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.

Boats

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

Thank you to all at my YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@CarmenAcevedoButcherPresence or this blog https://youtu.be/qr6EQtIofgU and thank you to those new to reading my blog. Welcome!

Boats

This is a blog about how experiences we have remain in our memory and can gain new and deeper meaning in our lives simply because of the gift of time. The gift of time can whisper the inexplicable Presence in ways sometimes our unresolved selves could not then hear it. What happens when we pay attention to images that resurface for us, bringing joy and peace? It’s also about finding what ways contemplation happens in our life and then being true to that by simply turning up for it, again and again, imperfectly, unresolved, still questioning and evolving, only partially understanding or partially experiencing, or even sometimes not having any felt sense of God’s love. But showing up anyway, as we are.

When I was an international student at Heidelberg University, thanks to a Rotary Scholarship, I was homesick living in a dorm in Neuenheimer Feld, and many days after classes walked the hills of that lovely city, often alone. I was 22. Almost without knowing it, I fell in love with the barges sailing up the Neckar River and down it, silently, low in the water, with mostly smooth flat tops. Pencil-thin from above, they reminded me of toy boats almost or poetry in action.

A walker since my early teenage years, escaping tumult at home, my walk then was along Philosopher’s Way. The path was across the river from the magnificent ruins of the Heidelberg Castle. At various times of daylight, below me the castle’s red sandstone looked pink as sunrise against the dark green trees. Below it, always in my peripheral vision, was the city’s Old Bridge with its matching red sandstone, elegant curves, and scalloped patterning of the placid blue water.

What made these times of solitude special is that I also walked there not alone sometimes, with Frau Sophie Buschbeck as my companion. At first, “Sie” for the formal “you,” fairly soon she said, “Call me ‘Du’ [the informal ‘you’]. And Mutti Buschbeck.” And later she said: “Call me Mutti, if you wish.” She was a widow at 79, and she’d take my arm and off we went. Climbing the hills, her head down, her saying through quick puffs of breath: “You have to stay fit. You have to have hills to go up.”

I didn’t know then that my walks could be meditation. I had no awareness of that. As I was taught then, prayer was something you did with carefully chosen words, to make yourself a better person, to help you serve others better, to note make mistakes. I was raised with a policeman in my soul. Who was my god then, little g.

I had been raised to be what was called “selfless,” to think of others and their needs first, and not to think on my self. I didn’t know yet that I needed to make space for, cultivate, appreciate, and get acquainted with my self/selves/ego so that I could one day move beyond such. I was too injured to know any of this. I hadn’t yet learned how painful that is.

I used my mind as a buffer against pain. If I kept my mind busy, I could provide some numbing against a pain I couldn’t yet name. And my mind was dyslexic, so it took up quite a lot of my time to keep it busy.

But I could walk, thankfully, in the green trees above the Neckar River. Even though I was miserable, not really consciously taking in the scenery as much as unconsciously absorbing it and being immersed in it healingly. Thankfully I did have friends there who cared for me: Mutti Buschbeck, my kind roommate Gundi, the Buschbeck family who also took me in, and others I met along the path, literally, including one kind-hearted man, a dentist from another country, who took such a liking to me that after just three walks together there he asked me to marry him. I politely declined.

Looking back, I see how much walking meditation has been my path. It has been a true gift. I didn’t plan it this way. I walked because I was lonely and I loved nature, always have. Saying walking meditation is a way to pray was not in the limited vocabulary of my dogmatic evangelical upbringing. I had no idea I was doing anything “right” by walking and in fact felt that my entire life was a failure then.

I walked the way an injured animal will often find a bush and crawl into it and try to rest and heal. Call it instinct.

That I didn’t pass the language test to get into Heidelberg University and had to take remedial German courses there was just the academic component of a much larger failure health-wise, family-wise, and in every other way. I was so not at home inside myself that even every physical step was somehow painful, yet I was given the gift of getting out and walking, even so. Alone and other times with Mutti Buschbeck.

Sometimes I picture what my life might have been like had my young self heard a guest preacher say at one of the small churches I was taken to: “So contemplation is any means you use—walking meditation, rosary, mass, a 20-minute sit—any means you use—to experience this Self. . . . [That] is for me contemplation. And don’t get hung up on the posture or the program or the procedure cause I think as there are so many personalities there’s going to be many ways to experience it.” It would be decades before I heard Richard Rohr say that.

I am still watching the boats on the Neckar River come and go silently, low in the water, pencil-thin and smooth. They do not hurry. They move with ease. They do not zig or zag. They move ahead. With spaciousness. They seem to move without moving. They taught me without teaching me, I caught from them, how calmness can be lived out.

Only much later would I learn that Thomas Keating teaches something about boats. His words gave me words for what I’d learned from the Neckar.

The River is pure consciousness. This makes sense to me because I remember in graduate school walking up to my sixth-floor room after my sister had moved on to work as a nurse, and I was alone there, and I needed to forgive someone for my own sanity, and as I went to put my key in the lock and open the non-refurbished, stained wooden door to that ramshackle, tiny, but wonderfully located apartment, I felt a r(R)iver open my heart and run through my emerging selfhood.

Boats of all sizes float down this River. I remember the barges and boats of all sizes that floated down the beautiful Neckar River, a tributary of the Rhine River, and home for many terraced vineyards. Sometimes I see myself as a diver under the River. I’m not wearing any gear. Somehow I can just breathe under water, with ease. I’m sitting on a rock there below, comfortably, a good way down, and I see the boats now going by above me, some are small, some are long and large, some are medium in size. These are my thoughts. They come and go. New ones appear.

They can be anything, any thought, any feeling. In contemplation I let the boats go by. I don’t react to them or respond to them. I remember the experience of being up on Philosopher’s Way, with the quiet boats below going to and fro along the river, that feeling of being sick, lonesome, lost, and in pain, and yet also held. What a gift.

So in contemplation I don’t leave my cozy rock, swim up, and climb onto a boat, to analyze what it’s carrying, though I may feel that I’d like to. I don’t leave my rock, swim up, climb on, and ride downstream. I let it go. I let it pass by above me.

In contemplation, I don’t engage with these, I don’t judge them. I let them go. This helps me see I’m not what I’m thinking. Space opens up to discover who I am apart from my thoughts, I discover the wonder and the love that that River holds for us.

I sit on my rock, and I notice the River all around me.

Blessings to all of you friends, and thank you for being here,

Carmen

Unmediated Life

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

You can also listen to this blog on Carmen’s YouTube channel.


I walk about two hours a day so I can feel the ground under my feet. It’s unmediated.

Unmediated is “not mediated: not communicated or transformed by an intervening agency.”

In the middle of unmediated, hidden there, is media. Media is the original plural of medium. Medium is from an ancient root *medhyo– for “middle.”

Mass media is a medium of communication such as newspapers, radio, and television.

Mass media often stands between us and the real news about our lives.

On my walks there’s nothing much between me, my body, and earth. I don’t traverse the earth on Google Earth by moving my mouse. I don’t read of its wonders in an ebook. I don’t watch a colorful documentary on YouTube. I see earth’s flowers, smell its grass, hear its birds, taste its fog on winter days, and touch its soft feathers when they molt to earth.

The media scholar Marshall McLuhan and I became friends when I was eleven. We met at a public library. My mother dropped her four kids off while she went grocery shopping. For the bring-one, take-one bookcase, I took in a paperback ordered at school from Scholastic and took a book home titled The Medium is the Message/Massage.  

Later I found there The Mechanical Bride, The Gutenberg Galaxy, and my favorite, Understanding Media. These changed me. Luckily I had no idea he was a “philosopher” or someone a pre-teen should not read. I understood enough, and he stayed with me. I returned to his work often over decades.

When I read his ideas—that most people are unaware “blissfully” of “what the media do to them” and do not notice that “the medium is also the message [and the massage in that] . . . it literally works over and saturates and molds and transforms every sense ratio,” my seeing was changed forever. I started noticing the radio and the tv in new ways.

In graduate school, much later on, I learned McLuhan did his dissertation on grammar, logic, and rhetoric, all my favorite inquiries, and was himself influenced by Jesuit scientist and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

So I can study media and learn with and from my students, now I teach a course at University of California, Berkeley, titled, “The Meme and the Human (& AI): Digital Literacies,” inspired by that chance encounter in a public library decades ago.

Memorably, the Introduction to the first edition of Understanding Media begins, “After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding.” McLuhan adds, “Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.” He argues that we are approaching (now are in, he might say) “the final phase of the extensions of [hu]man—the technological simulation of consciousness,” and he says that “the creative process of knowing will be collectively” because we have “collectively and corporately extended . . . our senses and nerves by the various media.”

McLuhan is an expert in pointing out the obvious that was not so obvious until he points it out: “Any extension [like a bike, car, cell phone, or social media, I add], whether of skin, hand, or foot, [or consciousness] affects the whole psychic and social complex.”

Sensory overload can prevent us from living in the present, unmediated, as McLuhan observes, “This is the Age of Anxiety for the reason of the electric implosion that compels commitment and participation, quite regardless of any ‘point of view.’” He also gave me hope by naming “[t]he aspiration of our time” as “wholeness, empathy and depth of awareness” as “a natural adjunct of electric technology,” by which he would also have meant our internet and social media today.

The essences of these “electric technology” changes are hard for us to detect, however, while they are happening. McLuhan calls it “the invisibility of any environment during the period of its innovation.” He compares the “content” of a medium to “the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” He adds that while a movie’s content is a novel, a play, or an opera, that the “effect of the movie form is not related to its program content.”

He saw, for example, that these media come to us (as the radio did in his day) “with person-to-person directness that is private and intimate” and that “touch[es] remote and forgotten chords.” This tends “to numb our central nervous system,” he says because when it is “extended and exposed,” we are overwhelmed, and that’s one reason, he notes, that we live so much with a rear-view perspective, what McLuhan calls in one interview “the rearview-mirror view”—because we are numbed by the new technologies as they are making a new environment—we work to make the old environment that much more visible by turning it into an art form and attaching ourselves to its objects and vibes, which explains a good deal of the present-day nostalgia.

Anyone wanting to read more about this can find media scholar Limor Shifman’s Memes in Digital Culture, where she helps us understand today’s “participatory culture.”

All I can say is that awareness for me includes walking the earth and listening to egrets, my family, my friends, my students, and everyone I meet. Trying to be a real listener is a path to walk also.

And I try to listen to my ancestors and these include those I’ve lived with and translated or communed with, like Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510).

It would be wonderful if we could all read Friedrich von Hügel’s The Mystical Element of Religion as Studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and Her Friends published by James Clarke in London in 1908. In fact, I put that there to remind me to one day. Ah, my bucket list of books grows apace.

But we don’t really need to read von Hügel. Instead we can go back to the words of Catherine. It’s one reason I translate or have translated and one reason I look up word etymologies every day. I go to the spring, the source of the Water. It’s also why I read the Bible and other Scriptures with commentaries and history books beside me, to reveal their words’ meanings and their contexts and to reflect on living out the word: “God is Love” into today.

These practices have also been and are life-changing helps with my decades-long-undiagnosed dyslexia.

If I go to the sources of classic works translated in English and read their original words, and if I go to words’ sources, and read their origins, then I can make up my own mind what they mean for me, as factually based as possible.

It’s also why I practice and study Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems, and that’s for another blog piece. I want to go to my own sources, my own parts, because I have experienced and do experience that the pre-packaged, systemically taught monomind paradigm is not true for me. As Beatrice Bruteau (and many past mystics) said and experienced, all of us have “artificial selves” and a “natural self,” and I call these my non-authentic, non-relaxed selves and my True or Authentic Self. Students always say, “You do you” or “Be authentic.” That Self.

About the True Self, in a very encouraging way, Catherine of Genoa gives us a word still as fresh as dew for today. Catherine is famous for saying, according to the translation you read, either, “My Me is God,” or “My deepest me is God!” And I think how she worked at the hospital helping people.

For “God,” “Love” or “Kindness” or “Ultimate Reality” or “Something More” et al., are often preferred.

Her words spark the question: What does it mean to be human?

Not to be a screen.

And what did she actually say in Italian?

“In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.”

Look at how the “Dio” and the twice “mio” rhyme. The Dio meaning God and the mio meaning my. That’s the medium being the message/massage. The è means is and the essere means to be or being. The English words essence, essential, and presence all have the same root: Latin esse for “to be” from the ancient root *es- “to be.”

I go to sleep now saying, “In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.” On mindful repeat.

I walk through the marsh saying, “In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.” Then I stop to listen to the egrets.

Because as Rilke writes, “Through all creatures extends one single space / World space within. Through us the birds fly silently. Oh, wanting to grow, I look outside at the tree / that grows in me.” [From “Durch alle Wesen reicht der eine Raum: Weltinnenraum,” Rainer Maria Rilke, Gedichte 1906–1926, Sämtliche Werke, II]

“In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.”

If I translated Catherine’s word, which I try not to because I’d rather experience it, I’d hear, “In God is my being, my Me.”

I go to sleep now saying, “In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.”

I walk through the marsh saying, “In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.”

I remember how Catherine of Genoa helped people at a hospital. I try to teach and be kind.

“In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.”

I teach, I sleep, I walk through the marsh. I listen. To the beautiful, raucous calls of the egrets.

Unmediated.

Without media.

“In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.”

“In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.”

“In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.”

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’”.