Introducing Season 8 (and our new co-host!) with Carmen Acevedo Butcher and Brian McLaren

Learning How to See with Brian McLaren

Center for Action and Contemplation

Christianity, Religion & Spirituality

4.8 • 748 Ratings

🗓️ 1 May 2025

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this opening to Season 8, Learning How to See returns with understanding how to see with the eyes of love. On this season, Brian McLaren introduces his new co-host Dr. Carmen Acevedo Butcher—a scholar, translator, contemplative teacher, and birdwatching chocolate lover—and together, they launch the theme for this season: Seeing Through Eyes of Love. This episode weaves together personal storytelling, embodied spiritual practice, and reflection to explore how love can transform the way we see ourselves, each other, and the world. Your Practice for the Week: Once a day, notice something you’re seeing with judgment or indifference. Pause. Shift your gaze to see it with the eyes of love. Then try to “telescope out”: See yourself seeing with love. See others doing the same. Envision Divine Love witnessing it all. Connect with us: Have a question you'd like Brian or Carmen to answer about this season? Email us: ⁠⁠podcasts@cac.org⁠⁠ Send us a voicemail: ⁠⁠cac.org/voicemail⁠ Resources & Mentions: The transcript for this episode can be found here. In this episode, Carmen referenced the following: Dorothee Sölle – Death by Bread Alone Howard Thurman – Mysticism and the Experience of Love Brother Lawrence – The Practice of the Presence of God Meister Eckhart – on the “eye within me” Brian referenced the following: Richard Rohr’s Cosmic Egg – a framework of nested stories: My Story, Our Story, The Story (This is located in his book, The Wisdom Pattern.) 1 Corinthians 13 – closing reading on the nature of love

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to a podcast by the Center for Action and Contemplation.
0:03.9	To learn more, visit cac.org.
0:11.7	Welcome, everyone, to learning how to see.
0:15.5	My colleague, friend, and mentor, Father Richard Roar often defines contemplation as meeting all the reality
0:23.9	we can bear. Meeting reality. Honestly and fully seeing and countering reality. It's harder
0:33.4	than it appears. That's why we began in seasons one and two of this podcast by looking
0:39.8	at our biases. Biases are glitches and our thought processes that keep us from seeing what is
0:46.8	real. Can we bear to face our biases? Can we learn to see them and perhaps overcome some of their power? During seasons
0:58.6	one and two, we heard from a lot of listeners who were struggling with their Christian faith,
1:04.0	the faith they had inherited from their parents or that they had chosen for themselves.
1:08.6	So we devoted seasons three and four
1:12.0	to learning how to see Christian faith in new ways.
1:16.0	Can we bear to look at the reality of harm and hatred
1:21.0	that Christian theology, spirituality,
1:23.2	and institutions have often created?
1:25.7	And can we imagine better and more healing and healthy ways
1:30.1	to see as Christians and to see what Christianity is and can be? Then in season five, we turned
1:40.3	our gaze to storytelling. Can we bear to surface and face the stories that so often
1:48.2	guide our lives and our relationships and our societies and economies and politics? Can we imagine
1:56.0	seeing along a different storyline, what we called the seventh story, the story of love.
2:04.0	Then in season six and seven, we opened our eyes to the growing impact of environmental
2:10.2	crises, the ugliness of a dysfunctional human earth relationship, and the beauty of seeing this sacred, beautiful,
	...

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