The treasure trove of 40+ minute episodes are available for online listening (at the links below), or for download through any podcast service. Truly even a random selection might be an Epiphanal experience. On Being is as if the most amazing sages and artists showed up at your door, and you invited them in for dinner. These conversations and wonderings with her outstanding guests span the whole spectrum of spiritualities (and un-religiousness). There are plenty more, however here are 6 to get you started (in no particular order) that leap out for me as special gifts to the season of Christmas. If you haven't been here before, you may find yourself getting both beautifully lost and inspired.
Old Testament Scholar Walter Bruggemann, December 2013
"It's a very much-used passage. "Do not remember the former things nor consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?" And apparently, what he's telling his people is just forget about the Exodus, forget about all the ancient miracles, and pay attention to the new miracles of rebirth and new creation that God is enacting before your very eyes. I often wonder when I read that, what was it like the day the poet got those words and what did it feel like and how did he share that? Of course, we don't know any of that, so it just keeps ringing in our ears."
Poet Mary Oliver, October 2015
"You go back and you’re these little bits of energy and pretty soon you’re something else. Now that’s a continuance. It’s not the one we think of when we’re talking about the golden streets and the angels with how many wings and whatever, the hierarchy of angels. Even angels have a hierarchy. But it’s something quite wonderful.
The world is pretty much — everything is mortal. It dies. But its parts don’t die. Its parts become something else. And we know that when we bury a dog in the garden. And with a rose bush on top of it. We know that there is replenishment. And that’s pretty amazing."
Composer Alice Parker, December 2016
"Each one of us is a walking encyclopedia of all the sounds we’ve ever heard in our lives. And it takes color, or a representational object, or an occurrence, or remembering the first love, all those things. What they call forth, the kind of communication they call forth is music. Trying to get them in words is loads of fun. It’s a marvelous game trying to pin these things down. And the lovely thing with the music is that we don’t have to be limited by the way that words are limited by our rational minds.
StoryCorpss founder David Isay, May 2016
"That's how memory works. You hold onto these images of people. And I guess there’s something about the way these interviews, the 40-minute StoryCorps interviews are structured that it’s almost — in some ways, we think of it as if you had 40 minutes left to live, what would you want to say to someone else?
What would you want to learn about them? And in some ways, I think it’s maybe the best way to sum up who someone is in 40 minutes, although that’s a very difficult thing to do. But we have everything going for us, because it’s the voice, and it’s intimate, and it’s honest. I think of it as the opposite of reality TV. No one comes to get rich, no one comes to get famous, it’s just about generosity and love."
"So you really have this huge problem of diversity. And you then go back and read the Bible and something hits you, which is, we’re very familiar with the two great commands of love: Love God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your might; love your neighbor as yourself. But the one command reiterated more than any other in the mosaic box — 36 times, said the rabbis — is love the stranger. For you were once strangers in the land of Egypt. Or, to put it in a contemporary way, love the stranger because, to him, you’re a stranger. This sense that we are enlarged by the people who are different from us — we are not threatened by them — that needs cultivating, can be cultivated, and would lead us to see the 21st century as full of blessing, not full of fear."
Priests and Astronomers Guy Consolmagno and George Coyne, September 2015
" Certainly, whoever's responsible for this universe has a great sense of humor, because whenever you're expecting something, you get what you expect, but from a very, very different angle than the way you were expecting it. You know, the center of all humor. We are constantly being surprised and delighted by the surprise. Also, a creator who loves beauty. It's not enough that the universe makes sense and we can come up with equations for them, but the equations themselves are beautiful."
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