Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and the Art of Living

I wish I could throw Elizabeth Alexander’s question by way of poetry, “Are we not of interest to each other?” into town hall meetings, the halls of Congress, and let it roll around for a while.

it’s hard to resist a generous question. We all have it in us to formulate questions that invite honesty, dignity, and revelation. There is something redemptive and life-giving about asking a better question.

describe presence rather than means towards an end: nourishing, edifying, redemptive; courageous, generous, winsome; adventurous, curious, tender.

risk falling down,

It just fit so well. And because we have neglected the lament pieces, we are ill equipped for the loss that we are facing in our society. So we keep pretending and denying that that’s not happening to us.

You can’t dominate people without separating them from each other and from themselves. The more people get plugged back into their bodies, into each other, the more impossible it will be for us to be dominated and occupied. I think that’s really the work right now, and I don’t mean that in a narcissistic way. I mean, how in our daily lives are we c

discussion about a large, meaty, theological subject began by framing it as a question, and then asking everyone around the table to begin to answer that question through the story of their lives: Who is God? What is prayer? How to approach the problem of evil? What is the content of Christian hope?

light in all events and all people, to lift it up and make it visible once again and thereby to restore the innate wholeness of the world. It’s a very important story for our times. This task is called tikkun olam in Hebrew. It’s the restoration of the world. And this is, of course, a collective task. It involves all people who have ever been born,

The balance of our world frequently is seen as a question of power. If I have more power and more knowledge, more capacity, then I can do more. And when we have power, we can very quickly push people down. I’m the one that knows and you don’t know, and I’m strong and I’m powerful, I have the knowledge. This is the history of humanity. And it is in

Way back already in 1872, Charles Darwin wrote a book about emotions in which he talks about how emotions are expressed in things like heartbreak and gut-wrenching experience. So you feel things in your body. And then it became obvious that, if people are in a constant state of heartbreak and gut-wrench, they do everything to shut down those feelin