I sing everyday. It’s my name. Carmen means “song or poem.” Even on days of challenging ways, I sing. I’ve always been thankful to live under and with and through a name that means “song or poem.” It’s like my very name reminds me, “Did you sing today?”
Kindness. We could be kind more.
Every true religion has kindness as its core. Same for every true philosophy and wisdom tradition. One way I listen to the Mystery at the heart of the Heart is I sing. While my brain swirls and loops and careens, like winds in March, my song holds my heart against love and I deepen into tenderness, as I sing.
A friend shared with me the Medicine Buddha Chant. Some 1400 years young, it’s as old as Beowulf. And totally otherwise has nothing in common with Grendel’s poem. It’s a prayer for healing from the fakery of duality. It’s a prayer for the dissolving of negative thoughts. It’s a prayer for the healing of past traumas. It’s a prayer for bringing calm energy.
A friend shared it with me. He’s a Buddhist teacher. I sing it often. Through the marsh. Down sidewalks. Folding clothes. Sitting at the computer. And in bed at night, quietly.
I think of the billions of souls and bodies and selves who’ve sung it before me and who sing it now with me and I with them, together. You see it spelled many different ways when transliterated. Here is what I am singing:
“Teyata om bekanze bekanze maha bekanze radza samudgate soha.”
Here is my meditative translation of that, with my friend’s approval:
“It’s like this. Om, sacred tone of the universe, holy body, holy speech, holy mind. Medicine Buddha, King, Supreme Healer. Eliminate and remove the pain of illness of mind and body, eliminate and remove the pain and illness of spiritual suffering, and greatly eliminate and remove any slightest imprints left on my consciousness by disturbing thoughts, Ocean of goodness and wisdom, may my prayer go to the highest, widest, deepest, in sincere intention, blessing, I offer this prayer and let it go out.”
I also made a short translation and a melody for the original and the English version, and I sing both:
“Teyata om bekanze bekanze maha bekanze radza samudgate soha.”
“Sacred Song of the Universe, heal me, heal us | Deeply heal us where our mind-heart wanders from Love.”
I’m posting these, sung, on my YouTube Channel, if you want to listen, sing with silently, or sing along aloud: https://www.youtube.com/@CarmenAcevedoButcherPresence
Remember, you’re singing for yourself, not as a performance.
The way life really is, for yourself, not performance.
“Our Father, who art in heaven. . . .” starts a prayer that has echoed down generations. Have you ever wondered what this oft-repeated prayer in the Christian tradition sounded like in one of the earliest English versions? Traditionally named the “Pater Noster,” I remember it as the “Sermon on the Mount Prayer.” How did it sound on the tongues of people who said it hundreds and hundreds of years ago in English? Very Germanic, with some Tolkienesque elfish-like liltings, as we’ll hear.
Here you encounter the beautiful Old English version. This prayer Jesus taught his students is found in the texts called the Gospels or “Good News,” in the books of Matthew at 6:9-13 and Luke at 11:2-4. I will read it in Old English from around the year 1000 C.E. My sources include Professor Roy Liuzza’s brilliant work on the Corpus Christi College Manuscript 140 (1994), translations of the Latin Vulgate, Sarah Ruden’s Gospels: A New Translation, many dictionaries with treasure, and my own experience with the Presence.
Through study, I became aware of the hapax legomenon or “unique use”—literally: “being said once”—here of epiousios, said “eppy-oo-see-ohs” (click here to hear the pronounciation), long translated as “daily.” This word epiousios is only found in Matthew and repeated in Luke in the same context. Translated as “daily” down through the eons in “our daily bread,” epiousios has been handed-down and handed-on doggedly as “daily” year after year after century after millennium, but again, since it’s only technically used once, in one context, in the anthology, there are no other uses to compare it to. Now many scholars don’t think it means “daily.” Imagine that.
Just this one word epiousios makes open-minded, research-loving, and contemplatively regarded translation suddenly seem quite vital to life and our well-being.
Some well-read scholars mention that epiousios may mean “tomorrow.” Which would suggest that Jesus, the man Rabbi Rami Shapiro enthusiastically calls the “God-intoxicated Jewish mystic,” would be recommending in his teaching that his students pray this way: “Give us today our bread for tomorrow.” How would that make sense? For Jesus also says, “Be mindful of the lilies in the field and how they grow—they don’t work and they don’t stress. . . . Don’t worry about tomorrow then. Tomorrow will take care of its own self.” (Matthew 6:28, translated by the author).
So the long and short of it is that no one knows what epiousios means. For thousands of years, this word has been prayed as “daily” when actually there may be more to it than that.
When I say this word, “eppy-oo-see-ohs,” I think of Cheerios, the honey nut kind, which are so delicious, and I am grateful for all food in my life. I was taught that growing up. When I would grumble about my hair not looking right or boyfriend troubles or driving junker cars that had such old batteries we often spent every winter morning jumping each other off to get cranked and going, I’d be told, “Do you have food to eat? Be grateful for that instead of grumbling. People are hungry in the world. Yet you have food.” Now gratitude is a habit that has become a part of my life, admittedly sometimes more than others.
I also think about how we have enough food in the world where everyone could eat and not worry about their next meal/s, if greed and a prevailing scarcity mindset didn’t prevent it and create billionaires instead. If we didn’t have an economic system built out by greed, which the Christian New Testament calls the “root of all evil.” Why is the legal minimum wage in Georgia $5.15? See DOL. Why is the federal minimum wage $7.25?
Why also would this petition—“Give us this day our daily bread”—be what Jesus asked for? Growing up, it never made full sense to me, since I was also taught in Sunday School that “God is love,” and love is generous, while “Give us this day our daily bread” seems repetitive, desperate, and part of a scarcity-based mindset. Which the God-intoxicated Jewish mystic did not have. He had an open-hearted, sharing, and inclusive 5-loaves-of-bread-and-2-fish-can-feed-a-multitude way-of-seeing (Matthew 14). So I moved as a kid toward interpreting this line of the prayer as, “Count your blessings. Be grateful.” Because I was taken to church three times a week, and we prayed this prayer at nearly every gathering at least once, I needed it to chime with Love. Otherwise, mindless repetition would make my brain spasm if the words didn’t feed me in some way.
And when Jesus says, “You always have the poor with you,” I didn’t think he meant that as fact, more like: “But really, why do you still have any who experience poverty among you? Didn’t you share everything out with those less fortunate and afflicted by the unfair systems?”
Today’s research into epiousios revealed that this Greek word is polysemantic, complexifying such questions with its multiple meanings. The ousia in it can mean both the verb “to be” or “I am” (from the verb eimí), and the noun “substance.” Epi- means, among other things, “on, at, besides,” even “intensely so.” So epiousios might mean “be present with.”
I see this lone adjective epiousios in the Sermon on the Mount Prayer as being “present-with-us.” A new translation then might include: “Give us this day our just-being bread” or “Give us this day our awareness-that-You’re-present-with-us bread” or “Give us this day our Nowness bread.”
Some see in epiousios the epi- as meaning only “over” and thus “supersubstantial,” or “transcendent.” But epi- in epiousios can mean “on” and thus “present with” and “immanent”—the sacred in the every day, the sacred in the mundane, the sacred in the silky sound of sugar poured into a mug of fresh coffee. The tang on the tongue and the silkiness of wine. The word Presence means something very similar with its prae- “before” and esse “to be.”
The Douay Rheims Catholic Bible version gives for Matthew 6:11: “Give us this day our supersubstantial bread,” translated from Jerome’s Vulgate: “panem nostrum supersubstantialem da nobis hodie.” Could the “supersubstantial” also mean “life-sustaining”—”Give us this day our life-sustaining bread.” And why might not the God-intoxicated Jewish mystic mean many wisdoms here? We could hold at one time: “Give us,” as in “Let us be aware we’re being given this, living in and from that awareness,” and “Let us be grateful for” our Cheerios and God’s Presence, so thankful for all F/foods.
Many scholars suggest epiousios modifying bread might mean “Eucharistic bread.” That could be true. But since it’s a ritual only happening in institutionalized churches, isn’t there room for more? Wasn’t Jesus inclusive always, always meaning Love is all-the-time and everywHere? And what is divine Presence if not Bread?
Also, I love the word “supersubstantial” because it can mean “superessential,” not merely as in “above or transcending all substance or being,” but as in “exceedingly, very essential,” the essence of Life. And even when our minds fall onto a binary track, as we might tend to do, if a person wants to take super- as “above,” then it is counterbalanced here with the sub- which is “below or under.” So “above” meets “below” in the here-and-now of *sta– in stantial/stance, which means “to make or be firm.” That which is, Is. The past traditional take on this word epiousios seems to be “it’s God’s transcendence,” but I see epiousios as divine immanence, the spirit indwelling all creation, making all creations, all creatures, all humans, and all beyond-humans sacred.
Since one of my best friends asked me to, I’ve read the Sermon on the Mount Prayer in Old English from around 1000 C.E. and posted it and my translation of it in modern English, on my YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/CarmenAcevedoButcherPresence, more specifically here.
I expand the opening direct address to be more inclusive, since the “Our Father” leaves a good many people out. Can the divine only be masculine? Is the divine also feminine? Is it both and also neither? Is it all of these and beyond all of these?
Also, what should we call this prayer? Jesus’s Prayer? The Sermon on the Mount Prayer? The more we move away from the language of domination, slavery, power, and ruling, the more love we can open up to, accept, and share.
Fæder ure, Módor ure, Ældran ure, þu þe eart on heofonum, si þin nama gehalgod. To becume þin rice. Gewurþe ðin wille on eorðan swa swa on heofonum. Urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg. And forgyf us ure gyltas swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum. And ne gelæd þu us on costnunge, ac alys us of yfele. Soþlice.
Our Father, our Mother, our Parents, you who are in the Here-and-Now, may your name be honored in all we do. May your Presence be recognized. May your Love be done on earth as it is in your Home. Give us this day our bread of your Presence. And forgive us our harmings of others, as we forgive those who harmed us. And don’t let us know danger, but keep us from harm. So be it.
Thank you for reading and listening, and for your kind presence in the world. Peace to all.
Notes:
“Ældran”means “older ones” or “elders,” translated here as “Parents” in honor of the Christian embodied Trinity.
The “heofon” Sarah Ruden translates as “in the skies.” That ancient cosmogony seems to risks furthering the alienation that comes from only conceiving that divinity is outside our earth, and far from us, when mystics like Hildegard see the viriditas or greenness of divinity in all of earth. And “heaven” has from its first days in English also meant “God’s home” in any place on earth, not just in a no-place “beyond the sky,” also: “celestial space,” “peace, paradise,” and “a state of everlastingness,” even “Love.”
The “ġehālgod” means in Old English “be made holy,” from hālgian, while holy, whole, health, and hale are all cognates with hālig. The “ġehālgod” means “consecrate” and has both intention and action in it. We intend to be whole and we act to love the world whole. “May your name be hallowed” seems to mean “May I become whole in Love, and may I contribute, even in small ways, to the world being whole in Love.” “May I be healthy, whole.” “May the world be healthy, whole.” Because the Presence is healthy, whole.
The “rice” (said “ree-chay”) that is cognate with reich has been tainted with the Nazi’s Third Reich. Rice and reich are related to the verb reichen “to reach” which includes diverse meanings like “extend, pass, serve, and be sufficient” or as nouns: “extension, passing, service, and sufficiency, even presence.” And when we add in power words like “kingdom” and “Lord” to such a commonly repeated prayer, we bow to the existing systems which Jesus counterculturally resisted, and offered healthy alternatives to. So rather than “your Kingdom come” for “To becume þin rice,” the sentence could mean “your Presence and Love be recognized and reach—be sufficient—even here, even now, in this moment, and everywHere.”
“Give us this day our bread / of your Presence” is written with the line break to emphasize that our physical bread and our spiritual bread are included. Being aware that all F/food is a gift, to be shared. There is also space there for including eucharistic bread, if one wishes it.
Sarah Ruden says about “temptation” or costnunge here: “Temptation: The word peirasmos refers to outward tests of all kinds, including those done on inanimate objects; but interrogation under torture could be a reference in some passages of the Gospels. Torture of noncitizens was routine in evidence gathering in the Roman legal system, and large-scale persecutions of Christians had begun before any of the Gospels’ texts were finalized. ‘Test’ or ‘ordeal’ covers this without suggesting sexual tantalization, in which the Gospels evince almost no interest.”
The “yfel” is usually interpreted in an unhelpful binary way. Most mystics teach it as “intending to harm.” The word evil itself has Faustian hints from the Proto-Indo-European *upelos for “going over and beyond acceptable limits.” This root meaning for “evil” of “exceeding due measure” or “overstepping proper limits,” as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, seems helpful as a reminder of what being a decent human means.
I translated Brother Lawrence. I entered some dusty and beautiful books from the 1600s, and they brought me the gold in my shadow and new friends. Something similar happened with Cloud.
Many of these new friends I kind of knew already. If you count having read all of Mirabai Starr’s books friendship. Isn’t it though, in a way? Do you do that, too? You find one book by someone that really resonates, so you find all they’ve written and devour it?
So here are a few kind friends whom I’m grateful for and whom I met through translation. Here they are in no particular order, each in a few lines, that like the tip of an iceberg just suggest rather than represent the richness they bring into my life and into the world’s. Some hyperlinked URLs are here for those who want to delve deeper into the richness these wise friends contribute to the global community. Today, we can be grateful for their helpful videos, too, that we can find on the internet.
Mirabai Starr, whose way of living teaches me more about beyond-binary life than even any of her amazing books, acclaimed translations, creative non-fiction works, Wild Mercy, and one on-the-way.
Mark Dannenfelser of Contemplative Outreach International, a wise storyteller who also introduced me to David A. Treleaven’s Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing.
Rev. SeiFu Anil Singh-Molares of Spiritual Directors International, who brings new life to conversations surrounding translation, spiritual companionship, and trying to live a life of tranquility and kindness.
Jon M. Sweeney, who cultivates meaningful conversations in “Off the Page” at Spirituality & Practice, and in his many books–I’m joyful anticipating his and Mark Burrows’s next Meister Eckhart translation!
Lama Yeshe Rose, who shared with me about her adventures translating Tibetan scriptures, and I’ll never gladly be the same, for what I learned in two hours of our talking.
Aurelia Dávila Pratt, whose A Brown Girl’s Epiphany: Reclaim Your Intuition and Step into Your Power is a wise, powerful book, asking all of us to honor the sacred voice within us and be kind to others.
Renée Roden, a freelance reporter and writer, also member of St. Francis Catholic Worker House in Chicago, whose deep listening and writing skills inspire me, and I hope for future books from her.
Josh Patterson and Greg Farrand who interviewed me for the podcast (Re)Thinking Faith and who gave me such grace of listening and who share their own journeys in ways that give me great hope and joy.
Annmarie Sanders, IHM, who interviewed me for the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) and shared such wisdom with me about what women religious are thinking and experiencing today.
Clifford Brooks III, who publishes The Blue Mountain Review, hosts the NPR podcast Dante’s Old South, and cultivates community through The Southern Collective Experience in the best, most lasting ways.
Cassidy Hall, Kevin Johnson, and Carl McColman, who through the Encountering Silence podcast, and in countless other ways teach us all what it looks like to really, really, really pay attention and listen.
Cynthia Bourgeault, a kind friend since Cloud days, is much cherished for how she creates newness from ancient wisdom and listens into the mysteries and brings us all back joy and new ways of seeing.
Shima Bagheri Ahranjani, is also my friend because of the Cloud. She emailed me a few years ago to say she loved the Cloud. Shima is a dear friend, she has a Ph.D. in Persian literature, and she has given me one of the greatest gifts I always yearned for–friendship with someone who knows Rumi in Farsi, inside and out.
And so many many more. Making me so grateful. Little wonder. From the last section of my Introduction to Practice of the Presence: A Revolutionary Translation by Carmen Acevedo Butcher, we encounter the amazing friend Brother Lawrence, who has a way of cultivating friendships wherever he goes:
The best description I know of him is, unsurprisingly, by his good friend and mentee Joseph of Beaufort. It’s from the Profile:
The virtue of Brother Lawrence never made him harsh. His goodness made him gentle. He was a warm, welcoming person. He gave others confidence. When you met him, you felt you could tell him anything. You knew you’d found a friend. As for him, once he knew the person he was dealing with, he spoke freely and showed great kindness. He said simple things, but these were always to the point, and full of common sense and meaning. Once you got past his rough exterior, you discovered a unique wisdom, an openness of mind and a spaciousness beyond the reach of an ordinary lay brother. His depth of insight exceeded all expectation. . . . And you could consult him on anything.
On the pages that follow, you will meet this genuine soul who lives in these words. His authenticity flowed from his friendship with the Presence. His gentleness and warmth, great kindness and common sense, wisdom and openness of mind, which made him a wonderful friend, are the spiritual muscles that his practice of the presence prayer developed, over time.
Brother Lawrence is the reason this wise book has stayed alive through centuries of plague, famine, inequity, inhumanity, religious strife, wars, floods, and our ever-present human fragility. He extends friendship and wisdom to you.
Enjoy becoming friends, and spending time with him, returning now and again for conversation.
Alexandria “Lexi,” Alithia, Amerie, Annabell, Eliahna “Ellie,” Eliahna, Jackie, Jailah, Jayce, Jose, Layla, Maite, Makenna, Maranda, Nevaeh, Rogelio, Tess, Uziyah, and Xavier, plus educators Eva and Irma. Grieving the deaths of nineteen children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, and more than a dozen people wounded.
I remember an international student from England who asked me once in disbelief during an office hour conference: “Why do you allow guns here like you do? My father was in the secret service, and when he retired, he had to turn his firearms back in. We don’t have guns, and we don’t have gun violence.”
I had no answer. I have no answer.
I turned to other questions I can begin to answer on an incredibly still gorgeous blue-sky Sunday morning. Contemplating how growing up in the South influenced me as a writer and translator. And, because I’m always up for learning more about how women navigated systemic obstructions, reading a dissertation by Dr. Han VanderHart on seventeenth-century women poets, thanks to Twitter.
Which tells me that writing and rewriting, reading and taking notes are sometimes more comforting to me than even walking in sunshine. Putting good ideas/feelings, and healthy challenges into my brain is a kind of nourishment when my self is existentially frustrated. Being a focused student is soothing, healing.
My good friend Darrell Z. Grizzle invited me to do a future online interview for his blog, Story & Spirit in the Shadow-Haunted South. His kind idea, to help get the word out about my translation of the spiritual classic Practice of the Presence by Brother Lawrence, releasing on August 23, 2022. Two of his questions, “What is your connection to the American South?” and “How has that connection to the South informed your work as a writer?” got red dirt on my knees again.
I grew up in the rolling ancient hills of northwest Georgia. If you haven’t felt and seen and walked through the lacy soft mist embracing those hills when they’re green and it’s early morning and it wraps you up in its beautiful mystery, you haven’t yet lived. The purple of those morning glories will teach you the meaning of glory like nothing else can or will. And its long-weathered, rust-shaded dirt is hard, packed by history. The ack-swat-whack at unassailable horse flies down deserted, asphalted back roads where I walked regularly taught me the meaning of persistence and made the pesky gnats of my mother’s south Georgia seem nowhere near vexing.
My much-loved neighbors influenced me a lot. I grew up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and they taught me Southern Mountain English and culture, how neighbors help each other, or as they said, holp each other. Beautiful language—How over there is over yunder way and a photo is a pitcher and there’s a joke my classmates told me in 5th grade about did I know that the wise men in the Christmas story were actually firemen because they came “from afar.”
Partial to bib overalls, my neighbors worked at deafening looms making denim for the cotton mill owners, and grew and canned their own vegetables. And raised sardined yellow chicks in long stinking chicken houses. While rocks and trees deep in the woods where I played had Cherokee carvings on them. And several of my high school friends who are Black whispered to me they had been shot at driving through a town nearby. And church was a screed or screech or scree of brimstone from a booming pulpit while women quietly tended nursery. And my childhood held other trauma for me. While I also found school almost impossible during decades of undiagnosed dyslexia and deep anxiety.
But the homemade ice tea was so sweet, so cold, and so delicious I can still feel my teeth set on delicious edge just by thinking of its amber light in a clear pitcher. Peaches were worth eating with the fuzz on, so juicy they drip down the chin. A neighbor called me into her garden one summer afternoon, pulled and offered stunned me a huge ripe red tomato, said, “Bite hit,” and only then tasting that deep sweetness did I learn why tomatoes are indeed fruit. I watched a neighbor’s house burn slap to the ground and then other neighbors took off work and built them a new one, while I helped clean the trailer they lived in until it was done. And, yes, the guns that were everywhere made me as nervous as Fiver. I have stories about guns I’ve written down for myself but don’t tell.
How do all of these stories and more shape a writer/author and a translator of spiritual texts?
I think of Rilke’s reminder to Franz Xaver Kappus—”Herr Kappus”—in Briefe an Einen Jungen Dichter (Letters to a Young Poet). I “try to have love for the questions themselves,” and I hear Rilke say again, “Live the questions now.” But how do we live the very hard questions now facing us all?
So often quoted, Rilke’s wisdom has become a bit of a blunt saw, so I refresh its teeth by looking at the original German, both beautiful and useful: “zu versuchen, die Fragen selbst liebzuhaben” (“try to have love for the questions themselves“) and “Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen” (“Live the questions now”). “Perhaps then,” Rilke adds, and I translate, “one day far from now you can gradually, without realizing it, be able to live into the answer.” This is dependent, he says, on the possibility that his young letter-writer does exercise his inherent power for “conceiving and shaping a sacred, healthy way of life.” If you like, you can read Rilke’s July 16, 1903 letter yourself at poetryintranslation or in German at Google books.
And what does Rilke have to do with my reading Dr. Han VanderHart’s dissertation this morning? Living the question for me means staying open to all I don’t know. Especially to that which doesn’t seem to be of any immediate practical use to me, but that pulls me to it for some unknown reason. Through all of life’s ups and downs, my journey has been profoundly enriched by listening to what and/or who I don’t know. Just being curious and genuinely interested in what others are doing is worthwhile, which today included this: “Gender and Collaboration in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry: Philip and Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer, Katherine Philips and Mary, Lady Chudleigh.” Listen to that title. I’m a fan of dissertation titles. Just reading it reminds me how solitary and brave and vertigo-inducing writing a dissertation is. (Yes, it’s also quite a community effort, but paradoxically, at its core, writing a dissertation is one long terrifying leap off a cliff, just you.)
Through Twitter logic, I stumbled happily onto VanderHart’s Twitter page: @hmvanderhart. I checked out linktr.ee/hanvanderhart, then ordered their What Pecan Light book of poetry, because I have spent countless hours in hushed, dense pecan groves, picking pecans for hours on end for my elderly neighbor for quarters that I stacked up very high, when I was ten or so in Perry, Georgia, and I fell in love with the way the light comes through pecan tree leaves, and anyway picking pecans is very meditative if you’re the meditative type. Then I went in search of VanderHart’s work on these four women writers: Mary, Aemilia, Katherine, Mary. Let’s admit it: One of the unsung, quiet joys of the truly chaotic, clamoring internet is you can access and read as-yet-unpublished dissertations and masters theses.
What is so great about VanderHart’s dissertation is it brings Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; Aemilia Lanyer; Katherine Philips; and Lady Mary Chudleigh to light, to breathe today’s air. I’d never heard of these writers. Or if I did hear of Mary Sidney Herbert, it was in passing, because of course I read Herbert’s brother Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy and Astrophel and Stella, but his younger sister would’ve been sadly soon forgotten on the high-altitude hike to a PhD Phi Beta Kappa.
VanderHart’s work elevates the poetry of these women, which they describe as “explicitly and warmly interested in the other.” We need more empathy and more interest in “the other”—in each other, I thought. To my delight, the dissertation’s through line demonstrates that the poetry of Herbert, Lanyer, Philips, and Chudleigh “does not merely resist, challenge or subvert male patriarchy networks, but that their poetries enact an engagement with them that creates literary and social spaces for women readers and writers.”
These poets made healthy community through writing. That’s it in seven words. I was happy to learn about their “collaborative writing,” and loved following VanderHart’s analysis of how the work of these women “acknowledges social bonds and community and, in fact, sees these practices as essential to the writing of poetry itself.” My teaching and writing keep me grounded in community, and seeing this example from several centuries ago inspires me, I mused.
My favorite chapter was on Mary Sidney Herbert. What a good Sunday morning read. Mary collaborated with her brother Philip Sidney in making psalm verse paraphrases. When he died in battle at thirty-one during the Eighty Years’ War, over 100 psalms were left for her to finish. She was grief-stricken, but carried on. In this chapter VanderHart directs keen attention to the act of revision—to “re-seeing” itself, a process I love for being so intimate with who I am (becoming) as a writer and a person.
VanderHart shows us Mary Sidney Herbert’s loving, brilliant work up close. Previously, Herbert was branded by scholars as a so-called “inveterate tinkerer who found it difficult to make up her mind” (quoting William Ringler, but also an epithet, VanderHart notes, used by Gary Waller, Harold Love, J.C.A. Rathmell, et al.). This chapter’s discussion of “the joy of revision,” particularly of Herbert’s “joy” in her “care[ful,] attenti[ve]” revisions of Philip’s psalms, and of revision itself as an activity “closer to that of a musician playing variations on a favourite theme” (quoting Harold Love) reminds me of the unfinished nature of all writing that is truly alive, even the most polished.
When I read that Margaret P. Hannay describes the Psalms in the Tanakh as a “divinely inspired expression of human experience,” I thought how I feel just the same about Brother Lawrence’s Practice of the Presence. It’s genuine wisdom. Always universal.
I loved discovering that Philip Sidney chose not “sinners” but “bad mates” in his poetic paraphrasing of Psalm 1, making the language “richer and more steeped in early modern life practices than the more abstract language of the English Bible translations,” as VanderHart observes. John Donne would later say that in The Sidney Psalter Philip and Mary “teach us how to sing.”
Next, VanderHart’s chapter on Aemilia Lanyer explores the life and writing of this Londoner, whose poetry was “expressly concerned” with cultivating a community of reading, writing women. Lanyer wrote from the margins. VanderHart discusses that she was “probably a Jew, married to a gentile instrumentalist associated with the production of royal music.” Lanyer reminds us that “to write from the margins, . . . is to write from a perspective of self-deprecation and unworthiness. Or at least a performance of humilitas.” As an olive-skinned woman coming of age in the South, margins are familiar terra firma.
Poet Katherine Philips intrigues VanderHart for how she “amends the concept of Stoic retreat by making sociability central to its conception as well as central to her writing process.” Philips’ poetry centers relationship and friendship rather than the expected Stoic retirement for self-discovery, self-healing. And poet Mary Chudleigh is fascinating for how she creates a “collaborative conversation” in the unlikeliest of places, with minister John Sprint, and her “Ladies Defence” is a wonderful argument for self-kindness.
VanderHart’s engaging dissertation ends with this paragraph about these remarkable poets they’ve brought blinking and bright-eyed into the klieg lights of the twenty-first century:
“With or without rooms of their own in which to write, early modern women in seventeenth-century England wrote with and for each other. To bring the modern language of collaboration to their poetry is to highlight an attention to audience and community integral to the production of their texts. The four women whose work this dissertation examines did not view themselves as writing alone but in a company of other women, readers and writers. These chapters argue that these four poets did not have the luxury or privilege—despite some of their aristocratic statuses—of considering themselves as working alone or autonomously. Whether the aim in addressing each other by name was praise, invitation or, as in the case of Lady Chudleigh’s poetry, a deployment of ‘reciprocal esteem’ taking the form of corrective dialogue, the recognition of specific others forms the occasion of the poem itself.”
Thankful for these poets, I reflect. I also do not consider myself writing alone but in the company of others, readers and writers, present and past, connecting these diverse strands: Grizzle, Rilke, VanderHart.
My friend Darrell Z. Grizzle and I write in different genres, but share similar interests, especially concerning books and kindness. Long ago, in a galaxy far away, he emailed me out of the blue to ask would I come to his book group discussing my Cloud of Unknowing translation. I hesitated because I was really busy teaching full-time and raising two young children, until Darrell said, “And I have to tell you I LOVE your footnotes.” Done. Our friendship and collaboration expand my world, helping me enter more deeply into “living the questions,” as Rilke says to his epistolary companion, while the seventeenth-century women poets also “lived the questions” against all odds, as Dr. Han VanderHart’s excellent work brings to life. How? Community. That’s what they all share. Sacred, healthy community is oxygen.
The same is true for Brother Lawrence. He was living as a friar in a Paris monastery at the same time, and right across the channel from the amazing women writers Herbert, Lanyer, Philips, and Chudleigh, who elevate community in their poetry. Community made and kept the friar’s spiritual classic Practice of the Presence alive. It has endured, been in print, read, and loved over 300 years, yet was only published in 1692, a year after his death, because of his friendship with Joseph of Beaufort, because of their conversations, and because Joseph and other friends wanted to read more of their friend’s writings.
Brother Lawrence also spent his days “living the questions” in community. He asked himself, and others asked him: “How can I heal? How can I find peace? How can I develop a friendship with the Divine? How can I become more like Love? How can I become Love?” His response was simple: “Practice the presence.”
Sacred, healthy community is oxygen.
Thank goodness Love is closer to us than we may think. Brother Lawrence experienced that 24/7, and when he writes, “God,” I think “Love,” because as we read his work, we realize it’s all about true love (amour is one of his favorite words). The Divine is Love to him, and for anyone hankering for more of God, Love, Wisdom, or however a person might conceive of Meaning or Ultimate Reality, the friar’s Practice of the Presence is balm.
Clicking into news, Love is easy to forget these days. I remind myself, it’s worthwhile to remember that, as Brother Lawrence also says, “Everything is possible for those who believe, even more for those who hope, still more for those who love, and most of all for those who practice and persevere in these three powerful paths.”
I see him limping toward the kitchen to begin cracking eggs for omelettes when that line came to him.
