Carmen:           Hi, I’m Carmen Acevedo Butcher. Welcome to Learning How to See. As Father Richard Rohr often says, “Contemplation is meeting all the reality we can bear,” so each season we explore some aspect of learning to see reality. And this season, we’re exploring what it means to see with eyes of love.

Brian:               And I’m Brian McLaren. Carmen and I would like to thank you for trusting us with this time, and for being the kind of person who cares about learning how to see with eyes of love.

Carmen:           In today’s episode, we’ll be joined by Jen Hatmaker, podcaster, speaker, advocate, educator, mother, and author of many books including her most recent, Awake. And we’ll be considering the topic of when loving means letting go.

Brian:               Then, after the interview with Jen, Carmen and I will have a brief response to our interview, and then we will lead you in a guided meditation concluding with a few minutes of silent contemplation. It is our hope and prayer that after our time together, you will feel re-centered on what really matters and that you will open your eyes with a deeper sense of love for all you encounter.

Carmen:           Jen Hatmaker, we are so glad, Brian and I, to have you here today. We know you’ve been very busy with Awake that’s just come out, and also with your award-winning podcast. And we just want to start by saying how has it been for you to be on the road and talking about these very deeply vulnerable experiences of your life? What’s it been like for you?

Jen:                  It has mostly been a relief, and that is saying something because I am an introverted homebody who likes to be in my house with my little things and my quiet little world. And so I think what I experienced on this book tour was having written something so hard and so, so very personal, and even to some degree exposing, I was just by myself with that message for so long. And so I’m now finally being in rooms with people who have read it. It’s become something new in their hands, you know how books work. It’s a very fascinating alchemy to watch it transform into the lives of its readers, has been such a profound relief.

I had a lot of worries about the book. The people have put those to rest for the most part. And so now I get to sit in the pocket of gratefulness and gratitude to share so many parts of this story with so many other people and really profound. Thanks for asking. I am glad to be home.

Carmen:           In Austin.

Jen:                  Last weekend was my last event and I am very delighted to just be in this quiet, old house.

Carmen:           Oh, yeah, that’s wonderful.

Brian:               As a fellow writer, putting yourself and your words out is tough enough, but when you do that talking about the hardest days and weeks and months of your life, it’s a really big deal. And I can imagine, I guess in what is it, six weeks or so that the book has been out, I can only imagine the thousands of people, and tens of thousands of people who’ve read the book and who are about to read the book whose own lives are falling apart or who have had some deep, deep pain, they have that same relief that you have. That, “Oh, good, I’m not bearing this alone.” And you’ve created a safe space for people to talk about the grief, and also then to dare to believe that the gains that come in the wake of the losses will be worth it.

Jen:                  Yeah. Thank you for saying that, that’s so kind. So many other writers, or teachers, or leaders of whatever stripe have done that for me. So I can’t count how many times I read somebody else’s words in a book and instantly felt less alone, and moved into connection and even hope. And so I always, I’m still stunned to this day that I get to be on the other side of that equation sometimes and be that person who wrote those words. I don’t think I’ll ever get over it, you guys, as long as I live. So I sit really humbled and grateful to have gotten to put a message like that in the hands of people.

Carmen:           Can you tell our audience, our community a little bit more about what Awake is about? Because I really want to get to the pecan tree. But can you just share a little bit about that?

Jen:                  Sure. I think the best way to describe Awake is to say that I nestled a smaller story inside a bigger story because it is a memoir. The small story is the loss of my marriage. I was married for 26 years. Married young, married in college, built a big family, built a big ministry, built a church. We were both in full-time ministry of sorts. And then I lost my marriage in July of 2020 and it was in a really shocking way, and I didn’t know that was coming, I didn’t know what was happening, I didn’t know what was actually real and true.

The small story is that experience, and then the grief process that I tried to write with honesty. And then the very slow recovery process, all the way into the shocking stage of flourishing again, which you could have just bowled me over with a feather. I didn’t know for sure I was going to get there.

And then the bigger story is that I sat there, you guys, and went, “Golly, nobody could have had more resources than I did.” We had every tool in the toolkit. We had been told, certainly I had since I can remember, “These are the building blocks of a healthy and holy life. This is what you do, this is what you don’t do. This is your role, this is his,” all of it. And then you get a happy life, that’s the transaction. You get a marriage that is bulletproof. You get kids who always will love God in the exact same ways or in spaces, or whatever it is, whatever that finish line is.

And so for me, having those pieces crumble right in my hands I thought, “Wow, let me take a closer look at the bricks that built this house.” And so there are big bricks that I look at. Things like patriarchy, and things like some spiritual dysregulation and even trauma, and institutional religious trauma, and purity culture, and gender limitations and expectations, and body disassociation. And so once I started parsing those pieces out, and I do that not in a prescriptive way. Awake is only written in vignettes, just little scenes from my life. It’s only descriptive, frankly, it’s not prescriptive at all. Then it wasn’t maybe such a shock that that house came down.

Brian:               That scene that Carmen’s referring to of the pecan tree, I don’t know, Carmen, if you want to actually read that. But I wanted to just acknowledge what you just said, Jen, is there was not only the loss of your family, but there was the loss of this confidence structure or even certainty structure. You had been given and you had believed, and you had become a kind of promoter of that certainty structure, and that is a very, very deep thing that a lot of people are going through. Obviously in the Christian religion, it’s happening. It’s happening in other religions. It’s happening in politics and political parties, it’s happening in economic systems. We were told these things that we could take to the bank and it turns out to be a bad contract or a bad deal.

Jen:                  That’s right and that’s so disruptive. Yes, it’s a double disillusionment. And to your point, most of us found ourselves at some point complicit inside those structures and just signed on the dotted line, and regurgitated the rules and the boundaries of it all. And you’re right, this is across so many different strata at this moment, that we are going, “Wow, we pressed hard on that form and it didn’t hold.” And so what do we do with that? And I think that’s a question that I was asking in this memoir and that a lot of us are asking of the world right now. So this is a challenging venture and a disruptive one, but at this point it is not lonely because there’s so many of us.

Brian:               So many people.

Jen:                  There’s so many of us.

Carmen:           Yeah. This is what I love, is that your medicine is very delicious because you really invite us into the mess. You really give us permission to grieve. So you remember, you talk about your friend Rob sending you a text in the middle of the beginning of the grieving and it was a link to a meditation app called Simple Habit.

You read there, “When we lose someone we love, it’s natural to feel grief. Grief in a way is exactly the correct response to loss.” And as Brian was saying we’re all going through grieving of so much right now. And then what really got me was you said, “I pull under my neighbor’s huge pecan tree, put my car in park and start screaming. I weep, and sob, and wail from the depths of my wrecked heart for almost an hour. I bypass my mind and give my body the gift of grief.” And that to me seems very good medicine.

And then you do talk a little bit later about your mom, who’s an accomplished gardener, master gardener. Saying, “You can’t make the roots, you can’t pull them up out of the ground, you have to have some patience.” So I thought could you just talk a little bit more about that? Because I do think we have to grieve. That was powerful.

Jen:                  Thank you. I think in part personality, in part gender, in part generation, and in part religion, I was never, ever taught how to be an embodied person. I was certainly taught that my body was a problem, that was clear. And then also, that my body was not trustworthy. That whatever it is that I wanted, or perceived, or some sort of intuition, that that was just completely suspect. My church told me that my heart was incurable and deceitful, so not a thing here could be trusted. And so I built a whole life essentially being disembodied. We are people of the soul. We are heart people, we are not body people. And so thus, not only did I really deeply ingest this idea that I am an unreliable narrator in my own story, but I should be able then to think my way through anything because the body’s just the container just walking us around. And so I should be able to use my mind to power through anything.

And of course, often taken out of context and almost weaponized, I was taught take every thought captive. And so if I seemed to be just torpedoed by sorrow, that I am clearly not taking every thought captive. I am not using my mind in the way in which it was designed to be used. So this whole idea of letting my body feel what it’s going to feel and be a conduit for grief, for suffering, and ultimately for healing because that’s how that works, was new information for me. That I did not have to be afraid of all that sorrow and pain. And truly the only way through it, frankly, is to feel it and to just let it cascade without tamping it down, or slowing it down, or shaming it, which is my personal preference.

This is been real monumental learning for me, the last five years, to learn how to process the world in an embodied way and thank it for its ability to see me through any given scenario all the way to the end.

Brian:               As you were saying that, it almost is like a real conspiracy that says, “You can’t trust your own thoughts and your own thinking, you can’t trust your own feeling, you can’t trust your body,” and then the subtle message is, “So trust what the authority figures are telling you.” Don’t think for yourself, don’t feel for yourself, don’t be embodied, trust what other people tell you. And especially often, they’re claiming to speak for God, so what they say is what God says. When that system that you have felt that your eternal well-being depended upon meant you were trusting what those people said and their interpretations of books that they pointed you to, and so on. That is a major, major restructuring and you describe that collapse, but it’s so interesting that the title of your book then is Awake. It’s not Collapse, or Misery, or Falling to Pieces, it’s Awake. I’d love to hear you just explain a little bit about how Awake is connected to that kind of collapse.

Jen:                  All those ideas that you just described, the use of fear, shame, self-erasure is a very tidy way that institutions can pin to the board authority structures, and hierarchy, and power differentials, and it’s highly effective. It’s incredibly effective and it’s worked for centuries, centuries. And because most of us have some real, whatever degree, they can be pure motivations, number one, to please God and to be a person of faithfulness. That we can say that we’ve been obedient. And then also, to protect our belonging. Both of those feel so important to any given person. We do want to be pleasing to God if we’re people of faith, and we certainly want to be cherished and included in our faith communities. So those are big deterrents to listening to any of our own intuition. Or to challenging what we’ve always been taught with what we’re seeing in the world. The fruit of the tree, when those don’t match and what do with that cognitive dissonance is highly consequential.

So it’s important, but it’s highly consequential and I would never suggest that it isn’t. That if we decide to pop those eyes open, to use the metaphor of Awake, and go very sober-mindedly into a sense of agency and presence, and integrity, and alignment, there’s a cost. And I deeply understand why people say, “I think I would prefer to stay asleep to this, this, or that in my life than deal with the rupture if I decided I’m going to be awake in this area of my life and then deal with the consequences as they come.” I get it. I get it, I did it for so long. So, so very long.

Brian:               Our theme for this podcast is learning how to see and this idea that that kind of deep reckoning with reality is what’s really behind the word contemplation. Contemplation isn’t having a mystical experience that tells you everything your authority structure’s told you is right and true and you should just submit, but it is actually having the courage to say, “What is my heart really telling me? What are my eyes really telling me? What is my experience really telling me? And what’s the beauty of life telling me, and what’s the agony of life telling me?”

But I’m thinking that you had to go through this big reorientation in how you see yourself, and I’m thinking that that overflows into the ways that you see other people. I’m going to guess that in the weeks since the book came out, you’re hearing stories from people, I’m just imagining that that would create a swirl of the realizations you had about yourself and now seeing other people. I’d love to hear what comes to mind about that.

Jen:                  Yeah. Boy, it’s really profoundly ubiquitous, these experiences. So I had hoped when I wrote it that Awake would have meaning well beyond any reader who would simply have an on-ramp into the story through their own divorce. Frankly, if I was just writing a book about divorce, I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t just write a book about divorce, that is just a waste of everyone’s time. Mine, yours, that’s not that interesting. It’s not uncommon. I’d hoped taking a little bit more of an examination of a lot of the threads of the sweater and in an experiential way was going to have meaning beyond that one storyline. And so you are so right, that I have now become a collector in the last six weeks, of other people’s stories and what they picked up off those pages.

Which was a bit of a gamble for me because, frankly, this is my 15th book. I have always written in a much more prescriptive way. I find that a way that I could control outcomes in which I could just say, “All right, everybody, I’m going to take this one idea, I’m just going to beat it to death. Here’s all my citations, here’s my bibliography. I’ve worked it out, here’s our conclusion. Here’s what we think.” And I’ll just hand it to you on a silver platter and very much controlling how people could interpret anything I had to say.

So this is such a departure for me, not just in content, but in format. To say all my little vignettes, there’s no chapters, it’s just little, tiny memories. And I wrote every memory even though they span decades in real time as if it happened that day. So even if I’m writing something from sixth grade, I wrote it like it was that day and I just finished experiencing it. I didn’t give myself the luxury of commentary or the wisdom of distance to say, “And now what I’ve learned about that is.” And so I thought, “Well, I’m just going to have to trust my reader. I’m just going to give my reader all these, what seems like maybe disparate moments, and I’m going to trust them to thread it and to find it, and to find why this thing here mattered two decades later.”

And so it’s been with great joy to discover that my readers are very intelligent. And it turns out, they have thinking minds of their own and they’re able to say, “Here is what I heard in this book. Here’s why it matters to my life. This was a mirror for me and this is a new question I’m asking and prepared to answer with courage.” That was my greatest hope for this book. So seeing that come to fruition right now is just, in my opinion, a writer’s dream. That all of this labor was well worth it.

Carmen:           I want to say that, following up on that, the chapter titles are a bit like, if you just read the chapter titles, they’re a bit like a found poem. You had the For Grief, you had the Feed These People that became the cookbook. And one of the things I want to add in my experience with this book is that your humor is so arresting.

For example, when you say, “And in the worst year of my life, a one-off cookbook project pulls me out of my head and drops me into the kitchen.” Which reminded me of our friend Brother Lawrence who is also often in the kitchen feeding people. But you say, “I spend one trillion hours chopping, dicing, roasting, tasting. I feed my people with unhinged menus because test kitchen is weird so they all get used to eating braised short ribs with blueberry almond French toast, bacon, a side of queso. As a writer this year, I can’t form one coherent sentence about women’s emotional health, but I can manage tacos.” So I want to say in amongst all of this profound wisdom that you’re sharing, we laugh. And that, to me, is worth a lot.

So I went to your Feed These People cookbook and I just want to add, I really loved the Food for When You Have No More Damns to Give chapter. How do you explain to people there’s this wonderful human mix of the embodied grief under the pecan tree, which gives all of us permission to be on the floor sometimes on all fours, grieving? You just happen to be in a car under a pecan tree. So where does this humor come from, Jen?

Jen:                  I grew up in a funny home. I grew up with a very funny dad. My siblings and I, there’s four of us, I’m the oldest of four, and all four of us think we are hilarious. And it is we are in fact insufferable. We found out a few years ago that all the people who married one of the four of us have their own group thread, their private group text where they talked about what it was like for them to have married a King kid. I’m like, “That is fair. You should take that probably straight into therapy.”

So I grew up where humor was a part of the fabric of my childhood and we used it judiciously. We used it when we were sad. And not as a bypass, but as a bit of salve. So I learned really early on, truly even in moments that are so sincerely dark, and sad, and low, like we are experiencing right this minute, even there there is a value in making one another laugh and finding some little, tiny slice of absurdity, or hilarity, or humor. So I honestly don’t know a different way to be. I’m not doing a shtick. I wasn’t thinking as I was going, “How can I be shtick-y funny?” It just seeps out of me even when I don’t mean it to be.

In fact, there was one sentence somewhere in the book. The book was structured in just three sections. The end, the middle, and then the beginning. So the end, that first third is notoriously hard. It was very hard to write and it is probably kind of hard to read is my guess. That was the lowest part of the story. And I remember writing a particular sad memory, experience, and I think the last sentence I said something like, “I really wanted this book to be funnier.” I just remember thinking, “God, I’d set out to do better.” And I’m just delighted to tell readers the joy returns and there is humor backed into the sauce.

But I don’t think humor is unimportant, and I don’t think it’s glib, and I don’t think it’s trite, and I don’t think it’s inappropriate. If we lose our capacity to laugh and just to feel some level of joy and humor, we’re truly doomed. We are truly doomed at that point. I think I hoped to use humor in service to the story. That even there, something is funny. We have permission to laugh again.

Brian:               Yes, yes. I think one of the reasons that’s so powerful, Jen, is that you really convince us as readers that the loss was horrible that you went through, but that the awakeness on the other side is truly, truly worth it. And it’s worth hanging on, it’s worth persisting through all the horrible, horrible times. So thank you for that, that means a lot to all of us.

I also want to just say a word of personal thanks and appreciation, and then I’ll let Carmen have the last word here and see where she’d like to bring things. But I know as a writer, one of the reasons that writing is healing for us, for those of us who write, a whole lot of us are introverts and it allows us to go in, and in some ways it’s doing our inner work in trying to make sense of our own lives, and then we put it out there. And I know that having to go around and talk about a book that’s so personal is not that easy in some ways because at least, if you’re like me, part of you wants to say, “I wrote a book about this, please don’t ask me to talk about it. If I’d wanted to talk about it, I would have.”

Jen:                  Just read it.

Brian:               Yeah, that’s right. So thank you for being willing to talk about it. But even deeper, thank you so much for writing it and all of the courage it takes to do that.

Jen:                  That’s so nice. I want to tell you something too, Brian, before we pop off the thanks train. I don’t even know if you’ll remember this because I think this is just how you behave, I think this is just the way that you live. And there’s probably so many examples like this that you have long since lost track of them and that I’m certain that you do not keep a catalog of all your good deeds.

But I do want to say that back in 2016, that was a big year for me of change, and to some degree loss. That was a year that I’d come forward in a very public way in an affirmation of the LGBTQ community. And as you well know, that was a full rupture in my inclusion in the evangelical world, which is where I had built my life and career up to that point. And it was just scorched earth for a while, until I moved into the rebuilding phase, which was next, which always comes. I wasn’t there yet. I was still the object of every sermon in the United States of America. And we barely knew each other. Now, I have read your work forever. But we had only passed in an ancillary way.

And I don’t remember how you got it, I don’t remember how we got here. Somehow, you got my phone number and you called and you spent one hour with me on the phone, talking me through not just that positioning that I had put my stake in the ground on, but this gentle sense of recovery and what I might expect as I moved forward, what you were proud of. It was unbelievable timing, a moment that I felt afraid and I was so rattled, just so rattled to my bones, and had yet to see a vision of what would come. I only knew what was gone. For some reason, spent one hour with me, a stranger, essentially pastoring me. That’s what you did. And I’ll never forget it. It makes me want to cry right now. I’ll just never forget that. And so, thank you for being exactly who we all think you are behind the curtain.

Brian:               Well, that’s kind of you to say.

Jen:                  This isn’t your shtick either. You are who you say you are. And in private, when no one is watching, when no one would ever know what you have done, and I just won’t ever forget that.

Brian:               Oh, that’s very kind, Jen. Well, you know the feeling’s mutual and we’d been down similar paths in many ways. It’s such, as you well know, to try to speak our truth that we’ve learned through hard experience in ways that we hope will help other people make it through their hard experience, it is a great privilege and joy that we share.

Carmen:           I’m so glad, Jen, that you shared that story because I know a lot of us would say, “Yeah, we agree with you.”

And I want to ask one last question. You talk about this in one of your recent Substacks, about if you’re going to be creative, it needs to go on a calendar in a time slot moved up to the top of the pile, and that seems to be a part of the grieving process is to rediscover the self. Cook, eat, feed people, and be creative in other ways, too. So can you, for people who are listening to our conversation and feel so hopeful, and I know you talk about this with a lot of people, but can you give us just a little bit of insight into first steps people can take to do that?

Jen:                  So interesting. In this new quest of being an embodied person who finds just as much holiness and potential in our bodies as we do in our hearts, and minds and souls, sometimes the very best thing we can do for our grief and for our suffering is to begin to experience some kind of healing through our bodies, and that is in so many creative endeavors. If we are painting, if we are creating, if we are cooking, if we are building, whatever it is that we are doing where we’re not trying to think our way into a space of healing, but we are painting our way into it, we are writing our way into it. We are dicing and chopping our way into it. Pick your thing. It’s really a beautiful way to process.

It’s not that we’re bypassing our minds, but it’s a holistic way to go, “This is a way to experience life. New life, new creation.” I find that not just metaphorical, but real and physical. Sometimes new creation looks like literally making a new creation. With your hands. I’ll never just leave my physical world behind again. I think I’m finally here at the midway point of life. I’m very optimistic about my lifespan, I’m 51, so I must have very, very high hopes for my longevity. But here at this season of life, I hope that I move forward in a very holistic way as I build the second half, that everything matters. And our senses matter, and our creativity matters. Our minds and our hearts matter too, but there’s more to us than just that.

And so to all the creatives out there, it’s not small to make room and time for whatever it is that you would like to bring forth in the world. It’s not small. In fact, it might just save your life, so I am cheering on every creative that’s listening today.

Carmen:           Beautiful. Thank you, Jen. Thank you.

Jen:                  Delighted to see you both. Thanks for having me.

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

Well, Carmen, what a great conversation that was with Jen Hatmaker. Just full of authenticity, and full of honesty and vulnerability. And helping us grapple with this reality that we come to points in our lives where the loving thing we have to do is to let go, and go through transition and change.

Carmen:           Yeah, and the courage that she models and helps us all to think, “Yes, that’s part of being human,” and not to be afraid of it. Of being able to let go as part of being human and loving.

And it really reminded me, Brian, of this poem by Stanley Kunitz called The Testing Tree. And he writes about being outside in an isolated clearing, he’s just a young boy, and he’s grieving the loss of his father. And he’s underneath this “inexhaustible oak,” he says. And he’s throwing, sort of magically, these three stones at it. And his heart is breaking with his father’s absence and he has these two lines that just haunt me and reminds me a lot of what Jen talked about. He says, “In a murderous time, the heart breaks and breaks, and lives by breaking. It is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn.”

And this reminded me of one of those beautiful episodic passages that she so courageously shares from her own experience when her heart broke at the loss of her marriage. And she says, “I pull underneath my neighbor’s huge pecan tree and start screaming. I weep, and sob, and wail from the depths of my wrecked heart.” And that just really speaks to me, I think to all of us, about how being human is allowing our heart to be broken.

Brian:               That phrase from the poem, along with that scene from Jen’s car, “the heart lives by breaking.” As you read that, it hit me. There are things we go through, if our heart didn’t break, I think it would become stone. The only alternative to breaking would be to become less human in some way. And so this sense of breaking and letting go of having it all together, that was a gift I think of this conversation.

I’m thinking about Jen as a writer and as a podcaster, so sometimes the three of us have in common. But when you’re a public figure, you can have this pressure to have it all together. Why should anybody read my books if I don’t have it all together? Why should anybody listen to our podcast if we don’t have it all together? But that pressure to have it all together creates a falseness to ourself sometimes. It means we have to pretend we have it all together, whether we do or not. And of course, none of us ever do for more than a millisecond at a time and that’s probably illusory in itself. So this willingness to let go of the need to be seen as a person who has it all together, that’s a gift, isn’t it?

Carmen:           It is. I really appreciate that. And the fact that she really emphasizes community in all that she does. So it’s not so much about ever us trying to be flawless because that’s, like you said, impossible, illusory, even in that millisecond where we think, “Wow, I made it,” just for that half a second. But I really also appreciated that she models gratitude and she also reminds us that in our need for each other, that just one voice can make the difference, somebody seeing us. And she tells that wonderful story of that time when you reached out to her during a difficult time. And she said she was living through a time that was kind of “scorched earth” for a while, and she was in a rebuilding phase, and you reached out. And literally, she said you pastored her.

And in my experience, you are definitely that person. I loved how she said, “So it’s not really a shtick,” how you are, Brian. You really are that. And I appreciate that because she reminds us that we’re in it together.

Brian:               Yeah, yeah. Well, it was very touching and it brought back a memory. I think what actually happened is a mutual friend contacted me and said, “Hey, any chance you could reach out to Jen? She’s going through something now.” And what she was going through, I think she shared some of this, but it had to do with the loss of a religious community. And this has everything to do with learning how to see with eyes of love because sometimes we are part of religious communities, or we might be part of a company or organization, or a business that pressures us not to see with eyes of love. In other words, it’s part of their business model or it’s part of their doctrinal framework that for us to be a member of the group means we have to stop seeing with eyes of love.

And then we have to make this choice, would I rather lose my status, my membership, my belonging in this group to be loyal to my calling to love? Or am I willing to keep my heart from breaking by just saying, “Okay, then I won’t love as much, I’ll toe the line and be a good member of this group?” I feel like that is an experience that many of us go through in many different ways, and her transparency about it is a gift to all of us.

Carmen:           Yeah, her transparency. When loving means letting go, so that can include a smaller belonging that’s very painful in order to enter into God’s larger belonging that includes everyone. I really appreciated that. Yeah, her transparency.

Brian:               I feel she has given people many, many gifts through the years, through her writing, her podcast, all of her other public speaking and so on. But her honesty about this time of great struggle feels like one of the best gifts so far.

Carmen:           I agree. And I want to add I love her humor.

Brian:               Yeah.

Carmen:           So she talks about really hard things, but this beautiful, graceful note of humor that goes throughout. How she said to us, “It just seeps out of me even when I don’t mean it to.” And she reminds us, and this is something actually that our friend Randy Woodley reminds us a lot of, “If we lose our capacity to laugh,” Jen says, “and to feel some level of joy and humor, we’re truly doomed. We are truly doomed at that point.” So she brings it all together, doesn’t she? She makes me glad to be human.

Brian:               Yes, yes. Well said.

Carmen:           There’s a chapter in the Christian scriptures written by an early Christian leader named Paul. It is, many people feel, the most profound, the most revolutionary, and the most beautiful passage in all his writings and we’d love to read the whole passage slowly right now, and then we’ll focus on one section. We’ll read slowly enough for the lines to echo in your thoughts and we invite you to listen deeply.

Brian:               This is a reading of First 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 cymbal. 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. And now, remain faith, hope and love, these three, and the greatest of these is love.”

Brian:               Today we’d like to focus on the sixth section of this passage. Carmen and I will read the section twice, and then we’ll discuss it briefly.

“Prophecies will eventually be discarded, speaking in tongues will stop, and knowledge will ultimately be set aside.”

Carmen:           “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.”

Carmen:           “For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when we encounter wholeness, the parts will be released.”

Brian:               Carmen, once again, I’m so grateful for you as a translator, giving us a fresh translation of this passage. And I was struck by the word discarded, and by just that simple word stop, and then by the word set aside, and then by the word released. Discarded, stop, set aside, released. It really resonates with our idea that sometimes looking through eyes of love requires us to let go of things, to let things go behind us, leave them behind and move forward.

Carmen:           Yeah, I love that you really zeroed in on these beautiful verbs because to me, they’re the juiciest part of this passage really. Because in the original, you know it says katargēsē and it’s like it can mean useless, prophecy becomes useless. But I really like how, when we have something that no longer serves us, we do recycle it, or we give it away, or we put it by the curb.

Brian:               Yes.

Carmen:           Yeah, so it’s like discarded. And then I love the part where it says, “Speaking in tongues will stop,” because it’s that pauō, that pausing. But I love the fact of stop because it’s so clean and simple. It’s just like it’s over.

Brian:               Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Carmen:           Yeah. I just really appreciate the simplicity of these verses. I think it’s one reason that they’ve endured so much in our consciousness, don’t you, Brian?

Brian:               Yes, yes, yes. There’s some kind of deep philosophy here because to say that faith, hope and love are the things that will remain, which will be a little later in the chapter, he is hinting at that now by saying that there’s a whole lot of things that won’t remain. There’s a whole lot of things that will be let go. A whole lot of things will move beyond. And it just reminds us that everything except the things that remain will cease. And that’s true of our individual lives here on Earth, it’s true of nations, it’s true of economic systems, it’s true of political regimes, it’s true of corporations, it’s true of religious institutions. They aren’t the thing that really is eternal. The thing that really is eternal is love, faith and hope, Paul will tell you.

And then one other thing I loved in your translation. You said, “When we encounter wholeness,” and this word wholeness relates with this image of maturity that he’s working with through this chapter. Wholeness is something that’s fully formed and mature, and this sense that we’re on a journey toward maturity and that’s why we leave things behind.

Carmen:           And I’m so glad you brought up wholeness because, for me, sometimes this is translated in this passage where we’re aiming to be perfect or perfection, which is fine if we remember it as the root of the word, meaning to do again. In other words, to keep doing and maturing.

Brian:               Yes.

Carmen:           Not flawless. But I grew up in a church, the evangelical church, where it was more preached as flawlessness, and so I grew up a perfectionist and that’s painful.

Brian:               Yes, yes.

Carmen:           So for me, this notion of wholeness and maturing is super grace-filled, and joyful, and full of self-kindness. And the Greek word telos does mean fully developed, fully grown, full realized, wholeness. It doesn’t mean flawless.

Brian:               Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, I call that, that flawlessness, technical perfection. And we might say that technical perfection is an immature goal.

Carmen:           I so agree.

Brian:               And perfectionism is not mature.

Carmen:           No.

Brian:               That there’s something that takes us way beyond that-

Carmen:           No.

Brian:               … kind of focus on technical perfection. Very different than focusing on love.

Carmen:           Yeah.

We would like to invite you to listen once more to this brief passage, and then we would like to invite you to respond with a request or a desire.

Brian:               “Prophecies will eventually be discarded.”

Carmen:           “Speaking in tongues will stop and …”

Brian:               “Knowledge will ultimately be set aside.”

Carmen:           “For we know in part and we prophesy in part …”

Brian:               “But when we encounter wholeness, the parts will be released.”

We now invite you to listen to this selection a 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.

Carmen:           Thanks for investing this time in Learning How to See. We trust that each episode will send thousands of us back into our daily lives with a little more skill and a little more depth in seeing everything and everyone everywhere with eyes of love.

Brian:               Big thanks for Corey Wayne, Dorothy Abrahams, 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.