Episode Summary
What if love’s absence is more than heartbreak—it’s collapse? In this episode, I explore Paul’s haunting triad in 1 Corinthians 13 —speech without love, being without love, and action without love —and follow it through the narrows, where divine self-giving holds the world together.
If The Beautiful Disruption inspires you, join us and become a paid subscriber. If 10% of all my subscribers upgrade, I'll leap to full-time writing, teaching, producing, and speaking—bringing beauty to a world in search of meaning. Thank you all for your support. I’m here in this space because of and for you.
Hello Everyone,
This week is special. I promised something for Advent, and today I’m making it available for pre-sale:
O Night Divine: Chasing Beauty During the Christmas Season
O Night Divine is four weeks of meditations on the journey of Advent and what it means to chase beauty during the Christmas season. I’ve loved creating this project for you. The journey begins on November 30th.
Oh Night Divine will include:
* 22+ reflections during Advent
* Audio reflections
* Bonus seasonal essays for reading by the fire
* I’ll compile all the reflections into a neatly designed, downloadable, and printable PDF
* Price: 20$.
* Today’s Pre-sale Discount: 20% off, now $16.
So, here’s the special I have for you. Well, actually, there are three ways to receive a pre-sale discount:
* By purchasing Oh Night Divine by itself today, you will get a 20% discount for a limited time. So, this one is for anyone and everyone. Click HERE to purchase.
* When you join Marveling—my signature three-chapter course on cultivating wonder—you’ll receive O Night Divine, free, totally on me. Click HERE to purchase.
* Paid Substack friends: check your inbox tomorrow for your inner-circle discount link. Just a hint, there’s a six and a zero in your discount. So, if you’ve considered upgrading to a paid subscriber, now is a great time to do it.
Advent is coming. Let’s prepare our hearts for the Light together.
Finally, my art shop is live. I’ll be adding new pieces regularly. Click on over and explore. If you have a question, DM or email me.
Through the Narrows
What happens to the world when love withdraws?
In this episode of The Beautiful Disruption, we return to Paul’s opening verses in 1 Corinthians 13. He begins not by giving us emotional sentiment. He invites us to consider a very important possibility: the world without love.
Without agapē, Paul says, our words deform into noise, our being collapses into nothing, and our actions lose weight. It’s a sobering reality for us who live in the machine world.
Love is what holds reality together. Because we all know, “all you need is love.”
Think about our unraveling culture: our content-saturated speech, our curated identities, and our performative activism. We are a culture devoid of heavenly love, the costly kind of love, the high mountain pass of love.
But there is hope. And it comes through the narrows. It’s the way love creates through self-limitation. Simone Weil and George Steiner describe creation itself as divine withdrawal, the torrent of infinite being pressed through the constriction of finitude.
Like a massive river flowing into the narrows, it’s reduced to a small area, producing a glorious spectacle of raw power and beauty.
Like the tidal current at Saltstraumen, Norway, God’s self-giving love surges through the narrows to carve beauty into the world.
This is the withdrawal of the loving one: the withdrawal creates a givingness in the world. This is the power of love's presence. When love enters, truth, goodness, and beauty cohere again.
But when love is absent, everything collapses.
One thing I loved thinking about was how all this relates to us in our everyday lives. I like thinking of myself as a tidal current, don’t you? For artists, makers, parents, pastors, craftsmen, entrepreneurs, and well, basically everyone, this is a call to live through the narrows—to pour ourselves into acts of love that give form and radiance to others.
* How can you live through the narrows today, this week, next? How can you pour yourself into others, into your craft, into your daily work that gives radiance to others?
* For the artists here, it is not about self-expression. That is the lie of modern society. Art is about withdrawal. Your challenge this week is to create through this lens. Create one thing that expresses beauty—that radiance beyond—so when others see your work, they see that which is hidden and wonderful in our world expressed in your creation.
* Evaluate your speech, your gifts, your actions. Are they full of the high mountain pass withdrawal nature of love? Or are they loaded with void? That's a tough question, yes, I know. But it’s what I ask myself all the time.
Ok, that’s all for today. Love you guys! Please leave a comment below with your thoughts. Or shoot me an email or DM. I love hearing from you guys.
Head on over to my fresh site and pre-order the Advent special, Oh Night Divine,and tell a friend about it.
I’ll see you next week!
Cheers,
Tim
Links to the Advent Special:
* Pre-Order Oh Night Divine HERE.
* Explore my Marveling course HERE.
Links Mentioned
* Explore what a tidal current is here.
* The Narrows— “where the trail is the Virgin River.”
What I’ve Been Watching
* Alex O’Connor & John Lennox: Why this Oxford Mathematician is Confident God Exists
Listen + Share
🎧 Listen on Substack🎧 Listen on Spotify🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts
If this episode stirred something in you, I’d be honoured if you shared it with a friend or left a five-star review. Every little bit helps new listeners discover The Beautiful Disruption.
Thanks for listening! This episode is public, so feel free to share it.
Support My Work
This podcast and publication are 100 percent listener-supported. If you believe in work and want to help me make it full-time, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
For a limited time, get 25% off a paid subscription for life.
Word Study
* γίνομαι / γέγονα – gegona, “I have become,” “to become,” denoting change of state. Used here to show the deformation of the speaker.
* εἰμί – eimi, “I am,” “to be,” the core verb of existence; without love, ontology collapses.
* ὠφελέω / ὠφελοῦμαι – ōpheloumai (the verb that was too long for me to pronouce:), “I am profited,” “to profit, benefit, be helped”; Paul uses it to deny the moral utility of loveless deeds.
Without love, speech, being, and action collapse. This is literally what is happening in our culture at every level. Speech: rhetoric, communication, writing, education, reduced to mere content. Being: identity, existence—confusion and distortion of what is real; we no longer know who we are as individuals, male, female. Action: virte signaling, activism without heart. See how when you look at the verbs, you can place an overlay of cultural distortion over it and see how important it is to follow the more excellent way … of Christ, of love.
From the TBD Library:
* Real Presences & Grammars of Creation, by George Steiner
* Gravity and Grace, Waiting for God, The Need for Roots, by Simone Weil
Coming Next Week
We’ll get into—finally!—what love is. Until then, gush your presence through the narrows and love like Christ.
