Seeing into the Future
A review of Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart by Brian McLaren
by Lory Widmer Hess
Life After Doom aims to acknowledge the fear that accompanies… radical change, while assuring us that we are capable of more growth than we have so far dreamed possible.
304 pp., cloth, $28
May 14, 2024
St. Martin’s Essentials
ISBN: 9781250893277
In the fall of 2020, as the world darkened and a global pandemic deepened, I came across a podcast series called “Learning How to See.” Over the course of six episodes, Brian McLaren identified the many forms of bias that keep us from perceiving and understanding the inner worlds of other humans, and thus from living peacefully in the world we share. He’d given these catchy, memorable names — contact bias, confidence bias, and so on — and had vivid, down-to-earth examples to illustrate each one.
As he talked about each bias with his colleagues on the show, I had a sense that he was not trying to teach us in the sense of conveying a fixed body of knowledge or asserting an opinion, but that we were all learning together, indeed, slowly opening our eyes to a greater reality. This reality is all around us, between us, within us, yet we cannot see it if we let our self-protective instincts take over. When we make the freely chosen decision to love, though, to transcend those unconscious survival-oriented limitations, we can truly grow into a new form of vision. I was so grateful to have such a generous, heart-opening perspective to help orient me in a confusing and frightening time.
Many readers are probably already familiar with McLaren; he’s written many well-known books, but until lately, my only experience of him or his work was through the podcast. So when I saw his latest book up for review, Life After Doom, I was interested to see what he had to say about an uncomfortable topic: the increasingly dire and inescapable environmental situation, heading toward catastrophe. Do we even have a future? What would survival mean? How can we avoid falling into despair, without merely ignoring the danger?
As I read, even though it wasn’t an audiobook, I found that I kept hearing McLaren’s voice. The warmth in his tone as he told a story about a loved one. The pauses to let weighty information sink in. The audible tinges of grief or pain, lightened by the glad relief of some healing insight. The process we’d been through together in “Learning How to See” continued to resonate with me, as he attempted to bring readers “wisdom and courage for a world falling apart,” as the subtitle puts it.
Hearing McLaren’s voice in my mind was eminently appropriate, for he writes in a very conversational way, speaking as an “I” to a “you” rather than attempting to be a detached conveyer of information or polemics. Each chapter begins with a story from his own life experience, setting the stage with a personal touch, and ends with a set of questions to stimulate further discussion. The middle of this conversational sandwich engages with historical, social, and scientific perspectives on our current situation.
Neither brittle adherence to rules nor aggressive assaults on the forces that threaten us will create a future world in which we would want to live. We need an open, flexible, calm but deeply feeling awareness in order to meet the future.
What emerges is a sense that neither brittle adherence to rules nor aggressive assaults on the forces that threaten us will create a future world in which we would want to live. We need an open, flexible, calm but deeply feeling awareness in order to meet the future. Remarkably, this awareness is not merely described, but demonstrated, offered as a practice: moving from personal experience to expanding consciousness to a willingness to question, learn, and change. As part of the demonstration, McLaren freely expresses his own questions and doubts, and lets the reader in on ways his own thinking has changed, during the time leading up to and even over the course of writing the book. That is not reassuring for readers who want sure-fire solutions or fixed truths, but for those looking for another way forward, it offers some intriguing possibilities.
Life After Doom is structured in four sections: “Letting Go,” “Letting Be,” “Letting Come,” and “Setting Free.” (McLaren does have a talent for catchy phraseology.) Letting go is about facing the likely scenarios for our future, of which avoiding collapse is ironically the least desirable, because it would merely sidestep the deep dysfunction underlying our current mode of existence. That means we have to look toward getting through collapse followed by some kind of altered existence, whether it’s a transition into a new consciousness, being reduced to grim survival necessities, or near-total extinction.
McLaren understands if you don’t much want to contemplate any of those possibilities. But he posits that “Welcome to reality” is the gateway through which we must pass if we are to enter into our human future. We need to learn both how to welcome ourselves into a reality that is largely unknown and immensely frightening, and how to welcome this reality into our consciousness. “To hold both knowing and unknowing in a delicate, dynamic, and highly creative tension” could be our greatest challenge of all, the inner work that will make more of a difference than any technological advance.
Can religion and spirituality help us in the challenge of welcoming reality? Surely that can and should be the task of a healthy spiritual life, and yet so often spirituality has been involved in keeping an unwelcome reality at bay, concealing, distorting, or suppressing it. Awakening to that phenomenon, without rejecting religion and spirituality altogether, is another crucial aspect of the work McLaren is encouraging us to do. A chapter that was particularly fascinating to me described how he himself was raised in a Rapture-oriented “cult of correctness,” and his process of freeing himself from it. While retaining compassion toward those still caught in such thinking, he makes the startling observation that the theology which would rather see the earthly world destroyed than have its consoling sense of being right threatened is itself the greatest possible threat to human survival.
As we let go of our survival-driven resistances, we say “Let it be” to a reality that is our only option for further evolution. We say “Let it come” to the humble task of admitting we are only children in a mysterious universe, daring to trust in something greater than ourselves amidst the scary stuff.
In truth, that tendency is not limited to theology, but infects every aspect of human endeavor, from science to industry to politics, shaping public discourse and intimate relationships. Changing our hearts and minds, therefore, is the real task at hand — the true meaning of John the Baptist’s call to metanoia, repentance. And in the remainder of the book, McLaren outlines a way for those who have heard the call to enter into the further stages. As we let go of our survival-driven resistances, we say “Let it be” to a reality that is our only option for further evolution. We say “Let it come” to the humble task of admitting we are only children in a mysterious universe, daring to trust in something greater than ourselves amidst the scary stuff. “The deep core, the strong spine and the vigorous heart of our spiritual traditions,” McLaren calls it.
We find ourselves “set free” as we embrace mystery and release our compulsion to be right. A salvation that does not involve escaping from unwelcome reality, but entering into it with compassion even if it means the death of all that we have known, starts to glimmer through the darkness.
McLaren is aware that the style and content of his book will not be palatable to every reader. Even receptive readers are unlikely to agree with everything the author says. For me, one sticking point was that McLaren sees natural processes — birds building nests, for example — as examples of love at work, and reasons that the natural world might be better off without humans. But can such unfree, instinctual behavior really be called “love”? Isn’t it our human challenge to bring freely offered love into the world process, and is that not something to sorrow over if it cannot come into being?
Disagreement is not really a problem, though, as long as we can use it as a springboard to further learning and growth. Locking ourselves in self-righteous containers is not the way forward. What will bring us past the point of doom and through the crucible of despair is trust in our spiritual ground of existence, trust that can truly let go, let be, let come, and set free, leading us into a new world where the love behind all phenomena does become a conscious experience. In essence, Life After Doom aims to acknowledge the fear that accompanies such radical change, while assuring us that we are capable of more growth than we have so far dreamed possible. May that possibility take root in our hearts, as we continue our human journey of learning how to see.
Lory Widmer Hess lives with her family in Switzerland, where she works with adults with developmental disabilities and is completing a training in Spiritual Direction. She is the author of When Fragments Make a Whole: A Personal Journey Through Healing Stories in the Bible (Floris, 2024). Visit her website at enterenchanted.com.
