Tag: centeringprayer

Hide-and-Seek Divinity

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

When I was a stay-at-home mom and our daughter was almost three, she loved to play hide-and-seek. One time in Mountain View, California, she and I were playing hide-and-seek, just the two of us, on the dusty, shaded playground a short walk from our rented townhouse. School had just let out, so we had the playground mostly to ourselves. I hid first, and she found me fairly easily. Various anatomical parts of me stuck out from behind a skinny pine tree.

“Your turn to hide!” I sang out, and off she dashed with that nervous look that is the excitement of possibly “being found.” I just saw her back as she pumped her arms and scampered off, head down, searching for shelter.

I was a stickler for following rules then, and, as the oldest of four siblings, I always was; so I turned my back to my toddler and dutifully counted slowly to twenty, out loud. Then I turned around and started searching. I was serious about the search, too. I looked behind the slide, behind the skinny pine tree, behind the bushes, and just as I started across the playground, still searching, out dashed Kate yelling, “Surprise! Here I am! I found you!”

Huh? I said to myself and started to explain to her that that is NOT how the game works, when I stopped and thought, In this surprise is some spiritual lesson, but I’m not sure what. We played several more times, with her “hiding,” only to jump out sooner each time, shouting, “I found you!”

Decades later, I think back on this hide-and-seek game with my then toddler. By temperament, I spent the first fifty years of my life as a rules follower, someone preferring order, but over the years that preference has given way (often whether I’ve wanted it to or not) in the face of life as it is truly lived. My natural temperament that yearns for routine and schedule and predictability has eroded in the waves of living and loving imperfectly, as a wife and as a mom and then as a tenured professor, writer, speaker, now an adjunct professor, and the sand of my once seemingly ordered life has been carried out to sea.

I turn to scripture, wise books, and poetry for nourishment as I always have. They are lighthouses on the rocky part of the shore, faithfully there no matter the weather.

Over time, I forgot those playground games with my daughter. Then, one day not too very long ago, I found myself translating the fourteenth-century classic on lectio divina (sacred reading) and contemplative prayer, The Cloud of Unknowing (also here). In Chapter 46, I read words that reminded me of those hide-and-seek games with our daughter:

And don’t be hard on yourself. By that, I mean don’t overtax yourself emotionally or physically.
Choose to be enthusiastic instead. This discipline [of Bible meditation and contemplative prayer]
doesn’t require brute strength, but joy. As you increase the joy in your contemplative work, you also
increase its humility and genuine spirituality, but if you force it, your efforts sink into a crude
physicality. So beware. Remember that anyone approaching the high mountain of contemplation
with a beastly heart will be driven away with stones. . . . That’s why you should be careful. Instead of
being stubborn as a mule, learn to love with gentleness and joy, kindness and good manners.
Cultivate self-control of body and soul. Accept the will of our Lord gracefully. Never lunge for it like
a hungry dog. Even if you’re starving, don’t be a greedy greyhound. Don’t grab. Let me suggest
how you can do this. I’m going to advise you to play a sort of game with God, seriously. Pretend
you don’t want what you want as much as you want it. When you feel that beast, desire, stirring
inside you with tremendous power, restrain it. Act as if you don’t want God to find out how much
you long to see him, know him, and feel him. Hide all that. Perhaps I sound like a child making up a
game, but I mean it. I’m confident that anyone with the grace to put my advice into practice will
eventually experience the joy of God’s playfulness. God will come to you, the way an earthly father
plays with his child, kissing and hugging, making everything alright. (105-106)

“God will come to you, the way an earthly father [or mother, I say] plays with his [or her or their] child, kissing and hugging, making everything alright” — this wise observation reminded me that my toddler daughter was so confident I would find her that she didn’t even try to hide well. To her, the joy was in not quite hiding and then bursting on me as soon as I began searching. She has always loved to surprise me with her unique presence. Would that I were that child with God my Parent, I thought.

In devotional literature, it’s not unusual to find this hide-and-seek image. Often ancient Christian writers use diction and description to suggest that our relationship with God is not unlike a game of hide-and-seek between parent and child, which ends with the parent’s “finding” the child and covering him, her, or them with kisses and hugs.

In the thirteenth-century spiritual guidebook, Ancrene Riwle, another anonymous author writes, Ure Louerd plaieth mid us, ase the moder mid hire junge deorlinge. (“Our Lord-God plays with us as the mother with her young darling.”) The Ancrene Riwle passage then describes a hide-and-seek game in which God our Mother hides. Her child cries out, “Mother! Mother!” and God jumps out with open arms and cluppeth and cusseth and wipeth (“hugs and kisses and wipes”) our eyes. The Ancrene Riwle author uses this image to describe the experience of how God withdraws or “hides” His grace from us for a time, before returning to “find” us.1

The hide-and-seek image is used, perhaps, because it suggests the intimacy of those who play this child’s game. In the classic The Spirituality of Imperfection, Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham tell a story that helps me understand this experience:


The Medzibozer’s grandson, Yechiel Michael, was playing hide and seek with another child. He hid
himself for some time, but his playmate did not look for him. Little Yechiel ran to Rabbi Baruch and
said amid tears: “He did not look for me!”
The Rabbi said: “This is also God’s complaint, that we seek Him not.” (107)

But perhaps this next story from The Spirituality of Imperfection best helps me understand those games of hide-and-seek with my daughter and also my own dark, difficult, and despairing life experiences where I felt that God was “hiding” from me.

The story is told of a young girl who loves to wander in the nearby forest and one evening becomes lost. Her frantic parents gather their friends and search for her. She herself has become very anxious, after trying several different paths to return home to no avail, and she eventually falls asleep in a clearing. The searchers as well become exhausted and many stop looking. Her father, though, continues searching through the night.


Early in the morning, the father came to the clearing where the girl was asleep. He suddenly
saw his little girl and ran toward her, yelling and making a great noise on the dry branches which
awoke the girl.
The little girl saw her father, and with a great shout of joy she exclaimed, “Daddy, I found you!”
(108)

Kurtz and Ketcham write, “[W]e find what we are looking for only by being looked for” (108). “[W]e find what we are looking for only by being looked for.”

As we played together those many years ago, my toddler daughter found what she was looking for, the assurance of my searching for her, by jumping out and surprising me, upturning the “rules” of hide-and-seek because she could count on my being right there.

Sometimes, when I’ve felt in hard times that Love’s face is turned from me, that God who is my best friend is “hiding” from me, what jumps out at me is often my husband’s listening, a hug or a kiss from my children, a verse or poem, a loving friend checking in, a kind stranger, a deliberately intentional wise comment, my spontaneous wonder before a newly white dogwood or while listening to a poignant podcast, and God says, “Surprise! I found you!”

Or maybe I say, “Father/Mother/Parent/Love, I found you!”

Sometimes, in mutually loving relationships, it is almost impossible to tell who does the finding and who is the found.

So I keep praying that I embrace the grace to keep on seeking. Is the seeking the finding and the being found?

I pray to live in the middle place of Christ’s enduring, loving mystery where grace and seeking meet, in that liminal middle space of the numinous Now.

1. Find this passage in Nicholas Watson’s Anchoritic Spirituality (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1991, page 132). This piece has been revised after being resurrected from my former iteration of this blog (2011).

Epiousios

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

“Our Father, who art in heaven. . . .” starts a prayer that has echoed down generations. Have you ever wondered what this oft-repeated prayer in the Christian tradition sounded like in one of the earliest English versions? Traditionally named the “Pater Noster,” I remember it as the “Sermon on the Mount Prayer.” How did it sound on the tongues of people who said it hundreds and hundreds of years ago in English? Very Germanic, with some Tolkienesque elfish-like liltings, as we’ll hear.

Here you encounter the beautiful Old English version. This prayer Jesus taught his students is found in the texts called the Gospels or “Good News,” in the books of Matthew at 6:9-13 and Luke at 11:2-4. I will read it in Old English from around the year 1000 C.E. My sources include Professor Roy Liuzza’s brilliant work on the Corpus Christi College Manuscript 140 (1994), translations of the Latin Vulgate, Sarah Ruden’s Gospels: A New Translation, many dictionaries with treasure, and my own experience with the Presence.

Through study, I became aware of the hapax legomenon or “unique use”—literally: “being said once”—here of epiousios, said “eppy-oo-see-ohs” (click here to hear the pronounciation), long translated as “daily.” This word epiousios is only found in Matthew and repeated in Luke in the same context. Translated as “daily” down through the eons in “our daily bread,” epiousios has been handed-down and handed-on doggedly as “daily” year after year after century after millennium, but again, since it’s only technically used once, in one context, in the anthology, there are no other uses to compare it to. Now many scholars don’t think it means “daily.” Imagine that.

Just this one word epiousios makes open-minded, research-loving, and contemplatively regarded translation suddenly seem quite vital to life and our well-being.

Some well-read scholars mention that epiousios may mean “tomorrow.” Which would suggest that Jesus, the man Rabbi Rami Shapiro enthusiastically calls the “God-intoxicated Jewish mystic,” would be recommending in his teaching that his students pray this way: “Give us today our bread for tomorrow.” How would that make sense? For Jesus also says, “Be mindful of the lilies in the field and how they grow—they don’t work and they don’t stress. . . . Don’t worry about tomorrow then. Tomorrow will take care of its own self.” (Matthew 6:28, translated by the author).

So the long and short of it is that no one knows what epiousios means. For thousands of years, this word has been prayed as “daily” when actually there may be more to it than that.

When I say this word, “eppy-oo-see-ohs,” I think of Cheerios, the honey nut kind, which are so delicious, and I am grateful for all food in my life. I was taught that growing up. When I would grumble about my hair not looking right or boyfriend troubles or driving junker cars that had such old batteries we often spent every winter morning jumping each other off to get cranked and going, I’d be told, “Do you have food to eat? Be grateful for that instead of grumbling. People are hungry in the world. Yet you have food.” Now gratitude is a habit that has become a part of my life, admittedly sometimes more than others.

I also think about how we have enough food in the world where everyone could eat and not worry about their next meal/s, if greed and a prevailing scarcity mindset didn’t prevent it and create billionaires instead. If we didn’t have an economic system built out by greed, which the Christian New Testament calls the “root of all evil.” Why is the legal minimum wage in Georgia $5.15? See DOL. Why is the federal minimum wage $7.25?

Why also would this petition—“Give us this day our daily bread”—be what Jesus asked for? Growing up, it never made full sense to me, since I was also taught in Sunday School that “God is love,” and love is generous, while “Give us this day our daily bread” seems repetitive, desperate, and part of a scarcity-based mindset. Which the God-intoxicated Jewish mystic did not have. He had an open-hearted, sharing, and inclusive 5-loaves-of-bread-and-2-fish-can-feed-a-multitude way-of-seeing (Matthew 14). So I moved as a kid toward interpreting this line of the prayer as, “Count your blessings. Be grateful.” Because I was taken to church three times a week, and we prayed this prayer at nearly every gathering at least once, I needed it to chime with Love. Otherwise, mindless repetition would make my brain spasm if the words didn’t feed me in some way.

And when Jesus says, “You always have the poor with you,” I didn’t think he meant that as fact, more like: “But really, why do you still have any who experience poverty among you? Didn’t you share everything out with those less fortunate and afflicted by the unfair systems?”

Today’s research into epiousios revealed that this Greek word is polysemantic, complexifying such questions with its multiple meanings. The ousia in it can mean both the verb “to be” or “I am” (from the verb eimí), and the noun “substance.” Epi- means, among other things, “on, at, besides,” even “intensely so.” So epiousios might mean “be present with.”

I see this lone adjective epiousios in the Sermon on the Mount Prayer as being “present-with-us.” A new translation then might include: “Give us this day our just-being bread” or “Give us this day our awareness-that-You’re-present-with-us bread” or “Give us this day our Nowness bread.”

Some see in epiousios the epi- as meaning only “over” and thus “supersubstantial,” or “transcendent.” But epi- in epiousios can mean “on” and thus “present with” and “immanent”—the sacred in the every day, the sacred in the mundane, the sacred in the silky sound of sugar poured into a mug of fresh coffee. The tang on the tongue and the silkiness of wine. The word Presence means something very similar with its prae- “before” and esse “to be.”

The Douay Rheims Catholic Bible version gives for Matthew 6:11: “Give us this day our supersubstantial bread,” translated from Jerome’s Vulgate: “panem nostrum supersubstantialem da nobis hodie.” Could the “supersubstantial” also mean “life-sustaining”—”Give us this day our life-sustaining bread.” And why might not the God-intoxicated Jewish mystic mean many wisdoms here? We could hold at one time: “Give us,” as in “Let us be aware we’re being given this, living in and from that awareness,” and “Let us be grateful for” our Cheerios and God’s Presence, so thankful for all F/foods.

Many scholars suggest epiousios modifying bread might mean “Eucharistic bread.” That could be true. But since it’s a ritual only happening in institutionalized churches, isn’t there room for more? Wasn’t Jesus inclusive always, always meaning Love is all-the-time and everywHere? And what is divine Presence if not Bread?

Also, I love the word “supersubstantial” because it can mean “superessential,” not merely as in “above or transcending all substance or being,” but as in “exceedingly, very essential,” the essence of Life. And even when our minds fall onto a binary track, as we might tend to do, if a person wants to take super- as “above,” then it is counterbalanced here with the sub- which is “below or under.” So “above” meets “below” in the here-and-now of *sta– in stantial/stance, which means “to make or be firm.” That which is, Is. The past traditional take on this word epiousios seems to be “it’s God’s transcendence,” but I see epiousios as divine immanence, the spirit indwelling all creation, making all creations, all creatures, all humans, and all beyond-humans sacred.

Since one of my best friends asked me to, I’ve read the Sermon on the Mount Prayer in Old English from around 1000 C.E. and posted it and my translation of it in modern English, on my YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/CarmenAcevedoButcherPresence, more specifically here.

I expand the opening direct address to be more inclusive, since the “Our Father” leaves a good many people out. Can the divine only be masculine? Is the divine also feminine? Is it both and also neither? Is it all of these and beyond all of these?

Also, what should we call this prayer? Jesus’s Prayer? The Sermon on the Mount Prayer? The more we move away from the language of domination, slavery, power, and ruling, the more love we can open up to, accept, and share.

Fæder ure, Módor ure, Ældran ure,
þu þe eart on heofonum,
si þin nama gehalgod.
To becume þin rice.
Gewurþe ðin wille on eorðan
swa swa on heofonum.
Urne gedæghwamlican hlaf
syle us todæg.
And forgyf us ure gyltas
swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum.
And ne gelæd þu us on costnunge,
ac alys us of yfele.
Soþlice.

Our Father, our Mother, our Parents,
you who are in the Here-and-Now,
may your name be honored in all we do.
May your Presence be recognized.
May your Love be done on earth
as it is in your Home.
Give us this day our bread
of your Presence.
And forgive us our harmings of others,
as we forgive those who harmed us.
And don’t let us know danger,
but keep us from harm.
So be it.

Thank you for reading and listening, and for your kind presence in the world. Peace to all.

Notes:

“Ældran” means “older ones” or “elders,” translated here as “Parents” in honor of the Christian embodied Trinity.

The “heofon” Sarah Ruden translates as “in the skies.” That ancient cosmogony seems to risks furthering the alienation that comes from only conceiving that divinity is outside our earth, and far from us, when mystics like Hildegard see the viriditas or greenness of divinity in all of earth. And “heaven” has from its first days in English also meant “God’s home” in any place on earth, not just in a no-place “beyond the sky,” also: “celestial space,” “peace, paradise,” and “a state of everlastingness,” even “Love.”

The “ġehālgod” means in Old English “be made holy,” from hālgian, while holy, whole, health, and hale are all cognates with hālig. The “ġehālgod” means “consecrate” and has both intention and action in it. We intend to be whole and we act to love the world whole. “May your name be hallowed” seems to mean “May I become whole in Love, and may I contribute, even in small ways, to the world being whole in Love.” “May I be healthy, whole.” “May the world be healthy, whole.” Because the Presence is healthy, whole.

The “rice” (said “ree-chay”) that is cognate with reich has been tainted with the Nazi’s Third Reich. Rice and reich are related to the verb reichen “to reach” which includes diverse meanings like “extend, pass, serve, and be sufficient” or as nouns: “extension, passing, service, and sufficiency, even presence.” And when we add in power words like “kingdom” and “Lord” to such a commonly repeated prayer, we bow to the existing systems which Jesus counterculturally resisted, and offered healthy alternatives to. So rather than “your Kingdom come” for “To becume þin rice,” the sentence could mean “your Presence and Love be recognized and reach—be sufficient—even here, even now, in this moment, and everywHere.”

“Give us this day our bread / of your Presence” is written with the line break to emphasize that our physical bread and our spiritual bread are included. Being aware that all F/food is a gift, to be shared. There is also space there for including eucharistic bread, if one wishes it.

Sarah Ruden says about “temptation” or costnunge here: “Temptation: The word peirasmos refers to outward tests of all kinds, including those done on inanimate objects; but interrogation under torture could be a reference in some passages of the Gospels. Torture of noncitizens was routine in evidence gathering in the Roman legal system, and large-scale persecutions of Christians had begun before any of the Gospels’ texts were finalized. ‘Test’ or ‘ordeal’ covers this without suggesting sexual tantalization, in which the Gospels evince almost no interest.”

The “yfel” is usually interpreted in an unhelpful binary way. Most mystics teach it as “intending to harm.” The word evil itself has Faustian hints from the Proto-Indo-European *upelos for “going over and beyond acceptable limits.” This root meaning for “evil” of “exceeding due measure” or “overstepping proper limits,” as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, seems helpful as a reminder of what being a decent human means.

Friends

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

I translated Brother Lawrence. I entered some dusty and beautiful books from the 1600s, and they brought me the gold in my shadow and new friends. Something similar happened with Cloud.

Many of these new friends I kind of knew already. If you count having read all of Mirabai Starr’s books friendship. Isn’t it though, in a way? Do you do that, too? You find one book by someone that really resonates, so you find all they’ve written and devour it?

So here are a few kind friends whom I’m grateful for and whom I met through translation. Here they are in no particular order, each in a few lines, that like the tip of an iceberg just suggest rather than represent the richness they bring into my life and into the world’s. Some hyperlinked URLs are here for those who want to delve deeper into the richness these wise friends contribute to the global community. Today, we can be grateful for their helpful videos, too, that we can find on the internet.

Mirabai Starr, whose way of living teaches me more about beyond-binary life than even any of her amazing books, acclaimed translations, creative non-fiction works, Wild Mercy, and one on-the-way.

Mark Dannenfelser of Contemplative Outreach International, a wise storyteller who also introduced me to David A. Treleaven’s Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing.

Rev. SeiFu Anil Singh-Molares of Spiritual Directors International, who brings new life to conversations surrounding translation, spiritual companionship, and trying to live a life of tranquility and kindness.

Jon M. Sweeney, who cultivates meaningful conversations in “Off the Page” at Spirituality & Practice, and in his many books–I’m joyful anticipating his and Mark Burrows’s next Meister Eckhart translation!

Lama Yeshe Rose, who shared with me about her adventures translating Tibetan scriptures, and I’ll never gladly be the same, for what I learned in two hours of our talking.

Aurelia Dávila Pratt, whose A Brown Girl’s Epiphany: Reclaim Your Intuition and Step into Your Power is a wise, powerful book, asking all of us to honor the sacred voice within us and be kind to others.

Renée Roden, a freelance reporter and writer, also member of St. Francis Catholic Worker House in Chicago, whose deep listening and writing skills inspire me, and I hope for future books from her.

Josh Patterson and Greg Farrand who interviewed me for the podcast (Re)Thinking Faith and who gave me such grace of listening and who share their own journeys in ways that give me great hope and joy.

Annmarie Sanders, IHM, who interviewed me for the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) and shared such wisdom with me about what women religious are thinking and experiencing today.

Clifford Brooks III, who publishes The Blue Mountain Review, hosts the NPR podcast Dante’s Old South, and cultivates community through The Southern Collective Experience in the best, most lasting ways.

Cassidy Hall, Kevin Johnson, and Carl McColman, who through the Encountering Silence podcast, and in countless other ways teach us all what it looks like to really, really, really pay attention and listen.

Cynthia Bourgeault, a kind friend since Cloud days, is much cherished for how she creates newness from ancient wisdom and listens into the mysteries and brings us all back joy and new ways of seeing.

Shima Bagheri Ahranjani, is also my friend because of the Cloud. She emailed me a few years ago to say she loved the Cloud. Shima is a dear friend, she has a Ph.D. in Persian literature, and she has given me one of the greatest gifts I always yearned for–friendship with someone who knows Rumi in Farsi, inside and out.

And so many many more. Making me so grateful. Little wonder. From the last section of my Introduction to Practice of the Presence: A Revolutionary Translation by Carmen Acevedo Butcher, we encounter the amazing friend Brother Lawrence, who has a way of cultivating friendships wherever he goes:

The best description I know of him is, unsurprisingly, by his good friend and mentee Joseph of Beaufort. It’s from the Profile:

The virtue of Brother Lawrence never made him harsh. His goodness made him gentle. He was a warm, welcoming person. He gave others confidence. When you met him, you felt you could tell him anything. You knew you’d found a friend. As for him, once he knew the person he was dealing with, he spoke freely and showed great kindness. He said simple things, but these were always to the point, and full of common sense and meaning. Once you got past his rough exterior, you discovered a unique wisdom, an openness of mind and a spaciousness beyond the reach of an ordinary lay brother. His depth of insight exceeded all expectation. . . . And you could consult him on anything.

On the pages that follow, you will meet this genuine soul who lives in these words. His authenticity flowed from his friendship with the Presence. His gentleness and warmth, great kindness and common sense, wisdom and openness of mind, which made him a wonderful friend, are the spiritual muscles that his practice of the presence prayer developed, over time.

Brother Lawrence is the reason this wise book has stayed alive through centuries of plague, famine, inequity, inhumanity, religious strife, wars, floods, and our ever-present human fragility. He extends friendship and wisdom to you.

Enjoy becoming friends, and spending time with him, returning now and again for conversation.