As we wrap up our series Advent: a Season of Waiting, Brian McLaren and Rose Madrid Swetman explore the theme of love, especially the challenge and beauty of loving across differences. The conversation delves into what it means to embody love amidst uncertainty and polarization. Rose and Brian discuss how love can hold space for shared humanity, allowing for connection even in disagreement. You’ll hear some practical insights include how to navigate tense conversations—like at holiday gatherings—with respect, humility, and openness. Listen to the full conversation to discover how love might be embodied in your own context this Advent season.
Listener Resources:
- Rose references Walter Brueggeman’s The Prophetic Imagination and Arundhati Roy’s War Talk, which Rev. Dr. Charlene Lee also referenced in the closing of Episode 3 on Peace.
- The first volume from Brian McLaren’s new trilogy, The Last Voyage, is set to release in summer 2025. Follow along at https://brianmclaren.net/ for updates.
- If you’re a leader seeking to transform the way you lead in the new year, we invite you to join a Leaders Circle. This transformative 12-month cohort is designed for leaders who want to deepen their social sciences knowledge and cultivate a profound self-awareness that drives impactful leadership. To learn more, visit transformingengagement.org/leaders-circles.
About Our Guest:
Brian D. McLaren is an author, speaker, activist, and public theologian. A former college English teacher and pastor, he is a passionate advocate for “a new kind of Christianity” – just, generous, and working with people of all faiths for the common good. He is Dean of Faculty for the Center for Action and Contemplation. and a podcaster with Learning How to See. He is a co-host of Southern Lights. His newest books are Faith After Doubt (January 2021), Do I Stay Christian? (May 2022), and Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart (2024). His co-authored children’s book Cory and the Seventh Story was released in 2023. The first book of a new science fiction trilogy, The Last Voyage, will be published in summer, 2025. You can connect with Brian on Facebook or X (Twitter).
Episode Transcript:
Rose: Today my guest is Brian McLaren. Brian McLaren is an author, speaker, activist, and public theologian advocating for a new kind of Christianity that is just, generous, and collaborates with people of all faiths for the common good.
Rose: Welcome, Brian. It’s good to see you.
Brian: Great to see you, Rose. Great to be with you.
Rose: Thanks for being with us today. Yeah, we’re going to talk about what does it look like, love in the season of Advent, a season of waiting. And sometimes we say in Advent, we’re waiting with anticipation, with expectation. So we’re not waiting in a place where we’re falling into despair, although that’s tempting. And in times of uncertainty, it’s kind of easy to slide down into hopelessness and despair.
And I always think about Walter Brueggemann’s, he has this line that he says in one of his books, I don’t remember what, but when he talks about the Israelites, that every time they went into exile, they would fall into hopelessness and despair, so they would lose their imagination. And so in order to like have an imagination for a better world, and what does the love look like in times of, for some people right now, I say times of darkness and uncertainty. So I would just love to hear your thoughts on what does love look like in these times?
Brian: Yes. Well, let me first say, Rose, that I’m really glad you frame it this way. I have this love hate relationship with the word waiting in relation to Advent. Let me tell you the hate part, then I’ll tell you the love part. I think something in the Christian religion went very, very seriously wrong quite a while ago and has been kind of the mainstream in Christianity. Which is a kind of waiting that says this world’s a mess. It’s going to get worse. And, and the worse it gets, the better it is because it makes us all want to go to heaven more when either Jesus comes back and destroys the earth and sucks our souls up to heaven or when we die and go to heaven. And in that sense, what we’re told is don’t expect justice now. Don’t expect love now. Don’t expect
maturity in the human species now. Just wait, wait for heaven. It’ll be better there. And all of that kind of postponing thinking, I feel has had such negative consequences on top of the fact that I think it betrays Jesus’ message, which was, repent, rethink everything, the kingdom or realm or new arrangement of God is at hand and at hand means within reach now. So instead of making it within reach out, it kicks it far off into the future. And then our only responsibility is to wait for it or wish for it or hope for it or something. And, but I love putting waiting in relationship to love, especially in Advent, because Advent is a season of pregnancy and in pregnancy, a mom and a dad and siblings and grandpas and grandmas and aunts and uncles and everybody and friends are in this time where love is building and building and building so that when the birth comes, the love is is like a huge reservoir behind a dam waiting to be unleashed for a lifetime. It’s a very different kind of waiting than kicking the can down and saying, don’t expect anything now. No waiting is preparing in love. And so that that framing makes, makes a lot more sense to me.
Rose: I love, love, love that because so many in certain realms and streams of Christianity are still very stuck in: the worse it gets, the better it is for us. It means the end is near. You know, all the stuff. But rather than that whole future magical thinking, what does it mean in this time, in this day? I mean, I think of waiting. I have friends that have cancer. They’re waiting for scans to come back or
Brian: Yeah.
Rose: And I love that you use the metaphor of pregnancy, like that expectation, that the hopeful expectation, especially as followers of Jesus, asking for the grace to be in the waiting, right? Like even having the spirit be able to grace us to be in the waiting with being able to embody love for people that are waiting, people that are having. I talk with a lot of clients right now that are having huge anxiety issues, disorders, especially in the last month. Just, so what does it mean to embody love and be in the waiting with people that are just, yeah.
Brian: Yeah. And you know, the image of well, the image of pregnancy or you mentioned people who are waiting for diagnoses, which will then lead to treatment plans and so on. That’s a kind of waiting that says, look, we’re not satisfied now. There is a gap between what we have and what we want. There’s a gap between what we think should be and what is. We’re not satisfied in the sense that we’re just sitting around complacent. We’ve been put into a position of destabilization, but it’s destabilization that makes us lean toward the future. And it’s well, it has this feeling of gestation. I’ll tell you, I just was thinking about this recently because I was reading, I believe it occurs in Matthew and Mark. It may also occur in Luke, but I don’t think I looked at that version. But it’s where Jesus talks about terrible times that are coming. And of course, the traditional interpretation of this is that Jesus is talking about the end of the world. I think more more theologians and biblical scholars think Jesus is probably talking about the end of the world as they knew it, meaning he was foreseeing violent, violence erupt, and he knew that would not end well. But what’s interesting in those passages, he says, look, it’s going to get bad. There’s going to be wars, rumors of wars. And then he says, this is only the beginning of birth pangs. He doesn’t say this is the beginning of the death throes or these are the last gas. It’s this is the preparation for something new to be born. And so here in the middle of trouble, it’s not a passive waiting. Someday things will get better. This is part of a process, contractions that are going to be painful and difficult and we need to get ready to breathe. and, but the time will come to push and that will be the giving birth of something new on the other side.
Rose: Wow. mean, I, when you say that, I kind of remember that it’s an Indian, East Indian poet that says something like, a new world is being born. And if I listen hard enough, can hear her breathing, something like that.
Brian: That’s it.
Rose: I’m sure I, but that’s, that’s what’s happening, right? Like that’s what those birth pangs mean. The beginning of those birth pangs, cause that new creation, he, he brought it when he came out of the grave, right? And it’s here. so the…
Brian: Yes. Yes. And it’s both here. It’s here like an egg and sperm have now conceived and they’re implanted, but it’s still coming to birth. so we find ourselves in this process, not of passive waiting, but of pregnancy, labor, delivery, nurture. It’s that, you know, that process of giving life and giving birth.
Rose: Okay, let’s get super practical. What does this look like Thanksgiving dinner with relatives that are on the, like it’s no secret we are polarized and it’s almost could be 50-50. I don’t know what the numbers are right now, because I’m not paying attention, but there are chances you could spend holidays with people that think drastically on the opposite. so practically what does love look like right now when we’re with people that we just don’t even see eye to eye on these things.
Brian: You know, I let me say two things I don’t think it looks like. And then we’ll talk about what it looks like. One thing I don’t think it looks like is let’s have a fight and call each other names and let’s mirror around our holiday tables the same kind of viciousness we see on cable news and a lot of social media. Yeah, let’s not do that. But second, I don’t think it means covering everything over and pretending like everything’s OK. So, let’s put those two aside and say, well, what zone does that leave us? And here’s what I would suggest. The first thing it means is we encounter one another on the basis of our shared humanity. Now, politics is part of humanity and all that goes along with that in our conflicted times. But we deal with our common humanity. That means that we talk to each other about human stuff. How’s your health? How are your kids? How’s your job? You know, how was your garden this year? All the things that are part of being human beings. We celebrate those things. We don’t let the political issues and economic issues and so on. We don’t let that rupture our connection based on common humanity. I think we see that in the Gospels when in that encounter in the Gospel of John, where Jesus meets a woman at a well. What do they have in common as humans? They get thirsty. So they have a they have a human encounter over sharing a drink of of cold, clear water. The second thing, though, I think, is that instead of papering over the deeper issues, we learn the phrase that an African theologian taught me that I really love. said we learned the courage to differ graciously.
Rose: Yes.
Brian: And he brought this up. said, look, as an African theologian, I constantly am faced with a choice when I am engaging with Western theologians and they always act as if they set the rules of the game. Do I just acquiesce and submit? No, I need to develop the courage to differ graciously. And that’s something that I think we can learn to do. And it actually, instead of being tense and ugly, it, if we understand that this is what we’re about, it actually can be quite joyful and beautiful.
Rose: You know, when you say, love that phrase, because we talk about that a lot at The Seattle School about differentiating. Like, how do you, what does it mean to differentiate? It means I don’t lose who I am, even though you might be different. Somehow I find a connection to you beyond that difference, right? Like that’s what integration is and we do it graciously. And so I am finding that people are having a very challenging and almost difficult time today when I’m watching the conversations, being able to do that, it’s like we’re in the battle and I have to be right and I have to win. So I like how loving means like, I don’t lose who I am or what I believe or what I stand for. But I think when you said that, like we differ graciously. I’m not, I love that you don’t acquiesce when we try to talk about how to hold difference. People think that we’re saying you have to acquiesce and but you don’t, you can hold difference.
Brian: I just maybe to make this visible. you’re sitting at a holiday table and Uncle Fred says something insulting about immigrants and you’re a decent human being and you don’t like to hear racist, prejudicial, dehumanizing things said. If you’re quiet, you feel you’re aiding at abetting hostility. If you say, Uncle Fred, you are a racist bigot. You might be able to say that jokingly and it would work, but if you, you know, it’s not going to go well. So what I recommend is you find a way you understand that what you’re trying to do is create a new set of rules. And so you do say something like this. I have a little five word script for this: Wow. I see that differently.
Rose: I love it!
Brian: So I might say, wow, Uncle Fred, I see that differently. And then Uncle Fred says, well, what do you mean? And then you say, listen, we don’t really, if you want to talk about this now, we can, it might be better to not talk about this now. If you’re interested after lunch or after dinner, let’s you and I get together alone. And I would love to really listen respectfully to your views. As long as you’d be willing to listen respectfully with equal respect to my views. We could do that after dinner. Now, the reason I say it that way is because very often in public, when we get into substantive arguments, we stop communicating with each other and we start performing for the other people in the circle. And, and usually that creates a win lose situation. Who’s going to win in front of this audience? And so by me changing the rules to say, and defining the rules as I will listen, respectfully to you, you’ll listen respectfully to me. I’m showing some respect for Uncle Fred and some respect for myself, right? So that creates a chance for us to talk. Yeah.
Rose: I love that so much. mean, honestly, that’s what to me, what you just described is what love looks like in the waiting in a time of uncertainty. And just to make a note, we are recording this just like two days before Thanksgiving. So I mentioned Thanksgiving, this will come out the third week of Advent. So we can apply it to our Christmas holiday as well, right?
Brian: That’s right. That’s right. Yeah, yeah.
Rose: Like whenever you’re with a group of people where there’s that kind of difference in the room, that is a very beautiful way to embody love and graciousness. And just remembering that this person that might vehemently disagree with me about religion, politics, culture, whatever, is still made in the image of God. Like just to remember. So part of for me what it looks like to embody love in this season is to constantly be checking my own heart. Because I get, I’ve been getting amped around things I hear or conversation. And so taking the time to just be in touch with what’s going on in my own heart seems very important as well.
Brian: Yeah. Yeah. The only other thing I’d say in these circumstances is, you know, sometimes it is OK. It is. It does make sense to try to have the conversation in public. But if that’s going to happen, it usually requires setting some more ground rules. So and very often what you can do is say, look, do we want to have this conversation now? I’m game. If you want to have it now, is everybody around the table OK having it now? What ground rules would we like to set? How about we set a ground rule that one person speaks at a time and after that person speaks, the other people around the table can ask questions, but we aren’t going to attack or insult or we’re going to show curiosity. and they’re just we can set ground rules that help people practice different ways of relating. Very often, though, what happens when you set up a situation where there could actually be substantive conversation is people realize they didn’t really want to talk about this issue. This is just some other little social rhetorical event happening, you know.
Rose: Yes, yeah. When you just said like setting up the ground rules, it makes me think like, especially in times how we’re living right now with so much polarization, and it’s hard to know where anybody really is. I mean, I don’t know. And so just try, you know, that work of being tender, like whatever practices that you need to put in your life that help you remain tender and try to like embody empathy, curiosity and care rather than fight. You know what I mean? Like, because, but Brian, this is the one thing I want to ask you about. Because people are getting amped so easily, I mean, honestly, it’s like we haven’t, we’ve barely had a break since COVID of people’s nervous systems being amped all the times. I remember somebody saying, what we used to think was the baseline of our nervous systems now is like, it’s at a seven from zero to ten. Our baseline now is seven. And you see that with people. So how do you speak to that? What are practices that you even do to help you live well?
Brian: Yeah. Well, let me say one that sort of is in the heat of the moment and then another that’s maybe out of the heat of the moment. And I would say I do this somewhere between 40 and 70 percent of the time. I certainly don’t do this 100 percent of the time. But when the tension is high, aggression accelerates it, and vulnerability has a possibility of decelerating it or de-intensifying it. So vulnerability takes courage. That courage to differ graciously, it takes courage. So, just as an example, I was invited not too long ago to a large, an event with about 50 people. I only knew one or two people at the group, including the fellow who hosted it. And when I arrived, they went around the circle, it was like a two hour thing of everybody introduced themselves, right? It was very long. And I was maybe three quarters of the way through the circle. Almost every person in their self-introduction said something that was intended to insult people like me. And they weren’t doing it to insult me. They were doing it to establish what we might call coalitionary aggression. In other words, we all have the same enemy. So they were all naming the enemy. It turned out I was a member of the enemy that they were identifying. So when they got to me, I felt my blood pressure was going up. Right. Like, how am I going to introduce myself? So in the heat of the moment, I just said, Hi, my name is Brian McLaren. I just need to tell you all, I think I’m the kind of person that a lot of you really don’t like. Like a lot of the things you’ve said. I’m pretty sure I’m kind of a unicorn in the room here. I don’t really feel like I belong and I fit here right now. So I’m feeling kind of uncomfortable. I think that’s all I’ll say. So, I didn’t even go into any details, but I just made my discomfort public in a vulnerable way. And they keep going. And about two people later, someone says, well, to tell you the truth, I feel a lot like Brian, like I feel like I really don’t fit here. And then maybe two people later. Yeah, I feel a lot like those two guys. I kind of feel like I don’t fit in, you know. And by the time we went around, I would say more than half of the people in the last section of us to introduce ourselves had one person having the courage to be vulnerable left other people with the courage to be vulnerable. Didn’t mean the rest of the weekend went well. It was super painful to tell you the truth. But I felt like what we did is we we created a zone of honesty and gave people a chance to be kind. And some people were. They came up and showed kindness. Other people didn’t. But that’s OK. That’s part of that. You know, we’re big boys and big girls. We have to learn what I deal with. Outside of the heat of the moment, though, I just think what you said before, Rose, the fact that we monitor the state of our own nervous system is a smart thing. If we can acknowledge, I feel threatened, I feel outnumbered, I feel intimidated, I feel attacked. And if we can sort of understand that, then what we do is instead of identifying the problem with those people trying to control them, which never works, we say, what can I do to help regulate this, you know, my own being here?
Rose: Yes. That’s so good. Okay, tell me about the sci-fi trilogy that you’re writing and I want to hear about The Last Voyage. sounds fascinating.
Brian: Well, as you know, Rose, I’ve been very active and committed and outspoken about a lot of what I think are the key issues that we face from racism and economic inequality to ecological overshoot and climate change and so on. And there’s only so much you can do in talking about the problem and even talking about needed solutions, especially when people keep not choosing those needed solutions. And eventually what you have to do, in fact, this relates to when you referred to Walter Brueggemann about prophetic imagination. We have to find ways to imagine the kind of world that we hope our great, great grandchildren can live in that’s quite different from this world. And one of the kinds, genres of literature that does that is science fiction. Science fiction sometimes is, you know, apocalyptic or dystopian. But there’s another kind of science fiction that tries to imagine better worlds. And and so I’ve been working on this little trilogy of novels that describe a future, maybe 30 to 40 years in the future where things are not better here on Earth. And some people are hoping that they can establish a Mars colony for centuries, humans have projected their hopes and aspirations on going into outer space and finding some home somewhere else for a fresh start. But of course, reality is it doesn’t go so well. And so I’m using that as a setting to imagine people realizing they have to face the issues that some that we have not succeeded in facing here on Earth. Yeah, that’s the framework. And coming back to our theme of Advent, instead of having one hero in the book, the protagonists are a team of women –
Rose: I love that.
Brian: who, in a sense, because they’re women, they’ve been excluded from the patriarchy and the sort of male domination and they have decided to work on a different set of skills to try to build a better future.
Rose: I love this. cannot wait for that to come out. Like it sounds, so it sounds fascinating. And I love that it’s built around a team of women that have a different way of going, like there’s just gotta be a better way, right? Than what’s been happening. So do you have any closing thoughts thinking about: it’s advent, we’re coming right into the Christmas holiday and what does embodied love look like?
Brian: Yes. Well, let me just maybe maybe just take one little detail from the Christmas story that for many people is beautiful and for many people is very problematic. And it’s the idea of the virgin birth. And, you know, some people see the virgin birth as: see, God thinks sex is icky. So God, you know, is finally going to get a baby into the world through some less icky, dirty method. This story taps in for a lot of people to a kind of body hatred and an anti sex kind of anti pleasure bias and so on. For other people, it taps into a kind of supernaturalism where, you know, the where it takes magic to fix things. And for other people, the doctrine of the virgin birth fits in with a whole Christian framework of original sin and and all of this. If you like that sort of thing, have at it. But I wonder in a violent world, in the story, people like Herod and behind him, Caesar, are running the world full of violence. There’s a mass murder of children in the story. People often, you know, talk about that, but there’s, you know, a mass murderer of children. And against this backdrop of violent men, here is, are two women who have extraordinary pregnancies. And I wonder if the Christmas story isn’t trying to tell us that it’s not male aggressiveness that is going to bring us to the world we want. It is motherly love. And it is not the taking of life through violence, but the giving of life through creativity and birth and generativity. If we were to actually believe that and take that seriously in Christmas 2024, Advent 2024, that could set us off for a very good path in the years to come.
Rose: That is a beautiful picture. And as you were saying it, my thought about, because I love those two women in the story and there’s so much to it, but just the whole idea of Elizabeth birthing John, and then Mary birthing Jesus, it’s like the end of an era, but it’s continuous into the new era, right? Which I feel like that in human history, that’s the spirit’s work, right?
Continues pulling us toward the future when all will be made right, so in the meantime, I want to say thank you so, so much for doing this and being our guest. And I hope you have a wonderful Christmas holiday with your family and loved ones.
Brian: Thank you and the same to you and to all of our listeners.
Rose: Thank you.
