Episode 1: Curiosity
This beautiful calligraphy depicting a quote from the poet Rilke is by Inky Square.
While we prepare our first full season of The Anatomy of Tenderness podcast for release this coming Autumn/Winter we wanted to share a taster of what’s to come, by offering a couple of conversations on the theme of curiosity and asking questions.
Curiosity, in many ways, is the foundation of all love, all relationships, as we open ourselves up in humility and vulnerability to a genuine encounter with the “other”—someone outside of ourselves. As we explore in this episode, this openness can be scary, because to be truly open to others means being open to discovering and perhaps even changing ourselves and our understanding of the world and our place in it.
We’re honoured to share the wisdom of the brilliant and lovely theologian and writer, Lore Ferguson Wilbert in this episode. Lore is the author of several books, including A Curious Faith: The Questions God Asks, We Ask, and We Wish Someone Would Ask Us.* You can find and follow her work here:
https://lorewilbert.com/
https://www.instagram.com/lorewilbert/
I went into the conversation with Lore thinking we’d explore how curiosity helps us engage more deeply and authentically with others, but I ended up discovering so much more about how curiosity helps us encounter ourselves than I expected. Lore helped me to think about curiosity and asking questions (that can’t always be answered, at least not in a straightforward way) as an act of love, and mum and I discussed the difference between inquisitiveness or knowledge-seeking in a spirit of control and manipulation, and tenderness-building curiosity that is coupled with love, wisdom, humility, and reverence.
Some other things we explore in this episode:
How mum and dad gave me a safe place to ask questions and be curious by fostering their own curiosity as parents when I was growing up; it’s only now as a parent and adult I’m understanding how rare that is, how hard it is to do.
How curiosity has shown up in Lore’s life and transformed her relationships; why curiosity and asking questions matters, particularly for people of faith.
What’s the relationship between curiosity and tenderness? Why asking questions is not just for the benefit of the person asking, but can also be an act of love, a gift we can give each other; an invitation to reflect and locate yourself in your experience.
How Lore has learned to become more comfortable with this kind of openness, and curiosity to herself and others.
Why we should be open to this reframing of curiosity as religious people, rather than being afraid of questions. God created us to be curious because he wants us to be found, and opening ourselves up to the questions can help us to cultivate a deeper sense of awe and wonder. Part of having faith means that you never stop looking for God; we must always be seeking.
Why is it so scary to encounter ourselves? Curiosity makes us encounter ourselves, parts of us we’d like to hide or ignore, as well as forcing us to locate ourselves, God, and others, discovering what is real and what is not. Curiosity is scary because it might change us; we’re afraid of being asked questions because we’re afraid we’ll be asked to change, we’re afraid we’ll lose ourselves, there’ll be an action required.
Curiosity in love means surrendering control, to allow the other person to tell us who they are—and perhaps also in the process we discover more about who we are. “Love is entrusting our fear to God…”
Why tenderness, to Lore, means “doing the surprising thing”, the thing that doesn’t “make sense”. Why the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, God made flesh in Jesus, is the epitome of tenderness (an idea which she explores in another one of her books, Handle With Care).
The quote at the beginning of the episode is from Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke:
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
Also quoted is a passage on curiosity from Brené Brown’s book, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience:
“Choosing to be curious is choosing to be vulnerable because it requires us to surrender to uncertainty. We have to ask questions, admit to not knowing, risk being told that we shouldn't be asking, and, sometimes, make discoveries that lead to discomfort.”
An extract from one of the essays in The World-Ending Fire by Wendell Berry:
“Our great dangerousness is that, locked in our selfish and myopic economy, we have been willing to change or destroy far beyond our power to understand. We are not humble enough or reverent enough.”
And Nick Cave writing on his blog, The Red Hand Files, in November 2022:
“A good faith conversation begins with curiosity. It looks for common ground while making room for disagreement. It should be primarily about exchange of thoughts and information rather than instruction, and it affords us, among other things, the great privilege of being wrong; we feel supported in our unknowing and, in the sincere spirit of inquiry, free to move around the sometimes treacherous waters of ideas. A good faith conversation strengthens our better ideas and challenges, and hopefully corrects, our low-quality or unsound ideas.
…
A good faith conversation understands fundamentally that we are all flawed and prone to the occasional lamentable idea. It understands and sympathises with the common struggle to articulate our place in the world, to make sense of it, and to breathe meaning into it. It can be illuminating, rewarding and of great value – a good faith conversation begins with curiosity, gropes toward awakening and retires in mercy.”
***
This podcast has been a long time in the making (4 years, to be exact!), and putting these episodes together has meant wrestling with my perfectionism and fear of getting it wrong. But here we are, showing up in all our messy imperfect glory to get curious and learn to foster tenderness together; we’re so grateful that you’re joining us for the ride.
Thank you so much, Lore, for trusting us with your voice and time, especially because it took us a while to get this out into the world.
And, huge thanks as always to Sara Fackrell for the beautiful visual design and cover art for this project, and to Upcycled Sounds and Rosie Caldecott for the music on this track.
Our conversations on this podcast have been edited for clarity and brevity.
If you’d like to share a short voice note with us about what tenderness means to you for us to share in a future episode, you can head this way.
*Please note, this blog post includes affiliate links to bookshop.org (UK only); if you purchase a book via these links, I’ll earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thanks for your support!