Alignment

Recently the Rev. Dr. Margaret Somerville shared with me her excitement over a new tattoo on her arm—it’s a flowing line of classical poetry scansion. Formerly a teacher of translation, Dr. Somerville knows her classical poetry, too! She’d invited me to speak with her warm and brilliant Alignment Interfaith community, so when they arrived online, we stopped talking about tattoos and metrical patterns, or the time recently that Margaret somehow calmly talked with an Alignment Author Visit presenter as a storm brought five large trees crashing down outside her home.

After a wonderful welcome from everyone, we dived into The Cloud of Unknowing by Anonymous in the late 1300’s CE and Brother Lawrence’s Practice of the Presence in the late 1600’s CE. I began by singing, then shared some of my journey, before talking about the subversive power of translation and of contemplation, reading from both books, and sharing dialogue at the end, dancing with everyone’s lyrical, insightful questions that were, as Rilke said, ones to live now. Then most people left, and I stayed a bit longer, because we were all just having such a good conversation. The whole evening included—in addition to Anonymous and Nic Herman / Br. Lawrence—also Jhumpa Lahiri and Bayo Akomolafe.

I don’t know why, but sometimes the best bits happen before and after, even when the main event of being together for a formal gathering is also very meaningful and appreciated. That’s when Margaret shared a wonderful Dr. Barbara Holmes (Dr. B.) story with me and those few there. I felt she’d handed me a golden ingot, as I hadn’t heard or read Dr. B. tell this before. Perhaps someone else has heard it, but I haven’t, and Margaret said I could share it on.

I learned Dr. B. was the first Authors Visit presenter two years ago. That made me smile to know. Margaret also mentioned that during informal conversation with Dr. B. that time, they began talking about the practice of preparing to preach as a contemplative act. Dr. B. shared with Margaret then that “she did not learn how to preach ‘for real’ until she abandoned the way she had been taught to preach by men and learned that a sermon was really a poem.” Dr. B. added that “[w]hen she created sermons as a poem, she felt that she was truly preaching.”

I added to Margaret’s memory Dr. B.’s last words of “Forgive everyone for everything.”

“What a treasure!” Dr. B. was, Margaret said, and as our wise ancestor, she is still with us.

Thank you, Margaret, and Alignment Interfaith community, for your welcoming presence!

View my Alignment Authors Visit here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsFnSfeOj9Y

Who Am I? by Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Prison Poem

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested in April 1943 by the Gestapo and imprisoned by the Nazis in Berlin-Tegel prison for one and a half years. In 1944 he wrote the poem, “Wer bin ich?” [“Who am I?”], and on July 8, 1944, he sent it to his friend Eberhard Bethge. In October 1944, he was transferred to the Gestapo cellar in Prinz-Albert-Strasse, then in February 1945 to Buchenwald, and in April 1945 to Flossenbürg Concentration Camp. He was sentenced to death on April 8, 1945, and hanged.

A kind friend included my translation in his Christmas Eve sermon in Virginia. He sent it to me when I couldn’t find my version, and I revised it. It has always been special to me, and its relevance is perennial. I began reading Bonhoeffer in the German starting in 1983-1984 when I studied at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg [Heidelberg University] on a Rotary Club Graduate Scholarship. In the original that is handwritten, the first three stanzas are indented some five spaces to the right. Please picture those there, which are in my manuscript, but which the formatting here would not hold.

It is interesting how Bonhoeffer ends his non-rhyming poem with a very meaningful rhyming couplet. During the heinous imprisonment that followed his stand against the Nazi Party, and with honest, authentic emotion and in dialogue with the divine, he laments not only his suffering but the suffering of so many others, and he must also be aware that he represents a loving and inclusive spiritual path not endorsed by political powers (remembering Hitler’s 1920-on racist “Positive Christianity”), as reflected in the then contemporary term “Gottgläubig” (“God-believing”), the Nazi Party’s non-denominational deism. Thus the poem also reminds that the small ego (our facades) can be involved in making a murderous mockery of a faith tradition.

So I was trying to capture some of that in my translation of the last lines. We can hear all the lonely doubt and worry “Einsames Fragen” and mockery / ridicule “Spott” dissolve into the word “Gott.” It’s lovely, and also haunting and ironic in the sense that clearly, in spite of the rhyme, nothing has been resolved in his and the world’s earthly situation. We sense and experience in some small way the tension within which he and so many others live and die. Here are the closing lines: “Wer bin ich? Einsames Fragen treibt mit mir Spott, / Wer ich auch bin, Du kennst mich, Dein bin ich, o Gott.”

Who am I? by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
©Translated by Carmen Acevedo Butcher

Who am I? They often tell me
I step from my cell
calm and cheerful and strong,
like a lord from his castle.

Who am I? They often tell me
I speak with my guards
freely and friendly and frank,
as if I were in command.

Who am I? They also tell me
I bear the days of misfortune
with serenity, smiling and sure,
like someone used to winning.

Am I really what others say of me?
Or am I only what I know myself to be?
Restless, longing, sick, like a bird in a cage,
gasping for breath, as if someone strangled my throat,
starving for colors, flowers, bird songs,
thirsting for kind words, human closeness,
shaking with rage at despotism and the pettiest offense,
haunted waiting for great events to happen,
weak from worrying for friends infinitely far away,
tired and empty at praying, at thinking, at coping,
lifeless, and ready to say goodbye to it all?

Who am I? This person or the other?
Am I one self today and tomorrow someone else?
Am I both at once? Before others a hypocrite,
and before myself a despised, whining weakling?
Or is what’s still in me like a battered army,
retreating in disorder from a victory already won?

Who am I? This lonely question mocks my facade.
Whoever I am, you know me, yours am I, O God!

Credits: I ask that you credit the work of the translator Carmen Acevedo Butcher if you share this translation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Wer bin ich?” [“Who am I?”] as given in the title here: “Who am I? by Dietrich Bonhoeffer ©Translated by Carmen Acevedo Butcher.”

“Wer bin ich?” is from page 179 in Widerstand und Ergebung: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen aus der Haft, edited by Eberhard Bethge (Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn, 1983). It’s also in Band 8 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke, edited by Christian Gremmels, Eberhard Bethge, und Renate Bethge, mit Ilse Tödt. (Chr. Kaiser/Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1998).

Pride

The concept of domination is baked into pride’s very bones. Its marrow consists of systemic hierarchy. For pride has the root pro- for “put oneself forward, before, in front of.”

The word has existed in English a long while. We find it in some of the earliest surviving sermons in Old English, written in poetic prose by a tenth-century CE Benedictine monk named Ælfric (said “AL-fritch”). The first Oxford English Dictionary (OED) example for pride is from the 12th sermon in Ælfric’s second series of Catholic Homilies, a Sunday sermon in Midlent. It’s in Benjamin Thorpe’s 19th-century collection, with thanks also to Joseph Bosworth and Thomas Northcote Toller, and others, for their Old English dictionary that helps translators.

From the OED:

OE [Old English]: Of ydelum gylpe bið acenned pryte and æbilignys.
Ælfric, Catholic Homilies: 2nd Series (Cambridge MS. Gg.3.28) xii. 125

For those interested in official titles, it reads: “Dominica in Media Quadragesime” and “Secunda Sententia de hoc ipso” (“Sunday in Middle Lent” and “Second Discourse on the Same”).

A larger excerpt reads:
Of ydelum gylpe bið acenned pryte and æbilignys, ungeðwærnys and hywung, and lustfullung leasre herunge. Se eahteoða leahter is modignys. I have translated this as: “Of vanity’s emptiness are born pride and indignation, division and hypocrisy, and a lust for false praise. The eighth [capital] sin is pride.”

Here is the OED’s first definition for pride: “A high, esp. an excessively high, opinion of one’s own worth or importance which gives rise to a feeling or attitude of superiority over others; inordinate self-esteem.”

What does this concept of pride mean for those not in dominant positions in a society? I ask this, mindful of Rilke: “Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen,” or “Live the questions now.”

As articulated in 1960 by theologian Valerie Saiving Goldstein in the Journal of Religion article “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” traditionally, a male-centric Christianity has defined sin around the male experience of “pride, will-to-power, exploitation, self-assertiveness, and the treatment of others as objects.” Given this historically masculine framing of pride, the traditional, masculine antidote to such pride, preached for centuries, has been “selflessness.”

Growing up, each time I heard a sermon admonishing me to be “selfless,” I would think, as a conscientious student and as a kid struggling with undiagnosed dyslexia, childhood trauma, and a deep religious nature, “How can I be selfless if I don’t have a self?” It boggled my mind.

This definition of pride, based as it is on a limited framing of the human experience, has had and has an unhealthy influence, as expressed in Receiving Woman: Studies in the Psychology and Theology of the Feminine by Jungian psychoanalyst Ann Ulanov: “For a woman sin is not pride, an exaltation of self, but a refusal to claim the self God has given” (134; see also 44-45, 164, 173).

Ulanov adds, in conversation with Goldstein’s ideas: “Women refuse this self by hiding behind self-doubt and feelings of inadequacy, . . . avoiding the self that they are, by always assuming that some greater authority knows better, be that father, mother, husband, even, in this case, theologians’ interpretation of sin” (134).

Boom. As a woman who grew up in the South in Evangelical churches, this wisdom is good medicine.

When I was translating Brother Lawrence’s early Modern French in his Practice of the Presence, I found that in traditional translations of his wisdom, an unhealthy binary also appears in rendering the amour-propre (“self-love”) as a strictly negative “arrogance, pride.” These traditional renderings of the friar’s “[L’présence] est détruire l’amour-propre” result unhelpfully in this kind of traditional translation: “The practice of the presence can help you destroy self-love [amour-propre].”

The amour-propre translated “self-love” here is, however, a Janus word, or, better put, it’s expansive and polysemic, a concept open to much discussion by the mathematician and inventor Blaise Pascal, the philosopher and composer Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and others. As an 18th-century edition of Le Dictionnaire de l’Académie française points out, amour-propre is a “legitimate and necessary sentiment” that might be “carried to excess.”

Returning to Ulanov, we consider that amour-propre / self-love translated as “pride” has one meaning for those at the top of society and quite another for those at the bottom of oppressive patriarchal systems. Repeating Ulanov: “For a woman, sin is not pride, the exaltation of the self, but a refusal to claim the self God has given” (134).

Past translations of Brother Lawrence are most often by those positioned nearer the center of the Appendix A wheel on the Ontario Centre for Innovation website. I have experiences further from the center of that wheel and/or below the line of domination on Kathryn Pauly Morgan’s graph on which the wheel is based; thus, reading in a translation that a prayer might “help me destroy self-love” feels reductive, representative of a dominant perspective that in its binary vision omits my experiences and those of many people I know, and is toxic and harmful.

Through my brown womanly eyes, I see differently. I was a kid who could hardly read owing to dyslexia, undiagnosed. Somehow I persevered during that stress and feeling stupid that characterized my childhood, and through grace and the help of kind teachers, was fortunate to earn scholarships to attend college, even after my father shouted, “You can’t go! I can’t afford it!”

Like so many, as I know from being a teacher for over twenty years and fortunate to be in conversation with countless students, I am someone who has also worked and healed her way to self-compassion and personhood, after societal and familial trauma. After childhood and young adulthood wounding of what Erich Neumann calls the self-ego axis, I had to build a small ego before I could “lose” it, and during that process I knew very painfully intense, self-loathing-informed self-consciousness. To my mind, then, and with the help of many historical dictionaries and books from the friar’s era, amour-propre translates in this specific context as “self-preoccupation.”

Thus, when Brother Lawrence writes that practicing the presence prayer can “détruire l’amour-propre,” I translate this holistically, in view of all the friar teaches that supports self-compassion and a modern understanding of a healthy ego and well-being. This translation comes closer to the mystical original and is more universally helpful. My 2022 translation reads like this: “This practice of the presence dissolves [détruire] gradually, and almost unconsciously, the self-preoccupation [l’amour-propre] that is such a part of human nature” (48).

This phrasing is truer psychologically to what Brother Lawrence means, is representative of what this practice of prayer actually does, as I know from decades of experience, and is more useful to more readers. By choosing “dissolves,” my translation honors the core of détruire, from de- “un-” and struō “I build” or “un-build.” It is a kind of dismantling, where the small ego no longer reigns, but our true nature, or self, call it love, does.

We remember, too, that in conversations with Joseph of Beaufort and elsewhere, Brother Lawrence emphasizes that we “work gently” (47-48), practicing the presence as often as we can, and with love, to deepen our intimacy with God as our primary relationship so that we are then more in touch with our own self, self-compassion, and others in a mature way, instead of being overly preoccupied with others’ opinions of us, which can be part of an unhealthy small ego hoping to “win” another’s superficial approval or some kind of status, as Joseph shares in the Fourth Conversation dated November 25, 1667 [italics by the author]:

Brother Lawrence talked to me with great enthusiasm and openness about his way of approaching God. . . . The refining process that develops our soul does not depend on changing our works, but on doing for God what we would ordinarily do for ourselves. It’s a pity to see how many people get attached to doing certain works very superficially, to gain something or someone’s good opinion, always confusing the means for the end. He found no better way of going to God than by the ordinary tasks that were prescribed to him by obedience, disentangling these as much as he could from all self-interest and concern for others’ opinions, and doing all work for the simple love of God” (133-134).

Again, we remember amour-propre’s positive meanings: “self-esteem, self-respect, self-love,” and how building self-esteem often first involves unbuilding or, as Internal Family Systems describes it, “unburdening” our selves of their unhealthy self-narratives. We also recall that in Letter 2, the wise friar Brother Lawrence chooses l’amour-propre to name the practice of the presence prayer “un heureux amour-propre,” “a happy self-love” (72).

This passage deserves a closer look. In the French we read, “Je sais que quelques-uns traitent d’oisiveté, de tromperie et d’amour-propre cet état; j’avoue que c’est une sainte oisiveté et un heureux amour-propre.”

“I understand some call this state idleness, self-deception, and self-absorption. I know from experience it is a sacred idleness, and a happy self-love” (72).

For modern meditations on healthy self-love, I recommend the work of the Center for Action and Contemplation, for example here in the Daily Meditations, “Your True Self Is Love.”

Rilke

A couple of years ago, I retranslated for my own personal meditation, some of Rilke’s letters to Franz Xaver Kappus. As I was revising my talk for an upcoming Center for Action and Contemplation gathering, I realized that I’d like to share from these on my blog here. You may enjoy to meditate on them too, in a bilingual way.

Living the questions now has been since my twenties a large part of my imaginal world. I have been meditating my whole life, with increasing frequency and intentionality. Isn’t that simply what it means to be human? In my experience, living the questions now and pray without ceasing can be synonymous. And we see below that Rilke also says we may gradually, eventually live the answer, or embody love. Which reminds me that Anonymous writes in the Cloud of Unknowing that contemplation is love and is healing myself and others and also stirs my heart to love myself and others.

May our pausing to be still and to taste the peace we already are in our hearts bring you and me to compassionate living in our chaotic and hurting world.

You are so young, your life just beginning. I wish to ask you, best I can, dear friend, have patience with everything unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like closed rooms and like books written in a very strange language.

Don’t search for the answers now. They can’t be given to you, because you wouldn’t be able to live them. And living everything is the point. Live the questions now. Perhaps gradually, without knowing it, some day in the future you’ll live the answer. Perhaps you have the power within you to see and shape a very sacred and simple way of life.

Study and train for that. But whatever comes, accept it with great confidence, and if it comes from your own True Self, from some need of your inner being, accept it as who you are. And hate nothing.

Sie sind so jung, so vor allem Anfang, und ich möchte Sie, so gut ich es kann, bitten, lieber Herr, Geduld zu haben gegen alles Ungelöste in Ihrem Herzen und zu versuchen, die Fragen selbst liebzuhaben wie verschlossene Stuben und wie Bücher, die in einer sehr fremden Sprache geschrieben sind.

Forschen Sie jetzt nicht nach den Antworten, die Ihnen nicht gegeben werden können, weil Sie sie nicht leben könnten. Und es handelt sich darum alles zu leben. Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen. Vielleicht leben Sie dann allmählich, ohne es zu merken, eines fernen Tages in die Antwort hinein. Vielleicht tragen Sie ja in sich die Möglichkeit zu bilden und zu formen, als eine besonders selige und reine Art des Lebens[.]

[E]rziehen Sie sich dazu, – aber nehmen Sie das was kommt in großem Vertrauen hin und wenn es nur aus Ihrem Willen kommt, aus irgendeiner Not Ihres Innern, so nehmen Sie es auf sich und hassen Sie nichts.

Translated by Carmen Acevedo Butcher, from Rainer Maria Rilke. Briefe an einen Jungen Dichter: Mit den Briefen von Franz Xaver Kappus, Wallstein Verlag, 2021, p. 32. Hg. und mit Kommentar und Nachwort von Erich Unglaub.