Last Post, by Krista Tippett

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I came back to religion - to taking it seriously in my own life, and finally to spending my days thinking and speaking with others about it - after a decade as a non-religious person. I spent most of my 20s, in the 1980s, in divided Berlin. It was fun for me to recall and make new sense of that in the process of writing the book. I found myself in amazing circumstances at a young age, living and working with people who were literally running the world and driving the most important issues of the age: the division of the world into Communism and Capitalism, the Wall in Berlin, the nuclear arms race.

But ultimately I saw that if you drill down to the heart of the grandest geopolitical crises, you are left with that same conundrum we grapple with in the most basic aspects of our daily lives - the complexity, frailty and promise of the human condition. I turned away from politics, and towards immersion in religious and spiritual traditions, because they analyze that. They are rich repositories for enduring questions and wisdom and practices to engage it. I love Reinhold Niebuhr's succinct, perfect line: "Man is his own most vexing problem." And more recently I discovered mystical, intriguing counterpart to it in the writing of Irish poet and philosopher John O'Donohue: "It's strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you."

O'Donohue is on my mind this week because we're creating a show with him under unusual circumstances. I read him in the fall and sat down with him for a wide-ranging two hour conversation. Then before it could go to air, he died in his sleep, suddenly and apparently naturally and peacefully, at the age of 52. We're putting his lovely, lively, exuberant voice out there in the world, though he is no longer in it.

There's something serendipitous about this. As readers of my book will know, I was changed beyond Berlin by a raw, beautiful edge of Scotland not terribly unlike the raw beautiful edge of Ireland that John O'Donohue called home. And the Celtic culture that infuses that landscape gave rise to one of my favorite spiritual notions, of "thin places." The Celts insist that there are places and times in human experience, sometimes just a matter of moments, where the veil between heaven and earth is worn thin, and the temporal and the eternal seem to touch. John O'Donohue spoke easily and captivatingly of "an immense respect for the invisible world" that he held like his father before him.

So we write books and blogs and keep putting the best words we can muster even to ideas and realities that will ultimately defy them. I long ago learned that devoting my life to "speaking of faith" entails honoring the limits of words alone. Strange and mysterious indeed.

View more information on Krista Tippett's Speaking of Faith

Krista Tippett, Speaking of Faith, religion, spirituality, ethics, Reinhold Niebuhr, John O'Donohue, Penguin Books, books