Brian McLaren:

Welcome, everyone. I’m Brian McLaren.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

And I’m Carmen Acevedo Butcher, and we’re so glad you’re here for this episode of Learning How to See.

Recently, Bishop Mariann Budde posted on Instagram a photo of her herself looking out an airport window, and she spoke about attending a gathering of Christians called the Kirchentag in Hanover, Germany, and they were discussing there the role of churches in standing up for justice. And everything she said held good reminders for me. And I sat with them and returned to them over the days. I took screenshots of them and reread them, and I want to share her words here, because I think in healthy community we remind each other of what matters, and of how to be human and of how to humanize others.

Buddy said she was struck by how curious people were about what’s happening in America, and how similar the conversations were about what’s happening in their own countries. At this gathering of Christians she said, “Our greatest contribution is to speak of what we know, and testify to what we have seen. More importantly, we are to live as best we can according to the highest aspirations of humankind revealed to us in Jesus.” And then she reminds us of what these are, “To recognize the inherent God-given dignity of every human being, to love our neighbors as ourselves, and even to love our enemies, to share what we have, and to strive for an equitable and just society. To refrain from evil and refuse to hate, to be mindful of the power of our words, and to speak without malice or contempt. To forgive as we have been forgiven, to live in hope, and to be willing to sacrifice even our very lives for the sake of love.”

And then she ended this short post, “I see love and courage embodied in the people I meet, and I am grateful,” and so am I. And Brian and I are so grateful for the questions you have sent us, and for how engaged you have been with the interviews, and the wisdom that we’ve heard during Season 8 of Learning How to See. And I want to think of what Bishop Budde said, especially the part about, “to speak of what we know, and testify to what we have seen, of the power of story and of each of us sharing our stories.” With that in mind, I want to tell the tale of two older German women I met, survivors of World War II when I met them in 1983. So back then, it wasn’t even that long ago. There were still some buildings that were pockmarked from the bombs in different cities. And one of these women is the reason that I prayed decades ago, “Please don’t let me become bitter.” As Richard Rohr writes in Tears of Things, “The path to not being bitter is one of tears and deep broken heartedness.”

But in my 20s, I didn’t know that then, so I didn’t really quite know what I was getting into. But I knew I didn’t want to be like my landlady. Both she and Boppard in Rhein, where I studied at Goethe-Institut to get my German skills more up to speed. And Mother Buschbeck in Heidelberg on the Neckar River had survived horrors. My landlady became bitter and controlling. And then when another student at the Goethe-Institut said she could not sleep for the train noises in a room that she had by the train tracks, I said, “Oh, I don’t mind to swap with you if you don’t mind a grouchy landlady,” because I’d grown up next to a highway, a major highway in Georgia. And we often had to re-tilt, straighten up the picture frames on our walls, because the big 18-wheelers would go whizzing past our house. You could throw a rock and hit them, pretty much. So I could sleep with trains blowing their whistles in the night.

So my classmate and I swapped. I ended up in a garage apartment of some nuns in Boppard. But after that, I went to study in Heidelberg where I met the other older German woman, and she saved my life. She’s the reason I began praying the Jesus Prayer. I was raised Southern Baptist. Nobody ever mentioned the Jesus prayer. It was the coldest winter when I was 22. It was the coldest winter I’ve ever experienced. And I was a student at Heidelberg University on a rotary graduate scholarship. And I met Sophie Bushbeck, Mother Bushbeck because my professor in Georgia had written her to say, “Maybe we can meet.” And he and his wife had sent Sophie and her eight children’s shoes and food during World War II. Sophie Bushbeck was joyful. When we would go for walks together, she would see the beautiful red berries on a bush and say, ah, “Vega Schmuck, that’s like jewels.”

At 22, I was not so joyful. I was lonesome and homesick, and I was also suffering and recovering then from an eating disorder. But then I met Sophie who could not have been better named, Wisdom. She had experienced during World War II, fleeing Russian soldiers, having to board trains while she was also caring for her eight children. And her husband, who was a contemporary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Fritz, was in a Russian prison camp. He was a war chaplain, and he would be there for five years. So she was a refugee with her eight children. Eventually she was taken in, and her children, by some nuns. Her husband was still not home. But during those many years, her children were often hungry. And she told me, “You just don’t know, Carmen, what it’s like to have to tell your children, “The rest of this food we’ll save for tomorrow.”” And she even told me some of her children didn’t grow as tall, because of these years of deprivation.

She had plenty, Mother Bushbeck, that she could have been bitter or in denial about. But instead she said to me, “I prayed every day for Fritz to come home. I prayed for years.” She said, “For some time I didn’t even hear from him. And then I was just so grateful to get a letter.” She told me the story one day, standing on her balcony. She said, “I was on a balcony like this, and one day I saw this man walking down the road and I didn’t recognize him. He looked emaciated. He did not look well.” She said, “But then I recognized his walk. It was Fritz. He was coming home.” She said to me, “Carmen, I had prayed every day for my husband to come home. And now, even though he has been dead for two years, I still pray every day thanking God that he did come home.” And she was always trying to teach me these things, and I filed them away. She said, “As often as you pray for something, when it is granted, be sure to thank God just as often.” I’ve tried to follow that wisdom.

So she taught me to live more gently. We went everywhere together. I have suffered a traumatic childhood and Mother Bushbeck and I never talked about this, the abuse in my family was even ongoing then. I had seen my mother go through grave difficulties, and my brother, and sisters and I also. And I really could not handle Christianity anymore. I was allergic to it. I couldn’t even read the Bible, but instead, mother Bushbeck gave me the gift of prayer, and a compassionate and real Christianity. One day right before Christmas, she said, “Here is a book for you. I think you’ll like it.” She never preached at me. She just told stories. And she gave me this little very deceptively slender book, Das Jesusgebet, The Jesus Prayer. And I began walking all over Heidelberg during that very cold winter, because I so wanted to learn German, and this book was in German.

And I was wearing the blue wool sweater Sophie had given me, because I came with a polyester sweater that worked in Georgia but did not work in Heidelberg. And this was a hand-me-down that Mother Bushbeck gave me. So I’m wearing the sweater she gave me, and I have this book also that she’s given me and I’m praying, “Herr Jesus Christus, Sohn Gottes, erbarme dich meiner.” Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me. And I’m walking the cobblestone, saying it over, and over, and over, all day long. At the end of that time when I went back home, all of my problems, they were still there. I still had my own internal struggles, and I was trying to navigate my ongoing breakdown at that time. But the Jesus Prayer, this constant returning to the present awareness of love had begun to heal me even though I didn’t even see it at the time. But looking back, I can see that that practice really helped me.

So Mother Bushbeck helped me begin again to be in community with my own body in friendship with her. She also would cook me a roast chicken every Friday, because she heard Americans like them. Even though she, I learned at the very end of my time there, did not like roast chicken. She would often remind me how important community is, saying, “[foreign language 00:10:25] erkaltet schnell, aber viele zusammen bleiben länger warm.” One piece of coal goes cold quickly, but many together stay warm longer. That’s what this season of interviews with guests has reminded me. We need each other, the body of Christ. These episodes are offered up as prayer together, that we may keep returning to and deepening our seeing through the eyes of love. So we’ll start, Brian, with one of our listener questions that are so authentic, and so searching.

Brian McLaren:

Yes, thank you so much for sharing that story, Carmen, about really how you got through those early years of your life without becoming bitter, but getting on a path of love and deep faith. Both of the questions we’re going to look at today deal with the same issue, but in slightly different ways. And I just think this is so fascinating. Basically, both of our questions are trying to say, how do I put love together with anger? So here’s the first question from Barbara. “I just finished listening to the episode with Jesuit priest, Father Rafael Garcia. As with all the episodes over each season, I was moved. Each time though I find myself saying, I don’t have a of difficulty finding empathy and compassion for each of these groups, the immigrants, the transgender, the LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters, those in prison, and more of the oppressed.”

“But I am having a lot of difficulty extending love to Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, and others in the administration and MAGA movement. I have been working on this since Donald Trump first came down those steps and declared his candidacy. I see that I’ve become less angry and hate-filled toward him in his sycophants, but it takes very little to relight the embers. I think we are also called to love them, but it is very hard to do. Could you speak a little about this?” And then she adds, “I’ve listened to most of the CAC’s webinars. I receive the daily meditations to start my morning prayers of them. I read everyone’s books. I practice centering prayer daily. I do the welcoming prayer. I’m learning the forgiveness prayer. I trust that God is transforming me, but it is so easy to fall back into the anger that I feel when I learn about something else, mean-spirited, cruel, stupid, and harmful that has been done or said. Surely I am not the only person struggling with this. How do you do it?”

And the first thing I want to say to Barbara is, thank you for your honesty. And you’re right. You’re not the only person struggling with this. This is a struggle I face constantly myself. And I love, Barbara, first that you are committed to being a loving person. What a beautiful thing. And then you’re trying to take stock of this persistent anger that you feel, especially towards certain political figures. So Carmen, I’d love to hear what you think in response to Barbara’s question.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

I want to echo what you said, Brian, because I really appreciate the honesty. And as you were reading it, I was thinking, this is a prayer. This question is a prayer, one of Rilke’s, you know, questions we can live into, because I’m asking it also. When I watch the news, I go between honestly, just crying sometimes, and then also being very angry, like the shaking of your fist at the things that are happening that are so cruel and harmful, injurious and criminal. So thank you, Barbara. It’s really the question we’re all asking. I would say that for me, I have to go back and think of the times before when I’ve had somebody to forgive, and what did I do? Because like Barbara says, she’s doing all the right things. Read the daily meditations, start my morning prayers, do the welcoming prayer Mary Mrozowski’s centering prayer.

And you’re doing everything right. And I remember when I was a teenager, I was studying the Bible, reading it every day, because my mother taught me that. And also, the churches I was going to, the Southern Baptist churches, that was a big deal. But also, because I was very religious in the good sense of the word, such as I had this real hunger to want to know more. So I thought I was doing everything right in so many ways and praying, and yet I was so angry. And what I was angry about was the fact that I didn’t know what it was, but my father was violent. I hadn’t much of an idea then why. That was something I spent a large part of my life trying to figure out, but he had an undiagnosed disorder of some sort. And not all undiagnosed disorders or disorders have violence, but his did.

And it shattered our family. It shattered me, my brother, my sisters, my mother, our pets. It was unbelievable. And he was a deacon in the church, so it was very confusing, but I was angry the way you can only be angry when you’re a teenager, because you just want things to be fixed. So my Bible study, my prayers, nothing was working. And one day I remember, because my parents, whenever we moved into a house, they were very practical, they would keep whatever carpet we had as long as it still had life in it. And I remember sitting at some age, probably 18, 19 or 20, and I was sitting on this burnt orange Berber carpet, type of short, beautiful, burnt orange. And I remember praying this very honest prayer, “Dear God, I hate my father. I hate him and I don’t want to forgive him, but I must for my own goodness. So God, this is the only kind of prayer I know to make. Would you please help me?”

And a door in my heart opened, and it was like a river ran through and something was different. Now, I still had to learn to let go, but at that time I was also reading Corrie Ten Boom, which I think a lot of people in the Baptist churches of my time were reading Corrie Ten Boom, and how she had experienced the concentration camps and losing family. And she described forgiveness like, you let go of the rope you’ve been pulling to ring this bell. She said, as long as you’re pulling on this rope, like say in one of the churches that has one of those big bells that rings one of those huge bells, she said, “If you let go of the rope, then eventually that bell will stop swinging, and stop making that noise.” Because I really thought forgiveness would happen overnight. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I do know that when my heart experienced, I can’t explain it, but that mystical experience of a door opening in my heart and this river coming through it, that something shifted in me.

And the key for me has been and always is now, when I go to the marsh, Barbara, and everyone, and Brian, I will talk to the marsh and to God in just a very honest way, just like that I did. Because I felt ashamed to admit this hate, because it meant I had failed, but it was the truth. And I think God can handle all kinds of truth. And us saying it is part of the going forward. So that’s my thing I wanted to share, Brian. How about you?

Brian McLaren:

Well, thanks for sharing that, Carmen. Just that alone gives us all something we really need, and that is permission to be honest. It’s one thing to be angry. It’s another thing to be angry and pretend you’re not. It’s one thing to feel hate in your heart, and another thing to feel hate and pretend you don’t. And it seems to me when we’re pressured, maybe pressured from within ourselves, or pressured by the group we’re in, to not admit we’re angry, or not admit we feel hatred, then that creates all kinds of folds, and complexities, and layers of struggle for us. So thank you so much for that. Barbara’s question is very significant, because in political matters sometimes we’re suffering ourselves, because of what people with power do. When people with power abuse their power and we suffer, we have every right to be angry. We need to be angry.

I often say that anger is to our soul, or our personhood, or our personality, what pain is to our body. When you put your hand on a hot stove, before you even think about it, you don’t think, oh, my hand is hot. I should remove it before further tissue injury occurs. We have a reflex to pull our hand away forcefully to protect ourselves from arm. And anger is one of the things that says, I should not be treated this way. And it has to be forceful, and it has to be immediate, otherwise we could be subjected to further harm. So that anger, I think we have to say, what is it trying to tell us? When we’re loving people, we care enough about ourselves that we don’t want these people who are abusing our power to hurt us. We love ourselves in the right way. But similarly, when other people are being hurt by people in power, the fact that we love our neighbors who are being hurt by these powerful people, it gives us every right to be angry.

But here’s where the challenge then comes. We now feel angry, and we’re admitting that we feel angry, but sometimes we feel that the anger that I feel is turning me, it’s what your story talked about, Carmen, it’s turning me into a bitter person. It’s turning me into a hateful person, a reactive person. My identity is being shaped around my opposition to this person, and we don’t like what’s happening to us. It’s funny. Germans are showing up in a lot of our stories today. There’s a German philosopher, a complex, fascinating, troubled, brilliant human being named Friedrich Nietzsche. And Nietzsche said, “Beware when fighting the monster, lest you become the monster.” And I think what can happen is, some political figure who is mean, and hateful, and unsympathetic and uncompassionate, we rightly get angry and then find ourselves becoming mean, and unsympathetic and uncompassionate, so we don’t like what’s happening to us.

So the only other thing I wanted to mention is, I was in great danger of this at one poin.t when I first became a writer and began to get some attention for the things I was saying, people in my religious tradition, many of them were appreciative of what I was saying. But others went after me with both barrels, as they say in a couple of, back then very influential magazines. Some people wrote very mean spirited articles and editorials about me, and some of my friends. And a very famous person wrote some articles that were just intended to discredit me and other people. And in one sense, I understood, by them attacking what we were saying, what that did, someone taught me, every attack is an opportunity to clarify your message. So in one sense, I was able to not take it personally. These people are attacking me. Well, that’s how this game works. And now I have the opportunity through their attack to clarify what my message is.

They’re misrepresenting me. That makes me angry. It’s not right for them to misrepresent me. I don’t like the hypocrisy of them saying things that just aren’t true, the carelessness. But you know what? It’s not about me. This is a chance to clarify my message. But sometimes it really got through to me, especially an editor from this magazine called me one day and said, “Brian, I need you to know, I just came out of a staff meeting, and one of my fellow editors said, “I’m out to destroy McLaren.”” And he just said to me, “I want you to watch your back, because one of my colleagues is out to destroy you.” And I knew what that meant. He wanted me to lose my job. And I was a husband, a father with young children. I realized he didn’t care how much he hurt me in order to discredit me. And I remember I felt a kind of anger I hadn’t felt, where I just felt the malice of it. I felt myself becoming malicious in return.

And a friend gave me a poem. It was written by Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich, who was a Serbian Orthodox bishop, who spoke out against Nazism in World War II. And he was arrested when the Germans invaded the former Yugoslavia. And then he was taken to Dachau. And while he was in Dachau, he was obsessed with the question, “Which of my priests betrayed me to the Nazis?” Because he’d only spoken against Nazism to the priests under his care, and he knew one of them had betrayed him. And after he felt, I could die in this prison camp, I don’t want to die full of hatred, he wrote a prayer. And someone gave me this prayer, and for many years it sat on my desk photocopied, and I just would take it and read it. I’m just going to read a few lines of the prayer, but if people go to my website, brianmclaren.net, and they look for this prayer, in fact, we’ll put a link in the show notes. This prayer helped me and it might help them in processing our anger. So here’s a little bit of the prayer.

“Bless my enemies, oh, Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them. Enemies have driven me into your embrace more than friends have. Friends have bound me to earth. Enemies have loosed me from earth, and have demolished all my aspirations in the world. Enemies have made me a stranger on worldly realms, and an extraneous inhabitant of the world. But just as a hunted animal finds safer shelter than an unhunted animal does, so have I, persecuted by enemies, found the safest shelter beneath your tabernacle, where neither friends nor enemies can slay my soul. Bless my enemies. Oh, Lord, even I bless them and do not curse them.” And this powerful prayer goes on. “Sometimes I’m proud and arrogant. I want to lift myself up. My enemies have pulled me down. Sometimes I’ve been attached to money. My enemies have gotten in the way to take away my hope of ever being rich.” He finally ends by saying, “Enemies are actually cruel friends.”

So in this prayer, this bishop processes the struggle in his heart. And that comes back to what you were saying earlier, Carmen. Just learning how to go inward, and in the presence of God, and the presence of love, and the presence of truth, to process, honestly, our struggle. I hope that will be helpful for people.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

I find that super helpful, because also, I hear in that what you’ve shared, Brian. You give us this different perspective. And I hear in it that part of the anger is also because of your love. So like your love for your family. You’re a young person then trying to provide for your family. And it’s not just a threat to you, it’s a threat to your entire family. So I like how your story also reminds us that anger is so tied to love, and to wanting to take care of those that we love. And I really appreciate how that poem came into your life and how it brought you comfort because also it was not just you who had had this experience, but there are others. So thank you for sharing that. It’s got a lot of wisdom to it for us

Brian McLaren:

Learning How to See, we’ll be back in a moment.

Before we proceed, we would like to slow down for a few minutes, just four or five minutes now. And we’d like to give each of us a chance to think about that point of tension, where we want to be people who are filled with love ,and who see through eyes of love. But the very existence of love in our hearts makes us need to feel anger when people we love are threatened, when values, and principles, and virtues we love are trampled on. When we love the truth, and the truth is mocked, or ridiculed, or discarded with conspiracy theories and propaganda. And so we find anger arising in us even as we want to be loving people. In fact, we find anger arising in us, because we want to be loving people. So if you right now, can be in a place where you’re not driving and you’re not busy with something else, I’d like to invite you.

You could either be standing or sitting, but I’d like to invite you to look at your two hands. And just hold your left hand, your right hand open. And I’d like you to look at your left hand, and open it and say to yourself, I have permission to be angry, and let your left hand in a sense represent the anger that you feel at this moment. And you might just now for a few moments in silence, let come up to the surface, what are the main angers that you feel? Who are you angry with? What are you angry with? Why? And I invite you in these next few moments to just look at that left hand, and keep returning to the idea that you have a voice. And with your voice, you’re allowed to say, “I’m angry. That hurts. That’s wrong. That’s an abuse of power. That’s harmful.” And I invite you now to just let those realities find words that you can be honest with in your own heart now.

So now having expressed, I feel anger, it’s real, it’s there. I don’t want to hide it. I want to face it, and name it, and not necessarily be ashamed for it or apologize, but just to acknowledge it’s there. And just as your left hand is part of your body, now I want you to look at your right hand and think of the love that exists in your heart. You might even think of the love that exists, that is what causes you to be angry. My friend is being hurt by someone. My neighbor is being hurt by some political policy. My family is being threatened by something. The earth itself, through greed and folly, is being harmed. And what I’d invite you to do now, is to realize the love that underlies your anger, the love that makes you care about that person, or thing, or virtue, or value that’s being harmed or dishonored. And as you look at your right hand, I wonder if you could just keep returning to the idea, there actually is love in my heart at this moment. It’s really there. And see what bubbles up now for you.

And now I wonder if you could take your hands together, and cup them together as if you were wanting to get a drink of water in your cupped hands, and to realize that your anger is always touched by love, and your love is always related to anger. And in some way in now these next few moments, to just allow yourself the realization that anger and love do not have to be enemies. Yes, they can be, but there’s a way they can be integrated, and you can hold both together in your one human heart. Amen.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

Amen.

Thank you, Brian. That was beautiful. I got teary-eyed, because as I was looking at my left hand and my right hand where the pinkies touched each other, that was a moment of the anger and the love. So very much, really teaching me about the embodiment of these emotions. And I hope it was the same for our listeners. We’re going to turn now to a second question from Pat. And like Barbara’s question, this question from Pat is like a prayer really. And we so thank you for it, Pat. And here’s what Pat writes to us.

“This season is both a blessing and a challenge, like most of life, I guess. The blessing is that the meditation exercises are helping me detox, and reconsider my visions of the world. The challenge is, I don’t think I want to. I love Pastor Nadia have read all her books, but while my heart seemed to tell me she had the right approach to our divisive and hate-filled world, I still find something inside me resisting. I guess my question is, do we lose something if we don’t keep our anger? I am thinking Jesus in the temple here, that he would not let the commodification and debasement of religion continue. He didn’t retreat, he engaged with anger. I am really struggling on the issue.” So Brian, what comes to mind to Pat’s really, really soul-searching question?

Brian McLaren:

So that’s why I just love these two questions. This second question hits the other side and says, look, I feel if I just let go of anger, I’m not doing exactly the right thing. And that’s why our exercise of trying to hold them together, I think, is really what Pat is doing in her own heart, and what made her want to write this question. I want to tell just a quick, humorous story, but it almost wasn’t a humorous story. I was a pastor for 24 years, and there’s almost like a comedy routine about pastors’ children getting into trouble, being hell raisers or whatever. And my kids were fantastic, and are. They’re just amazing people. But one Sunday we were in rented facilities. We hadn’t built a building at this point and we were renting space in a college. And during Sunday school time when kids had classes, one of my sons and a couple of his friends snuck out and went out into the woods, just to have fun and hang out.

They’re good kids, but they snuck out. And in the middle of the woods, you know how people sometimes dump their junk out there? They pull up pickup truck and dump a bunch of trash. Somebody had dumped an old sofa, an old grill, and a quart of lighter fluid to light charcoal for a grill. Somehow these things ended up in the middle of the woods. Now, if you’re a couple of 12, 13-year-old boys, and you’re out in the woods, and you find a sofa and lighter fluid, there is almost an irresistible urge that would come to say, I wonder what would happen if I doused that sofa with lighter fluid and lit it on fire, so you know what happened. Church service is ending, and we all hear sirens. The fire trucks have been called, and they fortunately got this fire put out. But then word got to me that my son was one of the people who’d been out there, playing with fire in the woods.

So we leave, and he’s in the car with me, and we’re heading home, and I just didn’t say anything. We just sat there in total silence. We drove for a long way. I wasn’t sure what to say. And finally, I just pulled off to the side of the road and I said, “Okay, let’s talk.” And I didn’t have to say anything. He knew I was angry, but he knew I didn’t hate him. He knew I was angry, but he knew I loved him. So there were a few minutes of silence. And then my son said, “That’s the stupidest thing I ever did. And for the rest of my life, I’m going to remember how terrible I feel right now. And from now on, I’m always going to think about the consequences of my actions. I don’t want to do stupid things like this. People could get hurt, houses could get burned down, terrible things could happen.” I never had to say a word, because his inner conscience said everything that needed to be said.

Now, that’s not always the case. Sometimes we do need to say a word, but in just the silence of that car ride, he knew he had to face me with my love for him, and my disappointment, and maybe even anger with what he had done wrong. That story comes to mind ,because I think ultimately what we want is not revenge on people. What we want is for people to learn from their mistakes. And if they don’t learn, we still don’t want revenge. We just want them to, in some way, not be able to keep doing the harm they’re doing.

So that will motivate us. Like we were talking about politics before, if we see people doing harm, then we’ll do everything we can to stop them. We’ll vote. In a couple of days there’s big protests happening in our country. I’ll be out there carrying a sign in a few days. It’s one of the ways I can say, I think some horrible things are happening, and we need to do something to stop it. We find ways to let our anger become our motivation to try to bring about change. But once again, these two things, anger and love are not opposites. They’re woven together I think very, very deeply. Carmen, how about you? What are your reflections on Pat’s question?

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

First, I want to say I really appreciate that you shared that, because the silence of that story is the most important part to me, where you had this relationship already well established with your son, and he leaned into the love. So that’s a beautiful story, and all kinds of lessons in it, Brian. Ever since we’ve gotten Barbara and Pat’s questions, I’ve been walking through the marsh with them, just ruminating on them. So they’ve been truly prayers for me. And this morning, very early I was out in the marsh. And I was like, sometimes I pray for the people who are right now in power in the United States. And this morning I was doing it and I was like, “This is super hard.” So I think just admitting that it’s hard is part of my experience, just being honest about it’s hard. So I’m really struggling on this issue too.

And here’s where I’ve landed for now. One thing is, I talk with the marsh all the time. People do things in their own ways. Maybe they talk to ducks, or to rivers, or to the sky, or just to God or however you do it. And I ask for advice. What is mine to do? Like what you’re saying, going to be out marching. Because in my experience, if I’m angry all the time, it’s tiring. It’s just not good emotional regulation for me. I know, because I’ve done it before and it’s not sustainable. And I want to have energy to be loving the world. And I was thinking about looking at Jesus’s life, and how I’m so glad he flipped over that table, and that he showed his anger. He really attacked the religious authorities, the scribes, the Pharisees, and said, what’s what. But he also went around healing people, preaching, telling people the good news of “God loves you, love God, love yourself, and love your neighbor.”

It’s all about love really though. Like you were saying, they go together. Because one of the things I want to say is that I think what this makes me think of is students who have written, when they get a chance to write something about their life, how many students have written about racism. So I can just call up just a few. A young woman who was walking along our campus one night towards the evening, and a police officer stopped her and said, “Are you a student here?” She’s like, “Yes, I am.” He said, “Can I see your ID?” And she had to show her ID. So she was a young black woman, and she wrote in her paper how she felt she had been racially profiled. And she was a very shy, calm person in my class. Always turned up, always did her work, and she was angry.

And then I remember a young man from Canada, a young black man who wrote in his paper, “I’m a black young black man from Canada.” He was in the United States to play basketball at my university. And he, one summer was hired in North Carolina to clean a church. And he was being paid for it, he had a key to it, he went in to clean it, and he had invited a friend in. And they had also played a little basketball. They had a basketball court out there like churches do. And they had played a little basketball, went in to clean the church. And when they came out, there were like six to eight police officers with guns pointed at them when they came out of the church that they had just cleaned. And what struck me about both of these students, and I have so many other examples, students who’ve told me they’ve been walking down the street of Berkeley and with a group of their friends, all people of color, and a white woman would cross from their side of the street to the other side of the street.

These are sweet kids. So what I’m struggling with is having stories of real inequity, like my students whose parents pick radishes in central California. So those kinds of stories, stories of racism with kids, what have they done? Just tried to be productive citizens of this country, and people that I know and love who aren’t aware of these things, like racism and such, and who have voted for cruelty, in my mind. So I’m really struggling with how to engage with that, because my heart is full as a teacher of students and their stories. And my students reflect exactly the heart of this current conflict, and the racism, and the inequity at the heart of it. So that’s one thing I’m sitting with. And you know who comes to mind is our friend James Finley, Jim. He often reminds us, God protects us from nothing, even as God sustains us in all things.

And only love has the power to name who we are. So one of the things I’m doing is living with that kind of wisdom and saying, “So what am I supposed to do?” And it reminds me of, and I’ll just end with this, a gift I was given when I graduated from college from an administrator. And it was Oswald Chambers, My Best for His Highest, I think is how it goes. And I read that from cover to cover. I think a lot of people raised in Baptist churches have read that book. And one of the things that he says in it is, to do what lies nearest at hand. So that summer when I graduated from college, I worked at a furniture company as a secretary, and I was very distraught at what was happening in my family, and looked around for what could I do.

And I noticed the back of the house needed to be painted, the barn needed to be painted, the roof of the barn, the side of the barn. So I went to Walmart and got paint, and started painting, through that somehow on the roof of the barn. And just to say, as an aside, I would be sitting with Bible verses, sitting, standing, painting with Bible verses, going over them. So practice has always been a friend to me, Lectio Divina and such. Even when it didn’t seem anything was happening, practice has always been a friend to me and is super important, like the one that you let us in. But I was so invested in this that one time I accidentally painted myself into a corner on the roof of the barn. And this is kind of funny. So I literally, it was silver paint that I got at Walmart. And I turned around and was like, wait, where am I going to step? And like as if I was on a skateboard, I slid off the roof of the barn, and luckily onto some non-barbed wire fence that was rolled up.

And I bounced, and landed on the ground, and no harm done. But one of the things that I discovered in that was, what can I do that lies nearest at hand? Well, I can practice. So to answer Pat’s question, what do we do? I can do my practice. As Jim Finley says, I can have fidelity to the rendezvous in whatever way makes sense for me. And I can be kind in an email. When a student reaches out, I can help them with a letter of recommendation. I can make my phone calls to senators and house representatives. I can do whatever lies nearest at hand. So the other thing I want to say is, these questions have really given me encouragement that we’re in this together, haven’t they you, Brian? I just so appreciate them.

Brian McLaren:

It strikes me that as we struggle to hold anger and love, the struggle is like exercise. And our heart, our soul, our spirit, the inner part of us grows stronger through the struggle. So the very struggle itself is exercising us to be more loving people. Carmen, we are ending our season. And I just also want to say again, thanking everyone for listening this season, between now and our next season. If you’ve enjoyed Learning How to See, I hope you’ll tell a friend about it, maybe even listen again with them and get together to talk about each episode. And I’d also encourage folks to go back and listen to one or more of our previous seasons. Nothing like a podcast when you have a long, summer drive ahead. So we hope earlier seasons will be of value to you as well.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

Thank you, Brian. And I want to close us with an ancestor who inspires us. Walter Brueggemann, who died recently on June 5th at 92. And he left us well over 58 books. His teaching on how the Christian Bible supports equity, justice, care of the earth and peace. He was the likes of which we shall not see again. His book’s amazing. And I want to read one of my favorites from his Awed to Heaven, A-W-E-D, Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth, Prayers of Walter Brueggemann. And what I love about this is a lot of poems here, some of them that he delivered in class and such. So we’re going to close with this beautiful poem he wrote, and it’s simply titled, “And then you.” and as I read it, and we can also include it, I think in the notes maybe, I want to ask you to do something similar, something what you did also with Carrie Newcomers’ poems and lyrics, to sit with it and ask yourself with each line, where does this resonate for you?

So we turn it into a kind of Lectio Divina for all of us together. “We arrange our lives as best we can, to keep your holiness at bay, with our pieties, our doctrines, our liturgies, our moralities, our secret ideologies, safe, virtuous, settled. And then you, you and your dreams, you and your visions, you and your purposes, you and your commands, you and our neighbors, we find your holiness not at bay, but probing, pervading, insisting, demanding. And we yield, sometimes gladly, sometimes resentfully, sometimes late or soon. We yield because you, beyond us, are our God. We are your creatures met by your holiness, by your holiness made our true selves. And we yield. Amen. Brian and I so look forward to seeing everyone on the flip side in Season 9. May you be blessed. Thank you for listening.