Here’s my final post offering thoughts from Krista Tippett’s book Becoming Wise.
I was struck by this wise statement on community by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which she quotes:
The person who’s in love with their vision of community will destroy community. But the person who loves the people around them will create community wherever they go.
Brené Brown, one of Tippett’s interviewees, studies vulnerability, courage, authenticity, and shame – and has this to say about courage and vulnerability:
I cannot find a single example of courage, moral courage, spiritual courage, leadership courage, relational courage, I cannot find a single example of courage that was not born completely of vulnerability. We buy into some mythology about vulnerability being weakness and being gullibility and being frailty because it gives us permission not to do it.
Even more powerfully, she makes the point that:
the most beautiful things I look back on in my life are coming out from underneath things I didn’t know I could get out from underneath.
Brown is well worth listening to, as she has demonstrated in her TED talks on The power of vulnerability and Listening to shame.
Lastly, Tippett addresses another important issue when she says:
There is a fine line between saving the world and manipulating other lives, however well-meaningly, in our own image.
And she reflects on Courtney Martin rejecting the notion that the world divides into ‘savers and those who need to be saved’. As Martin herself says:
Our charge is not ‘to save the world’ …. It is to live in it, flawed and fierce, loving and humble.
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In connection with the Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue, she mentions his belief in ‘the possibility of creating our own inner landscapes of beauty, to keep us vital in the midst of bleak and dangerous surroundings and experiences’, a need that, as many of us know only too well, may arise at any time.
What matters … is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages, which are already upon us. The barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.
Brief thoughts & quotes … 