How do we learn to see and appreciate through eyes of love?
—Brian McLaren and Carmen Acevedo Butcher, Learning How to See
In the Learning How to See podcast, Brian McLaren describes some of the lenses that keep us from seeing the world clearly:
Any of us who wear glasses know the experience of being in the optometrist’s office. You sit behind a machine where the optometrist gradually adjusts a series of lenses to help you get the right prescription to correct faulty vision. There’s a click and the doctor says, “Is that clearer now?” Click again. “Is that clearer or less clear?” Click again. “How about now?”…
Some lenses help us see more clearly, others less clearly. Let me mention three lenses that make our seeing worse. One is the lens of authoritarianism. Through the lens of authoritarianism, we look at every person and judge them based on whether they share our allegiance against that common enemy, and allegiance to a dictator or a strongman. Authoritarianism always reduces our sight. Another lens is the lens of scapegoating, where we feel better about ourselves by uniting ourselves and projecting our aggression and shame on some other group of people, making them into an enemy. Scapegoating reduces the clarity of our vision, and so does supremacy, whether it’s based on race, religion, party, ideology, or nation. People spend billions of dollars to change the way we see each other through advertising, politics, propaganda, and the algorithms on social media. We all face the constant struggle of having our vision reduced by authoritarianism, scapegoating, supremacy, and no doubt, other bad lenses as well. [1]
When asked about the lens through which she chooses to see the world, Quaker songwriter Carrie Newcomer shares her practice of seeing with the eyes of love:
My life as a songwriter and a poet has asked me to consider how I look at the world on a daily, moment-to-moment kind of way…. Our first job is to pay attention and then to take in what we see with a certain kind of spirit and for me, a certain kind of love. I think it’s a practice and the more you practice it, the more you see; the more you see, the more you see with love….
The big things I love: I love my husband. I love my daughter. I love justice. I love mercy…. I love so many big things, but my life is also filled every day with all these glorious little loves…. There can be great meaning and great love in small things. I love blueberries and I love the smell of lilacs and I love how little kids hold each other’s hands when they go across the street….
In looking at the small moment and the small thing through love, it’s not always completely joyous…. You take it all. When you decide I’m going to be here, I’m going to be present, and I’m going to be present with love, you take it all. [2]
A Choice for Love
My children, I will be with you only a little while longer. I’m giving you a new commandment so you’ll know where I am, and who I am: You must love one another.
—John 13:33–35, paraphrased by Richard Rohr
Father Richard Rohr speaks on Jesus’ command to love one another in John’s Gospel:
Sister and brothers, the energy with which we do things matters. To be in love is to be standing in a different space. Love is not only what we do; it’s how we do it. When we stand in the state of love that Jesus offers, we live inside of a different energy. For those moments, we’re not entirely self-preoccupied. We try to care for the world. We’re able to say, “I have one life and when I leave here, I want to make sure this world is a little better because I was here.” What might happen if we woke up each day with this intention: “How can my existence on this earth increase the quality of life on this planet?”
Jesus says, “I’ll be with you only a little while longer, so I’m going to leave a sign that I’m still here. I’m going to reveal myself in the presence of loving people” (John 13:33–35, Richard’s paraphrase). That’s the only way anyone can know God. If we’ve never let anyone love us, and if we’ve never let love flow through us—gratuitously, generously, undeservedly—toward others, then we can’t possibly know who God is. God is just a theory or abstraction. If “God is love” (1 John 4:8) then those who live in love, live in God, and know God experientially. There’s no other way we can know who God is—or who we truly are—but to love and be loved. Take that as an absolute!
Love is not something we decide to do now and then. Love is who we are! Our basic, foundational existence—created in the image of the Trinity—is love. Remember, Trinity is saying that God is not an isolated divine being. God is a quality of relationship itself, an event of communion, an infinite flow of outpouring. God is an action more than a substance, to put it succinctly.
Love, like forgiveness, is a decision. It’s a decision in our minds and in our hearts. And we’d better make it early in the day, because once we’re a few hours into low-level resentment, anger, or disappointment, it’s too late. When we’re not choosing love, we’ll use any excuse to be unhappy or irritated. We’re already unhappy, and then something gives us an excuse to externalize it. The exact object for our unhappiness is actually arbitrary. Unhappiness just needs an object—as do happiness and love. We have to recognize ahead of time when we’re not living in love. This is surely why a morning prayer or practice is so important—to allow us to choose to love each and every day.
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Friday Five from John Chaffee
| Hello Friends!A happy thing happened this past week: I discovered a small group of about 25 men who will be using my most recent book, The Way of Holy Foolishness, as their quarterly reading selection. The book was released roughly a year ago, and I put considerable effort into making it as good as possible, specifically for small groups to read together. Some might call that a failure that it took a year to be noticed, but I was honestly quite happy to find out that it will be read at all. Here is the thing: We can each put as much energy and hope as we can into a project, but at the end of the day, we must let go of any attachment to how it is received. There have been days when I’ve beaten myself up because the projects I’m working on don’t become best-sellers, and that in itself is causing me to do a lot of reflection on my own ego and need for validation. But then I met up with an old professor of mine, a professor whom I looked up to since taking his classes in college nearly 20 years ago… He said that most days, when he is in the right frame of mind, he prays, “Lord, just let me help people today.” He said that prayer has helped him along throughout the years, and you know what? He said that God answered that prayer many times over. And, if I am being honest, that prayer is something I have said every day this week when alone, and it has given me a good jolt of extra energy for several things. So keep pressing on. Try to help people around you. Don’t worry so much about the outcomes, and instead fall in love with the process of simply helping others. As always, thank you for reading! |
| 1.”Christianity is an entirely new way of being human.”- Maximus the Confessor, 6th Century Syrian Monk Earlier in the week, I had a meet-up with an interesting church worker. Over Boba Tea, we chatted about education and how the Church could do a better job of it.One thing that we both agreed upon is that, in our experience, churches tend to teach the basics of the faith without providing people with much exposure to the rest of the tradition. By this, I mean that very rarely will you hear a church quote someone from outside their own denomination, or rarely from before their (Protestant) denomination was established.We both imagined what it could be like if churches took it as their responsibility to teach people “the new way to be human,” which reminded me of this quote from Maximus the Confessor. Maximus was a monk and theologian who sought to develop the implications of the Chalcedonian Creed fully. As a result, many of his writings are refreshing because they are grounded in the harmonious interplay of humanity and divinity, rather than being at odds.“The entirely new way of being human” that Maximus writes about is in full solidarity with Ephesians, which speaks of Jesus coming to create a “new humanity” full of love and virtue. 2.”It is no small pity, and should cause us no little shame, that, through our own fault, we do not understand ourselves, or know who we are.”- Teresa of Avila, 16th Century Carmelite Nun I am in the midst of another re-read of Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle. It is likely my favorite piece of Christian mysticism ever written, with a very close follow by St. John of the Cross’ poetry, and The Flowing Light of the Godhead by Mechthilde of Magdeburg.It might be my 5th or 6th re-read, and this time I am using a blue highlighter. Each time I reread a text, I use a different color highlighter to mark what stood out to me differently this time. Fascinatingly enough, the quote above has been underlined, starred, and highlighted multiple times, which means the wisdom of the quote is timeless. 3.”The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.”- Walter Brueggemann, Old Testament Scholar It has been a tumultuous week in the news. The Epstein file scandal seems to be implicating the current president, the National Guard is being deployed to historically more black cities, Charlie Kirk was assassinated, children are dying in Gaza, the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues, and more.Watching the news may be an addiction for some, something to avoid for others, and a civic or even spiritual duty for others to stay up to date with. I find myself looking at the news less often than I used to, but consciously turning to it out of some form of spiritual obligation.For the most part, I think people understand the Old Testament prophets as people who (1) gave cranky foretellings of destruction and (2) occasionally said things that point toward Jesus.Walter Brueggemann’s work helped me understand that the role of the Old Testament prophet was twofold: to provide prophetic critique of the current ordering of the world, and to offer hopeful imagination for how the world might be if it followed the principles of Yahweh.This invariably means prophets name with surgical precision to the abuse of power by political and religious authorities, exposing their hypocrisy, and firmly stating that if the current order does not change, then economic collapse will occur. It then offers an imaginative interpretation of what a better future might look like. Here’s the thing: the abusive leadership of today benefits from you and me not believing a different world is possible. They might even go so far as to say that the current ordering that they are protecting or trying to make happen is what God wants to have happen, and thereby hijack people’s piety for the sake of their own gain.It is for this reason that prophets rarely come from the inner circle of the political or religious leadership. Prophets exist on the fringes. This means that if we want to find the prophetic voices that give prophetic critique and hopeful imagination, we must look to the bottom or the edges of society. 4.”We are all just walking each other home.”- Ram Dass, Psychologist and Author on Spirituality This one speaks for itself. 5.”If we want to grow as teachers — we must do something alien to academic culture: we must talk to each other about our inner lives — risky stuff in a profession that fears the personal and seeks safety in the technical, the distant, the abstract.”- Parker Palmer, Founder of the Center for Courage and Renewal Both of my parents were educators.My Mom was a professor of literacy at the graduate level after years of working in elementary, and my Dad was a middle school teacher who also taught at the auctioneering school my Grandfather helped found.As a result, education is very close to my heart. I have crafted a life in which most of my endeavors are educational, even though they are not all in the classroom.To be an educator is far more than simply passing on information; it is about the overall formation of the student, and ideally, through the humanity of the student encountering the humanity of the educator. It is at that precise moment that education shifts to being vulnerable mentoring.The world is not starved for more information; it is starved for incarnated wisdom and love. |
