Brian McLaren:

Welcome everyone to Learning How to See. My colleague, friend, and mentor, Father Richard Rohr often defines contemplation as meeting all the reality we can bear. Meeting reality, honestly, and fully seeing, encountering reality, it’s harder than it appears. That’s why we began in seasons one and two of this podcast by looking at our biases. Biases are glitches and our thought processes that keep us from seeing what is real. Can we bear to face our biases? Can we learn to see them and perhaps overcome some of their power? During seasons one and two, we heard from a lot of listeners who were struggling with their Christian faith, the faith they’d inherited from their parents, or that they had chosen for themselves, so we devoted seasons three and four to learning how to see Christian faith in new ways. Can we bear to look at the reality of harm and hatred that Christian theology, spirituality and institutions have often created? And can we imagine better and more healing and healthy ways to see as Christians and to see what Christianity is and can be?

Then, in season five, we turned our gaze to storytelling. Can we bear to surface and face the stories that so often guide our lives, and our relationships, and our societies, and economies, and politics? Can we imagine seeing along a different storyline, what we called the seventh story, the story of love? Then, in season six and seven, we opened our eyes to the growing impact of environmental crises, the ugliness of a dysfunctional human earth relationship, and the beauty of seeing this sacred, beautiful living earth in new and reverent ways. We brought in amazing guests to help us see the natural world from a variety of perspectives. As we have tried to discern a direction for seasons eight and nine, we saw the rising tide of anger and fear, bigotry and hate, deception and division, narcissism and mean-spiritedness in our culture, and we knew what our theme should be. Learning How to See Through Eyes of Love.

And to start this new season, I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll have a new co-host, you’ll meet her in just a minute. But for now, I want to welcome you to season eight, Learning How to See Through Eyes of Love. Thank you, all of you who have been with us through multiple seasons, we’re so glad you came back, and thanks to all of you who are new listeners. After you meet our new co-host, we’ll have a practice, because learning how to see is not just about theory, it’s about actual seeing, and so we’ll practice that skill. And then we’ll have another story and then we’ll send you off with some homework and a final word. I can’t imagine a more important theme for this moment than learning how to see through eyes of love.

One of the great joys of my life this last year or so has been getting to work with a new colleague, Dr. Carmen Acevedo Butcher, a professor, a translator of important contemplative texts, a delightful writer, a natural-born educator, and just a wonderful fun person whose company I greatly enjoy. Carmen, thank you so much for agreeing to be my co-host.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

Oh, thank you, Brian, for inviting me because I just enjoy being in conversation with you and with everybody at CAC. So, thank you for having me.

Brian McLaren:

The folks who listen to Learning How to See are amazing, and when you meet them at different places, you’ll just find out what great folks they are. Carmen, what would you like people to know about you? If you were introducing yourself to several thousand people right now, what would you want them to know about you?

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

Well, I would want them to know that my husband and I and our daughter, we live in a very beautiful part of Northern California, it is Ohlone territory, and we live very near a marsh, and I go there to walk quite often, and you and I share a love of birds, and so I spend a lot of time out there with the ducks and the egrets, and that takes up an hour every day whenever I can, so it’s a walking meditation. And also I do love to read and that takes up a lot of time also. And on top of all of that, I love dark chocolate.

Brian McLaren:

Oh my.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

I think that’s a very important aspect of my life. With sea salt.

Brian McLaren:

Oh my goodness, it’s getting better and better.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

Yeah. And I do teach at UC, Berkeley, I teach in the college writing programs, so I teach what we call the bread and butter courses, like you used to. So, this is one of our overlaps. I teach composition and research, and I also teach public speaking. And this semester I’m delighted because one of my students told me that he would be coming to class, if he could, as often as he could, in prison. And so, this is a new avenue to reach out to our community, and for all of us to learn more.

Brian McLaren:

Isn’t that great? A good experience for him, I know, and it sounds like for you and for the fellow students too, that’s tremendous. Well, Carmen, as we talked about this season, what we want to invite our guests to do, I think you and I can try to bottle in this first episode. We’re going to have some wonderful guests this season, who we’re going to ask to share some stories. And we want to hear from people stories when they learned to see through the eyes of love, where they encountered a person, a place, a thing, themselves, but they had to learn to see with new eyes, with eyes of love rather than judgment, or critique, or acceptance and rejection, but rather just to see, no, I want to appreciate and see through eyes of love.

And the flip side of that is sometimes we have experienced being seen by someone else with those eyes, and we experience the transformative effects of being seen with eyes of love. And of course, we’re aware we’re having this conversation at a difficult time in our nation’s history, in our world’s history, and these stories I think will be important for all of us so that we can meet hate, or indifference, or prejudice, or bigotry, or greed, or narcissism that surrounds us with something different, with something better, with something healing. So, tell us a couple stories about when you have seen or been seen with the eyes of love.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

That’s such a good question, and I’m glad our listeners are going to be asking it along with us. So, I would say the first time I felt really seen by love was we always grew up in the country, I’m a country girl, and we’ve spent most of our summers barefoot, and you could get actually caught, and I did at the age of eight, out in a thunderstorm. And you knew to try to find shelter rather than to run through the lightning to try to get back inside. I made it just as far, and the wind was blowing, it felt like there was going to be a tornado, this was in South Georgia.

There were some beautiful pine trees moving, and I was just concerned to get out of harm’s way, so I hooked into the corner of the house, and I was under the awning and beside a bush, and all of a sudden I found out, instead of being blown about, there was this intense calm, and I heard it and I felt loved. And this has happened to me on so many occasions out in nature, when a hawk will fly over and I think this is the eye of love seeing me, or as Eckhart says, “The eye within me seeing me.” And so, that’s the one that has stayed with me and kept me grounded.

Brian McLaren:

How old were you when that happened?

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

I was probably about eight or so, still in elementary school.

Brian McLaren:

And did that feel like at the time, would you have said this is the presence of God, or how would you have described it? Or do you think you just felt it and weren’t worried about describing it?

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

That is a super good question, because at the time I just felt warm and loved and safe, and it was only in interpreting my own life and going back through, and reading other people, sharing their stories, like Howard Thurman, that I realized, oh wait, other people have had this experience, and that was actually like a mystical experience, a very human, very normal, but I really had to go back and interpret it and see it and hold it. Yeah.

Brian McLaren:

As you said, it almost makes me feel like, yeah, the physical memory of the warmth and the safety and the calm in the midst of the storm, that’s what stayed with you, just the feeling not words about it.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

Right. And I’ve never lost, I can actually feel that feeling as intensely now at 64 then I did at eight. It’s not at all lessened. And this is exactly what Brother Lawrence says when he saw the tree and he said it never lessened his feeling of love. So, I think these are huge gifts.

Brian McLaren:

Could you retell that story before we go on, about Brother Lawrence?

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

Oh, Brother Lawrence. So, I think of him as Nick, so Nicolas Hermand, but he became Brother Lawrence in the Discalced Carmelites. And when he was about 18, he was outside, and it was winter time, and he saw, you know how beautiful, Brian, a barren tree is, and he saw this beautiful barren tree, and then realized, you know what? It’s going to green soon. And he got an intense feeling of joy and safety and fullness, and he said it never left him. And he had plenty of difficulties before and after that, but he never lost that rock solid feeling that God is a resurrecting God. That’s why he’s Brother Lawrence of the resurrection, I think.

Brian McLaren:

Oh, that’s so great. And about what year would’ve that been that he had that experience been?

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

It would have been… So, he was born 1614, so it would’ve been in the 1630s.

Brian McLaren:

Wow. Amazing. Simple experience, like yours, of in the midst of a storm feeling that you were seen, and you felt the calmness and peace around you. You said you had a couple more.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

I just think this is such a good question because I also doom scroll sometimes, so I’m super glad we’re doing this on love. So, I would say the other one that’s huge for me is my mother. So, one of the ways that she showed that she loved us and loves us is she cooked. That’s a Southern mother. And we grew up in Georgia and Alabama, and she would make fried chicken… And doesn’t that sound healthy and delicious? She would made really crispy fried chicken and fried okra, and because my father was Cuban, she would also make arroz con pollo and plantains. And it just, when I look back on those meals, because sometimes we buy things, back in the day, my mother made everything, and I just feel so loved just thinking about those foods. And my mother didn’t have money to go to college, but she always supported me in the things I wanted to do.

Howard Thurman says in mysticism and the experience of love, that, “Love as intrinsic interest,” so not love as what can I get out of somebody. So, for example, when I told my mother I really wanted to learn German so I could maybe get a scholarship… This is all just throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping it would stick. And she said, “Well, hang on,” she said, “I’m going to see if I can find you a German teacher.” Now, my mother didn’t go to college, she found a woman who tutored German, and she went with me just to make sure that this woman was on the up and up, and I was found a German tutor so that I could later study at Heidelberg University. So, there are things like that, where she really showed her love for me.

And one last story I want to tell because it goes to one reason I try to be a kind teacher. I just want to say, when you’re a teacher, and you know this, Brian, there’s a temptation to want to just deal with behavior. So, like if a student doesn’t come to class or isn’t turning work in, there’s a temptation for that to be inconvenient, and for you to forget for a moment the student. But what always reminds me to pause and to listen for the student is that when I was about to try to go to college and needed scholarships, my family was going through trauma of domestic violence. And I went to this college, and this woman interviewed me because it was a local college, but I had a scholarship for it, and I was trying to figure out do I go there or do I try to work and go somewhere else? And she said to me before I left the interview… And I had such an inferiority complex, I didn’t think at all I was smart or qualified, I had imposter syndrome.

She pulled me aside before we left and she said, “You have intelligent eyes.” And I have carried that phrase in my pocket since I was 17. A student told me the other day, a student whose mother has just had a very difficult diagnosis health wise, she said, “I’m sorry I’m missing class because you’re the teacher who told me I’m a class leader.” And I just think these kinds of encouragements are not small, I’m grateful for them.

Brian McLaren:

Oh my. That’s just… I can picture that, and you are not just another student who she had to get in and out, she saw you, saw your quality, this quality of intelligence, and affirmed it in you, that’s beautiful.

Learning How to See will be back in a moment.

We want to pause in the middle of each episode so that you just aren’t as a listener in the listening mode, but you’re also in the practicing mode, and we want to give you a chance to actually try something that will stretch your ability and maybe give you a new experience, and help you feel and practice your way into a new way of seeing and a new way of looking at the world through eyes of love. If you’re driving right now, you might just want to listen now and then come back to this later. If you are taking a walk, you could probably do this while you’re walking, or if you are doing work around the house, you could probably just take a break and sit down, let’s spend about five minutes together in this practice.

What I’d like to invite you to do is to just pick anything or person around you. It could be your own hand, it could be a tree, it could be the cover of a book, it could be a photograph on the wall, it could be a piece of technology, it could be something on your desk or something you just took out of the refrigerator and put on the kitchen counter. First, I’d like to invite you just to see what you notice about it, to pause and linger and have curiosity, just notice everything you can about this subject of your attention. And feel free to hit pause if you’d like to take more time in this experience. And you might just pause now and consider what was it that you noticed, was it physical things? Was it curiosity about where it came from, or what it’s used for? Or if it’s a person, who this person is, and what their background is, what curiosity arose in you as you just observed this subject of attention?

And now, I’d like to invite you, this might sound a little scary and dangerous first, but we do it all the time, and we’re just going to do it intentionally as an experiment now, I’d like to invite you to look at it, again, but look at it critically. If you were interested in finding fault with this thing, or criticizing it, or seeing some way that it could be improved, how would you see the same thing critically? Give yourself permission for a minute or two to bring that critical eye to your seeing. And so, now you’ve practiced just looking with curiosity and then looking with a critical eye. Now, I’d like to invite you to look once more, but this time consciously bring eyes of love to this subject of your attention. See what happens when instead of looking at the quality of the subject of your attention, bring the quality of love to that subject.

And now, here’s where this gets interesting and maybe a little more difficult. I’d like to invite you to try to look at that object with eyes of love, and then to telescope out and imagine seeing yourself as you see that object, and see yourself with eyes of love as you see what you are looking at with eyes of love. And if you can’t hold that vision for very long, just go back to the subject of your attention and then telescope back to include yourself, observe yourself looking with love at this subject. And now, I want to invite you to telescope out a little bit farther, and I’d like you to imagine thousands of people who listen to this podcast, who are doing this exercise together, and so each of them observing something with eyes of love, bringing the quality of love to their seeing.

And now, I’d like you to imagine seeing us as little points of light around the globe, people in their cars or homes or walking along the marsh, looking at something with eyes of love, and now you’re looking at them with eyes of love as they look with eyes of love. And now, finally, I’d like to invite you to try to see all of that love from all of those people from a higher vantage point, and I’d like you to imagine that the love that looks with eyes of love on everything everywhere, all at once is God. And in some way, you are joining God in seeing this beautiful beloved creation with love. And I invite you now to telescope back from seeing the whole world, to seeing you, to looking through your eyes and seeing that object. And when you feel you’ve telescoped back, just close your eyes for a few moments, and try to savor this experience of seeing with the eyes of love.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

Thank you, Brian, for leading that embodied practice that really spoke to me. I was using a book by Dorothee Sölle, Death by Bread Alone, and I’ve not done this before, to be honest with you, so I hope our listeners enjoyed it as much as I. Thank you so much.

Brian McLaren:

Well, I think each episode in this season will give folks some chance to engage in some practice, and I hope each week it will stretch us a little more so that this isn’t just something we hear about, but something we find ourselves actually practicing.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

I like that because stretching, stretching is good. Seriously, right? So, I want to also now turn the spotlight back to you, Brian, and ask you a time, a story or two when you saw through the eyes of love, or were seen through the eyes of love. You’re a great storyteller, so I can’t wait.

Brian McLaren:

Well, thanks. Well, listen, your story is about being seen through the eyes of love by that teacher, or in the eye of the storm, or by your mother will stay with me. I remember a time when I felt like I saw through eyes of love in a way I hadn’t before. My wife, Grace and I were newly married, a year after we were married, we had a baby, and a year after that we had another baby, and so we were deep into babies. And then we had two more. But when we had our first two children, I was working as a teacher, and I was in my office at a college, and I got a phone call, and it was from a woman who worked with refugee resettlement. And I had met her because we were doing a lot of work with refugees in our little church that we were part of, that I eventually left teaching to become the pastor of.

And the woman on the other end of the line was very tense, she said, Brian, I’m so sorry to bother you, I’m so sorry,” she said, “we just had something terrible happen.” She said, “We have a family of refugees coming in from Cambodia, they got on the plane this morning in Thailand, and they flew to the Philippines, and I talked to them by phone when they’re in the Philippines and they’re getting on the plane and they’re flying to the United States.” She said, “This is a family who saw their son be beaten to death by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, and they were deeply traumatized and they escaped to a refugee camp. The father is an illiterate rice farmer in his first language, his wife is illiterate, the daughter can read or write in Cambodian, and by all accounts, they’re a lovely family, and I had a sponsor set up for them, and the sponsor just backed out.”

And she said, “They’re literally on the plane, and they landed in Seattle, and their next flight will take them to Washington D.C.” She said, “They arrive at 8:00 tonight,” she said, “I already have two refugee families on my living room floor, and on my dining room floor, I don’t have room for anybody else.” She said, “I thought of you, could you help us?” So, I said what I think any good Christian would say, I said, “Let me call my wife.” I called Grace, and here we have two babies, and it’s not the calmest time in her life, and I explained the situation to her, and she said, “Well, what can we do? We have to say yes.” So, that night I drove down to the airport not knowing what I was getting myself into it all. And back in those days, you could go right to the gate, you didn’t have to have a ticket to go to the gate, you’ll remember.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

Yep.

Brian McLaren:

And so, I went to the gate, and everyone came off plane, I didn’t know what these people looked like, I was just looking for an older man and woman, and a teenage daughter, and nobody came. And so, I went actually to the jetway, and I remember looking down the jetway… I get choked up as I say this. And I saw three terrified people, they looked so frightened. This thin, frail man with salt and pepper gray hair, his wife, and they looked like clothes that they’d gotten from a thrift store because they were just given to them, in flip-flops, and this was cold winter, Washington, D.C. weather, no coat. And they came up the jetway, and I realized, this is the family I’m taking home, and they look so terrified. And so, I tried to talk to them, and of course we had so little English. And the father’s name was Poun, and the mother’s name was Uht, and the daughter’s name was Vani.

So, all of their belongings were in plastic bags that they were carrying in their hands, and so we didn’t have to get baggage. So, we’d go out to my car, they get in my car, it was so cold, I got the heater heated up. And so, Vani was in the back seat trying to communicate with me because the mother and father couldn’t at all, and we were both doing the best. And her father gave this long speech, and then she was trying to translate. And apparently they had been told when they landed in Seattle that when they arrived in Washington D.C. that they had no sponsor, and they were afraid to leave the plane. And they heard there was a lot of crime in Washington D.C. and they were imagining they were going to have to sleep on the streets, with no blankets and nothing, and that’s why they had just stayed in the plane as long as they could because they were so terrified.

And so, she began telling me about how grateful her father was that there was someone there to pick them up. And it took a long time, and every sentence to translate took a long time, but I just remember that day, my wife and I were in our mid-20s, we had just taken on this big responsibility with no preparation, but we felt we were caught up in a love that was bigger than us. And I’m so glad we said yes, and it ended up being such a life-changing experience for us.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

Wow.

Brian McLaren:

I suppose I feel that especially now because we live in a time when people have such a jaded attitude toward immigrants, and I’ll just never forget looking down that jetway, seeing these three beloved, beautiful, terrified human beings.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

That is a beautiful story about Poun, Uht and Vani, right?

Brian McLaren:

Vani, that’s right.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

Vani. I love the fact you said, “I’ll call my wife,” because I am trying to picture all of this and all the diapers happening. You know the realities of both. But wow, that made me teary-eyed too, Brian.

Brian McLaren:

So many memories come along with it. A few days later, turns out that a thing in Cambodia was to take babies and put them in a blanket, and then drag the blanket around, kind of like having a wagon, but you don’t have a wagon. And so, Poun would drag my little girl, my little boy around in a blanket all around the house, and a lot of joyful memories, and some very funny memories too, like when they had to be tested for worms, imagine with a language barrier trying to explain that process.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

I can picture it.

Brian McLaren:

Yes.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

Wow. This is the kind of story that I think is so important, and I’m so glad you shared it. Because when we read the newspapers, we’re given numbers, and we’re given reportage, but we’re not given the human element, and this is beautiful.

Brian McLaren:

I think at that time, all I was thinking about was what are we going to do? And it was complicated, and there was trouble, and there was difficulty, but it was an experience that was important for them and deeply important for my wife and me. But I think to myself, at that moment as a young guy, who was pretty much preoccupied with my own survival and success, that was a day where I got sucked out of myself to try to be concerned about somebody else’s survival, and my problems were put in a different perspective.

And I think, I didn’t aspire to this then, but when I look back on it, a little bit like you looking back on yourself as a child, having that experience of finding a safe space, a safe presence in the middle of the storm, that probably lifted me to a deeper experience of seeing with eyes of love, that if I could go back and talk to myself, I would say, what you’re feeling right now, you should aspire to be the way you see always. What surprised me at that moment was an invitation into something bigger and larger.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

Well, what I appreciate about it too is it reminds me of Richard’s Cosmic egg. So, you and your wife, you had my story, you’re in your 20s, it’s about having a young family, and also your thoughts of how am I going to be successful that first half of life. And then, our story, being the second egg, of my family. I’ve got a lot of diapers to change. And then, the other story which is Poun, and Uth, and Vani. And then, the story, which is that love you said you felt getting sucked into in the best of ways, this larger story. I will never forget this story, I’m so glad that you and Grace said yes.

Brian McLaren:

Each week we want to send you out with a little homework, something to practice during the days ahead, and today, we’d like to invite you to, every once in a while, we hope at least once a day, that you could notice something, something you’re maybe seeing without really seeing, or something you’re seeing only with the eyes of a critic, and we wonder if you could catch yourself and then actually pause to see that subject of your attention with eyes of love. And then, maybe you could practice telescoping out and seeing not only that subject of your attention with the eyes of love, but to see yourself seeing that subject with love. And then, to see other people, thousands of people around the world seeing with love, and then for you to join in the love that loves all those who see with those eyes of love, and loves those subjects of attention with eyes of love, and just see what happens. See what you want to do.

And if something happens that you’d like to share, we hope you’ll send us a note, and just tell us about it. We’d like to send you off with some words from a famous chapter in the New Testament on this subject of love. “If I speak in the tongues of humans and of angels, but do not have love, I’m a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all of my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patience, love is kind.”

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. And thanks for sharing Learning How to See with others if you find it meaningful.