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Angel Kyoto Williams is one of our wisest voices on social evolution and the spiritual aspect of

social healing. And for those of us who are not monastics, she says, the world is our field of

practice. She's an esteemed Zen priest and the second black woman recognized as a teacher in

the Japanese Zen lineage. To sink into conversation with her is to imagine and experience a transformative

potential of this moment towards human wholeness. There is something dying in our society and our

culture and there's something dying in us individually and what is dying, I think, is the

willingness to be in denial. And that is extraordinary. It's always been happening and when it happens

in enough of us, in a short enough period of time at the same time, then you have a tipping point

in the culture begins to shift. And then what I feel like people are at now is like, no, no,

bring it on, I have to face it. We have to face it. I'm Christa Tippett and this is on being Reverend

Angel Kyoto Williams is the founder of the National Organization transformative change.

And it says something about the enduring nature of wisdom and the generational scope of the change

we're in that this conversation happened in 2018. So I'd like to start by asking, you know, this

question I always ask in some form about the religious or spiritual background of someone's

childhood. What I think is interesting about it is that on any given day in our lives, I think we

might tell that story differently. And also what I was thinking about as I was preparing to speak

with you is that the spiritual background of your childhood and the religious background of your

childhood can be too completely distinct things. So I so really I'm very open to wherever you would

like feel like starting to reflect on that today. I would say that I had no religious

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