On Being with Krista Tippett

We are brilliant at survival, but brutal at it. We tend to slip out of togetherness the way we slip out of the womb, bloody and messy and surprised to be alone and clever, able to learn with our whole bodies, the way of this world.

And the context of that was talking about how your default position is wonder. And, um, you have to carry around a lot of disappointment and frustration and critique with, with humanity. And, and that that applies that you also, you know, that, that, that, that, that, that especially true when you look at, um, social justice movements, um, where you expect so much, right. And desire so much.

And you're, you're being honest and you're actually saying that from a place of love, right. And of, and of high brilliant expectations. And yet, um, and so this is kind of, you know, this, this is a, an entry point for your, for your book. We Will Not Cancel Us. Um, which, which is, which was about, is about cancel culture simplistically put and so counter cultural in this context in which, um, to, to call for accountability, to express honest critique, even to kind of, um, acknowledge imperfection, um, is, is leapt on as failure.

I mean, I want to make justice and liberation the most pleasurable experiences that we can have as a species.

I want to make it feel like, ah, when I make the best choice, it feels good.

And I know it from my bones up and out.

And I know that that means a deep reclamation, especially for those of us who have experienced oppression or trauma, that what gets taken from us often is the sense that we deserve pleasure, that we know how to feel it, that we're allowed to feel it.

So one of the things I say is pleasure is not a frivolous thing.

She put out a book last year, We Do This Till We Free Us.

So she has another book out called Fumbling Towards Repair with my friend Shir Hassan, which I love because it's a workbook that's like, OK, how do if I wanted to do, you know, a process like this and like not have to call in punitive devices, you know, what would that look like?

It was an essay I wrote for an anthology called Black Futures, edited by Jenna Wertham and Kimberly Drew, where I wrote about this intersection between ocean conservation and social justice, because I feel like we don't talk about that enough.

There was a book in my house called Foods That Harm and Foods That Heal. I don't know how much science there is behind that title now.

I think Mary Oliver has this poem, somebody I love once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to realize that this too was a gift. And that rings so true for me. The poem is called The Uses of Sorrow in the book Thirst just after Molly had died.

And they say sectarianism is belonging gone bad. Belonging gone bad.

The scale for them begins, there's about 14 or 15 points. The first part of the scale is going, you're different, I'm different. And the 15th point is, you are demonic. And that's the word they use. And all the scales down to that.

And the farther down that scale you go, the more violent... The more dangerous. Dangerous it becomes. And the more you justify it. Because if somebody is the devil, well then you get rid of them.

One of the scales in that is, in order for me to be right, it is important that I believe that you are wrong.

Okay. Yeah. So I've spent a good amount of time these last few days acquainting myself with a lot of the sweep of your work, and so I'll just try to ask good questions that will elicit good answers.

I've been reading, I've read you for a very long time, and in fact, I was really excited this morning. I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me earlier, but to look on our bookshelves and find my copy of Answering God from when I was at Yale Divinity School in the early 90s.

I think your books, and maybe especially Answering God, but not just Answering God, have been part of the training of seminarians and theologians for a few generations here.

And you have actually also, you are a writer but also a translator. The message, your translation of the Bible is revered by so many people, different kinds of people from Bono who recently interviewed you to one of our producers, Lily actually, whose father was a pastor.

Yes, she told me. And from Columbia and used the message with his congregation of people whose first language was not English.

But what you said a minute ago about the poetry of the text is even in many of the translations many of us grew up with, not evident.

I didn't realize, when I did the message, I had no idea what I was doing to tell you the truth. I had a congregation of people that didn't read books.

So I started translating the Bible in their language not knowing what I was doing. And suddenly they started paying attention to me in a way they never did before.

I think people who use language have to be pretty subversive. And if they don't learn how to use language, I mean we've got a-

I didn't know what I was doing when I started out. And then it just kind of grew and grew and grew.

And finally, you know, the publisher said I'd done the New Testament and he said you've got to do the Old Testament. And I thought I can't do that.

But then I thought well maybe I, because I really enjoyed it. I felt, you know, felt alive discovering the poetry of the Bible.

I always, as I talk about in the Poetry Handbook, discipline is very important.

I think we're creative all day long. And if we have to have an appointment to have that work out on the page because the creative part of us gets tired of waiting or just gets tired.

And it's helped a lot of students, young poets doing that, to have that meeting with that part of oneself because there are, of course, other parts of life.

That's from the poetry handbook.

It's been a while.

It's great.

But you say you promise it learns quickly what sort of courtship it's going to be. You're saying that the writer has to kind of be in courtship with this elusive, essential but elusive, you say, cautious part and that if you turn up every day, it will learn to trust you.

Yes, yes, yes, I remember that.

It's a very practical way of talking about something that's quite... The trust is very important.

Yes. Yeah.

And that's the creative process.

That is the creative process.

You know, somebody once wrote about me and said I must have a private grant or something that all I seem to do is walk around the woods and write poems.

But I was very, very poor.

But I was very, very poor. And I found I ate a lot of fish and a lot of clams.

You know, in the poetry handbook you wrote, poetry is a life-cherishing force and it requires a vision, a faith to use an old-fashioned term, yes indeed.

For poems are not words after all but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry, yes indeed.