Apple Podcasts
Show Notes
The most familiar line in the faith — that God is love — turns out to be the hardest to pin down, so we sit with the difference between defining love and discerning it.
Episode two, no script — just the two of us picking up the feedback that came in after the pilot and following it wherever it wanted to go. Pushback on the Krishnamurti quote and the quilting metaphor turned into a longer wrestle with love itself: whether you can define it or only discern it, and what it means if the center of reality is a Person you can come to know but never pin down.
Less defining, more discerning. Pull up a chair.
What we talked about
- 00:00 Intro
- 00:37 Cold open
- 06:12 Welcome back — no script
- 07:57 Naming, or labeling?
- 09:33 What Adam was really doing
- 16:31 Tasting something for the first time
- 21:01 The tree of knowing
- 23:07 Love as the substance of the quilt
- 25:28 Where the metaphor breaks
- 32:19 Why Jesus
- 35:11 Discern, don’t define
- 41:46 Truthing in love
- 46:49 “How do I say your name?”
- 57:28 Love without guarantees
References
Quotes
- “How do I say your name?” Barry Lopez, on first approaching an unfamiliar landscape — quoted in James K.A. Smith’s Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark.
Mentioned
- Jiddu Krishnamurti — the bird-naming line from the pilot, revisited
- Tim Mackie (BibleProject) — Jesus opening our eyes to what reality is really like
- The “truthing in love” reading of Ephesians 4:15
Stay in the conversation
Got a question, a story, or a thread you want us to pull on? Email us at hello@tabletalk.fm.
Here’s to faithful curiosity and patchwork spirituality.
Scripture
- 1 John 4:8 “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”
- Genesis 2:19 “Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.”
- 1 Corinthians 13:4 “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.”
Scripture quotations taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version® (NIV®). Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Books Mentioned
- Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of Unknowing
- The Cloud of Unknowing