Tag: translation

Georgia of Santa Fe & Julian of Norwich: Love as Reseeing

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

During my formative years we moved a great deal owing to my father’s volatility, every two or so years pulling up stakes and heading elsewhere. Each new place had a small evangelical church where I was taken three times a week. Once Wednesday evenings for suppers and sermons and twice on Sundays, mornings and evenings, a punitive deity began to patrol within my soul seven days a week, eyes watching for transgressions. Like my wanting to have a life larger than the one prescribed for women. Like my persisting in wishing for a denied bikini as a teenager. Like my wanting to speak my truth but being relegated to nursery duty and dirty diapers. This inculcation wounded me deeply. I am still healing.

I still don’t quite know how. But I trust my practice. Maybe because of how much time I spent and spend in Nature listening to Silence. Maybe because of my mother’s consistent gentleness. Maybe because of kind teachers K-12 and beyond. Somehow I developed a different, my own idea what a Christian was, which didn’t match what was shouted angrily from the pulpit. A Christian was kind, listening, and open to healing and growing. A person who saw life as it was. Someone you’d feel safe around. Someone whose notion of a Deity was one of kindness, inclusivity, compassion for self and others, and a goodness that opened into Mystery.

I had to sort through a lot of misinformation growing up. I’m reminded of my charming and sober-eyed Cuban immigrant granddaddy who knelt a lot before others during his career of fitting women’s feet into high-heeled pointy-toed shoes at Rich’s. He didn’t like it when someone tried to take home a pair of shoes that mixed two sizes, a 7.5 for the buyer’s slightly smaller left foot, an 8.0 for the right foot. He learned to recognize such. He called this sagacity in English: “knowing shit from Shinola.” Shinola being a popular brand of shoe polish in the 1940s. My granddaddy’s colloquialism seems like something an early Church father like Paul might say, if he’d been alive during World War II when everyone knew of or had used Shinola polish. For Paul’s, see Philippians 3:8: σκύβαλα or skubala.

We’ve gotten away from seeing things as they are. Collective delusions rise. One way I root myself in reality is through mindfulness. Simply being attentive to What Is/what-is. This is not a left-brain activity. Mindfulness involves my mind, heart, soul, self, body, others, nature, and daily events. This “What Is/what-is” Reality/reality reminds me that the 6th-century C.E. philosopher and theologian (Pseudo-)Dionysius called God ὅ τι ποτέ ἐστιν or “Whatever-It-Is/Whatever-It-Is-Becoming.”

This “Whatever-It-Is/Whatever-It-Is-Becoming” fluid name for Divinity has a wonder-full openness to it inviting us to keep our eyes open. Too, the painter Georgia Totto O’Keeffe (1887-1986) made art that convinces me to look more deeply at everything. We see the fruits of her re-looking here online: https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/exhibitions/rooted-in-place/, and we hear her philosophy in words: “Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven’t time, and to see takes time—like to have a friend takes time.”

Centuries earlier, another who took her time to see is the 14th-century plague-survivor, writer, theologian, spiritual companion/director, anchoress, and Christian mystic Julian of Norwich. Using different words, she reminds us of the same truth: Looking is everything. How we see is crucial. Julian writes in Middle English in her Revelations of Divine Love: “God is nerer to us than our owen soule.” Said easily: “Goad ees neigh’-rurr tow oos th-ah-n oor o-wen soo’-luh.” “God is nearer to us than our own soul.” Often translated as “God is closer to us than our own soul.”

Julian’s use of “God” is not small-minded nor male-dominated. It belongs in the lineage of Augustine’s pronoun “It” for Divinity, Dionysius’s “Whatever-It-Is/Whatever-It-Is-Becoming,” and Hildegard’s evergreen Viriditas for the rejuvenating Spirit in Nature. Though alive at the same time as Chaucer and the Cloud of Unknowing‘s Anonymous, the anchoress also has a gender fluid view of Divinity.

Julian’s eyes-wide-open, steady, gentle, fiercely wise, joyful emphasis on God as Love in a world of “health or happiness and suffering” (“well and woe”) has over the centuries softened her own God-language into what is Best for those who read her. As one laboring in the bureaucratic, phrenic discourse community of “higher education,” and having also experienced diminishment via Church language, I find God-language not the most helpful for dialogue with my soul, Self, interior parts, or the diverse world. Julian’s wisdom and inclusivity draw me in to see that her “God” is one of Mystery, not dogma.

Whether calling God Whatever-It-Is, Whatever-It-Is-Becoming, It—or Love, True Self, Presence, Self, Christ, Higher Power, Ultimate Reality, Yahweh, Ground of Being, Divine, Spirit, or any other, or none, I am habitually looking in all places and in all ways and on every day how to be kind, listening, self-compassionate, compassionate to others, and open to growing and seeing life as it is. Someone others feel safe with.

We all fail. But what a worthy intention to have. To return all throughout one’s life to “How can I be Love?” so when a final breath comes, I exhale a last time in peace.

We have so much healthy psychology now around “True Self.” We also have an expanding interior galaxy that we can look at up close through the wiser lens of the beyond-the-monomind paradigm, as Internal Family Systems’ Richard Schwartz practices. We no longer need to posit a True Self against a single “False Self,” with all the negative baggage coming with the word “False” and any artificial binary approach. Rather we can see our various interior parts as what we have not in ourselves yet fully recognized, embraced, dialogued with, brought in from lonely exile, reassured of our love, listened to again and again, unburdened, befriended, healed, and invited to be Self-guided. This process introduces us to the ongoing unfolding nature of Divinity or Love in ourselves, in others, in Nature, and in what we experience as time. Philosopher Ilia Delio explores this Reality/reality and calls It/it the “Not-Yet God.” This “not-yet” Divinity takes us back to Dionsyius’s loving “Whatever-It-Is-Becoming” Reality.

Whatever a person’s choice, faith, wisdom tradition, or other kind path, perennial wisdom lives on in diverse forms, and when we listen, we discover what we can best hear given our experiences, and at this time what most honors our own life and journey, helping us best live the questions. As Rilke reminds.

Experiencing that Ultimate Reality is Kindness is more important to me than what to call It. I suffer from severe anxiety, and Kindness is more significant to my well-being than words can say. When I become anxious filling in more forms and spending infinite hours calling Anthem’s Accolade and Delta Dental lines, talking with other human beings who are trying to help me find ways I can access the labyrinth of ever more expensive healthcare and dental insurance, even as I am painfully aware of present and former students, friends, family, and millions of others in the U.S. who unfairly do not have the basic human rights of healthcare or dental insurance, and as I hold all that in tension with  my gratitude for having insurance at all, I find myself in my anxiety returning to fellow seekers like Georgia O’Keeffe and Julian of Norwich for nourishment to keep looking.

I eat their words. I steep in them. I write them in permanent black ink on cards and carry them with me or put them on my desk for daily seeing and reseeing.

They remind me that repetition is my friend. Just as my wounded mind-heart-soul-body-self can repeat fearful stressful thoughts loop after loop, I can steep my thought-loops in O’Keefe’s and Julian’s well-earned truths about seeing and reading deeply and attentively, returning to What-Is/what-is:

“Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven’t time, and to see takes time—like to have a friend takes time.” ~Georgia O’Keeffe

And

“God is nearer to us than our own soul.” ~Julian of Norwich

Sometimes I carry Julian around with me on a 4”x6” card, so I can hear her saying in the original: “God is nerer to us than our owen soule,” “Goad ees neigh’-rurr tow oos th-ah-n oor o-wen soo’-luh,” “God is closer to us than our own soul.”

To be human is to be forgetful. Keys, papers, files, someone’s name, a car somewhere in large parking lot. Sometimes we forget this forgetfulness. To forget our forgetfulness is to become somehow less human. When we forget that we forget, we may skim the surface of our lives for hours, days, months, years, and even decades.

I’m grateful for those who remind us not to forget the simplest things—like looking two or three times or more at a flower. How remarkable a flower becomes even if we only give it a seconds-long second glance.

We also forget looking isn’t time-consuming. We’re likely to put off attentiveness, as if it will cramp our style, keep us from making our way down our to-do list. But as we are reminded by the Anonymous monk who wrote the many brief letters of Cloud of Unknowing to a 24-year-old woman spiritual directee/companion, contemplation takes no time at all.

Contrary to what we may think, contemplation is as quick as an atom, the Cloud’s Anonymous says. The same is true of a painter’s countless glances at an iris, a lover’s many glimpses of the beloved. There are never too many looks. Who says to their lover, I’d look at your beauty and exquisite youness more, but truly I just don’t have the time. Instead we can’t get enough. You just don’t grow weary of looking and re-looking, each time seeing something new.

That’s why respect and love seem synonyms. Both root in the act of reseeing. Respect linguistically sprouts from reseeing. Its spect is in the spect-acles through which we “see,” and re– simply means “again.” Re-spect is we see again and again.

It reminds me of translating. You look again and again at a word and at a passage you love, and you return to it again and again. You revise—you re-vision—you re-see it all, until you see it, truly see it. Then you look again. By looking you are loving through seeing. Another reason we do this is that the world and all creatures in it are becoming, changing, and need re-seeing to see what newness is there.

As Benedict says, “Always we begin again.” To paraphrase, “Always we see again.”

We forget to see. We forget to look. We forget to recognize Love is closer to us than our own soul. We forget Love is all we are and all there is and Love is before all that too. We love those who remind us of these simple human truths.

Looking up close at Julian’s work, going beyond her fame, we see Julian is not too well-known for saying: “God is nearer/closer to us than our own soul.” I hope this little blog might contribute to changing that, bringing it forward in our collective consciousness.

I hope we see within it Julian’s wrestling with larger themes. My favorite translator of Julian is the award-winning author, teacher, and translator Mirabai Starr, whose Revelations presents this truth beautifully as “God is closer to us than our own soul.”

Most readers who find Julian are attracted to this Christian mystic’s more well-known “All will be well” quote or one of its many variations. If we read through again and again, steeping in Mirabai Starr’s alive and accessible translation, looking for every time Julian’s “All will be well” wisdom comes, we see it resonates again and again with her lesser-known quote: “God is closer to us than our own soul.”

Returning again, reseeing Mirabai Starr’s translation of Julian’s Revelations, we first look at two passages with “God is closer to us than our own soul” as grounding:

  • God is closer to us than our own soul. He is the foundation on which our soul stands. He is the energy that keeps the essence and the sensuality together so that they will never separate. In true rest our soul sits in God. In unshakable strength our soul abides in God. In endless love our soul is naturally rooted to God. And so if we yearn to know our soul, to have oneing and dialogue with it, we would be wise to seek our beloved God, in whom our soul is contained. Our essence can be rightly called our soul. Our sensuality, too, can be rightly called our soul. This is because they are one in God. Our sensuality is the glorious dwelling place in which our beloved Jesus is enclosed, and our natural essence is enclosed within him, while the blessed soul of Christ rests inside the Godhead. I clearly saw that it is necessary for us to experience longing and contrition until we have been led so deeply into God that we truly and completely know ourselves. I also saw that it is our Beloved himself who leads us into this depth, through the same love by which he created us and redeemed us, in mercy and grace. Still, we cannot come to a complete understanding of God unless we come to truly know ourselves. . . .
  • It is also true that [Love] is closer to us than the heart can think and the tongue can tell.

These observations made by Julian are foundational for her most famous saying, “All will be well.” They remind us God is our “energy” and “essence” and human “sensuality” and “rest” and “unshakable strength” and “soul.” They evoke our soul’s true etymology with its roots in divine Love. Our part is to “seek our beloved God” and “truly know ourselves.”

If then we compare these truths with the passages where some variation of “All will be well” appears in Mirabai Starr’s translation, rereading, reseeing, and steeping in them, we see Julian’s famous “All will be well” not as the platitude we’ve accidentally made it out to be, but as a well-wrestled-to-and-experienced truth for the anchoress. I have carried these words around on cards, too, or had them nearby during my work day.

Mirabai focuses us on Julian’s experience by using Julian’s most famous words as title for her translation’s Part II: “Every Kind of Thing Shall Be Well,” as Chapter 27’s title: “All Will Be Well,” and as Chapter 31’s title: “I Have the Power to Make All Things Well.”

Here are a few passages below from the text itself, translated by Mirabai Starr. They show “All will be well” not as a static axiom from the anchoress but as an experiential truth for Julian, emerging from her ongoing, ever-evolving, full-of-questions dialogue, part of her practice, of her returning to Love in gratitude and in suffering, in “well and woe.”

We love Julian’s Revelations in part because she models engaging Presence by living the questions.

  • “Oh, good Lord, how can all be well? The transgressions of your creatures have caused such harm!”
  • There was not a single question or doubt I raised for which our good Lord did not have a reassuring response. “I have the power to make all things well,” he said, “I know how to make all things well, and I wish to make all things well.” Then he said, “I shall make all things well. You will see for yourself: every kind of thing shall be well.”
  • Once our Beloved said, “Every kind of thing shall be well,” and on another occasion he said, “You will see for yourself: every kind of thing shall be well.” My soul recognized a number of teachings contained in these phrases. . . . When he says, “You will see for yourself: every kind of thing shall be well,” he is referring to this level of care. He wants us to know that he will not forget the least little thing.
  • And so I draw deep comfort from these words, “I have the power to make all things well,” and I know that our Beloved has many great blessings in store for us.
  • It is enough to know that our Beloved intends to bestow a great blessing on us, which he has kept hidden and treasured in his holy breast since before time began. This is the deed, known only to him, that will make all things well. Just as the blessed Trinity created all things from nothing, so the blessed Trinity will make all things well that are not well.
  • And so how could it be that every kind of thing shall be well? In light of this teaching, it seems impossible! The only answer I could find in any of my showings was when our Beloved said, “What is impossible for you is not impossible for me. I will keep my word in all things, and I shall make all things well.”
  • For when I saw in a showing that God does all that needs to be done, I did not see any sin, and I saw that all is well. And then when God did reveal something to me about sin, he reassured me that “All will be well.”
  • But then an answer came into my mind, as if offered by a friendly intermediary: “Accept this in a general way, and contemplate the grace of our Beloved as he reveals it to you,” the voice said. “For it is a far greater honor to God for you to glorify him in everything, everywhere and always, than in any one special thing.” I agreed. I realized that if I were to act wisely and follow this teaching, maybe nothing in itself would make me particularly happy, but I would also not become especially anxious or distraught about anything in particular, either. For “All will be well.” To behold God in all things is to live in complete joy.
  • During our lives here on earth, we experience a wondrous mixture of well and woe. We hold inside us both the glory of the Risen Christ and the misery of the Fallen Adam. Christ protects us in our dying and, through his gracious touch, uplifts us and reassures us that all will be well.
  • Yet often when our falling and our misery are revealed to us, we become overwhelmed by shame, and all we want to do is run away and hide. Our courteous Mother does not want us to flee. Nothing would distress her more. She wants us to behave as a child would when he is upset or afraid: rush with all our might into the arms of the Mother.
  • I saw that there is no greater stature in this life than that of a child, who is naturally humble and free from the encumbrances of power and intelligence, until our Divine Mother brings us up to the bliss of our Divine Father. This is what Christ meant when he uttered these sweet words: All will be well. You will see for yourself: every kind of thing shall be well. The bliss of our Motherhood in Christ will begin anew in the joy of our Father God, and this new beginning shall be ever renewed, without end. And so I saw that all her beloved children whom she birthed by nature return to her by grace.
  • He did not say, you will not be tempted; you will not be troubled; you will not be distressed. What he said was, “You shall not be overcome.” God wants us to pay attention to these words and be strong in absolute trust, in both well and woe. Just as he loves and delights in us, it is his will that we love and delight in him, and fully trust in him, and all will be well.
  • The more clearly the soul sees his blessed face by the grace of loving, the more it longs to see him in his totality. It is true that our Beloved dwells within us and is here with us, calling to us and enfolding us in his tender love and will never, ever leave us. It is also true that he is closer to us than the heart can think and the tongue can tell. There will be no lack of well-being there.
  • This blessed friend is Christ. We need to bind ourselves to his will and guidance, and join ourselves ever more intimately with him, no matter what state we are in. For whether we are clean or unclean, we are always the same in his love. In well or in woe, he wants us to never run away from him.
  • Then none of us will be moved in any way to say, Lord, if only things had been different, all would have been well. Instead, we shall all proclaim in one voice, Beloved One, may you be blessed, because it is so: all is well. We see now that everything happened in accordance with your divine will, ordained before the beginning of time.
  • Throughout the time of my showings, I wished to know what our Beloved meant. More than fifteen years later, the answer came in a spiritual vision. This is what I heard. “Would you like to know our Lord’s meaning in all this? Know it well: love was his meaning. Who revealed this to you? Love. What did he reveal to you? Love. Why did he reveal it to you? For love. Stay with this and you will know more of the same. You will never know anything but love, without end.” And so what I saw most clearly was that love is his meaning. God wants us to know that he loved us before he even made us, and this love has never diminished and never will. All his actions unfold from this love, and through this love he makes everything that happens of value to us, and in this love we find everlasting life. Our creation has a starting point, but the love in which he made us has no beginning, and this love is our true source. Thanks be to God!

To read these examples yourself of “All will be well,” discover them in Mirabai Starr’s stellar translation Julian of Norwich: The Showings: Uncovering the Face of the Feminine in Revelations of Divine Love (Hampton Roads Publishing/Bookshop.org).

Repetition is our friend. We read again that Julian says, “God is closer to us than our own soul.” “God is nerer to us than our owen soule.” “Goad ees neigh’-rurr tow oos th-ah-n oor o-wen soo’-luh.” “God is nearer to us than our own soul.”

I invite you to join me in steeping in these passages from Mirabai’s translation of Julian and in “God is closer to us than our own soul,” reading one or more again, slowly, perhaps alongside O’Keefe’s “Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven’t time, and to see takes time—like to have a friend takes time.”

We were perhaps taught that reading fast and faster is best, but it’s simply not true for most of us. We are meant to read, we humans, as ruminants, reiteratively, recursively, again and again, digesting words. The deep repetition of unrushed reading is our friend.

Returning to words that can heal us reminds us of our essential humanity as we recognize and experience the truth of Love as the essence of our aliveness and rest.

Peace.

Welcoming Practice

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

This piece is also posted on Carmen’s YouTube Channel here.

“To welcome and to let go is one of the most radically loving, faith-filled gestures we can make in each moment of each day. It is an open-hearted embrace of all that is in ourselves and in the world.”

— Mary Mrozowski, creator of the Welcoming Prayer

The Welcoming Prayer Practice created by Mary Mrozowski is a good sitting or “as-you-go” exercise. It was influenced by her training in biofeedback, Thomas Keating’s teachings on the False/True Self, and Jean Pierre de Caussade’s Abandonment to Divine Providence.

It has three movements:

1/ Focus. Feel. Sink. Hearth. Touch. Drop in. Scan body. Become aware of sensation/s. Be present with them. You are befriending them by listening to them and feeling them and being with them, which helps them become unburdened.

2/ Welcome what you are experiencing in your body as a way to say yes to the Divine / Love /God / Presence / True Self. Wel-come = will/pleasure + cuma/guest. Say: “Welcome, frustration….grief…joy…fear…anger….”

You welcome only the physical or psychological content. You are not welcoming an external situation, like cancer. Author, mystic, and priest Cynthia Bourgeault reminds, you are not “passively aquiesc[ing] to situations that are in fact intolerable.”

3/ Let it go when you feel it is time. There is no need to rush. You might go between noticing and feeling and being with (1) and welcoming (2) for a while. When you feel ready, say: “I let go of my frustration, etc.” You might also add, if you feel comfortable doing so: “I let go of my cravings for security, affection, and control. I let go of my wish to change what I am feeling. I embrace this moment just as it is.” Please word however most helps you.

This practice helps unburden acquired emotional programs and heal the wounds of a lifetime by meeting them where they are stored, which is in the body. It moves us from our got-to-fix-it mentality and returns us to unconditionally loving presence. This letting-go is not final but is repeated over time as we return to this exercise, and as we practice this welcoming, we are unburdening and undoing emotional programs that keep us operating out of the small-egoic self. This practice returns us to the Center, to the Source of the Source or Ultimate Reality, Love.

Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems work (No Bad Parts) can be a help in adapting this practice to our needs, and a therapist and spiritual direction can support us also.

Cynthia Bourgeault sums it up well:

“’By the power of the Divine Indwelling active within me, I unconditionally embrace this moment, no matter its physical or psychological content’. And by this same indwelling strength, once inner wholeness is restored, I then choose how to deal with the outer situation, be it by acceptance or by spirited resistance. If the latter course is chosen, the actions taken – reflecting that higher coherence of witnessing presence – will have a greater effectiveness, bearing the right force and appropriate timing that Buddhist teaching classically designates as ‘skillful means’”.

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).

Ask Your Professor

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

Every semester, all semester long, from Day 1 and sometimes before Day 1, I give my students surveys. Survey means to “look over,” but actually I think of them more as “listening tours.” I plan countless hours, pouring myself into course design and then into the time-intensive buildout on Canvas. Then I meet students, listen to them through surveys, in conferences, and in other ways, and then day-by-day tailor-make my courses to fit the actual individuals in them. It takes more work and isn’t always easy, but it’s worth it.

This semester I taught 3 courses, two of which were Advanced Research CWR4B, designated as fully online for students who are immunocompromised or are dealing with other challenging illnesses and precarities. They are a wonderful two sections of students, and we’ve had a good semester. But several have gotten COVID, there’ve been deaths in the family (not uncommon anymore), and they’ve known other hardships, family emergencies, and other stresses.

One survey that is pretty much given every year about this time is my End-of-Year survey. Students do it and upload it as an assignment. I give them time to do most of it in class, and most finish in the 20-30 minutes we take for it. The survey contains these prompts for my students in Advanced Research CWR4B:

Please respond to questions below. When done (only one thoughtful sentence each, please), upload your survey on Canvas:

  1. Who are you? (one thoughtful, detailed sentence only, per prompt, please)
  2. How has the research you’ve done influenced your understanding of who you are–how has it shaped, changed, or affirmed your identity?
  3. Of all you learned in CWR4B, what most surprised or delighted you to learn, and/or what are you most proud of that you’ve accomplished in CWR4B this semester?
  4. What did you learn about the research process or about libraries that will stick with you longest as you go forward in your remaining time at Cal as well as into your career? Also, please just add “yes” or “no” here: Did you meet with a librarian one-on-one? If so, with whom, and how did that one-on-one meeting help you become a better researcher? If not, just write “No.” It was not a requirement–I’m just curious.
  5. During our many in-class and on-Canvas discussions, what is one story/experience you learned about another classmate or from another classmate that really changed how you view the world or research? You may omit or include the classmate’s name, as you wish.
  6. What class activity or assignment most helped you understand how to navigate the library’s research treasures, and what work that you did on your own most helped you understand what it means to research?
  7. What was your definition of research coming into CWR4B, and what is your definition now of research here in our last weeks of CWR4B? 
  8. What do you yourself most need and want to do to finish strong in CWR4B? 
  9. What can I most do to help you as our semester together ends?
  10. A question about online class delivery, to help me help future researchers / students / R4Bears: To provide accessibility to all students, our CWR4B is designated as a fully-online learning/class to help students with immunocompromised health and/or other challenges. What is the one most difficult aspect of a fully online course that you find most difficult, and what can I do about it to make that aspect better?

I remind students of my rationale in this way: “Metacognitive activity is a strong component of any excellent researcher’s toolbox (as are empathy and compassion). You know I’ve listened to you through surveys since Day 1 and all during our time together. Here is another chance a) for you to reflect on your personal journey and identity and b) for me to listen to you and to learn more about you and how you learn and what you’ve learned. So these surveys help you, they help me, and they help future students.”

I decided to mix it up a little this year, and led in to this End-of-Year survey by asking them the class before it to answer these two questions just in the Zoom chat: “What keeps you grounded, and If you could ask me anything as a Cal professor and/or as a human being, what would you ask me?”

Here are questions from two classes of first-year students and sophomores. Their questions were so sincere and wise that they brought out in me not just ad hoc comments in the next class period (the class where I also asked them to take the End-of-Year survey) but made me sit down, take handwritten notes on my ideas for responses, and then type them up, and then revise them. I also recorded them because I only had time to read each class’s questions and my responses, since this time of year especially we have much to get done in class. If you’d like to listen to this 25-minutes “Ask Your Professor,” it’s on my YouTube Channel at “Ask Your Professor,” and you’re invited to subscribe too, once there.

  • If you could go back and do anything different during your time in college what would it be/ why?
    • Worry less about grades. But it’s complicated by the system. Studying in high school with hopes of college was my way out of trauma. My academic scholarships that paid for college were dependent on maintaining top-notch grades, so that complicated my life and added stress. People told me later I had the first 4.0 in college history. My alma mater was founded in 1873 and was known for academic rigor and grade deflation. Eventually, my whole identity was tied up in a 4.0, and that wasn’t healthy for me. I did read and learn a lot, though, thankfully. Good grades were what would enable me to get an education and change my dicey home and socioeconomic circumstances. That stress contributed to panic attacks and recurring stomachaches.
  • What has been a memory that has impacted your life? Has this influenced  why you wanted to become an educator?
    • I’ll never forget when I went for my college interview. Dr. Paulina Noble, an English professor, interviewed me. She must have seen a skinny brown kid who was shy, hunched, not confident, but here’s what she said to me: “You have smart eyes.” I carried that comment with me like a powerful secret, wore it inside me like a magic cloak for years, never forgetting her words. This small award-winning liberal arts college in northwest Georgia offered me the most in scholarship money, so of course I chose it. That and for Dr. Noble.
  • Was there a turning point in your life that guided you to be where you are (career wise, mentality wise)?- open to interpretation
    • I don’t know what age I was because there were many growing-up years that were and are a blur time-wise. But I remember sitting cross-legged on a rough-textured, late-1960s-era, garish orange carpet, quite worn but always clean. I was high school or maybe college age. This is my childhood bedroom. Suddenly I realized I had to forgive someone because if I didn’t it would be mortally unhealthy for me. And I asked the Universe for that. Help me forgive x-person for x and x and x and x. I don’t want to, but if I don’t, I’m worried for myself. I don’t know how to either, but help me do it. Somehow. I felt a shift. New space opened. I can’t explain it, and it took time, and honesty about my experience, and new boundaries, and it was hard, but after some years, it was done. In some ways, it goes on even into today, because healing from trauma takes ongoing self-compassion, much learning about and honoring of my voice, much meditation, and lots of healthy community.
  • Could you give us one piece of advice as college students?
    • Trust your gut.
  • Who was/is your role model and why?
    • Well, at 6, it was Batman. The cartoon version from the 1960s. He had genius-level intelligence, was a master detective, a master escapologist, was in top condition physically, was a martial artist, and fought for good and for the underdog—all things I wanted and felt I lacked. Later, my true role model has always been my first and longest best friend, my mother, who exemplifies that person who believes in you, no matter what, and who tells you, always, that they believe in you 100%. She has always seen people as people, never valuing a CEO or a Superintendent or a wealthy person over a cleaning person or a teacher or a person who is homeless or poor. She treats everyone with respect. Her model taught me a lot about kindness. How kindness isn’t earned by some rules that change depending on whether someone is “useful” to another or not, but that kindness is given to all. My mother is the type of person whose heart aches knowing that one person in the world is hungry, without a home, without healthcare, and without love, so that sticks with me, because she has lived out that concern-for-others her whole life.
  • It honestly surprises me that some educators care a lot about their students (you!) but others just teach the course material and provide minimal support. How would you inspire other educators to provide the care that students appreciate and need most times?
    • Thank you, first. Your kind words encourage me. I don’t know how to do that, how to inspire others in this way. I think that intention matters because as a teacher, there is so much listening involved, and no matter how much you plan and prepare (which for me is countless hours), you have to be a kind of jazz musician, where you also are willing to turn up, listen to your students and their situations and strengths and needs, and then respond in the moment to those unique human beings who make Cal great (you all). That means you have to be willing to revise your carefully planned curriculum as you go, rather like an experienced, much-practicing-beforehand jazz musician riffs. Michelle Obama said in an interview, “Don’t hug unless you mean it, because people will know the difference.” Her words made me think: “Don’t teach unless you mean it, because people will know the difference.”
  • If you could have any other career what would u have done?
    • Race car driver in Europe or a therapist.
  • What’s your least favorite part about being a professor at Cal?
    • Grades. I could write a paper or even a book on how I think grades are tied to an ancient oppressive system that doesn’t encourage learning; however, I teach composition, research, and public speaking, where students aren’t learning how to do heart surgery. I do think we are learning comparably important skills: how to spot mal-, mis-, dis-information, how to respect each other and have cross-cultural conversations, how to be good citizens, how to cultivate healthy community, how to honor your voice, and how we can contribute to the Common Good.
  • What is one piece of advice you would give a college student for the future?
    • VOTE.
  • If you decided not to be a professor/writer, what do you think you would be doing right now?
    • I’d be lonely, because students have brought such meaning to my life! (I really like how you put together “professor/writer” here in your question.)
  • What is the best gift you’ve received?
    • So many. Life. My children. Sean.
  • Did you face any hardships while a student and female that made you question your profession/career? If so, how did you overcome it? I’m interested in stories of overcoming adversity from a female perspective.
    • My father told me I couldn’t go to college. He said he had three children behind me, and he couldn’t afford it. He wouldn’t help me, and I shouldn’t even apply. I was a senior in high school. So I used money from my job at Granny’s Fried Chicken and quietly applied to three colleges, and it was so expensive to do that. I was the fast-food restaurant’s opening employee, getting there at the crack of dawn to set up the ice cream machine, stock out the restaurant, get the tator tots ready to go for deep frying, chop the coleslaw by hand with a huge knife, sweep the parking lot, and get the cash registers up and running. Once I made it into college, I worked as a secretary to a professor to earn money to pay for my books. This was 1979, and one semester a professor had us buy 8 books, all expensive, and my book bill was $400, which for that time was hugely costly. I looked it up. That’s about $1,650 in money today, for one semester’s worth of books. And all during my years at college, there was hardship at home. I treated schoolwork like it was a job. I worked hard to stay in school and was stressed 24/7, but a few kind professors helped me keep going, too. I’ve never forgotten them or their kindness. I try to pay it forward.
  • What are some of your favorite books/ books you recommend to read!
    • There really are too many to mention. I’ve spent countless hours reading. Some of these are from my growing-up years. Pippi Longstocking. The Alchemist. All of Carl Jung. Flowers for Algernon. Anne of Green Gables & Percy Jackson, which I read to our children. Watership Down. Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific on a Raft. Tolkien, especially The Hobbit. All of Mary Oliver, poetry and prose. Diary of Anne Frank. The Outsiders. Heidi. The Little Prince. All of D. W. Winnicott. All of Ann Ulanov, especially Primary Speech.
  • What was the worst piece of advice someone gave you?
    • An English professor at my college whom I looked up to told me when I shared my desire to write children’s books: “You don’t want to do that.” Then told me: “Here’s why you don’t want to do that.” This professor’s response helped me see what not to do. I would listen instead.
  • A piece of advise for finding your passion
    • Be self-compassionate. Be kind to you. Listen to your heart. Be with people who support you 100%. Don’t be shy about telling people what you bring to the table. Hone your public speaking skills in your downtime, even if by practicing what you’d say if someone asks you: “Tell me about yourself.”
  • What is one awesome thing about being a professor that you’ve discovered over the course of your career?
    • I realized over time that what I say to students and genuinely mean, and what I hope for students (which is that you self-actualize and succeed), I also hope for myself. I only realized that fairly recently. Cal students taught me. So I truly mean: “Honor your voice. Contribute to the Common Good. Go forth and conquer, O ye mighty ones.” And also I think, I’m reminding myself of all that.
  • What is your dream destination to vacation at
    • Georgia—to see my family. Next—Anywhere in Hawaii.
  • What keeps YOU grounded?
    • Meditation. Breathwork. Walking. Walking meditation. Being out in nature. I go to the marsh to see creation’s beauty. I go to remember I can’t fly and how beautiful bird flight is. To marvel. Family and friends keep me grounded.
  • What do you think Cal can do better?
    • Listen to students and act on what is said.
  • What’s the most interesting thing you have experienced or the most interesting interaction you’ve had?
    • Standing before the Grand Canyon. That awe is profound. And I’ve had the joy of meeting a lot of people (especially authors) I respect and admire who are also famous, but that’s not what stays with me in the end because everyone is just a person, no matter how accomplished. So here’s my story. When I was in graduate school, my brother was in a severe wreck, he and his friends hit by a drunk driver, who died. Two of my brother’s best friends died. They were in their late teens, early twenties. Gone. I left graduate school at UGA for a week to tend to him. He had nearly died. I was trying to make all As since that was what was expected, and UGA had just shifted to a new way of testing Ph.D. students, and a lot of my friends had failed out of the program, which was distressing. It was all about intellect and analysis, and the stress to perform was heavy. At the end of my time in grad school, I was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, so I made it, but this was during my Master Degree, so my success was by no means assured yet. Meanwhile, my brother had a cracked skull from the wreck and a chip had come off of it. I saw it. He was also in a back brace, sleeping on the sofa because it was stiffer and also he couldn’t be moved back to a bedroom yet. One night when he was asleep and I was up watching him, ready to bring him water, and help with whatnot, I was thinking how he almost died. I looked over, and he was enveloped, even cocooned in a white light the likes of which I’d never seen before nor since. A graduate student trained to question everything, I was like, This can’t be. I must be imagining things. So I closed my eyes, turned away, kept them closed for a beat to “reset,” then turned back, and opened them. This white light that I’d never seen before and I’ve not seen since was still there. I did that a third time. Still there. So I stared at it. It wasn’t scary but it also wasn’t earthly. It was Other. All I could figure was it was like my brother had been to the other side, he’d been dipped in it, and he had somehow come back. This light was from that dipping. I still don’t know what it was.
  • Anything I would ask Professor would be what motivates you to wake up every morning? For students it’s to push through schools, or grades, etc. but what is that thing for you?
    • I get up wanting to help students honor their voices and succeed. I am still so grateful for teachers K-12 and professors who did that for me. There were many. I want to help empower and inspire students to invest in themselves and (continue to) contribute to the Common Good. To do that, two things are needed. I’ve got to continue trying to honor my own voice (a work in progress), and I’ve got to figure out new ways daily to listen to my students, to what they are really saying, and then act on that.
  • what inspired you to write a lot of your books on spiritual translations?
    • First, for my own healing. They pulled me to them inexplicably even before my intellect quite knew what they were offering me. The works I’ve translated are widely acclaimed ancient medicine for the soul, self, body, and mind. Childhood trauma led me out into nature, as it did Mary Oliver, the poet. While there, nature saved me, as it did her, and I started meditating, without and before knowing it. The books I translate are all about kindness. They are universal, for everyone. They have global appeal and reach across religious, wisdom tradition, and other divisions, to anyone wanting to know how to be more human (in the best sense of that word). Their authors lived in the 900s, in the 1300s, in the 1600s, and in other ancient times. Though these authors are technically “dead,” they are alive to me, and translating them is what first gave me a community of friends who help me a) deal with my shadow self and also b) discover the gold in my shadow, the good in me and my talents. Since then, I’ve been fortunate, through translation, to make friends with those who are doing this work also today.
  • What’s your favorite part about being a professor at cal
    • You. You all. Period. My students. Learning from and teaching my students. You all inspire me. Daily.
  • what is your favorite part of your career? As an author/professor/translator…what do you like about each job?
    • As an author, I love how writing articles and books helps me be and stay a student. As I’m researching and writing and revising, I regularly experience those moments of “WTF am I trying to do here? What does this mean? How will I organize this?” Genuine confusion. That’s part of the learning process, when done well. So being an author reminds me how students feel starting something new. It makes me more compassionate as a professor. Then, as a professor, I love when a student says, “I see!” after many struggles, and when a student writes me years later to say, “Thanks for the recommendation. I got my dream job!” As a translator, I love how translation requires me to listen actively so that I can hear what the work and what the author are actually saying rather than what I wish they were saying. That means, I only translate texts that are kind and open-minded inherently. Translating is the most intimate form of reading, it’s meditation, and it requires applying all of my linguistic and scholarly skills in an intense way over sustained periods (a marathon of sorts, and one I love, and trained for). Translating, I find that these classic texts translate me to myself. I grow. I heal. I translate these works for everyone, including my students, and I do it with an inclusive mindset, hoping we can find more peace, meaning, and joy in these texts.
  • What’s your favorite way to spend a day off?
    • With my family on a hike in Briones Regional Park. Or, alternatively, with a book and a cup of coffee or tea.
  • I would like to ask how do we manage stress and emotional downfalls towards the end of the semester? It’s been a rollercoaster of emotions this week and sometimes I just feel like I am stuck.
    • I’m so sorry to hear you feel stuck. We all know this feeling, and it’s never fun. The awareness of it is helpful, though, so I applaud you for that. It seems for me the solution is complex—being with family and friends; trying to eat well, sleep, drink water, meditate, exercise (one reason walking meditation is so helpful to me); having a support group I check in on and who check in on me; and going to therapy (is sometimes exactly what I’ve needed)—and Berkeley has student-to-student therapy too (which I learned about from student leaders when I was on the Mental Wellness Taskforce, nominated to that by students: https://cabutcher.weebly.com/support-for-students.html Student-to-Student Peer Counseling at Cal and Lean on Me are two programs you can find there on the collaborative teaching website my CWR1A and CWR4B students made. Please try to be kind to yourself. Also, practicing self-compassion (as researched by Kristin Neff) helps me to no end.
  • What is the best piece of advice you have received?
    • Three come to mind. A student once said about a comment I made in class, “You do you, Dr. Butcher.” I love that. My therapist in Rome, Georgia, said to me often, “Trust your gut. Don’t forget—trust your gut.” That has stuck with me. A wise person once said to me, “Forgive yourself for where you’ve let yourself down or hurt others. Then ask for forgiveness from anyone you have hurt, and atone, do better. Change. Always practice self-compassion.”
  • What’s a piece of art (movie, book, music, etc) that changed the way you looked at the world?
    • Monet. I mean, there are so many movies, books, music, etc, but Monet comes to mind at once. I love how he paints Rouen Cathedral and haystacks, so many of these “same” paintings but at different times of day and/or year, which makes all the difference. He finds the beauty in the nowness of today’s light and this time of day in this season of the year. Those series of paintings are remarkable. When I was a Rotary Scholar at The University of London, these paintings by Monet were exhibited at London’s Royal Academy, I went alone. With Sean. With friends. With family visiting. With friends visiting. I went and went and went. And when I was a Rotary student at Heidelberg eight years before that, right after I graduated from college, I was just an international student from a very rural part of Georgia, Monet was NOT part of my vocabulary, nor were museums. A friend invited me to Zürich, Switzerland, and I went to the Kunsthaus (Art Museum), and there was a wall-to-wall water-lily painting by Monet so all-encompassingly and unbelievably beautiful that before I knew it my usually conscientious, color-within-the-lines 22-year-old self heard an alarm going off. A security guard approaching I darted off realizing I’d touched it without knowing I was going to. Something about Monet.
  • What was your most wonderful experience in college?
    • College was hard for me. Sorry to disappoint, but it was, every day hard for me. I was living through family hardship then, and undiagnosed dyslexia and depression, and putting one foot in front of the other was a gargantuan achievement that cost me so much energy. On the face of it, I looked happy, accomplished, thriving, doing all the extracurriculars and well, but I was dying inside. Among all that, having a kind, brilliant teacher take my writing seriously—Wilson Hall—he commented on my work as I do on yours—gently and specifically. He helped me move from perfectionism in writing to trying to honor my voice. Also, during college we went on field trips for Dr. Hall’s environmental class, up in the beautiful wilderness of northwest Georgia Appalachian foothills. We went hiking and canoeing the rapids, and we all spent one night alone, apart from the group, all by myself, just twinkling stars in an ink-black sky, and that experience has been formative and generative for me, to this day. And I’m very grateful not to be living with depression now and that’s one reason I emphasize therapy and asking for help.

Thank you for asking me these questions. You all rock, Go, Bears!

Please note: I am proudly a lecturer, an adjunct professor, thankful to be teaching at a school that encourages respect for all people, but “Ask Your Adjunct Professor” doesn’t have quite the same snazzy, short ring to it as “Ask Your Professor.”