Living the Questions: Why 2020 hasn’t taken Rev. angel by surprise
A companion conversation to the On Being episode that has been re-aired for a third time — Krista catches up with Rev. angel Kyodo williams on how she’s keeping her fearlessness alive through pandemic and rupture.
Listen to the full interview here: https://onbeing.org/programs/living-the-questions-why-2020-hasnt-taken-rev-angel-by-surprise/
This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.
Krista Tippett, host: Hi, angel.
Rev. angel Kyodo williams: Hi there. How are you?
Tippett:Ah. Well, [laughs] I’m glad to be hearing your voice.
Rev. williams:Good to hear yours.
Tippett:Where are you?
Rev. williams: I am in Oakland now — different Oakland than I was before, but Oakland. I moved right at the onset of all of the pandemic.
Tippett: You were moving as it was unfolding?
Rev. williams: California went into their stay-at-home orders on the 17th, and we were scheduled to move on the 18th.
Tippett:Well, I think, I’m sure Julie explained we’re putting our big, beautiful conversation back on the air. And I wanted to talk to you right now for just 20, 30 minutes, check in with you. I will say that listening to you again, to the conversation we had several years ago, it feels prescient. [laughs] It doesn’t just feel prescient. I don’t know that you used the language of “this moment,” but you said, “There is something dying in our society, in our culture, and there’s something dying in us individually. And what is dying … is the willingness to be in denial.”
And someplace else you said, “We are evolving at such a pace, what we’re experiencing now in our society, we’re just cycling through it. We’re digesting the material of the misalignment. We’re digesting the material of how intolerable it is to be so intolerant. We’re digesting the material of 400, 500 years of historical context that we have decided to leave behind our heads, and we are choosing to turn over our shoulders and say: I must face this, because it is intolerable to live in any other way than a way that allows me to be in contact with my full, loving, human self.”