Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living
- Mar 24, 2025
- 7 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
★★★★☆
Some live lives of quiet desperation, some actively toil to cultivate fear and derision, and there are some who choose to embrace the fullness of life, revel in its complexity and perplexity, embrace its mystery and wonder, and work to realize, by which I mean actualize, hope and joy and abundance for themselves, those around them, and, often, the larger world. And then there are some who fall in the space between those ways of being and moving through the world, perhaps wanting more but not knowing where or how to find it, lacking the courage within or the support without, to find greater meaning and purpose to live a well-lived life. Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living is an invitation from those who have chosen to embrace the fullness of life to those who fall in the space between to see how others see the world, hear how others hear the world, and think about how others think about the world.
I, like most, fall in the space between. As a poet, I have written that “I am at my best when alone,” a sentiment that is likely familiar to other poets and writers and creatives. Being at my best when alone isn’t a desired state of existence: It’s not the reality I want for myself. But because I fall in the space between, I’m often not the person I’d like to be, for and with others, and for myself. As a poet, I spend a lot of time reflecting on my inner life, my invisible, personal, interior universe. What comes out doesn’t necessarily, on its face at least, speak to that reflection, but everything I write comes from that place. The more I write, the more I reflect; the more I reflect, the more I write. The result of that continual loop of reflection and writing is that I become ever more acutely aware of the gulf between how I’d like to live and move and be in the world and how I’m actually living and moving and being in the world. In hi Nobel acceptance speech, Ernest Hemingway wrote, “Writing, at its best, is a lonely life … For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.” He must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day. Being a poet is both a blessing and a curse, a solitary pursuit that yearns for intimate, universal connection—a contradiction I live with and that is, no doubt, well felt by my dear wife.
For me, writing poetry is a journey, not a destination; each poem, I hope, another step in a broader pursuit of finding my way from the space between to the fuller, richer life beyond, from the way I was taught to see the world, as a child, by and through the actions of my parents, blood family, and the limited social circles afforded by youth to the way I have evolved to see the world as an adult, by and through the actions of the friends and family I’ve made, from the books I’ve read, and from my own internal investigations of self-searching. The imprint of youth is powerful. The hurt and harm that come from there form deep ruts that many can’t maneuver out of, and, at 51, I am still not fully shod of them. I wish I could say otherwise, but a lot of anger and resentment toward my parents still live inside me, and, for good or ill, poetry has been a salve—which can soothe or heal but which can also draw or pull out that which is unwanted—even when, as is most of the time, I am not explicitly writing about family or childhood.
Over the past half a dozen years or so, as my awareness of falling in the space between has been increasingly elucidated, I have found myself drawn to books like The Art of Peace (which I am currently rereading), Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Anam Ċara by John O’Donohue, the Tao Te Ching, The Book of Delights by Ross Gay, Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, poetry by, amongst others, Mary Oliver, Ada Limón, David Whyte, Jericho Brown, and Wendell Berry, and in podcasts like Poetry Unbound and On Being with Krista Tippett.
Tippett, like me, was raised Southern Baptist, and, like me, in Oklahoma. Unlike her, I was baptized Roman Catholic before that, as an infant. Like me, she left the Baptist church and became unreligious. Though neither of us found anything in that evangelical world that enlivened us, unlike me, she didn’t become an atheist. Instead, after becoming a journalist who was, amongst other things, fascinated by the Cold War geopolitics of the 1980s, Tippett rediscovered Christianity in her thirties and went on to get a master’s degree in divinity from Yale University. Her show, originally called Speaking of Faith, began life on Minnesota Public Radio in 2001 to specifically address religious issues, and, if you’ve ever listened to On Being, the show isn’t overtly religious, nor are its guests, but her faith is central to its point of view, just as it is central to her own.
I’ve written amply about this before, but it comes out a little differently every time, so I’ll go here again. I became an atheist at the same time I discovered veganism, straight edge hardcore music, and radical leftist politics. By then, I was a senior in high school who hadn’t attended (or thought about) church since the seventh grade. I became an atheist for two reasons: to reject what I saw as blatant hypocrisy (this was before the abuse scandals that rocked the Catholic church in the early 2000s, but not before Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart went down in disgrace) and to reject religion’s foundational belief in dominion over animals. I was also angry—actually, I still am in my way—that I was baptized twice without having any say in the matter. No Catholic infant does, but, technically, a youth in the Southern Baptist church does, if you consider unrelenting adult pressure around the age of eight or nine to “bring Jesus into your heart” counts (it doesn’t).
To me, as a kid in Tulsa, Oklahoma, religion was a thing you did. It wasn’t who you were. It was easy to abandon. Back to my senior year in high school, a girlfriend, now my oldest and dearest friend, decided to become Roman Catholic. This was a complicated matter for me. I was an atheist who fundamentally abhored religion and everything it stood for. I wanted to support her, to understand why she wanted to do such a thing. Despite looking back on the lack of nuance I had about a lot of things I felt passionately about at the time, I think I did alright by her. Which is to say, I think I managed not to make her feel bad for walking toward religion while I, to paraphrase Nietzsche, had declared it dead. When I got to college, religion—or what we referred to as “philosophies”—showed up in all kinds of interesting ways. Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, and, especially, the Hare Krishna movement, which had infiltrated the hardcore music scene through bands like Shelter and 108, were intriguing and offered pathways to faith that were more personal and less dogmatic (or so they seemed). Intriguing but not enthralling; curiosities and nothing more.
It is said there are no atheists in foxholes and that people tend to become more religious as they age. While I might consider myself at war with a great many things about the world, I am not in a foxhole. I am, however, firmly in middle age. I don’t know why people become more religious as they age. I presume it has something to do with approaching death (that certainly seems to be the case with my mother-in-law). I also presume it applies to people who were already religious, not to people like me who spent a significant part of their lives identifying as an atheist. I bristle at the thought that I’m on a known, and typical, trajectory for someone my age. What I don’t bristle at is that, as I age, I am less certain about anything (knowing and certainty are the folly of youth). That might not extend to the notion of an omniscient, all-powerful, interventionist God, or the Holy Trinity, or adherence to the theological dogma of one church or another, but it does extend to what I think about faith and spirituality and what the word “god” can mean in its broadest and deepest sense.
Reenter Krista Tippett, who can put better words to all this than I can. Across five themes—words, flesh, love, faith, and hope—Tippett explores how she sees the world, and what the world can look like, when approached with heart and hands open, with curiosity, with reverence. She is, unabashedly, a Christian and a theologian, and while that is the lens through which she sees the world, she is no sermonizer. Becoming Wise is suffused with faith—but not religion—a distinction I could always understand intellectually but, until the past several years, would have made no room for emotionally. If you’ve listened to her podcast, you know she is sensitive, thoughtful, intelligent, a skilled interviewer, and, perhaps, an even better listener. She brings all of that to this book, judiciously drawing from exchanges with her conversationalists to amplify and give flesh to her insights. Its lone flaw: Each chapter concludes with what Tippett refers to as End Notes, snippets of interviews with various guests that didn’t make it into the chapter proper. Like an album’s bonus tracks or a film’s outtakes, they round out the picture, but don’t necessarily make for a better product. Given that there were 86 pages of these notes in a book that only ran to 267 pages, a full third of the book, they also felt like so much padding. I think it would have been a tighter, more potent book without them. Still, the result is a book well worth reading, and, if you’re reading this, haven’t yet read the book, and are thinking of doing so, you can skip the End Notes and have the experience I wish I’d had.
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