to how people define that word. Do you have any working definition of that word that works for you? Oh, it's a good question. A lot of people used to ask me 10 years ago when I started the show, there was a big curiosity about what's the difference between religion and spirituality. religion and spirituality. And I don't hear people worrying about that so much anymore. You know, I think, to give a short answer, that it's a symbiotic relationship. Often it's not necessarily neither or. But I do think there's say tolerance. That the word spirituality has taken on some depth and integrity in the culture at large that it didn't have just a few years ago, which is interesting.

Yeah. And I really think that the kind of spiritual, the searching spiritual energy of American culture has really, there's been a real evolution from, I mean, I kind of mean the spirituality that's happening outside institutions, although a lot of it's also happening inside institutions, but, you know, from the new age of the 80s, which was very suspect in many ways, you know. It was really superficial, a lot of it. Of course, not all of it. I remember somebody talking to me about spiritual promiscuity, which at the time I thought was a great phrase.

But there's been this evolution. And here's the thing. We 21st century people have a freedom to choose and create our spiritual lives. It's completely unprecedented, right? Until not that long ago, our parents and grandparents were mostly, you know, spiritual life and tradition was inherited. It was like you had blue eyes and you not only were Christian or Jewish, but you went to this church or that synagogue that your parents and grandparents had gone to before you. So we're figuring this out. And I think there is an increasing amount of integrity to talking about spirituality, again, that happens outside traditional institutions, but also is becoming a force of renewal inside a lot of institutions,

you know, challenge and renewal. And I don't know, what do I mean? I mean, I, you know, I think atheists have spiritual lives or can have spiritual lives. Some of them might not want to use that language. Some of them are very happy with that language. So it's definitely not synonymous with religion. I guess, you know, I think it's the inner work. It's the inner work that accompanies the outer work of our lives.

The truth is that our traditions, our religious traditions and our spiritual traditions are these vast repositories that have been thinking about that and asking questions about it and creating rituals and creating communities around it for thousands of years. So they are these repositories, and it's no accident that we turn to them or that they are the places where people find this often in the first instance. places where people find this often in the first instance. We had another guest on who I don't even think he meant to, but he said something that just so hit me. I was like, so it's my current working definition of what spirituality is. Yeah, what is it? He said spirituality is simply the recognition that happiness doesn't come from things on the outside. Yeah.

And I was like, that kind of does nail it for me. It's that there's this interior life that that's where, you know, the true happiness and true joy comes from. And if we're not tending that field, we're not going to grow those plants, so to speak. Yeah, it might be interesting to start collecting definitions of that. Yeah, I know. I think it would be interesting, too, because it's a term that I agree with you. I'm becoming more comfortable with it, I think, as the times evolve, but I'm still not entirely comfortable with it because it's so, I guess, back to our earlier point about being comfortable with ambiguity, but it's a pretty ambiguous term. Yeah, it really is. Well, I think that we're nearing our time here,

so I wanted to thank you for coming on the show. The last thing I was going to get to, and I think we've covered it simply by doing it, is that you've mentioned that you think that humor is a spiritual virtue, which I often think is a very underappreciated humor or levity, is a highly underappreciated spiritual virtue, which I often think is a very underappreciated humor or levity, is a highly underappreciated spiritual virtue, and it's one of the things I like about listening to you is you laugh often. Well, thank you.

When I first started my show on public radio, all these dour public radio programmers were so worried that this would be too serious and so earnest, and some of them still say it is, and that just tells me they haven't been listening. But what I say is I have never met a wise person, and wisdom is something you know when you see it, who does not smile easily and know how to laugh, including to laugh at themselves. And then I did, for years, one of my dream people I wanted to interview was Desmond Tutu, and I finally sat down across from him a few years ago, and he told me uncategorically that God has a sense of humor.

And, of course, he just embodied that. You sit with him, and he's one of the most joyful, funny people you've ever met, alongside all his gravity, right? Again, there's another paradox, right? Those two things don't cancel each other out. They enliven each other. And I have to say that when Desmond Tutu tells you God has a sense of humor, you believe him. So I'm now telling you. him. So I'm now telling you. I would agree. I think that there is humor everywhere, and it's one of the very best parts of life. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate this. I'm so happy for your project, and I'm glad. I'm honored that you want me to be part of it. Well, thank you so much. It's certainly an honor for us to have you. So we will talk again. Thanks. Great. Take care. Okay, bye.

you can learn more about Krista Tippett and this podcast at one you feed.net slash Krista