PSYCHOSCAPES: The Mystery of Life

Seapoint Beach, Kittery ME
CC Jean Stimmell

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a positive voice raised against today’s doomsday handwringing. Krista Tippett also exudes hope for the future: She has become a leading spiritual voice of our times through her podcasts, interviewing exceptional people “whose insights kindle in us a sense of wonder and courage.”^⁠1

In her latest book,“Becoming Wise,”^⁠2 she uncovers how wisdom is gained, not by denying the most tragic aspects of our lives but by facing them. Time and time again, she has drawn out stories of folks who have walked through darkness and hardship but “integrated them into wholeness on the other side.” They became not fixed but “whole and healed,” not despite their trauma, but because “they let it become part of who they are.”

Hope for Tippett is connected to her unique understanding of theology. While she says optimism is only wishful thinking, hope is a reality- based, spiritual force.“It sees the darkness. It takes that seriously. It sees the possibility for good and redemption. And takes that seriously. And it’s a choice. And it’s also — it’s an action. It’s something you put into practice.”

Redemption is a radical notion for Tippet. Although she doesn’t think humans are innately sinful, it is clear we all screw up. “Every single one of us. And collectively, we’re making massive mistakes.”^⁠3 Despite our flaws, she believes we are all redeemable, relating the example of what Mother Teresa told a group of death row inmates at San Quentin Prison: “If you want to see the face of God, look at the prisoner standing next to you.” Then she adds, “I see the face of God when I look at you.”^⁠4

She believes hope is fostered from practicing rituals within a community. “Hope, like every virtue, is a choice that becomes a habit that becomes spiritual muscle memory. It’s a renewable resource for moving through life as it is, not as we wish it to be.”^⁠5 Modern neuroscience agrees that habits determine who we are: What we practice is who we become. One can become “more patient, being more hopeful, being more compassionate just like it goes for any other skill.”

Tippett admits it was a turning point for her to discover theology has more to do with humans than god: While psychology can make sense out of part of who we are, only theology and philosophy explore in-depth “ our contradictoriness, and our complexity, and our beauty, and strangeness, and our possibilities.

Sadly, she relates how soaring political rhetoric, which traditionally helped hold us together as a nation, has sunk into a divisive, knife-throwing contest between parties. Generous and inclusive words, what some might call spiritual, have fallen by the wayside: “Peace is strangely divisive. Justice is somehow partisan.^⁠6 “

None of us can know the ultimate truth, Tippet says, quoting the renowned physicist Brian Greene: “The fundamental nature of reality, as far as we can grasp it now is fundamentally hidden from us at this stage in our development as a species.”^⁠7 While we may think our dining room table is made out of 100% solid wood, it is actually 99% empty space in a force-field of spinning atoms, just like our bodies. In other words, we are made up of nothingness.

Children, Tippet writes, have a natural affinity for exploring this unknown: the inquiry, the enormous curiosity about this universe, and the hope that somehow those answers will come about.” What children and religion have in common is a burning desire to answer these questions. “Mystery is such an important part of it.”^⁠8

That’s my biggest takeaway from her book: Understanding spiritual practice as a mystery.

We don’t know any more about the big questions in life than our cave-dwelling ancestors. The difference is that the ancients worshipped the mystery of it all while we moderns, the sophisticated ones, deny it. Cutting across the myopia of our increasingly secular society, Tippet looks to theology as the one force that can bring us together on a higher plane, celebrating the holy mystery of life itself.

I will conclude with my own more pagan-like example illustrating the mystery of growing old that I once sent to my mentor, the psychologist Peter Baldwin: “Ah, isn’t life wonderful in its multifaceted mystery, so mind-blowing if we could just let go… fearlessly riding bareback into the sunset on a run-away stallion.”^⁠9

xxx

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