A Deeper Life in an Uncertain Age, with James K. A. Smith

Well, Jamie, it’s so great to have you here today. I’m really excited to get to talk with you about your new book, Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark.

Thanks so much, Cherie. It’s always a pleasure to be back.

It’s really good to see you. So I have to ask at the outset, you have made so much of your intellectual and even vocational life, exploring the power and shape of desire, what forms us, our habits, the liturgies that shape us, all of which are a way of, you could say spiritually orienting ourselves. But this new work, it seems like you’re doing something different, which is how to live with disorientation. And I think you even say in the very first sentence, how to be when you don’t know. So what led you to write this book?

That’s a really great insight, by the way. You’ve just kind of given my own vocational trajectory back to me in an interesting way. Pain is what catalyzed this book. I mean, I don’t mean to be trite about that, but yeah, I would say this book-I hope it grows out of continuity with those other projects that you’ve talked about, but I think I came up against experiences and seasons and phenomena that I couldn’t analyze and that I couldn’t make sense of, and it was deeply disorienting. And I think I was originally scared of being disoriented. It felt anxiety inducing to not sort of have a map and to know where I was going. And I think what I didn’t realize is there’s actually possibility in the disorientation if I could learn to stick with it for a time, does that make sense?

That does make sense.

I mean, as you know from the book, I talk about the sort of personal catalyst was really an experience of really debilitating depression that as a philosopher, I experienced as kind of an affront. You know, I was like, I’m a pretty smart person. I should be able to figure this out. And I realized I was up against something that I couldn’t think my way out of. And it was the beginning of a spiritual journey.

And one of the things that struck me, anyone who knows you or has heard you speak knows that you have a very incisive way of thinking, you know, very precise and clarifying. And one of the things that struck me is that you noted in the book that in your own time of disorientation or of suffering, you found, as you were saying, consolation not in clarification, or in finding answers, but actually in reading the mystics and, perhaps some particularly mystifying mystics. You know, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing and Saint John of the Cross. What what consolations-I mean, clearly the mystics did not offer you clarification. What consolation did they offer?

Great. What a great way to formulate it. It was, the consolation was not solving a riddle or conquering what was befuddling. The consolation was discovering a kind of peace and rest that could be available if I learn to let go of the need to analyze and parse and conceptualize, if that makes sense. In other words, I think what the mystics taught me was to let go of this penchant, to understand everything and to let go of this desire to analyze everything, because both of those were forms of trying to deal with my anxiety by controlling the external world. And that sort of penchant, I think the mystics say, is just sort of doomed to failure. You’re just going to keep coming up against things that are not manageable for us in that way. And so what they did is I found in the mystics this consolation of being invited into really what was, I don’t know how else to say it, another way of being another, a way of trying to be available to God and the world with hands open rather than claws formed, so to speak, you know, and it was an unsettling-we’re talking about it kind of after the fact. So it sounds like I knew what was going on, which I did not. Only afterwards can I see, and with the guidance of, say, Saint John of the cross and Saint Teresa of Avila and others. Oh. The unknowing is not a failure. The darkness is not just absence. There is a presence and there is a reality that is now available to me in this way that wasn’t available to my analytic mind.

That is beautiful. But it also strikes me that that is a real occupational hazard for a philosopher.

Yes. Yeah. No, exactly. I mean, as a philosopher, I’m sort of professionally tasked with thinking about everything. And philosophers are the worst because we also like think about thinking and know about knowing. And we’re sort of we’re supposed to be in control of this. But I’d be interested to know too, because this is where my wife is always like, but you know what? Not everybody is a philosopher, so not everybody is sort of hampered by this. Do you think this resonates with people in sort of real life, this desire? Is this only a philosophers problem, sometimes I worry about?

Oh, I can’t imagine that it is in that. If anything, I think a sense of disorientation is actually very widespread and a sense of I’m not sure what to make of it. You know, perhaps the feeling of failure in that is less profound than it might be for a philosopher who-yeah, when your vocational capacity is all about categories and clarification, and thinking there’s probably a sense there that, you know, not only am I adrift, but I have failed. But I would think for you know, so many of us, the world is changing so quickly. The categories don’t seem to be holding. The institutions, the people that once seemed so solid have given way, you know. And where are we?

Yes. No. Exactly. I know I’m encouraged by that because I feel like on the one hand, we live in a culture that still prizes knowing and being in the know for everyone. And it’s almost you’re sort of badge of like, I’m with it. I’m in control. I’m trying to be part of the solution because I’m trying to understand everything and figure it out. But as you say, we also feel like we live in a world-I mean, you know, there’s a personal impetus for this, which was my own journey. But there’s also, I think, a collective impetus, which is where are we? When are we? And so as you say, there’s the old kind of concepts. It’s interesting, you know, as a philosopher, the word that we have for concept, it kind of comes from the root that means to grab hold of. I think that’s why I keep, I always keep thinking of like these claws, but concepts are meant to be these tools that kind of like grab hold of and encompass things. And I feel like our concepts used to be work great because they were built for the world that we knew. And concepts are great in all kinds of ways. But then what happens is either you come up against realities in your own experience, or we collectively live in a historical moment where the old institutional realities aren’t the same. They might kind of have the same name on them, but they don’t have the same sort of being about them. So we’re using these old conceptual tools to try to make sense of a world that has moved on without us. And that’s where I think we feel this disorientation and our knowledge isn’t the solution that we thought it was.

In some ways it makes me wonder about your thoughts in that there is a sense of disorientation out there. I don’t think it’s just native to philosophers, but you’re a teacher as well. And you probably see it I’m guessing.

I do. That’s very true.

And we’re also on a cusp of an AI revolution that basically we see the knowledge that exists is basically being scraped and stolen, will soon probably be metered back to us. And what is considered knowledge is almost all, you know, predictive, highly rationalistic and exclusive of the imagination of intuition and the like, and certainly opposed to wonder, which I want to talk with you more about in a second. As someone who teaches students for a living, how do you think that affects our own sense of disorientation as well as just our sense of what we can know?

I mean, this is a minority report, I’ll tell you. And I don’t know if this makes sense, but, you know, some of my earlier work has been trying to emphasize that human beings are not just brains on a stick, right? We are these desiring creatures. We are imaginative creatures. We are liturgical animals. You know, our being is more than what we can think.

I wonder sometimes if the current discourse and project of artificial intelligence-see, what interests me is, I think what counts as intelligence in these conversations is remarkably flat and narrow and instrumentalist. It’s just kind of, you know, knowledge that accomplishes something for us. We’re treating knowledge as a tool. I don’t think that is the fullest orb sense of what it means to be intelligent. So I’ve sometimes wondered, I think there’s all kinds of reasons to be worried about artificial intelligence as an ethos shaping reality. I do wonder if harbored in that is the possibility that we would stop thinking of human beings as information processors, right? We would realize, oh no, wait, this is the sort of thing that you can farm out to machines. If that’s the case, then it’s not at least at the center of being human. What is? Well, maybe we get back love, care, imagination, charity. Do you know what I mean? maybe sociality, embodiment. Materiality, nurture. I wonder if all of those truly, uniquely human facets are almost kind of liberated to be revalued in our time. That’s probably wishful thinking, but it’s part, you know, Pope Leo’s, new encyclical and artificial intelligence, I think really, really bears witness to striving after something like that.

And part of, I think what I’m after in Make your Home in this Luminous Dark is trying to get people to realize this is what I think the mystics all kind of fumble for words to say. There is a way that humans can be attuned to and aware of reality that cannot be reduced into logic, propositions, sentences, even. Because there is a mode of becoming aware of God’s presence, love, care that really transcends logic. And that’s what I had to struggle with as a philosopher. But, and it’s why the mystics struggle with like, how do you write a book about an experience of meeting God’s love and finding your belovedness when language itself tends to work logically, conceptually, you know? So it’s an interesting exercise of trying to live at the limits of how we can think and talk about a reality that transcends what we can say. But I think there’s, I also think there’s a lot of people today who have an inkling of something rumbling on the edges of what we’re able to think.

You know, I found it so interesting that in addition to the mystics, another thing you described is actually being quite helpful to you was modern contemporary art. And many of the pieces you described, actually, my first reaction in reading about them thought was that, boy, that seems confusing and frankly frustrating. So it was interesting to me that for you, they were illuminating and if anything, a sense of consolation. Tell us a little bit more about what modern art did for you in terms of the apprehension of something that escaped our conceptual categories.

No, exactly. So let’s put it this way. One of the lessons-this goes back to your earlier question I think. One of the lessons I learned from the mystics is you have to make friends with failure. We don’t fear our lack of knowledge or our inability to master. We actually sort of receive it as a gift of possibility. So you make friends with failure. And my unknowing was not a lack. It was because I was getting beyond the binary logic sort of thing. So when I look back, there’s two things I think that contemporary art sort of did for me. First of all, it demanded contemplation. So that’s, you know, we’re talking about the mystics and the mystical tradition. Another way we could just talk about it is we’re talking about a contemplative tradition of piety and spirituality. Contemplation really is about shutting it down, getting quiet and meditating in some sense. And contemporary art is art that does not immediately give itself away to you. Do you know what I mean? You can’t walk in and you’re like, oh. That’s beautiful. Or look at that scene or, or, you know, you’re in Florence and you see these incredible, you know, evocations of the Virgin or something like that. You recognize it and it’s doing something to you. Contemporary art you walk in and you’re like, why is that on the wall? What’s going on? Right? Or you’re at a play or you’re reading some experimental poem and you’re like, is this language? What does it mean? So I think the alienation that we experience from contemporary art is a feature, not a bug. Right. Like it’s meant to kind of get under our skin, resist immediate comprehension. But that’s the invitation too. That’s the gift. If we can dwell with this in such a way that now we are sort of invited to realize, oh, wait, I’m not supposed to know what this is or my job right now is not to say “this is what this means.” My job is actually to sort of dwell in perplexity as a mood of not being in control. And I think that’s what I sort of grown to love about contemporary art, because I also am like, what are we doing? But then you sort of get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

You find a strange thing thrill in not being in control. And to me, that’s spiritual practice, right? That is like, oh, okay, I’m not trying to lock everything down. I’m getting okay with-I always put my hands out like it’s about availability, openness, and it is about letting go. And now, oh, I’m actually willing to live with a kind of exposure and vulnerability where I don’t have to put a bow on this. I just think, and part of what I think is counterintuitive is a lot of people would can’t imagine why contemporary conceptual art or something could be religious. But what I’m saying is it’s not religious because of its content, maybe not even because of its intention, but because what it invites in our consciousness is sort of like tilling the soil for a kind of spiritual availability that I actually think opens us up to a new way of experiencing God.

Say a little bit more about that in that one of the things that intrigued me is that, in some ways it almost seemed, well, you said quite explicitly that much of wisdom is actually learning to live in uncertainty. And essentially kind of grouped wisdom and wonder as opposed to wisdom and clarity or wisdom and knowledge. What happens to us when we dwell in uncertainty, which sounds really uncomfortable.

I mean, what if we said, I almost wonder if, what we’re partly talking about is like a paradigm turn where one, we can describe one sort of experience as uncertainty and if you just turn the kaleidoscope a little bit, you realize that, oh, wait, what I was experiencing as uncertainty, I could also call wonder. Now what’s the difference? And the uncertainty is real. I don’t want to pretend otherwise. But I think what goes on in wonder is, first of all, you have learned to attend to something long enough that it can captivate you, right? You’re sort of, you’re being sucked into it. You’re wondering. And that is itself a form of attention. This is one of the other reasons, I guess, why I think the mystics are maybe important for us to retrieve today, because we have to learn how to resist distraction in order to get to contemplation. So one wonder is leaving you in this this space of, it trains you how to be attentive to the mystery and complexity of reality, without immediately having a penchant to kind of parse it, pigeonhole it, and master it. Now, that could sound sort of anti-intellectual though, right? It could be like, oh, well, I’m just giving up. I’m giving up on understanding the world.

No, I think this is what I came back to at the end. It’s interesting. Plato said philosophy begins in wonder. Philosophy is etymologically the love, the phileo, of sophia wisdom. So philosophy begins in wonder. Ah, so wonder is not the end of thinking. It’s letting go of the need to think that the only sort of thinking is control and mastery and analysis. And it’s getting to say, oh, now, because I would say, uh, it’s in my 50s. I’m like a philosophy student again. I got philosophy back in a way. But now I would say it’s not because I’m trying to win the argument or I’m trying to rule the world or-philosopher kings be wary of philosopher kings. But it’s because, oh, the world is wondrous and perplexing and befuddling and maddening. And there is no end to our attempt to try to live with it and grapple with it. And in that sense, we still want to deploy the intellectual and all the kind of rational gifts that God has given us, but now we’re not doing it in such a way that we’re trying to control reality. We’re trying to sort of like swim into it and understand its complexity. I don’t know, does that sound woo woo, to put it.

Well, maybe a little bit. But, you know, really just actually, I’d love for you to keep swimming in it in that, you know, in that, in your book, when you described swimming in a sea of uncertainty, you described it in both really exhilarating ways, you know, a sense almost of euphoria. I think at one point, it was a beautiful phrase you talked about, you know, fearing you were shipwrecked, you found you were actually being buoyed in a sea of love, which is just a beautiful image. On the other hand, you’ve described it also as a trauma and a wound. So I’d love to hear you say a little bit more about what it means to be afloat on a sea of uncertainty and, you know, of course, part of me wants to immediately get to the elation.

No. Right. Sure. No, I get it. That’s helpful. Maybe be helpful for us to say, one of the things I try to do in this book is to present the mystical tradition as a pathway. I think, maybe especially for people who aren’t familiar with the mystical tradition, what we probably associate with it is kind of like ecstatic, rapturous religious experience. And it can include that. But I actually think what’s really going on in the mystical and contemplative tradition is sort of like a pathway of spiritual disciplines. And the reason why this is an answer to your very good question. I put it this way. What the contemplative tradition requires is us to retreat into solitude. We have to find solitude in order to dwell in silence and stillness, which is really primarily about listening and listening to all the things we couldn’t hear because of all the noise and chatter of the world that we were hearing when we weren’t in solitude. But then here’s the thing. That stillness and solitude is exposure and vulnerability. And it’s why I’m, you know, I’m not uncomfortable describing this mystical path as its own kind of therapeutic journey, almost. Actually, it overlapped with my own therapeutic journey, which is to say, when you get to this place of stillness, it’s not like the epiphany immediately arrives, right? Instead, what happens is you’re exposed and vulnerable. And one of the things that has to sort of crumble are all the little idols we’ve built for ourselves. All the little scaffoldings that we thought were going to protect us or map the world for us. We actually have to lose some habits, frameworks, concepts. There’s an undoing that happens in that stillness. But if we are willing to dwell there and endure the pain and ordeal of it on the other side, this is Saint Theresa says, what begins as a dark cloud turns luminous.

There’s this shimmer. There’s this shine that comes. It doesn’t mean you’re never going to experience pain in the world again. But I do think that-here’s the difference between the terrifying experience of uncertainty and swimming in a sea of uncertainty, knowing you’re buoyed by love. All across the tradition, what all the mystics testify that you finally learn is you are beloved. That the truest story of your being is that the God who is love loves you unconditionally and always has. We just couldn’t hear it in our hearts because of all this noise and chatter. That’s why I think once you get to that place, that becomes a certain kind of, I think, yeah, I think I want to say a kind of unshakable anchor. And it doesn’t mean that you’re still not going to experience heartbreak and a disappointment in the world. But now, in all the uncertainty there is-and it’s not an intellectual accomplishment. There’s something else going on. It’s a bit like a wound, but it’s a wound of love where now you can withstand the buffeting winds of the storm because you know that you’re in the boat with the creator of the cosmos. And it sounds crazy to just talk about it. And, you know, reading a book won’t get you it, although it can’t hurt, right?

But I would say that to me is the difference between that utterly terrifying experience of uncertainty and this swimming in it. It’s not that you’ve conquered uncertainty. It’s who you are and how you are in the midst of that uncertainty. And maybe we should also say how we are in the you know, I don’t want this to-It’s interesting that the mystics talk about solitude and withdrawing into solitude, but the whole point of that is so that you actually then also make yourself available to others. Like it yields a solidarity and community so that we are swimming in the sea of uncertainty with the God of love. Does that make, does that feel like a difference between those two? Because I just think otherwise people are like, how can we solve the problems that make us uncertain?

And maybe that’s some of the hope that people actually have in the AI revolution. Oh, well, we’re finally going to figure out the solutions to all our puzzles. And I’m just suggesting, first of all, I think our uncertainties are endless. It’s part of being mortal. It’s part of being finite. It’s part of inhabiting time. So it’s not how can we quell uncertainty, how can we dwell in uncertainty in a way that it doesn’t ruin us? Overwhelm us, wreck us. And I feel like a lot of people are looking for some sort of resource like that.

Oh, absolutely. One of the things that interested me in reading your book is that you described having a sense of, you know, in this process of your own givenness and that the sense that you, Jamie Smith, are not your own. You have done a lot with your life. I’m sure there’s probably, you know, especially as a young man, a sense of desiring to be a self-made man. And yeah, almost an intimation that none of us are actually our own. Can you say a little bit more about that, about that realization and what that means to you?

Yeah, it’s interesting. You know, in my tradition, we use the Heidelberg Catechism. And the first question and answer of the Heidelberg Catechism is, what is your only comfort in life and in death? And the first line is that I am not my own, but I belong body and soul to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. This sense of, again, it’s about a relinquishing of a control.

We live, especially type A people like us, we live in achievement culture. We live and we distinguish ourselves-our identity is our achievement, which then also tempts us to imagine that we are only worthy of attention and love and respect insofar as we’ve achieved, which is a terrible, terrible lie. I think one of the things I realized was how much of my life was not an accident, but gift. And I say that as somebody who I think worked pretty hard, but you realize, oh, this is what Paul is talking about, right? Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. Or as he puts it in first Corinthians, you know, by the grace of God, I am what I am. And his grace towards me was not in vain. And yet I labored more abundantly than they all. And yet it was not I, but Christ who was in me. This paradox of this sense of oh, I’m caught up in a story that is bigger than me. And in that sense, I’ve been given a calling. I’ve been given a vocation. But I’m also sort of surfing a wave in a sense. I guess I love that paradox of effort and grace. I think that’s a big part of the mystical tradition, you know, like Saint Teresa and the interior castle, she’s like, okay, here’s the 14 things you got to do. But by the way, at the end, here’s what you can’t possibly do. And it only arrives as a gift.

Now I can see, and maybe I’m asking you to put back on your conceptual, incisive philosopher hat, that there may be some people who read the mystics or read your work describing the mystics and think, that sounds a little bit Gnostic to me. Like there is some special knowledge that comes from this. And yet almost all of your previous work is very much opposed to Gnosticism. So maybe you can parse out a little bit about the distinction between the two.

Yeah. Good question. Because, it’s interesting. I think that one of the things I was surprised to sort of learn from the mystics. I thought as somebody who, and Protestant that I am right, we don’t really grow up with mystical traditions. And I think I thought, oh, this kind of mystical tradition was really a ladder of ascent. Do you know what I mean? Like, oh, here’s how I climb up to achieve this union with God that I couldn’t get otherwise. Actually, what the mystics are constantly talking about is you just need to peel away layers and layers of distraction and noise to get back to and discover what has always already been true of everyone, which is that we are beloved of God. So I think one of the reasons why mysticism is not Gnosticism is, first of all, it thinks this is available to everyone, right? It’s actually an utterly democratizing vision of what’s available. The other thing is it is in Saint Teresa in particular, if I had a favorite mystic, it’s probably Saint Teresa of Avila.

And why is that?

She’s so-The Interior Castle is such an intimate voice. Like, it’s such a gentle voice just trying to guide a friend to discover what she has discovered from God. And I just find it’s a beautiful picture of friendship. Spiritual friendship, really. And it’s interesting to me how often Teresa is not trying to float away from our materiality and embodiment. In fact, she says, one of the things that we should be contemplating is the incarnate Jesus. What Jesus is doing in his life, what Jesus does in his body, and kind of keeps bringing us back to the grittiness of. And so that’s very unlike Gnosticism, which tends to be this sort of spiritual ether kind of thing. That and at the end, I don’t think the mystics are saying, oh, there’s a club of people who got the secret password to sort of know this secret truth. It’s more like an invitation to all to discover what’s already there.

Another thing that struck me about your your work is that it seems. Well, there’s a tenderness to it. It’s also a hopeful book, and it seems quite opposed to both cynicism and triumphalism.

This means so much to me. Cherie. Thank you. That’s really encouraging.

Oh, absolutely. Which, and of course, cynicism and triumphalism, if anything, seem to be kind of the dominant cultural emotional registers of our age. And I assume that was very deliberate.

Yes. No, thank you for giving that back to me in that way. Look, I think our current cultural moment is locked in the binary. Us them. Either or. Good, bad. Republican, Democrat, you know I mean, we’re just we’re locked in binaries and, and the cynicism triumphalism is another one of those. It’s like you swing from one end of the pendulum to the other. And what the mystics are saying is it’s this pendular, binary way of thinking that’s our problem. And trying to invite us beyond that. I mean, one of the things I kind of hope for ambitiously and benightedly. Look, I don’t think we’re going to solve the culture wars by figuring it out. Do you know, I mean, I don’t think we’re going to solve the deep, rabid animosity of our cultural moment because somebody like writes the right op ed or convinces us of something. I think what has to happen is we have to get to a place where we just see one another in such a fundamentally different light that it creates sympathy, solidarity.

Now and what’s going to get us there? I think the mystics are right. Fundamentally, it’s going to be a form of humility and not fake humility. Christians are really good at fake humility. But I mean, like, and this is why I think what the mystics say is you need to be rocked and maybe broken to emerge from that with a limp that makes you realize, oh, I see your limp too. And I wonder how you got it. You know, I think I do not think we are going to find a different way of being social, unless we get to a place where we do this kind of interior soul work that transforms into a kind of perceptual compassion. And I think that only comes from a deep, not humiliation, but that is language that the mystics use. You know what I mean? Like you’re just like, oh man, stop imagining that your immediate take on this person has distilled the mystery of who they are. It’s like, oh, I see. I’m more mysterious to myself than I realized. And every other human being is a walking mystery. And even in their rabid, venomous hatred of me, there’s something. I need to get curious about their brokenness, I need to get curious and wonder about my interlocutor’s animosity, where Teresa would say what I probably really need to get curious about and wonder about is what are they afraid of? What am I afraid of? I think another thing that really draws me to Saint Theresa is she has this kind of spiritual diagnosis, almost a psychological diagnosis that says probably the root of so much that plagues us is fear.

It’s not ignorance. It’s not all the kinds of problems that we usually-it’s like, what are you scared of? What are you anxious about? What are you afraid of? And if I can get to a place where, oh, I realize, oh, man, I was doing all these things because I was scared. Then maybe I can start to get to a place of compassionate, wondering about the other and say, I wonder what you’re scared of. And we might even start to ask each other that. I’m not saying that that’s some magical kumbaya solution. I’m just saying that’s a fundamentally different posture that we would then bring to our interactions.

You mentioned earlier just how distraction and hurry and, you know, all the things that keep us from stillness and silence and solitude. Just yesterday I had a niece visiting and she has moved from rural Idaho to Manhattan.

That’s a long ways.

It is. And one thing she said that she was surprised by is how quickly people want to categorize you. And we were kind of talking about like, is that because everybody’s in a hurry? Is there something that kind of drives us to put each other in the boxes just because of the anxiety of hurry? And all the distraction.

There’s an efficiency to it right? It’s like, okay. I need to sort of categorize you so I know how to deal with you so I can keep moving on to my thing. I mean, I hope this isn’t cynical, but I also think there are whole industries that are built on making us categorize people in such a way to. Do you know what I mean? Like, it’s very, very convenient. There’s a lot of money to be made in doing that too.

Yes. There’s a tenderness in the book that is striking. In some ways I almost saw it as you offering yourself as a Virgil to those who are floundering in a sea of uncertainty.

Wow. That’s very kind of you.

And I’m kind of curious what you hope people will take away from your own experience with it. And from, you know, essentially the encouragement in a sense that you offer.

Yeah, yeah, I am trying in this book to just sort of be a witness to testify in some ways, I want to give some people still permission to be honest, maybe about their anxieties and fears and to say even some people who you think have it all together are dealing with deep troubles. And so let’s just keep being honest and candid and vulnerable about that. I also think someone has told me that they feel like this is a very middle aged book. My wife Deanna says, I think you’re a little old for middle age, buddy. But there is a certain sense in which, yeah. I would like to let people imagine that they don’t have to be afraid in the ways that they have been, or to get to a place where they can be honest about that anxiety and realize it doesn’t have to be that way. There is another way of being. So my hope is, I mean, in many ways, if I can just be a gateway to some people returning to the real treasures of a Thomas Merton or a Saint Teresa or The Cloud of Unknowing, I’m always happy to be a portal. But I would love it if somebody found here a friend they didn’t know they had who’s just encouraging them to sort of venture into what will feel like unsafe waters and to say, I’m just talking to you from the other shore and I want you to know you can make it and to hopefully give them some encouragement in that.

You know, you mentioned waving to them from the other shore, you know, to make your home implies some sort of of stability, of long term permanence. Is the dark, the luminous dark a permanent home or is it a temporary home that we eventually pass on from?

This is-I will just tell you, I’m not sure the answer to that question. I think of it this way. You’re absolutely right that the cloud of unknowing says, you know, make your home in the dark. I think what they mean is get used to it. I don’t think that that means it’s always as dark as it can be. I would say another way that sometimes Saint John of the cross talks about it is you come, the darkness is a season, right? It’s a stage that you have to work through. Unfortunately, scarily, he says, it can last for years. The thing I don’t think happens is you never forget the dark. If you really sort of-if this work has been done in you, then in that sense you will be at home in the dark because in some ways you found yourself in the dark and you wouldn’t want to lose that or forget that. And in that way, I think it’s like, you know, Jacob’s limp, there was a blessing that was won. But the rest of your life, you walk with that limp. But actually that limp is a reminder of what was given up. In that sense, I do think you sort of dwell there in a way or it dwells with you.

You know, kind of bringing this back to you. You mentioned earlier that so much of your early career as philosopher was sort of mapping cultural terrain. And it seemed like maybe in the 2010’s or so, you made a switch, where several of your books were really more about interior cartography, you might say. You know, On the Road Augustine and then How to Inhabit Time, you essentially went from the space time continuum in terms of the interiority that you were matching. What you’ve mentioned here that essentially finding yourself where all your maps were burned, where does Jamie Smith go with all of his maps burned?

Remains to be seen in some ways, but I’m not freaking out. Do you know what I mean? Because as I say, I feel like I’m in a real new incubation stage and I’m, just like, I’m drinking in the world and philosophy and arts and I’m waiting to see what God’s distilling from all of that. And so I’m interestingly, I’m in a phase where I’m not like rushing into, I don’t know what my next book is yet, for example, which I literally in 30 years that has not been true for me. I know what I’m working on. I know the things that interest me. But, I’m kind of reveling in being a student of wonder again and waiting to then see what my vocation was. By the way, you gave a very nice little encapsulation of my-I don’t know if I saw the trajectory like that for myself. I think one of the things that happened is if you had asked me in the 2000’s, my dream job was to sort of think tank Washington kind of thing.

Oh, really?

Yes. Yes, absolutely. And then I think.

You would have been very good at it.

Well, but I don’t know about that. But the world changed a lot too. And I was like, I’m not sure that I’ve got the soul for that or the, you know.

I’m not sure that any of us do.

But there’s. But now I’m also wondering if there’s a way that that’s because I imagined entering those spaces to win. And now I wonder if maybe one of the things that’s percolating is bringing these gifts of philosophy back to helping us think about how we are with one another socially and culturally. But now it’s more in the mode of witness than trying to win the public argument. And, I don’t know, I feel slightly energized by those possibilities.

So one last question. I don’t even have a good question about it. But, one of the things I think that’s unusual and wonderful about your work is you take beauty very seriously. And so in the absence of a better question, like what does beauty have to do with being lost in the sea of annoying?

Yes, exactly. And, I might even expand it to say, what does esthetic reality. And I think part of why I’m drawn to that is, what’s going on in an esthetic encounter with beauty is there’s this kind of transport that’s going on. Do you know what I mean? There’s a sense of, oh, I’m, we’re on a different register. We’re moving on a different plane here. And it activates something in the human person that is atrophied by most of the rest of our existence. Most of the rest of our ho hum, efficient capitalist existence leaves these whole parts of the wonder of the human person just shriveled. And I love it that the arts and beauty and these esthetic encounters kind of wake up a part of us. And then sort of carry us beyond what we could even say. There’s a kind of mystical mystery element to this. There’s a certain uncontrollability in the esthetic that I find. It just reminds us how to be human.

You know, actually, I’ll ask one more question, which is, well, to wildly mix metaphors, part of what you have described, that being lost in this sea of unknowing/sea of love does is transport us out of our desire to categorize and essentially to conquer. To divide and conquer. Is there a sense in which uncertainty can actually be a little bit of a cultural antibody for what sickens us?

That’s a great metaphor, I love it. Yes. I wonder if we almost treat uncertainty as the virus that has to be repelled. Whereas maybe, yeah, that’s an intriguing way that in some sense, what I’m saying is, look, if you learn to live with uncertainty, it doesn’t activate your defense mechanisms in the same way, which then almost always overreacts to uncertainty. And then we do all these kind of monstrous things to other people in the world and things like that. I think that’s right. Learning to live with uncertainty is its own kind of defense that I think leaves more room for wonder. It’s true the way, you know, Cherie, you’ve handed this back to me in a helpful way. I’m wondering now if there isn’t a sense in which wonder and uncertainty are two different modes of experiencing the mysterious and the amorphous. Do you know what I mean?So that in some sense you’re only paralyzed by uncertainty if you thought you could conquer everything and get certain about it, right? Uncertainty is only an enemy and a threat if you think my job is to be certain about everything. If you let go of that and say the world is a wonder, other people are mysterious. Now, uncertainty is not a violence or a failure. It’s a characteristic of a wondrous world. But the difference between those two responses is not actually the external reality, so to speak. It’s what is it doing to me? What’s going on in me? And that’s where I think this kind of soul work has to happen about how we react to it.

You know, there are many people, probably like me who grew up in a conservative sort of fundamentalist adjacent, you know, faith background where uncertainty was seen-uncertainty, like doubt was seen very much as contra faith, you know, erosive or corrosive to faith. But what you’re describing is something quite different.

Yes. It’s about making room for not knowing as faithful. Now, what’s interesting in our moment too, I think we also are familiar with the other pendulum of that kind of fundamentalist certainty is a kind of deconstructed doubt, which then ironically turns our doubts into new certainties. And so the mystics come along and say, guys, you’re still playing along this sort of binary pendulum. What we’re talking about is another way of being that escapes that oscillation between the two.

So just to sort of wrap up, there are likely people listening today who have never been exposed to the mystics before, but who nevertheless find themselves in very uncertain times, their worlds have been rocked by things they never would have anticipated, much less understand. How would you counsel them?

Yeah. The first is you just want them to hear a word that God is already with you and is waiting to be discovered in new ways. I’m a reader, so I guess that’s kind of the way, you know, like, I think Saint Theresa’s interior castle is this powerful, powerful invitation. Another, if I can mention one other little book by Martin Laird. It’s a beautiful little book called Into the Silent Land. And to me, it’s a little bit more like a manual of contemplation than I’m doing in my book. But also, you know, just do a little digging around your neighborhood. You might find like in Grand Rapids where I live, the Dominican sisters have these wonderful retreats where you can go experience this. It doesn’t just have to be talking heads. And if you start looking, I know the right people will find you to enfold you into these practices.

Jamie this has been a real pleasure.

This has been great fun. Thank you so much.