Krista Tippett: Voice of America’s Spiritual Journey

The host and creator of On Being talks about her own spiritual journey, and the changing face of spirituality in America.

As the creator and host the popular public radio/podcast On Being, and the author of Becoming Wise, Krista Tippett is renowned for her meetings of mind and spirit with wisdom figures, politicians, poets, and great thinkers of our time. She is the host and narrator of America’s spiritual journey. When I asked her to define American spirituality and predict where it’s going, she navigated these big questions with articulate, considered insights. As we chatted, Tippett herself was being guided by the interrupting wisdom of Google Maps. She was driving to her next destination. —Lindsay Kyte

 

Since you began your journey with On Being, what changes have you seen in how spiritual practice is regarded in mainstream American society?

There’s been an important shift, an opening and softening toward spirituality. When I started my show in the early 2000s, there was a sense in respectable educated circles that you couldn’t talk about this part of life with any intellectual integrity or reasonableness. That is changing, in some ways dramatically and in other ways more subtly. More and more, we have unexpected public figures or journalists speaking about spiritual practice or things like mindfulness, which is the vocabulary many people use now.

Whenever we put out a show with a Buddhist voice on the air, we get what we call “the Buddhist Bump.”

Two years ago, I got the National Humanities medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Years earlier we had applied for funding from the NEH, but at that point talking about the humanities and including spirituality was intellectually suspect. But when I got the citation for the medal, it read something like, “Thoughtfully delving into the mysteries of human existence.” A decade earlier, “the mysteries of human existence” was not a topic that would have been considered respectable by federal agencies and the White House.

 

Tell us about your own spiritual path or belief system.

I don’t really have a quick one-word label. I would say Christianity is my mother tongue and homeland. But I’m not an especially active Christian right now in the traditional ways. My yoga practice is as important a part of my spiritual life as anything else. I also get a lot of spiritual nourishment out of the work I do. As well, reading passages from Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart at regular intervals is a big piece of my spiritual life.

 

Who are the people you serve in your show and what’s the common thread that binds them together?

I would say they’re seekers, people who are searching. We have devout Christians, Muslims, Jews, people with a very serious Buddhist practice, atheists and agnostics, and people searching for their spiritual path. What joins all of them together is a spirituality evolved as much through questioning as it is through answers. We also serve people who are really committed and intentional at the intersection of inner life and outer presence in the world.

 

How has your audience been changing over the years?

The cultural encounter with the spiritual part of life has been rapidly evolving. There’s a tectonic shift happening that we don’t stop to acknowledge often enough.

We are the first generation of humans who haven’t inherited our spiritual identities. For most of human history, in most cultures, these things have been passed down. But suddenly, in the last couple of generations, people are very likely to have been born without that very deep formation.

Looking back at this century a hundred years from now, I think that the subtle but very profound way that Buddhist wisdom and practices have entered the culture is going to be one of the big stories that is told.

So while traditional religious affiliation may be waning, I don’t think spiritual life is waning. Accompanying the demise of inherited tradition is the fact that people who have been born without a lot of formation also don’t have much baggage. They have a lot of curiosity. These generations are searching and are really committed to the integrity of joining inner life and outer life. They haven’t necessarily been given opportunities to do that, but they are looking for it and they know they’re in need of it.

 

How much does your audience draw on Buddhist practice and philosophy?

Whenever we put out a show with a Buddhist voice on the air, we get what we call “the Buddhist Bump.” All of our major traditions have contemplative practices at their heart. But in most traditions they are reserved for experts—the monks, the nuns, and the clergy. Buddhism makes these techniques and insights available to everyone.

Across the years, I’ve interviewed a number of those I call the “first explorers” — people like Sharon Salzberg, Mirabai Bush, and Joseph Goldstein who went to India looking for spiritual life in the 1960s and 1970s and brought back Buddhism and meditation to American culture. That has been transformative far beyond the numbers of people who are officially Buddhist. It’s transforming medicine. It’s transforming families and workplaces and social action. It’s even transforming the lives of people rooted in other traditions who are bringing these spiritual technologies, like meditation, into their life. It’s magnetic.

I like to think in a long view of time because it helps relax us. We have this American idea we have to do everything right now — without discernment, without attending as much to how we do something as to what our plan of action is. When we do things this way, we may walk forward in ways that aren’t as mindful as they need to be. We could end up having to do a lot of repair. Looking back at this century a hundred years from now, I think that the subtle but very profound way that Buddhist wisdom and practices have entered the culture is going to be one of the big stories that is told.

 

What role is technology playing in the changing face of spirituality in America?

What’s quite new is how widely accessible the teachings of the ages are. I remember twenty or thirty years ago talking to Phyllis Pickle, who started the religious division of Publishers Weekly. It was a big thing for Publishers Weekly to acknowledge that religious and spiritual books actually had a big market. What she said to me back then was that a lot of people were getting their “church off the shelves.”

Today we can say that a lot of people are getting a very diverse spiritual education “off the shelves.” But it’s not just the shelves anymore. It’s technology. It’s a show like On Being. It’s travel and accessibility. People can go on meditation retreats in many different kinds of institutions and communities, or they can go on silent retreat at a Buddhist monastery that may not have as many monks as it once did but is bursting at the seams with modern people looking for quiet and wanting to touch into that contemplative part of themselves.

I see technology offering opportunities to be both free and creative, while also providing an earnest, serious searching place in our common life that’s unfolding in unprecedented ways.

 

With such access, are you seeing people putting together pieces from different belief systems, or would you say more are dedicating themselves to immersion in one path?

There’s a little bit of both. The notion of “seekers” in recent generations has sometimes been seen as superficial or unmoored or vague. But the classic New Age movement of the 1980s and 1990s has evolved and grown up.

I’m impatient with people who are dismissive of the world of spiritual seeking, because I see in it a real impulse to integrity and a longing for depth and commitment.

There is a natural path that emerges when people are seekers. It starts out very individual and private, with people saying, “I’m nurturing my inner life.” Then, if that is meaningful, people will gravitate toward things that religious traditions have always carried forward: fellowship and companionship with others. It’s a very natural thing that the further you go, the more important community becomes. You seek out fellow spiritual searchers.

People also seek ritual, which is a basic human need. I think we need rituals to function in ways that we’ve forgotten in Western culture. Then there is a reverence for the text and wanting go more deeply into written teachings and scripture.

I’m impatient with people who are dismissive of the world of spiritual seeking, because I see in it a real impulse to integrity and a longing for depth and commitment.

To what extent do you think people are bringing distinctly American attitudes and values to their spiritual search?

Americans are creative, which has an upside and a downside. It can mean playing fast and loose with traditions and risking the integrity of those traditions. But it can also mean being faithful to the ways that traditions can be lived in modern everyday life, instead of encased in a museum.

Also, I think it’s true that Americans, whatever their background, are more prone to do things individualistically, at least at first. They think, “I’m going to embark on my individual spiritual path.” I don’t think that happens as easily in other cultures, even when people are alienated from their religious traditions. Even Europeans, where it’s a more secular culture in many ways, seem to have a more collective sensibility about how these things work. The collective thing is a bit more of a stretch for us; it’s not as intuitive. But it’s essential if what we are doing is spiritual life.

Because American society is so individualistic, it’s also very lonely. It’s not just that it doesn’t serve us and makes us unhappy — it’s out of sync with the world we inhabit. The ancient abiding questions behind our spiritual traditions are “What does it means to be human?” and “How do we want to live?” In the twenty-first century, those have become inseparable from the question “Who we are to each other?”

That question may have felt optional in the past, when spiritual practice was often about going to church on Sunday with your family and was more of a private affair. Today, the question of who we are to each other is spiritual work. In fact, it is the work of whether we survive and flourish.

I think we don’t quite know how to live that reality yet. But if we don’t, the traumatic and tragic events happening around us are bringing it home in all kinds of ways. That need to see ourselves as connected, to be caring, and, as the Buddhist tradition says, to attend to suffering in the world and the suffering in ourselves is more evident and more urgent now.

 

Many people are deeply worried about the state of the world and politics these days. How do you understand the situation from a spiritual point of view?

The truth is that what is behind all of the worst things that are happening is human fear and pain, human suffering. We know how to get outraged about it, we know how to come up with a plan to solve it. But we do not know how to stand, collectively, in public, with pain and suffering.

Our spiritual traditions are about honoring that pain and suffering. They give us the courage and tools to walk through suffering. Because if we don’t dwell with fear and suffering, if we don’t honor it, it will continue to haunt and define us.

I am actually encouraged by the way Americans are openly bewildered right now.

Public life is a magnification of life. It’s human life writ large. What we see now is so much pain, so much suffering, so much fear. So we rush to be upset about it, we rush to solve it, we rush to deny it. What we have to figure out is how to have some public forum for the discipline of dwelling with pain and walking through it so we can bring some health to our public life. Our public life needs that so desperately. It needs wisdom and what the spiritual traditions have to teach as much as it needs a better political campaign. Pema Chödrön talks about the fact that when we understand groundlessness, there is a possibility of growth and of health. Boy, does that describe where we are collectively now.

With that in mind, I am actually encouraged by the way Americans are openly bewildered right now. Things are so bewildering that they’re saying, “We don’t know what to do about this.” That’s a potential moment of advance. That’s new, because we’re usually so on top of things. There’s an opening here. But we need spiritual life — its insight and its disciplines — to navigate this.

 

Where do you see the spiritual movement going from here?

Culturally, we are opening up to this part of life with a new integrity. That is going to help us be more complete human beings, and therefore it’s an important aspect of manifesting the wholeness of our best human potential—not just in private, but in public.

The culture, the collective, is lagging behind where masses of individual people already are. But I think this next up-and-coming generation of deep, deep searchers and people committed to joining their inner integrity and outer presence in the world will do it differently, if we can just fasten our seat belts and not self-destruct. This spiritual life that’s been emerging will be good for all of us.