The Prime Motive of Love
Friday, June 26, 2026
Even if hope fails, something bigger can replace it, and that is love.
—Brian McLaren, Life After Doom
Brian McLaren suggests that love can serve as a deep source of hope that is not dependent on outcome:
If we can see a likely path to our desired outcome, we have hope; if we can see no possible path to our desired outcome, we have despair. If we are unsure whether there is a possible path or not, we keep hope alive, but it remains vulnerable to defeat if that path is closed.
When our prime motive is love, a different logic comes into play. We find courage and confidence, not in the likelihood of a good outcome, but in our commitment to love. Love may or may not provide a way through to a solution to our predicament, but it will provide a way forward in our predicament, one step into the unknown at a time. Sustained by this fierce love (as my friend Jacqui Lewis calls it), we may persevere long enough that, to our surprise, a new way may appear where there had been no way. At that point, we will have reasons for hope again. But even if hope never returns, we will live by love through our final breath.
To put it differently, even if we lose hope for a good outcome, we need not lose hope of being good people, as we are able: courageous, wise, kind, loving, “in defiance of all that is bad around us.” [1] …
We feel arising within us this sustained declaration: We will live as beautifully, bravely, and kindly as we can as long as we can, no matter how ugly, scary, and mean the world becomes, even if failure and death seem inevitable. In fact, it is only in the context of failure and death that this virtue develops. That’s why Richard Rohr describes this kind of hope as “the fruit of a learned capacity to suffer wisely and generously. You come out much larger and that largeness becomes your hope.” [2]
The ecotheologian Sallie McFague (1933–2019) centers hope in our faith in God, who is love:
As we consider the basis for our hope, let us recall who God is…. The hope we have lies in the radical transcendence of God…. God’s transcendence—God’s power of creative, redeeming, and sustaining love—is closer to us than we are to ourselves. God is the milieu, the source, of power and love in which our world, our fragile, deteriorating world, exists. The world is not left to fend for itself, nor is God “in addition” to anything, everything. Rather, God is the life, love, truth, goodness, and beauty that empower the universe and shine out from it….
This faith, not in ourselves, but in God, can free us to live lives of radical change. Perhaps it is the only thing that can. We do not rely on such hope as a way to escape personal responsibility—“Let God do it”—but rather this hope frees us from the pressure of outcomes so that we can add our best efforts to the task at hand. [3]
References:
[1] Howard Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times (Beacon Press, 1994), 208.
[2] Richard Rohr, A Lever and a Place to Stand: The Contemplative Stance, the Active Prayer (Hidden Spring, 2011), 104; Brian D. McLaren, Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart (St. Martin’s Essentials, 2024), 84–85.
[3] Sallie McFague, A New Climate for Theology: God, the World, and Global Warming (Fortress Press, 2008), 169, 171.
| John Chaffee – Five on Friday |
1.
“Prophetic preaching does not put people in crisis. Rather, it names and makes palpable the crisis already pulsing among us.”
– Walter Brueggemann, Old Testament Scholar
‘This coming Sunday, I will be giving a sermon on the role of a prophet, taking cues from Jeremiah 28. It is an important passage because it involves Jeremiah rebuking another prophet, Hananiah.
Here is what happens in Jeremiah 28…
Hananiah tells the leadership of Israel what they want to hear: that Yahweh will bless them, smash their Babylonian oppressors, and return Israel to its promised land.
Jeremiah then exclaims that he wishes it were the case and instead calls out Hananiah for telling wishful fantasies as “prophecies,” then says that things will remain difficult for Israel as long as they continue in their stubbornness and disregard for Yahweh.
In preparation for the sermon, I have been flipping through Brueggemann’s The Practice of Prophetic Imagination: Preaching an Emancipating Word. Prophets don’t foretell the future as much as they name the ugly truth about the now, and from there can send out a warning of what might happen, as well as a hopeful stance about what is possible if people turn back to Yahweh.
2.
“Values give us direction – pointing us toward what we estimate is good for us.”
– Dr. Jerome Wagner, Clinical Psychologist
Dr. Wagner wrote a very interesting book on the Enneagram called Nine Lenses on the World: The Enneagram Perspective.
What sets the book apart from other books on the Enneagram is the extent to which modern psychology is brought into the discussion. He brings it alongside conversations about paradigms, maladaptive schemas, survival strategies, childhood development, mid-life crises, and more.
“Values” feels to me like a neutral word. One could have good or bad values, right?
What about virtues? With values, we might end up choosing something we “estimate” is good for us, but that is ultimately terrible for us and those around us. Virtues, though, seem more concerned with ultimate Goodness, Beauty, Truth, and Love. If we live our lives in the direction of Virtues, that is a categorically different life, isn’t it?
One thing I believe is helpful here is recognizing that we try to orient ourselves toward what we believe is good for us, which is a completely subjective stance. You and I might both be completely heartfelt and sincere about the direction we think we want to go, but that does not exempt us from the responsibility of repairing things if what we “estimated” we wanted ends up hurting those around us.
I guess the only thing to say is that we are all doing our best and simply trying to aim toward what we think is good for us. Lord, have mercy.
3.
“There are truths that can be discovered only through suffering or from the critical vantage point of extreme situations.”
– Ignacio Martin-Baro, Jesuit Priest and Martyr
Man, this is true.
There are some things I have learned about life that I never would have come across if I had not gone through serious discomfort, suffering, pain, loss, disappointment, etc. If I had never spent time around the homeless, the poor, the lonely, or the dying, I would have a very different (and misinformed) view of the world.
It’s a shame we avoid such things, especially if they can lead to some incredible transformation. It makes sense, though. We want to shelter ourselves and never have to adapt our worldview to the reality of what is. We would rather stay small in our scope of the world, and dismiss the uncomfortable parts.
Perhaps this is why Jesus uses the word metanoia?
It is famously translated in the New Testament as “repent,” but a more accurate translation might be: “elevate your mind, change your mind, mind your mind, reconsider, rethink, the mind after your current mind, evolve your mind, and so on.”
It is impossible to be a Christian and not to stay open to constantly “reconsidering everything” we thought we knew about ourselves, others, God, poverty, vices, virtues, justice, hospitality, life, death, and so on.
4.
“Between God and the soul there is no between.”
– Julian of Norwich, 14th-Century English Mystic
Something about the tenderness of Julian of Norwich keeps coming back to me.
She famously created the word “oneth.” It means to be made “one” with something else. She used it in various ways to describe the uniting of the human soul with God, in her book The Revelations of Divine Love.
In the same book, she also writes about how the human and the divine are “knotted” together in the person of Jesus.
Honestly, there is a lot of “union-talk” in Julian, but also much of the contemplative tradition of Christianity.
I have said this before in other ways, but some interpretations of Christianity are built on being separated from God, but I am in a season of life or a faith journey where I would rather have a faith built on being united with God.
5.
“A church that doesn’t provoke any crises, a Gospel that doesn’t unsettle, a word of God that doesn’t get under anyone’s skin, a word of God that doesn’t touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed-what Gospel is that?”
– St. Oscar Romero, Archbishop of El Salvador
Yes, this might seem like a contrasting quote to the #1, but I think it is possible to hold two things true at the same time!
Oscar Romero was a famous priest in El Salvador who preached that devout Christians in the El Salvadorian military would stop engaging in dehumanizing atrocities. As a result, he was shot in front of the altar right after giving a sermon. Government officials have since confirmed their complicity in his assassination.
I am led to believe that Oscar Romero faithfully carried the prophetic tradition in his ministry, and it cost him his life.
The Gospel of Jesus is absolutely de-centering, and as a result, it is most able to help us re-center on what should be the center: God and the Kingdom of God. Any Gospel that does not destabilize our sense of the world is likely not helping us to see it as God does. Yes, the Gospel is comforting, but only after it first points out the ways in which our common life is disconcerting. If we go to church and all we experience is a service that reaffirms that everything is fine and nothing needs to change about ourselves or the world we find ourselves in, it is tragically short of being the Gospel
