Study material for Chapter 4 "Becoming Wise"
Don and Joyce
Session 3, Chapter 4 "Love" (Becoming Wise, by Krista Tippett)
Reading and discussion guide
1. What is love? Answer the question through a story about the last time you saw it.
“We’ve made [love] private, contained it in family, when its audacity is in its potential to cross tribal lines. We’ve fetishized it as romance, when its true measure is a quality of sustained, practical care. We’ve lived it as a feeling, when it is a way of being. It is the elemental experience we all desire and seek, most of our days, to give and receive.”
2. Consider our current collective challenges—politics, race, education, immigration, refugees, poverty, health care—and ponder this question Tippett asks: “What if love, as Elizabeth Alexander asked on the Washington Mall on inauguration day in 2009, is the mightiest word? How would this word, tossed into our questioning, reframe and challenge it?”
3. Of course, Tippett says, “‘Love’ is not always or often the first response to violence and violation, one human being to another, nor can we expect it to be. Anger is also a moral response.” With love as a lens, how might one engage with anger in a generative way?
Have you had or seen an experience of this?
“Love, muscular and resilient, does not always seem reasonable, much less doable, in our most damaged and charged civic spaces. But it seems to me worth insisting that those spaces where the worst has happened do not utterly define us as individuals or a people.” “To insist on faith in the common humanity even of our enemies and live accordingly; to begin with the assumption that love is there and it is up to us to make it real. Could we imagine that now?”
4, “Sorrow is a near enemy to compassion and to love. It is borne of sensitivity and feels like empathy. But it can paralyze and turn us back inside with a sense that we can’t possibly make a difference.” Where have you seen this or experienced it yourself?
5.“‘Deep listening’ is a virtue that anchors every kind of love relationship and it is the compass Sister Simone cites again and again as a creative, openhearted anchor to her life of strong passions and advocacy. She offers these lines of self-appraisal on whether one is being true to deep listening in any situation: ‘Am I responding in generosity? Am I responding in selfishness? Am I responding in a way that builds up people around me, that builds me up, that is respectful of who I am?’ Such questions are tools to start walking willingly towards the more exacting question of what would it mean, day to day, year to year, to become the beloved community. And how, concretely, to begin.”
6. There are times and places in human existence when love means life on the line, but most of us need not live that way most of the time. . . . Sometimes love, in public as in private, means stepping back.” Have you experienced this in your life or seen it in public life?
Edyie
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