Blog Your Blessings: 'Speaking of Faith'

This week's blessing is the best memoir I ever read. It is both personal and relevant, literate and lyrical. It is eminently re-readable and well worth the time you can give it.

Krista Tippett's spiritual memoir Speaking of Faith traces her experiences first as the granddaughter of an evangelical Christian preacher in Oklahoma, then as a young skeptic who turned her faith over to the world of politics during her years as a diplomat in East Germany, and now as a woman of faith who sees the important places of religion and spirituality as well as politics in public discourse about how we form our lives personally and as a nation.

Tippett is creator and host of the weekly American Public Media radio program Speaking of Faith, which consists of conversations with persons of various beliefs--Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist...--about the intersection of faith in their daily lives. She is a seeker and a listener, and she has a wonderful gift of including all voices in the conversation and finding a way of conversing that respects the integrity of each faith at the same time it finds some point of entry for listeners who stand outside that belief system. Tippett brings her diplomacy skills to the table here to great effect.

Tippett says her experiences made her "a crusader against insufficient questions and answers that stand in, prematurely and destructively, for both justice and mystery." Her book will leave you with a beautiful new vocabulary:

Humility: "As I watched my children move through the world, I began to imagine what Jesus meant by humility. The humility of a Hilda, moving through the world discovering everything anew, is closely liked with delight. This original spiritual humility is not about debating oneself; it is about approaching everything new and other with a sense of curiosity and wonder. It has a quality of fearlessness, too....."

Kindness: "Kindness--an everyday byproduct of all the great virtues--is at once the simplest and most weighty discipline human beings can practice. But it is the stuff of moments. It cannot be captured in declarative sentences or conveyed by factual account. It can only be found by looking attentively at ordinary, unsung, endlessly redemptive experience."

Truth: "There is a profound difference between hearing someone say this is my truth. You can disagree with another person's opinions; you can't disagree with his experience. What I heard invariably shed some light on an experience of mine, or lit up some corner of another faith that had been closed to me, mysterious and even forbidding. I could never again dismiss one of those traditions of my conversation partners wholesale, because it now carried the integrity of a particular life, a particular voice."

This book read like an extended prose poem. To underline a significant passage would be to underline every line of it. The book refuses sound bytes; it won't be typecast any more than Tippettwill typecast her radio guests. To read this book is to read all of it and to walk away understanding this:

"Our public life would not be polarized but enriched and gentled if we began to ask religious people to be genuinely religious--that is, to say,to the core of their traditions, which have mercy and humility from and center, and demand 'faithfulness' as much in how we treat those with whom we disagree as with the positions we hold.

Study Guide for Tippett's Book
Tippett's Blog on the Penguin Site
Audio Recordings of Krista Reading her Book and Print Excerpts

Blog Your Blessings