Carmen:           Hi, I’m Carmen and welcome to Learning How to See. As the podcast name suggests, this podcast is about seeing and each season we explore some facet of learning to see, learning to encounter reality, not just superficially with our eyes, but deeply with our whole being. This season, we’ve been exploring what it means to see with eyes of love. Thank you so much for trusting Brian and me with this time and for being the kind of person who cares about learning how to see with eyes of love.

Brian:               I’m Brian McLaren, and we’re so glad you’re with us. Today we’ll be responding to questions and comments that you all have sent in, and we’re really excited about that. After we look at those questions, then we’ll lead you in a guided meditation, concluding with a few moments of silent contemplation. It is our hope and prayer that after our time together, you will feel recentered on what really matters most and that you will open your eyes with a deeper sense of love for all that you encounter.

Well, we received so many wonderful comments and questions from listeners. Carmen, I’m really looking forward to discussing these with you. One really is addressed to you, the first one we’d like to look at today.

Here it is. Regarding the Learning How to See Podcast. “I am intrigued by Carmen’s translation of 1 Corinthians 13. I’d like to ask for her to talk about her word choices of certain verses that got my attention. Verses five and six, plus in verse seven. Love never ends. Saying love never ends instead of love never fails makes much sense to me. I so appreciate that change from what I’ve always read before. To say love never fails can cause despair when suffering continues. Since I have no idea of the original intention of which Paul was trying to say, I have to rely on translators. Thank you for helping me in learning how to see.”

Well, Carmen, I also really appreciated your translation and I want to hear anything you have to say about those verses.

Carmen:           Oh, thank you so much, Brian. Thank you to this listener who wrote in because I so appreciate that he asked this because it makes language more obviously communal, which it is. I mean, I think sometimes we look at language and it’s just like we’re about to take a test on something. This makes it a dialogue rather than just defining something. Our friend, Dr. Mike Petrow, how he says exploration over explanation. So thank you so much for this listener. We so appreciate it.

You gave me the motivation to go back into the Koine Greek. So that was really a lot of enrichment just for myself because I need lots of reminders. So here’s how it went. When I looked at this, my first thing is always what can make it really match the tenor of the original. This chapter that Paul has written is very much inspiring and mystical, really poetic in a way to remind us that love is the ground of our being.

So when he says, “Love is not rude,” really it’s agape. So it’s that unconditional love is not rude. In the Greek, it’s aschémoneó. That literally is like our understanding of rude, meaning in civil and crude and rough and violent and really shows how, Brian, words and actions are not two things really. They’re really one of the same.

I know, Brian, you and I talked about where it says agape is not centered on the separate self. One of the ways that could have been written was solipsistic, which is kind of a $10 word, isn’t it? What I love about the separate self, the zeteo in the Greek, is it’s not small ego self living under the illusion that I am a separate self with my own little resume and that’s all that matters, but it’s the interconnectedness. So I love that.

Then the next one gets really interesting. Agape is not easily angered. In the Greek, it’s paroxyno. I love that because sometimes when a person will get angry, we read in a novel or something, they had a paroxysm of anger and that’s from that same Greek word. Paroxysm literally means sharp and pointed. So it’s when somebody points their finger at you or is very bitter in their words towards you.

So it’s saying love is not easily prodded or poked or goaded, which is, if you don’t mind me saying, this is kind of hard, wouldn’t you say, Brian? Then it says, “Agape keeps no record.” That in the Greek is logizomai. I know, Brian, you know all these, but it’s the same word logos in John 1:1. So it’s not sitting over there keeping account books of the things.

It says, “Doesn’t keep a record of evil.” This perhaps is one of my favorite words in the Greek because it’s kakos and it means bad or criminal or deceitful. It doesn’t mean that love is not aware and is in denial of the truth of things. So if there are crimes going on, love doesn’t have its head in the sand, but it does mean that love is not just focusing and obsessing on that.

What I love about the word kakos here in the Greek is it literally means human waste. So like in our words cacophony, which is a bad sound. So in other words, love doesn’t keep a record of the ship that’s going down. I mean, literally what it means is you’re not just focused on the bad stuff.

The reason that I love that is because Walter Wink, the theologian, he wrote this article titled, “We Have Met The Enemy,” quoting Pogo, the cartoon character. He says, “We become what we hate.” So when we’re trying to be nonviolent lovers, we don’t want to be just focused on the bad.

Then he says, Paul does, “Agape takes no pleasure in injustice,” literally is chairō, meaning doesn’t rejoice, doesn’t have that schadenfreude, but instead rejoices in the truth. What I love about that word truth there, it’s alētheia and it means not forgetting. In other words, we’re reminders of what really is true and what really matters when we’re loving.

Then finally, the love never ends. I love that because ends is old English. It’s an ancient word and also it doesn’t put us into the binary of fail, succeed. I don’t know about you, Brian, but there’s the tendency to look on past relationships and rank them. How well did I do in it or how did I succeed in this? That’s just, Paul is reminding us that’s just not what love is about.

I love that in the Greek, the term for ends here that I’ve translated ends can mean falls. It’s pipto or ekpipto and it can literally mean falls. What I love about that is it’s saying love never falls. Now, those who are listening who are so smart will say, but fails also has the root of falls. The problem is that fails is in that binary of failing and succeeding. Whereas falls reminds me we’re all human because Jesus talks about it in the gospel of Thomas.

He’s always talking about we stumble, we fall and we fall into the discovery of grace. The same as Brother Lawrence talks about, that we stumble and we fall into grace. What I love about this when it says love never falls, I hear it saying love is the ground of our being and that word ends is so simple that it enables it to have this huge openness for all of us that love never ends. It is ongoing forever, this ground of our being that’s love. I need that reminder so much.

Brian:               My goodness, Carmen, so many things you said strike me. First, I appreciated using that word agape, which is this Greek word that gets translated for love. One of four Greek words that often gets translated for love and maybe even more than four, but phileo, a Greek word often meaning friendship, and storge, the words for family, affection, family love, eros that suggests more passionate, desire, sexual, romantic and broader kind of love, but is very oriented with the idea of passion.

Then this agape love, which suggests unconditional and transcendent kind of feel to it. I remember before I knew that these were Greek words and I saw this written somewhere, I kept referring to it as agape love because that was the only English word I knew spelled that way.

Carmen:           Perfect.

Brian:               I was trying to figure out how that made sense, right? Also, you remind me as you use that word agape, that when I originally encountered the Bible, I bet it was the same way for you as a child. It was the King James version, and this whole chapter was charity.

This word charity now has a different meaning, but I think this just reminds us that, and it’s why this question is so good, we got to pay attention to what words mean. We can’t assume that the little, quick definition that comes most quickly to my mind is the whole story. So it’s so worthwhile.

When you were talking about love never ends, I couldn’t help but remember, it just brought to mind, I was once on a panel with a group of activists from different faith traditions. One of them was a Muslim leader in Detroit named Imam Dawud, and someone asked me and Dawud the same question.

They said, “Could you talk to us about what it means to love the people who are your opponents in struggles for justice? Dawud, would you talk about your response to that question in relation to your Muslim faith? Brian, would you talk about it in relation to your Christian faith?”

I have no idea what I said, but I can’t forget what Dawud said. He paused for a moment and then he said, “I’m often in struggle where I see people causing great harm to other people and I’m angry at them, I’m disappointed in them. I want them to not succeed in continuing to do the harm they’re doing.” He said, “So I really have to ask myself, what do I mean about loving my opponents and loving my enemies?”

He said, “Here’s what I think it means. I never give up on them. I never allow myself to say they’re beyond hope, they’re trash, they’re never going to change.” He said, “I always hold the hope that even they might someday have a change of heart.” When you talk about love never fails, and that idea that it doesn’t just fall down and say, “I give up. They’re hopeless. I don’t care about them anymore.” It stumbles, but it gets up again and says, “I’m not going to give up hope on you.”

Maybe one last thing I’ll say, my wife and I have become fans of K drama, Korean drama on Netflix. We’ve watched a bunch of series and we’re just finishing a very good series called The Doctors. What’s so interesting in many of the Korean dramas, they don’t divide the characters into good guys and bad guys. The good guys usually kill or hurt the bad guys in American films. In other words, there are some people who are just bad. They can be discarded and disposed.

What’s interesting in many of these K dramas is the worst of the bad guys have some redeeming change of heart before the whole thing is over. That brings me back to love never fails. It’s this sense. It relates a little bit to that other passage that love doesn’t rejoice in evil. It’s like we don’t just want to be happy that some people have a sad ending. Our goal is for redemption.

In some ways that’s hard. In other ways when we realize that … Well, I’ll just speak personally. When I realize that there are people in the world who look at me as a bad guy, and there are people I’ve hurt in my life. If I want there to be a possibility of redemption for me, it’s only fair that I would want the same for anyone else.

Carmen:           I really appreciate that. That’s beautiful what your friend said. We don’t give up on each other and we love with the idea of redemption because we’re all connected. So we don’t rejoice in the bad of any sort for anyone. No, I really appreciate. I think we need reminders of that. We really do.

Brian:               It doesn’t mean we think every ending is going to be a happy ending. There are some tragic endings. Some people, including very powerful people, use their power and become more and more addicted to it. Instead, and you hope they’ll turn around and many go to their grave giving no visible sign to any of us that they’ve had a change of heart. So as you said before, we’re not sticking our heads in the sand and saying evil, this evil isn’t real. What we’re saying is we want to hold out hope for everybody that there could be a change of heart.

Carmen:           I would say personally, for me, the only way that this happens is by turning to God. So for example, I always tried to love my father who was violent, keeping in mind the fact that I had to protect myself and my family. What I’m saying is I asked God to not let me give into bitterness and also hatred. What I discovered over time was that the only way that was possible was by turning to God. Yet also when my father died, I had made peace with him and with God, but I was relieved. I wasn’t happy, but love is difficult sometimes.

So that’s one reason that I appreciate this agape because it’s not the same word you’d use to say, “I agape a hot dog.” Do you understand? You really, in the Greek, you wouldn’t say … you wouldn’t go to the baseball park and say, “I agape a hot dog. Let’s get one.” So I mean, I really appreciate the fact that it’s helping us remember that part of being a human being is to have this unconditional wise love. I just want to say it’s not easy.

Brian:               Yes. Yes. That’s just a reminder too, it’s one of the great values of words. If we have an array of words and we think about their meanings, it allows us to make finer distinctions and notice things we might not have noticed before to just say there is a special kind of love that is associated with a spiritual path, associated with what Jesus was about. We want to take that very, very seriously.

Well, I wonder if we could move on to another question that came up on our social media for the Center for Action and Contemplation, there was a quote from Dr. Cindy Lee, who was a wonderful guest on one of our episodes. The quote that they put up was, “When we are in our most stressful seasons, we actually need to slow down and do nothing.” That evoked some conversation. It’s just a reminder to me that this happens to me too.

People take one sentence out of something I’ve written that I may qualify in five or 10 ways before and after that sentence and people react, “Well, that’s not the whole story.” I think some people would say, “Well, maybe sometimes when we’re in our most stressful seasons, we actually need to speed up and do something because some of us maybe are paralyzed.” There were some responses to that question that I’d love for us to have some conversations about.

One of them was that one person said, “I’m an extrovert. When I’m drained, I need to connect with other people. I need to gain some energy from being around other people.” Then someone else said, “Well, I’m home bound and I’m a very social person, but I’m not able to be out and about with other people.” This interchange just reminded me, as you said before, that we need conversation to clarify things and explore things more deeply. I’d love to hear any thoughts you have on that interchange.

Carmen:           I’m an introvert. I think you’ve said before you’re an introvert, Brian. For me, when I’m tired, I’m home if I can’t be or in the marsh. What it always tells me, it’s like when I tell students to go into a breakout room and have a discussion, I’m always saying to the extroverts, “Thank you for sharing and please invite others in.” To the introverts I’m saying, “Please share.”

Then I’ve had seasons of my life where I’ve had chronic illness, my family’s had chronic illness. First of all, it always breaks my heart a little bit when I hear of someone being home bound because I know they’ve just shared something really personal and really hard. It just reminds me to slow down. Actually, that exchange in itself was … I mean, I like the fact that you say what Cindy said around that was even more complex in that one byline, so to speak.

What that whole exchange reminded me of was slowing down because human beings are fragile and strong. It reminded me of what Báyò Akómoláfé the philosopher said. He said, “I learned a long time ago about a particular saying from the continent I grew up on, the times are urgent, let us slow down.”

I really think that the speed of empire is move fast and break things. That’s actually one of the business mantras for this new technocracy, move fast and break things. Well, people can be broken. That’s not human, that’s not agape love. So when I saw that exchange, I thought conversation, this kind of conversation on social media is sacred. That’s what I thought.

Brian:               It’s beautifully said. Later in that same online conversation, someone said, “Yeah, well, what if half your life is a stressful season with a chronic illness?” One of the first quotes that I remember reading when I was a teenager that I said, “I want to remember this for the rest of my life,” was from a book by Henri Nouwen. I don’t remember exactly the quote, but I remember the point of it, which was, he said something like this, “When you have a toothache, it’s very hard to be loving.”

I think why that statement stuck with me is I felt like finally somebody’s being realistic. There are times when you’re not doing well and just surviving is hard enough, don’t expect us to all be at our best behavior all the time. This reminded me about part of the way love works. This is where this agape love, this deeper kind of love that we’re talking about.

Remember in your translation, as you were talking a few minutes ago, you said, love doesn’t keep an account of wrongs. Love is like a bookkeeper because what we often do as soon as we start thinking about love, you didn’t do a good enough job loving in that situation. Oh, you broke one of the rules. Whereas love isn’t thinking about that.

It’s saying, you’re having a bad day, you’re not going to be at your best, you’ve got a bad illness, you’re not going to be at your best. Or how about our whole country is in a feverish state socially. A lot of us aren’t at our best. So instead of finding fault with each other, we extend love to each other and say, let’s acknowledge we’re not at our best.

Carmen:           Yeah. I’m really glad you said that about the toothache because my husband has long COVID and sometimes if a prescription or something is held up at the … You know how things happen with pharmacies and just good people, things go missing and stuff. We’ll often say to each other, it’s not just me to him, but he’ll say, I’ll say, “When you talk with them about that issue, remember, be really kind.” If you’re not feeling good and you can’t get done even a small thing like that, those small things are not small. Those small interactions are not small.

I drove through the pharmacy where we get our prescriptions not long ago and it had on the window, remember that this person … It was like an official corporate advertisement. Remember that the person serving you is a human being. I thought, because people coming to get their medicines probably aren’t at their best, you know what I’m saying? Often, and medicine is expensive on top of that.

One of the things I’ll do, if I’m having a tough time and I go out in public, I’ll see myself saying to myself, “Girlfriend, remember you’re not at your best today.” In other words, whatever you feel like doing first, maybe choose the third one instead. Do you know what I’m saying? Like that toothache phenomenon from Nouwen.

Brian:               Learning How to See will be back in a moment.

Carmen:           Brian and I were really very touched also because we received a gratitude voicemail from Shona. Shona, thank you so much. Brian, I know you also had a question that was for you particularly.

Brian:               Yes. I can’t really read this because we want to protect the anonymity and privacy of the person who sent it, but a person wrote us a very detailed and heartfelt response where they said, “Look, it’s a Sunday morning. My husband and I are sitting on our porch and the only shadow on this beautiful Sunday morning is, do we go to church today?” Then she said, “Well, we’ve decided we’re going to go kayaking instead, and so our peace remains intact.”

What she was conveying is she grew up in church, church has been part of her life, but she doesn’t feel she fits in, in the church. She and her husband have had deep involvements in the church, but they’ve been going through a deconstruction process. She said, “Going to church now feels like we’re living a false life.” In other words, we’re having to pretend that we’re happy about everything that’s being said when it doesn’t really sync up with us.

It was very beautifully and powerfully communicated, but she ended up with this question, “Do you have any wisdom or resources to try to help us transition away without burning family ties and burning these relationships with people who we love, but we just don’t feel we can stay part of this?” I have a couple thoughts on this, Carmen, but I wondered, is there anything that comes to your mind on this right away?

Carmen:           My first thing is it’s hard. I think that church trauma is very hard. That’s the thing I was sitting with from my perspective of not having been a minister or pastor as you, because you know it was forbidden partly in the tradition that I came … So yeah. I wanted to say first of all that I found what this listener was saying very relatable. So mostly what I felt was empathy for what that is worth, and I think that’s worth a lot really. I knew you’d have something wise to say, Brian, from your perspectives of both sides of this.

Brian:               Yeah. I was a pastor for many years and I had a lot of people leave my church for all kinds of reasons. So I understand how it is from the pastor’s perspective, but I also have been part of things that I didn’t feel good about and had to leave. I wanted to leave with love, not with a bitter taste in either of our mouths.

The first thing I want to say, this relates to the idea of empathy. There are reasons a lot of people are leaving churches, and it’s not just churches. People are leaving synagogues and mosques and gurdwaras and temples and all the rest. Organized religion around the world is being shaken up by people leaving.

There are all kinds of dimensions to this and nobody should reduce anything to one diagnosis. So I am not doing that. I will say that one of the things that’s happening is we’re starting to realize the relationship between a lot of religious communities and authoritarianism. There’s a way that religious communities can develop authoritarian leadership style, which then means an authoritarian kind of sociology to being part of the church.

When you do not want to be part of an authoritarian system where you feel this is bringing trauma to you, it’s bringing abuse and harm to you and your family and people you love and you just feel it’s wrong, when that happens, you have to figure out what to do. The letter is feeling like we’re being false by pretending we’re happy about what’s happening here. So many of us have felt that way.

I have one little piece of advice. It won’t apply in all situations, but it might be a place to start. It comes from an experience when I was a pastor, someone told me that someone had left the church. This is someone I really liked and I loved having them part of the church. They had never told me they were unhappy about anything and then they just left.

It turns out the reason I found out that they left, I actually agreed with them. I think they were right and the church was wrong. If they had told me, I would’ve been able to say, “Look, you don’t have to stay, but if you’re willing to, you could help me help us address this issue in the church.”

So coming out of that, what I would recommend is that there are some times, and this might not be one of them, where you could make an appointment with the priest or the pastor, whatever. You could say, “Listen, I just want to let you know, I think I’m out of sync with this church in some areas.” It could be politics. It could be how we treat certain kinds of people.

It could be doctrinal approach and say, “Listen, I’m not here to argue with you. I’m not here to say that you’re wrong. I’m not here to defend myself. I really don’t want to argue about it. I respect that you and the church see things this way as I understand it and I respect myself that I see things this way. I guess my question is, am I wanted around here having this belief? Or would it be better for me to move on? I don’t want to cause trouble in my leaving, but I just wanted to be sure that if this is something you actually agree with me on, I could maybe stay and help us work on this together. Otherwise, I think it might be best for me to leave.”

If people had done that with me as a pastor, it would’ve helped. It very rarely happened that way. Usually people would get angry or whatever. If a person left that way, it would feel to me like that was a very loving way to leave. There are other times where I think, in a sense, we’re having a breakup. One of the things that I think we all learn who’ve had romantic breakups of any kind is that telling people, “It’s not your problem, it’s my problem,” often is an excuse, but trying to tell a person what their problem is on your way out of the relationship usually just leaves wounding.

So I think very often the best way to do it is say, “You don’t need an excuse to leave. You can just say, I feel it’s best for me to leave and I would love to retain the best kind of relationships we possibly could. I’m not leaving with resentment and bitterness towards you, but it’s time for us to go.” So those are a few thoughts about those difficult situations.

Carmen:           I really like the fact if you’re saying you wish you had been at least approached and heard about it. It reminds me that this authoritarianism is also a symptom of universities, schools of all sorts. I mean, it’s not just religion, right? I mean, this empirical approach of top down.

This is not exactly related, but it is. One of the things I try to do in the classroom is have surveys of students, whether it’s in a conference asking them what they think or actually having surveys that I give them throughout the semester so that we don’t get to the end and I go, “Hey, how did you like it?” Do you know?

Then they go, “We hated it,” or whatever. Then I try to make changes as I go, but it’s hard because the system is not one of dialogue, is it really? None of the systems are really … They don’t really have dialogue baked in. You have to really go out of your way to say, “Could we talk?”

Brian:               The more authoritarian the setting is, the less the idea that talking about difference is even allowed. I think was it George Orwell, 1984? Was it Animal Farm? One of them, the fundamental rule is you never disagree with those in power.

Maybe one last thing we could say is we can leave quietly, we can stay quietly. We can leave loudly, and we can stay loudly. Those are all four legitimate options. All four of those can be done with a loving attitude and all four of those can be done with a bitter and hurtful attitude.

Loving doesn’t mean you’re quiet. Loving means sometimes you leave. I wrote about this in a book called Do I Stay Christian? Sometimes you have to leave defiantly or stay defiantly. We all make those decisions. That’s part of the process of how we grow by caring about being loving people rather than just saying, “They’re wrong, I’m right. So whatever I do is justified.” Saying, “No, I want to be a loving person in how I handle this situation.”

Carmen:           Wow. That’s a lot of wisdom, Brian. I would like all that in just a little pamphlet because I think this is a very particular situation that this listener has identified that many people are experiencing now, as you said, across faiths and wisdom traditions.

One of the things it reminds me of is that when you’re in that situation, because I’ve been in similar ones, you really, even if you’re saying to God, “What’s best for me and my family?” Years later, you look back on it and go, you realize what a hard decision it was and how you could have decided something different.

I mean, it’s really complex. How do you do it? Trying to do it lovingly is really tricky sometimes because things get very emotional. Yeah. Those are good, wise words to live by that you shared.

Brian:               Yes. Well, I hope they’ll be helpful, but these situations aren’t easy, but I think that’s the point. Love in one sense makes life simpler because we know what our North Star is, but it doesn’t mean life is easy. Figuring out how do I be loving in this circumstance is a great challenge.

I wanted to just read another letter. You might have a comment or two on it, we received from someone. “I’ve been making my way through the CAC’s podcast slowly for years now. I seem to jump around and have been brought to tears many times. My heart opens wider and wider with each listening, and I’m usually riding my bike through the neighborhood. So I thank you and all your guests mightily. They’ve enriched my journey greatly.”

He says, “I was riding my bike this morning and our guest John Deere stories had me in deep communion with tears streaming and his truth and love beckoning to me with such a strong glow of joy. My heart just burst open into guffaws of light.” So I love the thought of someone with their earbuds in or however they’re listening, tears streaming and laughing as they’re riding their bike.

Carmen:           Yeah, I love that too. I think the other thing that this listener points out is he says, “I’ve been making my way through the CAC podcast slowly for years.” So there’s a lot of good listening out there that’s so life giving, I think. That’s a great joy. I loved listening to this one. The guffaws was good, especially about John Deere. Yes.

Brian:               That’s right.

Carmen:           So good.

Brian:               We’re not only grateful for all the folks who’ve sent in these comments and questions, we’re so grateful to our guests. What a good season it’s been. We have one more question and it’s a great one to end our season on. Let me read it.

“I’ve been following most of the CAC podcasts for the last six years. Having been descendee from the Living School of 2022, you speak of learning how to see with eyes of love. Some of us were never taught about love, what love meant, how to show love, how to give love. Maybe you could help me understand love.” What a open-hearted question that is.

Carmen:           I found that so moving. That question to me seems more important than any response we could give. It reminded me of how important it is. I mean, I have had students share with me what this listener shared, that they had nobody in their life who showed them love. I’ve had some students who I’ve taught who turned out to be very … They discovered love somehow. I find that the heroic when someone expresses this kind of thing of I’ve never been taught this, and then they want to know. So to this listener, way to go.

Just this question itself, because my mother showed my brother and sisters and me agape love, but my father was violent and did not. I just think you catch love in many ways. It can be your mom or a friend or a grandmother. It can even be a small amount of time with a grandmother growing up, as some students have shared with me. I really think this is what makes us human is getting to be around someone who really loves us just because we breathe, literally, and is going to be with us through our ugly phases and also through the times that are easier and good.

So this question to me, I’m going to sit with longer than us responding to it. Also, this listener made me go look up love in the Merriam Webster, and it’s got about eight definitions. Then the agape one is the unconditional one. That to me is really what this listener’s talking about is how do we live this unconditional love?

For me, it’s listening. Literally, and this is ironic me saying this on a podcast, which thank you, Brian, for inviting me into, but I think the world has so many talkers and very few listeners. I really think love listens. That’s it. That’s my whole philosophy. I pray to listen better. Yeah.

Brian:               You’re reminding me of one of our guests, Becca Stevens, who talked to us about that this season.

Carmen:           Yeah. Well, what do you think?

Brian:               Well, I love what you said, referring to a mother. I mean, in some sense, that’s the most universal and primal experience of love. Obviously, no mothers are perfect and not all mothers are even good, but they’re good enough that we survive as a species. That experience of love that begins with mothers and we hope would include fathers and grandparents and then siblings and aunts and uncles and then friends. The experience of love in some ways for us to say, rather than try to find words to talk about it, let’s go back and remember the experiences of being loved.

Then I’d add that there are times when we learn what love is in the act of giving love. When I saw this question, you and I were together at the Revision conference that CAC held in late 2025. Our friend, Carlos Rodriguez, told a story of being involved helping elderly people, visiting an elderly gentleman who was in, I guess, an assisted living or rehab center, I guess, and he hadn’t had a shower in a long time. Carlos found himself giving a shower to this man, elderly man who couldn’t do it himself.

I remember experiences in my life where I got myself into something trying to be helpful to a person that was not pleasant. It was not comfortable. I might even say I didn’t enjoy it, but the act of doing it brought me someplace in experiencing what it means to love. I think of some circumstances in my life where I was really hurt by someone and eventually I worked my way through to being able to forgive them.

There was nothing about that that was pleasant, but in the act of forgiveness I remember thinking, I understand love a little bit more. The willingness to suffer and to forego revenge or cutting the person off forever and treating them as if they’re absolutely worthless. That struggle in that process wasn’t pleasant. It wasn’t a warm, fuzzy feeling, but I became a more loving person through that.

Maybe the last thing I’d say as we bring this conversation to a close, one way to think about love is to think about love as a story. In an earlier season of Learning How to See, I was joined by Gareth Higgins. We talked about six stories that are stories of separation and that lead to violence and hate and fear, stories of domination, revolution, isolation, purification, accumulation, and victimization.

Then we said there’s an alternative to those stories and it’s this larger story of love. When we think of that as a larger story, one of the ways we could explain or explore or define love would be to say love is to decide that we want to show up as characters in that story, not some other story. I hope that’ll be helpful.

Carmen:           That’s really good. Yeah, I love that. I do want to add one thing to all of that wisdom. There’s also the piece that Jen Hatmaker and others talked about this season of self-compassion. So I think sometimes when we talk about … I know we’ve talked about this on Learning How to See, but I think for some of us, having self-compassion is a very overlooked part of the equation.

We’re really trying to be kind to others and maybe lacerating ourselves. So I think giving ourselves permission to love ourselves as God does, as Howard Thurman says, I am a child of God and being kind to myself, that’s radical and so needed, I think.

Brian:               There’s the balance, loving our neighbor as ourself and ultimately that brings us to realize that my neighbor and myself are so connected. We’re part of one story and one humanity and one life.

Carmen:           Yeah.

Brian:               There’s a chapter in the Christian scriptures written by an early Christian leader named Paul. It is many people feel the most profound, most revolutionary, and most beautiful passage in all his writings. We invite you now to listen deeply. This is a reading of 1 Corinthians Chapter 13, a translation by Carmen Acevedo Butcher.

Carmen:           If I speak with the tongues of humans and of angels, but do not have love, I am an echoing gong or a ringing symbol. If I have prophetic gifts and can understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so I can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away everything I own and if I surrender my body as an offering, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Brian:               Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy. Love does not brag on itself. It is not inflated by disdain. It is not rude. It is not centered on the separate self. It is not easily angered. It keeps no record of evil. It takes no pleasure in injustice, but rejoices with the truth.

Carmen:           Love bears all things, believes all things. Hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. Prophecies will eventually be discarded, speaking in tongues will stop, and knowledge will ultimately be set aside.

Brian:               For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when we encounter wholeness, the parts will be released. When I was a child, I talked like a child. I understood like a child. I reasoned like a child, but when I became an adult, I let go of childish ways.

Carmen:           At present, we see unclearly as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Right now, I know imperfectly. Then I will know fully, even as I am fully known. Now remain faith, hope, and love, these three, and the greatest of these is love.

So we’re going to begin our time together of Lectio Divina by hearing the last few lines of this beautiful passage, 1 Corinthians 13. This is 11, 12, and 13. You’re invited to listen and we’ll go through it slowly so that we can all steep in it together.

When I was a child, I talked like a child. I understood like a child. I reasoned like a child, but when I became an adult, I let go of childish ways. At present, we see unclearly as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Right now, I know imperfectly. Then I will know fully, even as I am fully known, and now remain faith, hope, and love, these three and the greatest of these is love.

Brian:               This is such a good way to end our season and for this passage to end, because Paul really, I think, demonstrates what we’re talking about on so many levels in these few sentences. When he refers to being a child, he doesn’t say, “When I was a bad person, when I was an evil person.” It’s just no, when I was a child, I didn’t know any better. I talk like a child. I understood … That was natural, but then I grew into an adult.

I think this is one of our great struggles in the world of religion. We feel that a lot of our religious traditions are still behaving and thinking and understanding in a kind of an immature way. We’re looking to try to help our religious communities grow to the place where love becomes the most important thing. So many other things squeeze out love. That’s one of the things that just impresses me in these closing sentences.

Carmen:           It reminds me, it seems to me that Christianity when healthfully done is about maturing, which is what this is talking about. It seems that we have this strand running through theology, in Christianity, of perfection. So we’re either, as you said at the opening, when you’re looking at the K drama, there’s not so much good, evil characters as complex human ones. I so appreciate this passage for making it very clearly about maturing. I mean, it’s redemptive. There’s hope for me to, once I see how to do it differently, to with God’s grace and just a little bit of mindfulness doing it differently, kinder.

Brian:               Yes. I think here we’re coming back to taking words seriously again. That image of a mirror I see now unclearly is in a mirror, but then we’ll see face to face. He parallels seeing unclearly with knowing imperfectly. Another word for imperfectly would be immaturely. So my knowledge is immature. I’m incapable of seeing things in a more mature way when I’m immature. Just as when I look in a mirror that’s not a very well constructed mirror, they seem fuzzy or they seem distorted.

This brings us back to learning how to see, learning how to see clearly, learning how to see maturely, learning how to see with fullness rather than superficiality. When we only see a distorted image and thinking that’s accurate in the whole picture, that’s immaturity on our part.

What I love about this is it makes me then say, okay, maturity means seeing with love. That requires us to say there’s always more to see, which brings us back to listening and the humility of acknowledging how deep another human being is and how another person can’t be described with one label or one adjective. As you said a minute ago, they’re complex characters.

Carmen:           I love that because as you’re describing it, I’m thinking of how my ears are right here on the side of my head. Then if I come forward a bit, there are my eyes, and how in an embodied way I’m to remember that my ears should help me see better. I’ve had students share things with me where I’ve realized, wow. I had a student ask me once or say that they had talked with someone and they had asked that person, “Do you know how much a bus driver makes in this city?”

They were talking with me like, of course I would know right off the bat and I did not know. So I’m listening to find … This was a student who came from a very difficult background. I really think listening helps me to understand people who have had really difficult times at the margins or suffering of sorts that maybe I haven’t experienced. I care about that and I’m just ignorant of some of it, but if I listen, I can mature.

Brian:               Let’s move now from hearing this text and meditating and having conversation about it, to turning this text into a prayer. We’d like to invite you to listen once more, and then we’d like to invite you to turn some word or phrase or response from this passage into a request or a desire. It might be just holding a word of something you need. Maybe the word maturity, or maybe the word imperfectly, or maybe it would be to just hold that word the greatest, the greatest of these is love. This becomes your prayer and your desire.

Carmen:           When I was a child, I talked like a child, I understood like a child, I reasoned like a child, but when I became an adult, I let go of childish ways.

Brian:               At present, we see unclearly as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Right now, I know imperfectly, then I will know fully, even as I am fully known.

Carmen:           Now remain faith, hope, and love, these three, and the greatest of these is love.

Brian:               We now invite you to listen to the selection of final time. In the brief silence that follows, we invite you to let this wisdom be present to you, and we invite you to be present to this wisdom. When I was a child, I talked like a child. I understood like a child, I reasoned like a child, but when I became an adult, I let go of childish ways.

Carmen:           At present, we see unclearly as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Right now, I know imperfectly. Then I will know fully, even as I am fully known.

Brian:               Now remain faith, hope, and love, these three, and the greatest of these is love.

Carmen:           Thank you, everyone, for investing your time in Learning How to See. We so hope that each episode has been in some way uplifting to you and holding you in God’s love. We have especially enjoyed hearing from you and we invite you please to continue to share with us your thoughts, your observations, your wisdom, and also your questions.

Brian:               Big thanks to Corey Wayne, Dorothy Abrams, and Vanessa Yee, who produce Learning How to See. Thanks to April Stace for her musical support. This episode was edited and mixed by the team at Sound On Sound Off. To learn more about their work, visit soundonsoundoff.com.

Thanks to the Center for Action and Contemplation for making Learning How to See possible, and special thanks to you for your investment of time. Thanks for sharing Learning How to See with others if you find it meaningful.