On August 25, OBI Director john powell joined author and podcast host Krista Tippett for A Sacred Story for Our Time: Wisdom, Practice & Belonging, a Thrive Network event and part of its Rooting in the Sacred series. Their conversation reflected on how spirituality and belonging can help communities navigate a time of deep fragmentation, exploring how new stories, practices, and forms of reverence can bridge tradition and innovation, strengthen our connection to one another and the Earth, and expand our shared imagination for the future.
Transcript
Joshua Gorman:
Happy Monday. We are honored to gather with you. My name is Joshua. Bethsaida and myself have the honor of co-hosting this conversation today. For some of us we have been waiting for months in anticipation. So, thanks for staying patient with us and we're here. We're doing this. Lots of joy with us today.We're going to start with just a short grounding process, just so we can arrive fully and call forth our full presence and our sacred listening. And so I want to invite you to go ahead and find a comfortable position and settle into your body and let's relax together. You're welcome to lower your eyes or close your eyes. Just take a deep breath in and let out a full exhale releasing anything that you want to release, so that you can show up fully here.
Finding a natural rhythm with your breath. Inhaling gently, exhaling gently. As you breathe we invite you to feel your gratitude. Your gratitude for the gift of being alive, for the gift of being able to gather in community, especially in these times when we need spaces to hold each other and lift each other up.
This conversation is part of an offering called Rooting in the Sacred. One way we root in the sacred is by connecting with the places where we're living, and the First Peoples of these lands. I am joining today from Northern California, from the Sierra Foothills outside of Sacramento, where the First Peoples are the Nisenan.
The Nisenan are actively engaged in the process of rematriation, caring for their lands, sustaining and revitalizing their culture. We invite you to deepen your connection with the First People of your lands, with the land itself where you reside. If you're someone who wants to learn more about the First Peoples where you are, we'll share a link in the chat where you can do that.
Bethsaida Sulochana Ruiz Natal:
Thank you. Let's continue to stay settled in our seats, and if you want to close your eyes or downcast them. Let's take a deep breath together settling into this present moment that we're sharing today. Feel your body supported by the earth, by the chair, by the quiet around you. Allow the inhale to bring steadiness and the exhale to release anything that is not needed right now.
As we arrive carrying the weight of many things, personal and collective, known and unknown, the world right now is trembling in so many different ways. And yet here we all are choosing to pause to root and to be together this afternoon. Even in the midst of all this turmoil that we can choose to be present. We choose breath and we can choose to return to that breath whenever it matters.
As we enter the sacred space of wisdom and practice and belonging, let's honor the voices of those who came before us, and the lessons that they carry and the possibility that this moment holds.
As we breathe together, let us remember that we are not alone. You are not alone. I'm not alone. We are not alone. The space is held only by us, by the wisdom of our lineages, by the earth beneath us, and by something sacred that moves through and beyond us.
With each breath, we invite clarity, openness, connection to ourselves, to each other, and to the story unfolding in and around us. May this space be where the scattered parts of us can return home. May this space be where courage is nurtured, grief is welcome and joy is not forgotten.
May this time be one of the present. May we listen with our whole hearts and may we find meaning in what is shared. We call upon the wisdom that dwells within and around us. May this space be held with grace. May our words be carried with care, and may our presence be bombed for what longs to heal.
We honor the lineages of the seekers, the healers, the storytellers and the teachers, those who carry wisdom through fire and time guiding us here. We welcome the breath of clarity, the of heartbeat belonging and the hands of practice.
We call in the spirit of Krista Tippett, who invites us into reverent curiosity, into the act of asking better questions that awakens the soul of the world. And we call in john a. powell, who reminds us that belonging is a sacred act, a practice of bridging across differences, expanding the we, and remembering our shared humanity.
May all who gather find meaning. May all who listen find truth, and may who all speak find courage. Let us begin together. Thank you.Joshua Gorman:
Thank you, Bethsaida. We want to just share a little bit about Thrive, the organization hosting this conversation today, especially for those of you who have not joined us before. Thrive is a community and a network based in Oakland, California. We bring people together at the intersections of meaning, belonging, the arts, music and social change. #e love to host meaningful conversations.Today's conversation is part of a year-long journey that we're hosting called Rooting in the Sacred, a journey of reverence and re-imagining. And so for our Rooting in the Sacred folks who are here today, thank you so much. We're halfway through our year and we have already brought to life so much. And so we're excited for today's conversation to take us further.
For those of you who are just joining us as guests today just for this conversation, welcome, and we look forward to connecting more with you.
The theme of our conversation is a sacred story for our time. We want to honor that there are so many sacred stories for this time, sacred stories of this time. And today what we're exploring is the sacred story of spiritual revival, the story of our return to the sacred, and the evolution of our relationship with the sacred.
We're talking about, as Bayo Akomolafe poetically names it, we're talking about the birthing of new gods. For those of us alive at this time, when the old gods are dead and dying and the new gods are being born, what does that process, what does that look like? What does that feel like? How do we engage in that process in our own personal lives, and in the communities that we're part of? So, we're excited to jump in and get going. Bethsaida.
Bethsaida Sulochana Ruiz Natal:
Great. Thank you, Joshua. So, Joshua and I will be asking questions of our guests, and then there'll be time for a few questions from everybody here. If they ask that, if you feel free to just share in the chat as we go along. A recording of this session will be sent out afterwards, and we will be taking questions only in the chat today.
So, let us begin. I am going to introduce Krista and then Joshua will introduce John. And then each question is for the both of them, but we'll let you know who we're asking who's going to start first. So, here we go.
So, I have the honor of introducing Krista, who I just met this morning. So, it's an honor to welcome you, Krista, a voice that has become a vessel for sacred listening in our time. Krista Tippett is a Peabody Award-winning broadcaster, generalist and author, whose work has gently reshaped the public square, inviting us to deeper conversations about faith, ethics and the mystery of being human.
She is founder of the On Being, a beloved radio show and podcast that has become a sanctuary for spiritual inquiry and cultural healing. Krista is a Fulbright scholar and a Yale-trained theologian. Krista received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama for her contributions to civic and moral imagination.
Her bestselling books includes Becoming Wise and Einstein's God, have guided countless seekers towards lives of reflection, courage, and connection. And through decades of dialogue with wisdom holders across traditions, Krista has cultivated a public voice rooted in contemplative presence, poetic inquiry, and the sacred art of listening.
Today, she joins us in the spirit of belonging and transformation to help us root more deeply in the sacred, and to remind us that questions themselves can be holy. I just want to say that I'm a little nervous and if I just put that out there, I think I'll calm down a little bit. Welcome, Krista. Joshua.
Joshua Gorman:
Yes. Dr. John Powell, I'm going to keep it brief, John. John is a renowned scholar and advocate in the area of civil rights, structural racism, housing, constitutional law, equality, democracy, and belonging. He is the director of the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is well known for his work developing frameworks of targeted universalism, and othering and belonging to effectively create equity-based interventions.
His most recent books, which we will share about at the end of our conversation today, are Belonging without Othering: How We Save Ourselves and the World, and also The Power of Bridging. I have the gift of knowing John personally as well.
Some people may know this, but I think it's less well known that John is also deeply passionate about the future of religion and spirituality. And so I'm extra excited, John, to have you here today bringing your voice and wisdom on these topics. So, thank you. Welcome.john a. powell:
Thank you, Josh. Good to be with you.Bethsaida Sulochana Ruiz Natal:
Awesome. So, let us begin. To start, we'd love to hear some of your own religious and spiritual backgrounds. How has your journey unfolded over time, and how would you speak to your spiritual life today? What threads have remained and what has transformed? We'll ask Krista to start, and then John.Krista Tippett:
Well, first of all, I just want to say it's been so beautiful watching all of your faces arrive in my screen, and also reading the chat and observing how many of us are tired and tender. And I'll say that I feel that way today too. And also though being very moved by the fierce holding together of grief and a commitment to joy. Beautiful, beautiful language.
If you do know my work, you know that I think words are powerful, powerful tools, and they make worlds as the rabbi said. Bethsaida, I also just want to say the way you describe my work to me was a real gift to me. Thank you for that.
So, this question of my spiritual life, I'm going to turn 65 next month. So, it's been a great evolution, and I like using the word faith and evolution in a sentence together. I grew up with a Southern Baptist preacher grandfather who I loved and who loved me and was the most joyful, loving adult in my life. And also his religiosity had so much fear to it, and it was all about rules.
And yet I think that as much as he taught me those rules, he embodied a love and a joy. And I think that the way I took in the contradictions in him was very instructive, and a really good lesson in the way the world works and the way religion works. I spent years not rejecting a spiritual life or rejecting religion, but very busy thinking that politics was the answer and not sure how relevant.
I don't think I would've used a word like sacred in those years in my young adulthood. And then coming back to that with an insistence that if I were coming back to it, I knew that it had to encompass the whole of me and the true complexity of the world I'd experienced, the life of the heart and the body and the mind.
And I would say that as I go through life, I've had many different, I've had such a beautiful introduction to many traditions and I have gifts, I've received gifts. I'm also aware of my spiritual mother tongue and homeland, and that is with me. And I feel like it is a journey of continuing to integrate, to have a what I would say, a whole spirituality, and finding that there are many ways to nurture that.
Bethsaida Sulochana Ruiz Natal:
Thank you. John.john a. powell:
Well, thanks for the question. And like a lot of good questions, it's hard to give a good answer in a short period of time. Many of you know that I come from a very religious family. I'm sixth of nine children. My father was a Christian minister. He passed a few years ago. I feel like in some ways my religious spiritual grounding was really my family, an extended family.
Family from the south. My parents were sharecroppers and didn't have a lot of material wealth, but they had so much love and in some ways the spirit, the best part of religion, of spirituality, they embodied. And probably like Krista, in some ways, sometimes the word and the doctrine got in the way. This deep profound love and connection that they embodied was sometime cut short by here's the rule, here's what.
And that tension erupted in my own life at some point, and I ended up leaving the church. And because religion was so central to my parents' life, when I left the church, it meant I left them as well, which was also very painful. I write about that, especially in the book on Power of Bridging. But leaving home then starts a journey to back home, or to making a home and finding a home.
I think to some extent that's many of us who use the term spirituality is in some practice like that, of trying to find, make a home. I think of what's the difference between spirituality and religion? I think really my family and my parents embodied both. But I think in some ways spirituality is, if I may say, embodied in Krista Tippett. Because I think spirituality is about inquiry, it's about searching, it's about asking questions.
Whereas religion in its narrow sense is about certainty. It's about knowing, and that's why you have rules. Here's what the rules say, end of story. Where spirituality, which is interesting to me, which is also in some ways the best of science, it's constantly questioning. It's like, well, we thought this, but then what about that? But unlike science, it's also imbibed. It's connecting with all, with the earth, with each other, with the air, and it's always unfolding.
So, there are periods in my life where my life was very emotionless and frankly, I was very unhappy, and I had some experiences that settled me. I feel like the world is suffering now. And I'm reminded of, I talked to a young friend today about Joanna Macy, she was a friend of mine. I talked to her about her own struggles and how she came, I don't want to use the word peace, because it wasn't quiescent. It wasn't peace in the sense of quiescence, but it was like groundedness.
And I think of a book, World as Lover, World as Self, and how do we have both that groundedness and grapple with the brokenness of the world? I think the thing that will help us in that is really not just our spiritual grounding, but each other. I think what you're doing with Thrive is really wonderful because you're helping people.
One of the things that Joanna said in her work is that there is suffering, but suffering in isolation that's unhealthy. But if you can suffer together, which means compassion, then we can hold the suffering and hold the joy at the same time.
Bethsaida Sulochana Ruiz Natal:
Thank you.Joshua Gorman:
Yes. And thank you for naming and honoring our beloved Joanna Macy. A lot of us are holding her close in our hearts. And Thrive, we sometimes call ourselves a church of the great turning in honor of Joanna Macy's work.
So, our second question really is just going to take us further I think into your personal stories, and hopefully we can hear a little bit more. We're talking about spirituality, practice, and belonging in these times. And so we want to ask for those of us seeking and really bringing our full hearts and spirits to find our way forward, how can we bridge tradition and innovation honoring the past while we welcome the future?
For many communities like Thrive and other kindred communities, we're trying to honor the depths of our ancestral or religious traditions, while also breaking open to new ways. So, what practices, what mindset can we bring to this process? Krista, we'd love for you to begin, and then we'll go back to John.Krista Tippett:
These are such vast important questions and we could spend days on each of them. So, I will say that I wonder about, I understand and share this impulse to take apart what feels like goes wrong with religion, and has gone wrong with religion and spirituality. But something that also that I hold with some reverence is that across the history of our species and every culture, traditions arose really as containers for the insights and the truths and the texts.
And the rituals, which the rituals that come with the various traditions and the teachings, they are forms of spiritual intelligence. It's so fascinating to be alive now. And like John, you're at Berkeley where neuroscience is actually discovering things about what happens inside our bodies that actually bear out the intelligence that is in religious ritual, for example, just in so many ways. Or things that we've called virtues or qualities of character, and understanding that we practice these things, that we can practice them.
And actually the traditions have taught us how to practice them to make them more possible. So, I think it's a dance. When Bayo says we live in a time of a birthing of new gods, I come at it more as that we learn to see more and better and more clearly. So, is it new gods or is it qualities of what we are pointing at when we speak of God? That we grow enough in consciousness to name and to see and to let into our spiritual imaginations, and therefore into what we do with tradition.
Years ago, I interviewed Jaroslav Pelikan, who was this scholar at Yale. He'd written this definitive five volume set about Christian Tradition with a capital T across the centuries. He'd written this book about the creeds and there's no other. That is the encapsulation of this we believe. Although, when he looked at how it has been really taken to life of particular communities, there was so much creativity and beauty and particularity and actually innovation involved in how people live these things when the tradition is alive.
He said to me, "What you get if you toss out the tradition is bad tradition." So, what he was saying, and I don't think that's true. But what he was saying is I think what I'm aware of that we as human beings, these spiritual truths, these insights, this experience of the sacred, which is so hard, impossible to fully put words around, to convey what we're talking about. Tradition at its best and ritual gives us the container for that.
And so I feel like even as if it is in Bayo's words, birthing of new gods or expand the boundaries of our ability to see who and what God might be and mean, I think we also get to honor. A rabbi once said to me, "Don't let people who exhibit the worst of the tradition you come from define that for you."
So, I think one thing that as people really go more deeply into spirituality, often they feel themselves wanting to be drawn back in some way to the traditions. I've come up with this language of my spiritual homeland, my spiritual mother tongue, and many of us have that.
So, I think the future is a reverent, open-eyed, open-hearted approach to both what we mean with spirituality, and where traditions are a great gift of the human enterprise, and where tradition meets our lives. And also where it needs to open into something that does not yet exist.
Bethsaida Sulochana Ruiz Natal:
Can I just ask a little further, because I'm just interested in what you're speaking to in terms of is it the way that Bayo speaks to are we creating new gods? Or is it, if I'm understanding, are we developing into just figuring out different language, therefore what it is that we're learning or wanting to change in the world?
I'm just also wondering that Bayo speaks to the new gods. They're not saviors, but they're disruptors. They're disruptors, they rupture. For me, it takes like a violence and not necessarily violence in the way that we look at it. So, I'm just wondering what is the invitation to re-world if we're not utilizing the past scriptures of religion and spiritual practices? I don't know if that's clear for that.Krista Tippett:
Yeah, it is. We're talking about things that ultimately are at the beyond of where our words can touch, so we do the best we can. What I'm saying is the word God has always been this absurd, it's a small three-letter word. So, what humans have meant when we use that word or when we think of that or try to live with an awareness of God has always been insufficient and searching in the dark to a certain extent.
And so is it that new gods, and I think, look, this is, both of these images are necessary probably, and then others for what we're standing before. But I think do we come to a place, even when I looked at everyone entering this digital room with this honesty and of how is your heart? How is your spirit? It's such a different question than how are you? And we say, great.
That's the cultural shorthand, and it is an expression of growth and maturity. The question is better. So, the question also elicits a better answer, but we're growing up I feel in all this rupture. In rupture, we would never have chosen.
To your point about rupture and disruption, what I think is, what I know is that is also in these great traditions, but it's not what has been transmitted. The prophets, for example, in Judaism and Christianity were disruptors. And so part of growing up means letting in more of what has been there in front of our eyes, but our eyes were not open to it.Bethsaida Sulochana Ruiz Natal:
Thank you.Joshua Gorman:
Already you, John.john a. powell:
So, part of the way to think about it is, there are many ways of thinking about it. But part of the way to think about it is that these traditions were born out of certain practices, certain experiences, certain contexts. They're not just traditions. I think part of the danger is that the traditions become dissociated from the world. We're doing something because someone else did it.
And in a sense, a lot of times, traditions frankly become dead weight because they're not associated with the world, or sometimes they're not associated with our deep internal yearnings. And so they did this to become a practice. And so part of is to reclaim that connection, but part of it is also to recognize that the world is different. That the world of 500, 1,000 years ago is different.
Let's go back a little bit more. We say, how do we? The question that resonates with me in that question is who are the we? And obviously this is somewhat rhetorical, but is it people on this webinar? Is it Americans? Is it the West? Is it people who are alive today and not alive tomorrow? Is it adults? Is it children?
And part of the thing, and this is part of our work at the Othering & Belonging Institute, is that we get to fine tune narrowly. So, just to be more poignant when you asked about the gods. Realize that probably 60%, 70% of the world by and large, in terms of their practice, whatever we might call that, are not organized around gods. That the way we think of gods in the West, especially with Judaeo-Christian, Islamic heritage is very different than the way the Chinese, or the Japanese or how many people in Africa come to their spiritual practice.
And so I think part of the reason that this question becomes actually so important is that we don't have a choice. Is that many of the religious traditions grew up in relative isolation when everybody that you knew by and large were more or less of the same practice and same culture. And those that weren't were oftentimes radically othered, so we had very sharp boundaries. You were infidel, or a Muslim, you're part of the chosen people or not. You are a Christian or a sinner.
So, one of the things we've been wrestling with at the Othering & Belonging Institute is that if you look at human history going back however far you want to go, 30,000, 10,000 years, it's been one of actually redefining who's the we. So, this is not something new in and of itself. What's new is that if you go back and look at those efforts, spiritual and otherwise, it defined who was part of the we and who was the other.
There's a sharp boundary between the barbarians and the civilized. We can't have that anymore. We can't have that sharp boundary. So, that boundary itself and that boundary work, which religion has played a big role in, played a big role in deciding who belongs and who does not belong. I think part of what are doing, frankly, and part of the spiritual work, part of what you're doing at Thrive is saying, let's make those boundaries porous. Let's actually rethink them.
One of the efforts of that has been just let's get rid of this bad religion which created these categorical others. And doing that is sometimes is a loss of the spiritual tradition completely. So, in correcting for the, to paraphrase what Krista was saying, the bad practitioners, we're going to get rid of all the practice. But then there's also a danger of, because something is old or apparently old, we venerate it. We can't look at it critically.
I think both of those efforts leaves us wanting. And I think the world, not just spiritually and religiously, but politically and culturally, is calling with something different. We're in a world now where there are not corners of the world that's not touched by other corners of the world. We're touching each other all the time.
How do we do that in our tremendous diversity and multiplicity and similarity, and how do we create? And so for us, the question of belonging without othering becomes a sharp edge. I said, look carefully at whatever we draw the boundary of othering, especially at a cultural institutional level, that's where the work has to be done.Bethsaida Sulochana Ruiz Natal:
Wow. Okay. I wanted to sit, can I just take a deep breath with what you just said? I have a lot of stuff going on in my head before I move on to the next question, but thank you both.
So, we'll start with John answering first now. John, your work centers on bridging and belonging in a fractured world. Krista, your conversations often explore the death of human connection. How can spirituality serve as a bridge to one another and to a deeper sense of interconnectedness with the world around us?
And I think, John, you started speaking to this, how might our spiritual lives support a greater belonging in this moment of collective chaos, uncertainty, and possibility? Because I do believe there's possibilities for us in what's going on.john a. powell:
Well, again, one of those two-week questions. In some ways, I think the best of spirituality, which I think everyone on this call exhibits, is being able to sit with questions, not thinking that questions have a discrete answer. And if it does, that that answer will hold for all times. That we're actually grappling with it. We're actually listening.
I said I had breakfast with a young friend this morning and we talked about some of this. He talked about what he wanted in life and how to some extent he was frustrated because he's not getting it. And I said to him, I grew up, at least till I was 11, in a Christian home. And so I remember some passages from the Bible. I remember, I think there were lessons there.
And now I don't think of myself as Christian, if I'm atheist. I don't think of myself as organized around the God of Christianity anymore. But I don't grapple whether I'm atheist or not. That's not a big question to me. But I think there are lessons, there are lessons from all.
So, one of the lessons I was drawing on was Jesus saying when he knew he was going to be sacrificed, when he knew he was going to be crucified. Think about that. If you think about that just heuristically. Someone says, "Tomorrow, Joshua, we're going to nail you to the cross." You might say, "Really? Do I have to deal with that Master Jesus? I don't think this is a good idea. Is there a plan B?"
But he ended it, his query by saying, "But not my will, that thy will be done." Which is the same thing that Dr. King said when he talked about going to the mountaintop and realizing, he said, "Long life is a blessing. All of us want to live a long time. And I would like that." He was 39 years old, but he's saying, "But not my will, thy will be done."
So, to me, part of spiritual practice is listening not just to what I want, but what the universe wants of us, what the earth wants of us, what we need from each other. And we actually don't spend much time with that. It's like what I want. We don't really delve into wanting, especially wanting that goes beyond just the I.
I'll end by saying this. Again, talking to this young friend this morning. He said, "I can learn to detach myself from my wants, from my fears. I'm not suggesting that, I'm suggesting you actually broaden it." And so think about all the conflict that we have. Talk about bridging.
Part of the conflict comes from change, fear. Part of it comes from what a friend calls it, conflict entrepreneurs. People who trade on each other's fears, people who trade on each other's pettiness. In that we know stories about each other, we don't know each other's stories. How do we learn to really, really listen? The contemplative practice, that's really what it's about.Part of listening, really listening is not just listening with the cognitive brain, but also listening with the heart, listening with the body. I think that's the heart of bridging. When we listen with the heart and body, we also connect. So, I think that's what's called for. And instead what we're seeing in a broken world is not only our fear of the other, but structuring walls of creating greater division.
But I'll end by just saying this. That's not a hopeful space, a reason for us to feel suffering, as Joanna Macy taught us. But also to realize that a lot of the breaking, a lot of the othering that's going on is people's longing to belong. That really deep down, and why these conflict entrepreneurs are successful is because that's what they promise. That when I'm done, your group will belong. But in order to do that, we have to get rid of that other group.
They are an expression of the worst expression of religion from 1,000 years ago, creating a small we and being afraid of everybody else. We have to create a large we that's not only all people, but the earth itself.Krista Tippett:
This is such a large thing to speak to. So, I just want to come in from a few different directions from what John just said. I think something I'm so aware of. I feel like what my work has brought me to do is look at the world and follow what we call the news in terms of a very specific focus on what's happening with the human condition here.
What is the underlying human drama that we're analyzing as political events and an economy? I think that we are living in this time with a distressed nervous system at a species level, and that that is what is manifesting in wars and tumultuous elections, and leaders who are speaking directly to that fear. Either by stoking it because it's very close to the surface, or meeting it by saying, "I will take care of things. We will order this."
What we know now in this century, we know about the fear response in a human body. There is nothing more powerful in the human body, except I think love, than fear. And so when I think spirituality, I try not to overuse the word spirituality honestly, because it has, first of all, it's so personal. I think what that means coming out of any mouth, out of any life, it has such distinct connotations.
But what we're talking about really is at root, is interior life, inner life. Where character and conscience are formed, and meaning and moral imagination are pondered. And that is both about how we find peace within ourselves and how we are present to the world and to others. I think that's one of the things that religion disconnected in recent times, that it became something merely private. And that's not true to spiritual health, and it's not good for our life together.
So, if I think about, there's so many ways to think about spiritual practices, or spiritual disciplines, or spiritual offerings to this time. I think one that feels sounds very quiet and simple, but really can make a profound difference right now, is using that inner work to calm the fear in ourselves, and become a calmer of fear in the world around us.
I also want to just introduce another idea that I'm thinking about so much now, because we have companions on the spiritual journey in this time that generations before us haven't had. Through our ability to look deeply inside the natural world, the way vitality functions in the natural world and inside our bodies, just all interactivity and ecosystem, it's not just togetherness, it's symbiosis. There is no vitality without a total interwovenness. My body and your body at any given point have more microbial than human cells.
I agree with John. I think that on the other side of one of the things that fear does to us is it shuts us in others. It sees danger around every corner, and it marks out the other, the unknown as danger. And yet there is such anguish that comes with that inside the body that is living in danger as well.
What we're learning in the natural world, and I think this is a companion for spiritual imagination and moral imagination now, is that on some level, you and I are individuals, but actually the notion of an individual is nonsense. We're just not. It is not reality based to speak of us as separate beings.
And so for me, that is a shift of consciousness to realize that what I want to do is not be very different from anybody before me, but align my life with reality, with the deep reality of this world and of vitality in all of life. Which says that my well-being is utterly inextricable from your well-being. This was actually the radical in what they call the, what do they call it? That period where Buddhism arose. There's period in history where the Hebrew prophets arose. What is it?
john a. powell:
[inaudible 00:48:53]Krista Tippett:
Yeah. And Buddhism arose in India and in China, and all these great traditions that are very disconnected and were utterly disconnected from each other. But the radical insight that they had in common was that my well-being is linked to more than beyond the well-being of my kin and tribe, to the outcast, to the stranger.
Again, that was a piece of intelligence that we're now understanding to be deep intelligence in the bedrock of reality. We don't feel it. I think we feel it, but we don't know how to name it. We can't feel it. We can't access it when we're living in bodies and fear.
The other thing I think about being alive now is that our generation and time, so I am talking John about the we. Our generation and time is given to remake all institutions, not just politics and economic life and medicine and the law. These things are not fit for purpose. How schools function.
So, we have this audacious calling to remake all of those things including how we live, it's what we call spirituality and religion. So, for me, that's a big frame of, and I like the language of calling too. I think that that also creates agency, that notion of calling. And it insists that we look, that we orient towards the beyond of this moment, and not let an orientation on what is rupturing and breaking.
Obviously we have to face that in some ways and hold some part of ourselves as we are able to be oriented towards knowing there will be a beyond of this time. And so spiritual life in this time in some ways is also how do we inwardly prepare ourselves to be walking into and building that beyond, even as we also may have urgent work right in front of us. And that's going to be very different life-to-life and day-to-day.
Bethsaida Sulochana Ruiz Natal:
I just want to say also that for me, in terms of fear, what lives on the other side of that fear? What new gods or what new truths or new forms of belonging awaits us there? How do I, as Bethsaida, really understand that I'm going to get there, but I'm not going to get there alone, and I'm not going to get there with my fear?Krista Tippett:
Yeah, go on, John.john a. powell:
I know we're getting close to time, I believe. But one thing we shouldn't be afraid of fear. So, sometimes people think yes, fear is a big deal. Just in the research it says that. By some accounts it's the oldest emotion, it's fast, it's big, it knocks the rest of the brain out of circuit.
And so part of the message is get rid of your fear. That's the wrong message. There's a reason we have it. So, part of it is actually learning to be in relationship with fear. I wrote a chapter in a book called Lessons from Suffering, and we talked about the great religions, the acts of ways. All of them have a deep wrestling with suffering.
Not just pushing away, but saying really if we're open to it, they're profound lessons in suffering, and I say the same is true of fear. So, part of it is learning to talk to fear, learning to be in relationship with it, and therefore it quiets.
But the conflict entrepreneurs, which Amanda Ridley talks about, exaggerates the fear. You should be afraid. They're coming for you, they're coming for your children. They're coming for your cat, get some guns. So, that's exaggerating the fear. Sometime on the other side, we just say, that's ridiculous. You shouldn't be afraid. That's not the answer either. We need to tell the stories which honor a full humanity, including our fears.
Bethsaida Sulochana Ruiz Natal:
Thank you.Krista Tippett:
You're right. We need to be reverent, because that fear response in us is intricately designed to keep us safe, and that is also something that we need, so there's some discernment. So, I like that, being in relationship. But getting to the place where we are not locked into the fear, but can figure out how to listen to it when that is appropriate.
I think, Bethsaida, we will not be whole. There is no flourishing alone or behind our barricades with people who we think are just like us, which also is ridiculous because even the people close to us are not just like us.
Bethsaida Sulochana Ruiz Natal:
Thank you. We need to do another one of these, but spend the whole day together because my brain is blowing up here. Joshua.Joshua Gorman:
Yeah, thank you all. We want to ask one more question, and then we'll open up to some questions from the chat. You both have the gift of connecting with spiritual entrepreneurs, belonging entrepreneurs, so many innovators, leaders of communities and organizations.
So, we'd love just to hear from each of you just a couple of stories of where you're seeing spiritual imagination take root in these times? Maybe in unexpected ways or just creative ways that shine forth for you. These could be in secular spaces, or our justice movements, or in the field of art and culture.
So, Krista, we'd love to start with you. You probably have lots to share, but we'd welcome a story or two of spiritual innovation that you're seeing out there.Krista Tippett:
Yeah. Well, first of all, I know that for every terrible story of somebody behaving destructively in the world, I see, I think again, what we're looking for is what we'll see and how do we orient our attention. This fear response has us looking for what might be dangerous, or scary, or threatening. That's also the way news works, is that it feeds that on an hourly basis.
So, I think a spiritual discipline for being alive in this time is looking for places where people are rising to their best humanity. When you start looking for that, you see it everywhere, that is in fact the bigger story. And so what I see, because that's what I look for, is in every discipline, in every organization, in every school, there are healers.
I am sure, and people being healers in whatever they do, in whatever their organization or work is, there are healing forces, healing humans, social creatives all over the place. And it's ordinary. It's quiet because these are people who are not branding themselves, but just getting on with the work.
In terms of a story, I'd say one organization I've been following that to me is just a model for this whole idea of how religiosity and spirituality get remade in this century. This group that started as the Nuns & Nones, are you familiar with them? So, N-U-N-S & N-O-N-E-S.
I've been watching these people who were mostly in their early thirties when I first got to know them, classic pew poll, defined nuns, spiritually curious, but couldn't associate with any tradition. But their spiritual search was deep and authentic. And so they were also, as people are in our time, they wanted community in a new way that had not been given to them in this culture.
They gravitated towards these female monastics, Catholic nuns, in part because they really wanted to sit at the feet of people who had devoted themselves to intentional community in long lifetimes. And so what started as a conversation about how do you live in community like this, and how is it hard, and what are the challenges, and how do you keep it going, became this beautiful cross-generational conversation about everything. And it became reciprocal.
So, it wasn't just the 30 something nuns sitting at the feet of the 80 something monastics, and learning from them about spiritual life and about community life. But these nuns who in this country are often living in communities that are dying. They are not growing. This is not a vocation that women are taking on in these generations.
And so they got into this conversation about these women from monastics, so many of them run hospitals and school systems, and they own actually vast physical plants. They own what have been retreat centers and convents and land. There was this beautiful process of discernment that was delving and also patient in the sense that it felt urgent, but it needed to take as long as it take to get at the right, the deepest conclusion of what the future.
And so in the beginning, it was like, do we hand over these retreat centers? I know I was with them when they said, "Maybe we take over the retreat center." Which sounds like an obvious thing that might work. But where they ended up sticking with it and continuing to live into the question and let the question be a teacher by holding to it, is that they have now evolved into land justice futures.
So, it became a discernment among these female monastics who again, own land and buildings, to get into deep relationship with the land and with the communities, the lineages, the peoples and the traditions that were on that land before them. And also just the equitable, this is such a crisis in our country everywhere we live. So, it's been this process of deep spiritual discernment that is leading to incredible action.
And now these webs of relationship with indigenous elders, cross-generational, having a sense of urgency and also holding a sense of knowing what they didn't know and being willing to really be spiritual investigators. And so it is at once profoundly spiritual and profoundly committed to reshaping reality. It has everything that I think is this part of what this part of life can mean at its best.Joshua Gorman:
Beautiful. Thank you. John, you can go in any direction. But in your work, how are you seeing spiritual imagination evolve and open up?john a. powell:
Well, I think part of what we're seeing is people are reaching for better stories, people telling better stories. We live in stories. Part of this collective anxiety that Krista made reference to, how that gets addressed is what we do with stories. Stories is a way of collective meaning making. Sometimes we agree on the facts, but do we still disagree on meaning, and stories is really what carry those meanings.
And so I want to give you a couple of maybe odd examples. One, I was recently in Brazil. One of the things we do a lot at the Othering & Belonging Institute, is say, "Okay, how do you talk to the lizard?" We learn to speak lizard. The language of lizard is the language that speaks to people's fears. I think many of us are very bad at it.
The lizard does not like footnotes. It does not like new studies. It likes stories, it likes symbols. It likes the sacred. It likes to know that it's recognized and it's cared for. So, stories is really how you talk to the lizard. And so it's like, well, we need better examples. They're what we call bridging stories, which are stories which basically hold all of us, and breaking stories, a story about the scary other.
So, I was in Brazil, Bahia in Brazil, and we were invited to go to a Catholic mass that was given by Afro-Brazilians. And I was a little bit grumpy. I haven't been to church in a long time. It's like I'm going to spend three hours of my time, my limited time in Brazil, going to a Catholic Church, who thought of this? Our host thought of it.
I went there and it was like this coming together of traditional African religions, of evangelical religions, of Catholic religions. They were singing, and it was very mixed. It was like all out of a movie. They were singing, they were throwing water on us. And I said, "This is lizard language."
Everybody there felt it. Didn't matter if you were Catholic or not. Didn't matter if you even spoke the language or not, but they imbued it. Anyway. So, that was just, to me, that was really like, anyway, we should capture that.
Here's another one, Joshua, that I shared before we invited people on, that both of us have lost close friends this year. So, to me, part of spirituality, part of the language, part of our deep, deep fear is fear of death, how do we deal with death. Religion and spirituality is grounded in how one wrestles with the question of death.
We're learning more and more about how the mind works. Krista made reference to that. One of the great teachers is Daniel Kahneman, who wrote a book called Thinking, Fast and Slow, and it's a wonderful book, so read the book if you want. But also if you don't want to read the book, read about him dying.
Recently, he was turning 90 years old. Someone from, I think it was, I forget, one of the major newspapers, I think it was The Atlantic, called him up and said, "Dr. Kahneman, we'd like to interview you. You've done all these incredible things. You won a Nobel Prize, you've changed the way people think about the brain. We'd like to interview you." And he said, "Well, I'm leaving town."
They said, "Well, can we meet with you when you come back?" He said, "I'm not coming back." They said, "What do you mean you're not coming back?" He says, "I'm going to Europe." "Well, can we talk to you when you get back from Europe." "No." "You're moving to Europe?" "I'm going to Europe to die."
The reporter shifted gears and is like, "Are you sick? What's going on?" He said, "No, I'm not sick. I have a really loving family. I'm still in good mental and physical health. I'm turning 90. It's time. I've done enough. I've been here long enough. It's time." And that's what the article is about.
It's so counterintuitive. It's like, what's wrong with you? Are you isolated? Are you lonely? And then the reporter objected a little bit and is like, "But you've done so much for the world." He said, "We think that all of us. We're not that significant. None of us are that significant."
Anyway. I think a lot about death, lost a lot of friends. I know more of my life is behind me than in front of me. So, just reading that story really touched me. And just by saying it, it reminded me a little of my dad.
My dad was 99 and a half, and he got sick and he was in the hospital. But they said, "We're not sure, it could have been COVID." But they said, "This is interventions we can make to keep you here." And he said, "Why?" He said, "Enough." And I made my effort, I said, "Dad, you're 99 and a half. You're so close to 100." And he said, "Ain't nothing special about 100." His last words, and he was completely at peace, was, "God, I'm ready. Take care of my children." Then he died.Bethsaida Sulochana Ruiz Natal:
Wow. Thank you. So, we're going to go on to the chat unless you wanted to add anything to that, Krista?Krista Tippett:
No.Bethsaida Sulochana Ruiz Natal:
You look like you're-Krista Tippett:
Well, I was-Bethsaida Sulochana Ruiz Natal:
... cooking something up there.Krista Tippett:
I was just thinking actually that it's somewhat connected to that story I told about a community that is dying and asks how to die well. I don't know how many of you know this book, Hospicing Modernity. I think it's a really, really important book for our time.
She's drawing on the things we're learning about vitality in the natural world. But it's basically like this world that we've been living in, that we came out of the 20th century in, is dying. And that's part of why there's a violence, there's a violent resistance in these death throes.
But one of the things she's saying is, how about asking this question, how do we give this way we've been living a good death, learn whatever else it needs to teach us? Nothing is lost in the natural world. Everything is picked up and taken into new life. But when we resist death, when we act like who was it?
Father Greg Boyle, I recently saw him, wonder and just amazing work in Los Angeles. And he said, "If death is something that happens to all of us, can that really be the worst thing that ever happens to all of us?" But I think that death in our time is not just something that happens in individual human bodies. We are living in a time of chrysalis. So, that's very connected to me.
Bethsaida Sulochana Ruiz Natal:
Thank you.john a. powell:
Can I just add one other thing? So, a friend of mine who died, a close friend, very close friend, and it's hard, I'm still grieving. But he also was like an urban farmer. He planted plants to the house and I gave his family a tree. He decided to be composted, and I just want to put that out there. I went to the service. I spoke at the service.
His daughter who is a lovely, lovely person, said, "He was always in close relationship with the earth. So, it's only appropriate in his death that he go back to the earth." And then they gave us compost to take home with us. And to me, it was so appropriate and so beautiful. I still miss him, but I'm trying to figure out what am I going to plant on that compost that is not just represent him, that is him.
Bethsaida Sulochana Ruiz Natal:
It's beautiful. Joshua, do you want to share any of your experience?Joshua Gorman:
No, I think we should turn to a couple questions here.Bethsaida Sulochana Ruiz Natal:
Okay.Joshua Gorman:
Yeah.Bethsaida Sulochana Ruiz Natal:
Okay. So, I'm going to start out with this one that starts out, I am nervous asking, and I'm finding it hard to phrase, if naming that. Here it goes. Sometimes parts of me wonder if this capacity for me to need a calling to wonder and practice spirituality comes from a space of privilege, while so many of us are struggling with survival in this capitalistic society? And whether I should focus my effort on action versus contemplation? Would like to hear your reflections. And either one of you could start.
Krista Tippett:
Well, I don't think that it's an either or. I think both are essential to being whole, to being spiritually grounded. I do believe there will be times when one is what we are engaged in, and I think it's more not losing either one. There are times to go inside, I think in this time where we have an entire world to remake. And the work that is before us is the work of the rest of our lifetimes.
And really refreshed by younger people now who understand that, who have a sense of time that is bigger than our, I don't know what happened 15 minutes ago in the market or whatever happens. And then election in two years or four years is going to determine the future. It just isn't, life and transformation don't work that way.
But if the work is the work for the rest of our lifetimes, then we absolutely have to build in time and space for rest and repair and restoration. We have to build in getting ourselves filled up again.
I've heard in these years, I hear people saying to this question of whether it's a privilege, how can we speak of joy in a time like this? How could we speak of hope in a time like this? How can we speak of calling? Is that a lofty thing? What I'm understanding from teachers who are on the front lines is that joy as a human is a birthright. It is precisely a space which the world cannot take away from you. It is resilience making.
Of course, it sounds like a privilege to hold joy or hope or calling in a time like this, but the irony of history is, is that it's often the people who look like they had the least resources and the least possibility, who have absolutely modeled those things for the rest of us.
So, I think that the question of humility and certainly the question of privilege, I think I'm just so aware of this all the time too. Some of us are standing on solid ground and many of us are not. But I do think that that joy, that a sense that I am called to something, that is not a matter of privilege or of being a certain person with a certain ground beneath your feet. The knowledge of that is a gift we must hold before each other.Bethsaida Sulochana Ruiz Natal:
Thank you. John.john a. powell:
Yeah, I just have a couple of things. First of all, thanks for the question and the vulnerability. I also think it is an unhealthy dichotomy, a false dichotomy. I've already done this, but I would recommend reading Joanna Macy's book, World As Lover, World As Self, because she's grappling with that, and she's just a beautiful, beautiful teacher.
She spent her whole life deeply, deeply engaged in contemplation and deeply, deeply engaged in activism. She was proud of Buddhist Peace Fellowship. When we think of people deep spiritual teachings and impact, first person comes to mind for me is I sometimes say this, not Dr. King, but the Reverend Dr. King.
What made his activism so effective was his profound spiritual grounding. What made his spiritual grounding so deep was his reverence for the world and activism. I tried to capture some of this in one of the books I wrote called Racing to Justice. I talk about how spirituality and social activism are oftentimes put in opposition, and that's false.
For me, and I'll just say there's a jazz singer, a jazz performer, not a singer, although he sings some, has a statement that I love, which I'll share with you. It's that the inside is not, the outside is too, and it's Don Cherry. What he's doing is rejecting duality, that there's inside and outside.
And then the last thing of course is that we are in relationship with each other. We sometimes have different roles. When my father was getting sick and my sisters, who are still very much in the church, they said they were going to pray and talk to God.
I knew the head of the hospital, Henry Port Hospital that my father was in, and I said, "Okay, you guys talk to God. I'll talk to the head of the hospital. We have all the bases covered." So, we have different roles, but we have different roles in relationship with each other. Some people will be cooking food, some people will be giving money, some people will be dressing wounds. Some people will be holding people's spiritual grounding.
If we're doing it in concert with each other, we have all the bases covered. So, one of the ways in which we deal with this is being in community. And so hopefully you can have a community that can help hold this. I used to say to my children, I'm living in Berkeley, Low Berkeley Hills, I'm looking outside, there's this beautiful garden.
It's a blessing, it's a privilege. I say to my older kids, "You had a lot of blessings and privilege. The question is, what will you do with your privilege? Will you share it? Will you extend it? Will you hold it just to yourself?"Bethsaida Sulochana Ruiz Natal:
Awesome. Thank you. I'm going to ask this one because a couple of people are asking the same question. It is about, I fear that the human need to other is fixed in human nature. What are your thoughts about this? Do you believe that human nature can change to cease the impulse to other? Start with you, John.
john a. powell:
This is a question that comes up a lot. It's a great question, and I deal with this a lot in the book that I wrote with Stephen Menendian, Belonging Without Othering, and you hear this. I was on the board of a group called More in Common, and they did a major study on hidden tribalism. And I said, "Great work. I love your work. I'm glad to be affiliated with you. Your work should not be called hidden tribalism."
What we're experiencing now is not tribalism. Tribes that existed, hunter-gatherers and foragers, they were generally small, 50 to 200 people, that you spent your whole life with. Your connection was not based on your, quote unquote, "race or your religion", it was based on your daily contact with each other. You needed each other. And so you could not have the tribe of a thousand people, it's too many people. So, it maxed out at some level.
What we're looking at now in terms of fragmentation and the polarization is millions of people fighting millions of people. Americans fighting Chinese. A tribe is not 1,000 people. A tribe is not a million people. That's something different. That's something that's come out of modernity. It didn't come out of evolution. It came out of stories.
So, read Harari's book, Sapiens, and he talks about this. So, what allowed people to create relationships beyond the 100 or 200 people? Stories. Stories. Imagination and stories created new possibilities, which is one of the reasons that people believe now homo sapiens outperformed neanderthals.
Initially, we thought maybe homo sapiens were smarter, they were whatever. It's turned out, probably not true. The secret sauce for homo sapiens, which we are, is our ability to collaborate. The thing that allowed us to collaborate was stories. You can read about it if you just Google cognitive revolution. The cognitive revolution, and I don't want to get too wonky on you, but the cognitive revolution is about 70,000 years old.
What the cognitive revolution was, it was the ability for homo sapiens to tell stories and to imagine things were not there. And of the 10 different types of humans, only homo sapiens developed this capacity. We start telling stories. So, now there's a story according to Harari, that brings together two and a half billion people under the banner of Christianity, 2 billion people under the banner of Islam. That's not evolution.
In fact, what people say is that the cognitive revolution created a break between history and biology. Because all of a sudden you think about evolution, evolution takes time. It's actually very slow and methodical. Culture doesn't take any time. You can have a culture change in a minute. That's because of your story.
I'll end just by saying this, and sorry for the dissertation. We have almost the exact physical physiology of people who lived 40,000 years ago. Those people did not have the internet. They did not have cars. They did not have money. They did not have religion. They did not have reading. They did not have nation states. But they're exactly the same as we are in terms of biology. What we have is stories. They didn't have stories.
So, this break, so no, we're not destined to other. The other thing that we're doing now, especially at this national level, is a function of national stories. I can go on, give counterexamples of people who come together like EU. Anyway. So, no, it's not inevitable. And how far can we tell stories to include everybody? That's the challenge before us. We need to tell stories where everyone belongs and no one is othered.
It's already embodied, at least in the seeds in our constitution. David French did a beautiful thing in terms of talking about due process. I won't get too technical again, but due process basically says, in our country, in our constitution, everyone, not citizens, not black people, not white people, not gay people, not straight people, everyone has a right to tell their story to a judge. That's due process. It's already embodied in our constitution that everyone in some way do belong.
Bethsaida Sulochana Ruiz Natal:
Thank you.Krista Tippett:
I think John is the expert on this. I'll just say one thing I think about a lot is, and this is connected, is the narrative that comes to us. Who is this we? But that is told about what it means to be alive now. Journalism in fact is very much driven by the primal fear response. It's very much pathology-based. What is news is what went wrong.
And so those are the stories we tell about what is important that is happening. I think we all know in ourselves and in people around us that it is possible, and all around us that people grow beyond that thing that gets called tribalism or othering. What we don't know how to do collectively is tell the story of that. To normalize that story, to see that as more important and in fact more real than the story of dysfunction and separation and alienation.
That's about the stories we tell, and I think it's a leap of imagination we need to make. But again, it's an imagination towards reality rather than some fiction.john a. powell:
One more thing, I know we're at time. 2,000 years ago, there was a illiterate person going around talking to a couple of 100 people, never thousands and thousands, who asserted that every person on the earth, this is when most people on the earth, 99% of them were in some enslavement.
But he asserted that everyone is a child of God except who? There was no exception. Everyone. That was Jesus. I say that because with Krista's point, that's such a radical statement to be making today, but certainly be making 2,000 years ago. And yet we are disinclined to actually make those claims today.
Bethsaida Sulochana Ruiz Natal:
Thank you.Joshua Gorman:
Thank you friends. We are going to bring this to a close. Of course, the questions are alive and the conversation will live on. Krista and John, I hope you know how many people find hope and resilience and love and possibilities through your life's work. And so please keep it coming.
Krista, I know you're working on a new book. And John, I'm sure you have a handful of books still to come. But we invite everyone. We're going to share a few links in the chat and we will share a follow-up email with the video recording from today's conversation along with links to Krista and John's work and their books.
We invite you to find them in other places too, where you can listen and learn with them. But a deep bow. Krista, a deep bow. John, thank you for your yes to joining us. Thank you for all the sparks today. For living so brightly and beautifully in the ways that you do.
john a. powell:
Thank you and all of you, your audience as well.Krista Tippett:
Yeah, this has been life-giving for me. Thank you. Thank you.Bethsaida Sulochana Ruiz Natal:
Yeah. I just want to say thank you both and my heart is full. I'm a crier and I'm ready to cry just from all the wisdom that was shared today and just all the stuff that's been just generating in my head. But before we finish, I'd love to just let folks here in the virtual space know that we would love for you to stay connected to Thrive. And like Joshua said, we'll send out an email, so you could stay connected with us.
Any questions, any musings you have, you could email us. Or you could follow us on our social media, we're on Facebook, Instagram. If you feel called to support this work that we're doing further, your donations make a real huge impact to this very small organization. So, it will support Thrive's efforts in bridging belonging and spiritual innovation, because of the community support.
Every contribution helps create spaces for connection, dialogue and transformation, healing divisions and deepening our shared humanity. We are going to share a donation link in the chat, and it doesn't matter what size, your gift matters. And thank you for being part of this movement.
We will say our final goodbyes. Maybe we could take everybody off chat and everybody could just say goodbye in your language and however way you want to say goodbye. Love y'all. Appreciate y'all.Joshua Gorman:
Feel free to come off mute and say goodbye, friends. Thank you.Tammi Scott:
Thank you so much.Speaker 6:
Thank you.
