Not yet 30 and a veteran of two lives already, Krista Tippett retreated in the summer of 1988 to a rented room on an island off Spain. There, perhaps, her next direction would make itself known.
She had grown up in Oklahoma as a fundamentalist Christian, a preacher’s granddaughter who sang solos in church, a homebody who had traveled beyond Texas only once. Then she won admission to Brown and recast herself as an unbeliever, taking up the study of German literature and history, and living in the same dorm as John F. Kennedy Jr.
The trajectory carried her to Europe as a Fulbright scholar and soon into the diplomatic corps, working on arms-control issues along the cold war’s front line in Berlin. All of which made her wonder why, with a fulsome résumé and a social calendar to match, she felt “really unsettled in ways I couldn’t acknowledge or even explain.”
So it was odder still, as she moved onto Majorca, to stir with an old, unbidden sensation. She told herself at first that she just wanted to meditate. Then she admitted that what she was doing was praying, returning not to the fierce theology of her Southern Baptist upbringing but surely to the way it taught her how to call on God….