The Questions Without Answers with Krista Tippett

Krista Tippett My daughter was what they call footling breach, and they tried to turn her and she turned a little bit and then she went right back to her pose. And so I already had this feeling of this willful person inside me. So I had a scheduled caesarian, but I do remember her just coming out, you know, so she didn’t have to struggle and I felt like she had decided she wasn’t going to struggle is what it felt like to me. And just wide-eyed and taking it all in and you know just I remember you know holding her on my body on my skin and just knowing like you are now bound to this new being and and also this curiosity I was just so curious I was curious even before she’s born like who are you and also I couldn’t I can’t believe they’re sending this being home with me because I did not have any idea what I was supposed to do, right?

Michael Feigelson It’s striking how similar those moments were for me and Krista. Not in the details, those are different, but in the feeling. You’re holding this new person and alongside them, someone else shows up, a version of yourself you haven’t met before. And there’s no easing into it. All of a sudden, you’ve arrived.

Michael Feigelson You famously ask people about their spiritual and religious beginnings as a child. And I wanted not to ask you that question, but to ask whether you think that becoming a mom or becoming a dad is another origin point?

Krista Tippett Oh my gosh, I do. I’ve thought about it so much in my life. I just think when you become a parent, they crack your heart open in a way that I just don’t know that any other life experience can. And then they keep cracking it open for the rest of your life in ways that are beautiful, in ways are really challenging. And uh… It’s not just that I can’t imagine my life without my children. I don’t know who I would be if I hadn’t had my children because being a mother and having them in my life, you know, totally reshaped my life ever after.

Michael Feigelson This podcast begins with a simple idea: when a baby is born, a parent is also born. And in that transition, just like their babies, parents’ brains and bodies team up to help them learn and adapt at high velocity, developing a set of skills and perspectives valuable for their kids and for society as a whole.

This is Birth of a Parent. Our guest today is Krista Tippett, an award-winning journalist, writer, and founder of the On Being Project. She has spent her career sitting with questions that don’t have easy answers. Questions about faith, ethics, and moral wisdom.

In this episode, I spoke with Krista about how becoming a mother grounded these questions in everyday life. How, in her view, parenthood serves as a kind of training ground for humility, for hope, and for how to be with other people.

Michael Feigelson I think it was with Sylvia Borstein, you said with her, and you sort of said it in passing in the interview, but you said they give you new eyes.

Krista Tippett Well I don’t know if this is exactly what you mean, but what comes to mind is I was in divinity school and seminary in the years in which Ali was born. So it wasn’t planned, but I was studying theology while bringing a new person into the world. And so I had this experience of, you know, like in the New Testament, Jesus is always talking about be like a little child. A lot of things like that were pretty nonsensical to me and like really sweet to read, but not how life works. And… Similarly, and I like think these things got connected for me, you know, some of the virtues like humility, right, which I think I especially felt like as a woman, humility gets you nowhere. Like as a women, there’s this natural humble stance that I have to kind of push through. So I think studying theology like planted me more actively with those kinds of puzzles. And so I remember this day that I was taking a walk with her. And I had a destination and it was like a 15 minute walk, but we spent the first 15 minutes getting about halfway down our block. Because she was discovering the world anew, right, and everything was fascinating to her. Maybe she’s three or four, and she was like saying hello to everything, you know, like, “oh, hello birdie”, or like she got totally fascinated with the cracks and the sidewalk and like bends down and looks at them. So I had this revelation that stayed with me all this time that like be humble like a little child is not to debase yourself, right? I realized like my idea of what humility was, was making myself small and debased in relationship to everything and everyone else. I realized that the humility of a little child is to greet everything else in its bigness and its beauty, right. It’s not about making yourself small, it’s about expecting – or at least having an openness – for everything to be really miraculous and interesting and everyone to be interesting and miraculous. And then looking at the world through her eyes, that’s one of the things that I think really shaped me.

Michael Feigelson So she’s studying these big abstract ideas, humility, virtue, what it means to be human. And then she goes for a walk and lo and behold, she finds that humility was hiding in the cracks in the sidewalk all along. Starts to feel like maybe from the moment they arrive, these kids are playing hide and seek with the secrets of the universe.

Krista Tippett There’s a story that occurs both in Judaism and in Islam about the angel Gabriel. It’s a little bit different, but it’s the same story that before a child is born, the angel Gabriel tells them everything, all the secrets of God and the universe, and then kisses them on the forehead and they begin to forget it all. But they haven’t forgotten it all when they come into the world. And that felt so true to me. Like in those early years, like they can’t talk to you and you know that they know so much. And I just was wishing, like, like, “tell me, tell me what you know.” And I also could almost feel her, you know, moving closer to me and farther from God, right? Or the cosmos.

Michael Feigelson I love this image of a baby knowing the truth about the cosmos and then slowly they forget. I find myself looking back at old photographs, inspecting them for clues, wondering what I might have missed.

Michael Feigelson Did it change your reading of scripture?

Krista Tippett Yeah, no, it was like I’m learning about these lofty concepts and virtues and there’s this line where it says “The little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.” I was like, come on. He’s crying. And like, for me, the incarnational story at the heart of Christianity is very beautiful, but it took on this whole new meaning having a baby, right? It made me see some intelligence in the stories that I hadn’t taken seriously and also a bit of a critical eye, but also, I think all the virtues, you know, like something like humility, something like patience, something like love, which we culturally speak about all the time as a feeling, but you realize it’s just one act after another, right? And you actually do those things when you don’t feel like them. I think that’s what it did. It really pinned the big concepts to the ground of reality in a way that made them much more interesting and powerful for me. Do you know Alison Gopnik’s work, do you know her?

Michael Feigelson I do, I do.

Michael Feigelson As a matter of fact, you’ll be hearing from Alison in the final episode of this series where we talk about ‘the grandmother hypothesis’. Back to Krista.

Krista Tippett Yeah, so that thing she says about “we don’t take care of someone because we love them.” I mean, parenting is the most primal example of this. We have this idea that maybe it’s like because I love you, I will take care of you. But like when you bring a child into the world, you take care of it, however you feel or you get to the feelings. But what she says is that that’s the way it works. The love comes out of the caring. And I’m also thinking about that thing, about the love following the care, just about our life together in public and how we don’t do that with strangers or the people we disagree with. Like, if we could maybe just bring ourselves to just act caring in ways that would not require us to even have a complicated conversation. We might be able to get a little bit of a feeling between us that would allow those conversations to be different.

Michael Feigelson To do the behavior and have the feeling come after.

Krista Tippett Yeah. It’s true for throwing a ball that you get muscle memory, you do it more, you get better at it. So I think it’s also true of the great virtues. You know, you put yourself into the shape, but then you become the shape. And I think that’s also true of parenting because none of us really knows what we’re getting into. You know you don’t know how to do it, but you are given to do and you put yourself in the shape of a parent and you learn.

Michael Feigelson You put yourself in the shape and over time, you become it. But you’re not shaping yourself in isolation. There’s another force in the room. A very small one with no degrees, no qualifications, and yet somehow a lot of influence over what and how you learn.

Michael Feigelson I think it was your last book. You dedicated it to your beloved teachers and you were referring to your kids.

Krista Tippett Yeah, oh, I forgot that.

Michael Feigelson So I wanted to spend a little time talking about their teachings. You’re talking about love as sort of a, I’ve heard you talk about it as an overused concept, but that having a kid gave it more depth. The other one that I’ve had you talk about a lot, especially recently, is hope, and the idea of it being a muscle, and that it can be trained like any muscle. So I wanted to ask what you mean by ‘hope as a muscle’ and what did your babies do to train that muscle for you?

Krista Tippett So what I mean by ‘hope as a muscle’, is, like love, it’s not primarily a feeling. It’s being confronted with the complexity of reality sometimes and refusing to believe that it has to be this way. I think when you become a parent, to not be hopeful is almost not a choice. I think these are very challenging times and I wouldn’t fault any parent for having really hopeless days, weeks, months, years. But I think having a child gives you that much more kind of, not even courage, but just a will to be working for the beyond of this, like to have a vision for the world you want your child to grow up into. And then the question of calling is like, how do I help make that real?

Michael Feigelson So hope isn’t a feeling, but a muscle. And babies are great at motivating us to exercise that muscle. Even when the world gives us plenty of reasons not to. Even when we’re tired, babies insist: wake up, get out of bed, it’s time to practice hope. And then just when you think you’re getting the hang of it, just when those hope muscles have gotten a bit stronger and are able to contend with reality, just then your child grows up a little. And the stakes change.

Krista Tippett There’s a really pivotal moment with my daughter when she was like 12, 13, 14. You have a daughter, right?

Michael Feigelson She’s turning 12 today.

Krista Tippett She’s turning 12. So I hope this is not as true in the Netherlands as it is in the United States. But there’s nothing meaner than a mean adolescent girl. I’m sure that I am a feminist in some sense, but I don’t think that the world would necessarily be safer if women were running it. Women have a lot of capacity for cruelty, especially at that age. So she got to that stage. And there were girls just tormenting other girls. And I remember that my initial reaction was that it took me back to the own experiences I had at that. And I’m like lying awake at night with this terrible place in my middle, you know, just like back there feeling all the feelings, feeling helpless, not feeling hopeful. And my impulse was like, what can I do to make this better for her, right? Like, how can I stop it? I don’t want her to go through this. So then at some point, and I don’t know how I got to this, but I realized that actually me trying to be in her pain with her and like transfer my memory onto her reality was actually not what she needed from me. She needed me, of course to care, of course to be there for her, but to be outside that experience, to embody the fact that that’s not a forever situation. That I lived through it, that she’ll live through it. That there’s another side of it. And that I was gonna be walking with her to that other side and that she was gonna survive it. And I think that has everything to do with hope. You know, I mean, like Brene Brown says, like hope is born a struggle. It’s really counterintuitive for parents to think this way. That we learn to be courageous, we learn that we can get through hard things because we get through hard things. Because we’ve had junctures where we didn’t know, we couldn’t see the other side. We couldn’t imagine it. We didn’t know how we’d get there and we got there. And like that is a kind of muscle, right? That’s a kind muscle memory of resilience. And something I’m seeing in this world is parents just like, you know, it’s so natural to just wanna protect your kids and you don’t want them to suffer and you want them to be unhappy. But actually we have to let them have their struggles.

Michael Feigelson So if the first part of the training is for them to help you exercise hope, the second part is for you to learn how to help them. But the technique is not intuitive. The training is not to take the struggle away, but to stand just outside it, close enough for them to know that you care, but far enough to remind them that it won’t last forever.

And trust me, with a 12-year-old daughter, this is one of the hardest trainings I’ve ever had to endure. Because on one hand you’re the one who’s supposed to know things, and on the other, you’re not supposed to give them solutions. You’re just supposed to sit near them, to witness their heartache, but not fix it, to listen to their questions, but no answer.

Krista Tippett I remember Robert Coles said to me, “children are little theologians,” like they ask all the questions. They ask all the moral questions that we then complexify and ask the rest of our lives. Like, “why do people die?” “Why are people mean to each other?” “Why can’t we get along?” You know, “where did my dog go?” “Why are you people so confusing?” You know? “Why do people lie?” I do feel like because of studying theology and then because I was doing this work, it allowed me to really delve into that. Attending to it, but it is such an experience of profound mystery on so many levels. And I do think, you know, we get exhausted and our lives are so complex, it’s possible to not really lean into that, but it’s amazing.

Michael Feigelson I was curious if you have memories of your kids asking you questions and the usual way of answering just didn’t work for you anymore.

Krista Tippett I’m trying to think. Yes, they ask actually very thorny theological questions. Sandy Sasso said that it’s okay when your children come up with these actually imponderable questions. Like they are the questions of the ages. It’s okay to say “that is an excellent question. Let’s just hold that.” Like let’s just keep coming back to it. Honoring just the act of asking the great questions. And that is very liberating to think about, right? That we don’t have to have the answers, but it is a gift to honor the questions with them.

Michael Feigelson After years of hearing Krista asking questions on the radio, I love the idea that her training as a mother was somehow fundamental to her professional success. It’s very aligned to the thesis of this show that the training we get in parenthood isn’t just valuable for our kids, it’s also useful in other parts of our life. I’m curious how Krista thinks about this. Now that her kids are older and she’s in a new phase, how is she using the training that they gave her? How is it enriching her work in the world?

Krista Tippett one of the things that’s very much on my mind at this stage of my work is actually the intelligence we possess in our lives of love and intimacy that we do not apply to our lives in public, but that would be superpowers if we could, if we just decided to do it. Like this that being a loving presence, is often about what you do in spite of how you feel rather than because of how you feel. I think that our relationship with our children is exhibit A, because there are stretches of time when you’re even, you know, somebody said to me, I actually think it was this amazing Jewish bioethicist, Laurie Zoloth, who had like five children. She said we give birth to strangers and we as another thing we don’t say. And like my two children, could not be more different from each other. So like understanding one of them and relating to one of them in a meaningful way is of very little relevance to how I learned to relate to the other one. And I think with our children, yeah, they are strangers and then they change and they change and they changed again. And I’m like, you know, my kids are in there, you know my son is in his late 20s, my daughter is early 30s, like I’m having to get to know them all over again. Although there are personality traits they take on that you don’t necessarily like. And there are kind of messy, ugly phases. But you love them, right? Like, you stay in a relationship. It doesn’t mean you like everything about them. So those are life skills. I mean, I have two very loving children. But, as much as they love you back, they will never love you as much as you love them, right? Like you were given, they take you for granted, you were there from the very beginning, whereas they cracked your heart wide open and changed you forever. So we learn also a kind of an asymmetry that is life-giving. But it’s really like with our children, it’s not at all about how much they understand us. Like there are things that we don’t even want them to know about us and they don’t want to know about us, right? And yet these are the relationships that give life meaning. So could we apply some of this to the other kinds of strangers with whom we share the planet and, you know, our neighborhoods and our communities?

Michael Feigelson What do you think stops us from applying these skills outside of the context of our kids? You know, I learn things in school that I’m expected to use with my neighbors and strangers. I learn things at work that I am taught to, you know, use in other spheres. These things, somehow we choose not to use in that. Why do you that is?

Krista Tippett I mean, I think that in the post-enlightenment Western modern world we undervalued what is merely relational. We’ve got ‘hard skills’ and ‘soft skills’, and it’s turning out that our technology now can do all the hard skills better than we can, and actually the soft skills are what makes life worth living. And, actually, the soft skills are hard, and we never get them perfectly right. I don’t think we think of how we relate to our children or our spectrum of friends as intelligence. I also think we’re all painfully aware that we don’t get it perfect. Our lives of love are full of failure and shortcomings and growing and breakthroughs but also impasses and so I think it would feel presumptuous to say, “oh, I know how to love.” But that’s the point, right? Human beings are complicated. Even if we took in that the people, that the groups who vex us in society are as full of contradiction as everybody we know intimately, then we would see that that is an opening for possibility. I think the world right now, I think all the things we take seriously like politics and economics and you know, what we have called “the societal demographics” are just like the thinnest of surfaces over the human dramas of hopes and fear and dreams and pain. And so I actually think in this generation we’re called to tend to those intimate things within their civilizational relevance. It’s not that you have to be a parent to take that in, but parenting is just such a crucible.

Michael Feigelson So, if she’s right that the so-called soft skills are actually the hard ones, then parenting might be one of the most intense and prolific forms of training available to human beings.

Not exactly in a way that you could list on LinkedIn, but training nonetheless. And this training, in most societies for most of history, has not been evenly distributed, especially when it comes to fathers.

Michael Feigelson I think the version of this that I think about a lot is my father. He died in 2020. He was almost 90, so he grew up in a generation where they didn’t do much infant care. My mom, when I was in my 20s, said something to me like I was lost until you and your father. And I felt bad for her at the time because my interpretation of that was you didn’t have a meaningful professional life.

Krista Tippett Mm-hmm, right.

Michael Feigelson When he died a few years ago, she said it again, but now I had been a father for a while. And I felt ashamed for having felt bad the first time. The person who I felt bad for was my father, because I now knew that there’s a kind of muscular love that I felt after doing the long nights for many years of her not sleeping. That he didn’t get to feel.

Krista Tippett Yeah. One of the ways I think about it is, you know, I graduated from high school in 1979. I think I was like among the first generations of women to be given this message as we entered adulthood that we could do it all, right? Of course we would marry and have children and we can have careers just like men. And of course that was not true. It was a lie. And it had not been road tested. You know, Gloria Steinem hadn’t raised children. Other of the feminist leaders that were already like, you know, all the way through it. And one of the things when I look back at that generation is we suddenly, women of my generation and after suddenly were almost like a different species from our mothers. But the men we married, they hadn’t had their movement, right? And I don’t think you can necessarily fault the women’s movement for not seeing this, that if you didn’t bring men along, you weren’t going to get there. Like this had to be a joint project. And I think we were a different species, but the men we married were very much like our fathers. And I think we talk a lot about how restrictive and impoverishing those roles were that women were given to play, but equally so the roles that men were given to play were impoverishing and restrictive. And maybe even more sad.

Michael Feigelson So for a long time, most men didn’t get invited into that part of the experience. And now slowly that’s changing, thankfully so. Which means more men are stepping into something that turns out to be a very particular kind of training. A training in how to expand their emotional range to feel more parts of what it means to be human and to be taught at the most granular level a critical lesson about control. Or perhaps more accurately. The illusion of control.

Michael Feigelson I would argue that in today’s world, a very important survival skill is being able to live without feeling like you have control. We spend a lot of time trying to gain control over things, have kids, and then are confronted with it. So I was curious if that was part of your, like how your kids taught you that you didn’t, and if it has changed your relationship to control in your work.

Krista Tippett I mean, you know, they just disabuse you immediately. Also, you never become an expert on your children. The minute you start to understand them, they go through another transition. So that’s humbling. I mean it is just this total loss of control. I remember feeling like a failure a lot at a time because I just was always second guessing myself. Did I respond to that correctly? What do I do next time? Am I getting this right? That actually now strikes me as hard on myself. And I think that’s societally, because we do think we’re supposed to be authorities on things, right? And we’re supposed to have answers. We don’t honor like a part of life, which is mostly about questions and mostly about learning and mostly about emergence, which you participate in. So I wish, if I could wish for like new parents in the world, it would be maybe a gentleness towards them, like a welcoming that, like you’re seeing it for what it is rather than a failure to have the answers or a failure, to, you know, have the playbook or the roadmap. But I think that’s because I was raised in a world that believed that control was possible, which was not true. And it never worked out, but somehow we still believe that that’s what we were supposed to be getting and aiming for. And then that translated into our lives as parents. I, as I said, I am concerned about this world where there are so many hazards, right? But it’s not just that we long to be in control of ourselves as parents, but we have this understandable desire to control what comes at our kids and what they have to face. But we’re not raising them to be our children, we’re raising them to be people out in the world when we are not there. And the world is not going to temper what they’re faced with? And so, I think this is really counterintuitive and maybe it’s a skill that is more challenging now than when my kids were little. But I think that there’s some like self-discipline and self-control, which can really be painful and saying like, my job is to be here, but not to fix things for them.

Michael Feigelson Okay, so let’s summarize where we’re at. What are the modules in this training? What are lessons of our beloved teachers? Let go of control. Check the cracks in the sidewalks for miracles. Stop pretending you have the answers.

Mom [laughing]
Michael Feigelson Why are you laughing?
Speaker 1 What’s…
Michael Feigelson What’s so funny? I just called. What’s going on?
Mom I’m just having so much fun, I’m hysterical, Ian. What? What?
Michael Feigelson Where are you? What are you laughing at?
Mom I’m going, here’s a little photo album.
Michael Feigelson Is something funny in them?
Mom Always, you know, and I got distracted. I really have to organize them. I have too many. I have to wean, throw some out, you want some? I’ll send them to you.
Michael Feigelson Yeah i’ll take some pictures.
Mom Okay.
Michael Feigelson I’m calling because i’m talking to someone who says children ask the most important questions
Mom That’s probably true.
Michael Feigelson Like what? Like what kinds of questions do you think kids ask there?
Mom Why are we here, what happens when we die, why do some people suffer, why did people get sick?
Michael Feigelson Did I ask those questions when I was a kid?
Mom No.
Michael Feigelson No. What did I ask?
Mom You ask if fish get thirsty.
Michael Feigelson That’s a good question. What did you answer?
Mom They drink a lot.

Michael Feigelson To be fair, when I was little, my mother did seem to have an answer for everything, even the important questions.

Krista’s point though is that parenthood slowly teaches you to get more comfortable without them, to let go of control, to work out your hope muscles on a daily basis. I’ll be honest, while this sounds great in theory, in practice, it strikes me as more intense and more tiring than the alternative. So I asked Krista, when she was at the beginning of her motherhood, what did she do to take care of herself? What kind of advice might she have for those of us immersed in the early stages of our training today?

Krista Tippett It can feel really lonely, you know? And I suspect that that may be new. I think that in earlier times, in more traditional societies, new mothers were just surrounded by other women and new parents. And I just remember sometimes getting to the end of the day and just being so profoundly tired and feeling so alone with that. Especially after my divorce, you know, when I really was like there’s not another adult to share any of the burden with and a lot of people are living like that. So for me, I think in those years, I’ve had all kinds of ways of meditating, like I’ve done breathing, I’ve done meditation. I found myself coming back to actual prayer, which is my spiritual homeland. And actually in those years when my children were little, like doing these monastic liturgies where I just read the prayer. You know, it’s like praying with the Psalms. In fact, a lot of it was the Psalmes. Cause I almost didn’t have the energy to like even make up my own prayer or, or even just sit silently and kind of like finding real solace and company in words that countless millions of people, the precise words have spoken before me and found solace in, you know, really as companionship as much as a religious act. That I remember being really important in those active parenting years.

Michael Feigelson And then somewhere in the middle of all that exhaustion, something starts to happen. The crack opens a bit wider and perhaps only for a few moments at a time, there’s this kind of breakthrough.

Krista Tippett Like they were giving me another opportunity to feel what it was to be new in the world again. You know, even something really simple like I noticed that when children are sleepy, And we’re sleepy and we learn not to let ourselves feel how bad we feel, but like they’re so in touch with their needs, their bodily needs. And there’s something in that to be relearned. I got to learn how to enjoy being in nature and enjoy being at a playground and just, you know, I got learn to play in a way that was kind of corrective and healing to my inhibitions, the inhibitions I had and the restrictions I had on that as a child, and that is an incredible gift. If we can let our children in some ways reparent us because of what we learn, what it takes for them to be healthy and whole and joyful and like let that sink in that we still need those things too.

Michael Feigelson We talk a lot about what children need from us and how we shape them. But perhaps the more interesting question is how they shape us. Not how we are preparing them for the future, but how they are preparing us for the present.

I find myself returning to Krista’s story about the angel Gabriel who tells our babies all the secrets of God and the universe and then kisses them on the forehead and they begin to forget it all. But they haven’t forgotten at all when they come into the world, and yet they can’t tell us because they can speak. And just as they learn to speak, they forget the last remnants of these secrets.

Maybe their gift is only fully audible in the quiet of that wordless place. Maybe that’s what this whole transition is, not just raising a child, but being trained by one, trained in humility, in not knowing, in hope.

And maybe, like us, they’re not here to provide answers or solutions, but to remind us what it means to be human and to sit with us while we struggle to remember.

Krista argued that parenthood can expand our capacity for hope, humility, and care. Next week on Birth of a Parent, Richard Reeves asked what happens when those qualities become central to modern fatherhood.

Richard Reeves So I think we’re just in this very murky transitional space now and we’re trying to figure out what the new script for fatherhood is and my own work has led me to believe that it does need to be a script for fathers. I do think that the appeal to be an androgynous co-parent is not a very effective one for dads.

Michael Feigelson If you’d like to support this series, the best way is simply to follow Birth of a Parent on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. It really helps more people discover the show. Thanks for listening.