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.
Students and I discuss that in class. The concept often surprises them. One wrote, “I never thought of research as a conversation, but by this point, it is very clear to me that research is more than just looking stuff up. It’s about finding connections between different sources and ideas by comparing and contrasting them, and creating something of your own.”
Research can also be a deeper conversing, a communing with. In this way, I visited daily for over a year with Brother Lawrence. This kind down-to-earth mystic lived in seventeenth-century Paris as a Discalced Carmelite friar. The Discalced for “without shoes” means he wore sandals as a sign of simplicity and voluntary poverty. While I lived with Brother Lawrence during the scholarly serious and playfully creative act of translation, a true conversation with this humble man developed. I listened to his voice in his French words, first in his spiritual maxims, then in his surviving letters. These and his conversations with his good friend Joseph of Beaufort, who took good notes, are the happy center of Practice of the Presence.
Living with this calm friar and his wise words on contemplation was a deeply satisfying, silent conversation. How life-altering healthy conversations always are. Listening to the friar’s vibrant presence in his book made my own life significantly calmer, even (or especially) in the middle of how-life-happens-to-everyone-including-me.
This book was also a conversation with my kind first readers. I spent hours on the phone with them and hours pouring over their emails, listening, asking for clarification, and revising. Their questions improved the book tremendously. Grateful doesn’t begin to describe how thankful I am for their helpful dialogue.
Then I sent the manuscript out, hopefully asking for endorsements. Twenty-three said, “Yes.” Their input added another layer of conversation to the book. Even as they responded, their words profoundly affected me. Listening to their words also contributed to the manuscript during its last stages before publication. They gave me confidence about my work. They helped me see it anew, often in ways I had not been able to, because I was too close to it.
Many days I walked around in a kind of happy daze: “They read my book. They sent an endorsement.” Interrupting for many moments the Quaker chant or Mary Oliver poem or mantra I was attending to.
Conversation of all kinds is the backbone of my translation. It supported the creation also of this humble friar’s life and work, since he lived his whole life in sandals and a coarse tunic, never trying to publish during his lifetime. We only have his work because of the conversations between him and his friend Joseph of Beaufort, who published Brother Lawrence’s words a year after the friar’s death, when other friends asked for more of his letters, since they found them uplifting to read, and encouraging.
Conversation rewards attention. It’s from con-/com- “with, together,” and versare “turn, bend.” It’s easy to think of conversation mostly as words, but converse also means “move about with, live with, dwell with, keep company with.” Today we’d say, “Hang out.” Translating is a uniquely intimate act of “hanging out” with another human, conversing. Converse also means “turn around, transform,” the way kind friendship, “hanging out” with others, can change us for the better and happier, forever.
Here are the nearly two dozen endorsers and their words for my revolutionary translation of Brother Lawrence and his Practice of the Presence. In print for over three centuries, beloved by kind seekers and thinkers from varied backgrounds – religious, not-religious, and everything in-between and beyond those categories, this spiritual classic is available for pre-order now here.
“Acevedo Butcher’s careful translation recreates the volatile, war-filled, plague-ridden world of seventeenth-century France. She invites us into the monastery kitchen with Brother Lawrence as he cleans the pots and pans amidst literal turmoil outside the monastery doors – a similar situation to what I imagine many of us find ourselves in today! This comprehensive translation of letters, maxims, and last words revolves around the simple practice of the presence, which is simply, and at its most essential, an awareness of the presence of God. Acevedo Butcher beautifully captures what Brother Lawrence continually reminds us: There are no special words, devotions, or actions needed, just simplicity of thought and deed.”
—Father Richard Rohr, OFM, Center for Action and Contemplation
Every skilled translator knows only too well the looming meaning of the French phrase Traduire, c’est trahir—‘To translate is to betray.’ The phrase means that something essential in the original language is left out of the translation. The translator’s art requires two skills at once. She must indwell each language while at the same time listening deeply and waiting patiently. Carmen Acevedo Butcher, both delicate and precise as embroidery, is no traitor. With inspiring, poetic prose she provides us the first complete translation of all Brother Lawrence’s works. And she does this from a unique perspective. As a woman of color, she is sensitive to the need to look beneath the pot-scrubbing Brother Lawrence (he actually detested the work) to see the social constraints that bore upon the man, Nicolas Herman, who, in King Louis XIV’s France, was socially excluded for not being adequately French in quite the right way. Carmen Acevedo Butcher gives a living voice to a person who did not count in his one culture. Out of this place of not-counting, emerges a depth of spiritual wisdom that transcends the ages. Carmen Acevedo Butcher is uniquely positioned to give him a voice in a way no previous translator has. Her translation will be the new standard by which other translations will be measured.
—Martin Laird, OSA, is professor of early Christian studies at Villanova University; author of Into the Silent Land; A Sunlit Absence; and An Ocean of Light (all by Oxford University Press)
“Carmen Acevedo Butcher’s insightful and inclusive translation of Brother Lawrence’s classic, Practice of the Presence, is such a needed balm for our beleaguered souls. Its wisdom reminds us that the maelstrom of this present age is not unique. In this world we will have trouble, i.e., pandemics, environmental disasters, and severely strained social contracts, but they are transitory distractions. Acevedo Butcher’s spiritually attuned translation invites us to host presence, awaken hope, and immerse ourselves in love.”
—Rev. Dr. Barbara A. Holmes, president emerita, United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities; core faculty for the Center for Action and Contemplation
“The best translations of spiritual classics are not those that sound familiar but those that strike the ear in a whole new way, because they offer proof that the teachings are still alive and evolving in our own day. Whether you love the teachings of Brother Lawrence or have never encountered them before, you can trust Carmen Acevedo Butcher to offer you a fresh hearing that is in tune with the lives we are living right now.”
—Barbara Brown Taylor, author of An Altar in the World
“Imagine Mr. Rogers was a mystic. That will give you a sense of the warm spiritual heart of Brother Lawrence, brought to life for the twenty-first century in this vivid, timely new translation. In our age of distraction and despair, Brother Lawrence’s counsel to practice the presence of Love is not a method or a formula, but the gentle gift from a friend of the God who is our Friend. This is a book to cherish as God’s incessant invitation to draw near.”
—James K.A. Smith, author of You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit
“To be present to God: this is the ‘method without method’ experimented by a humble Parisian religious of the seventeenth century. This new translation, faithful to the original text, allows us to rediscover a simple spiritual path accessible to all.” —Denis Sureau, editor, theologian, author of Frère Laurent de la Résurrection: Le cordonnier de Dieu (Artège, 2020)
“What a bold, vibrant, and potent translation of this mystical masterpiece! As she did with the perennial wisdom jewel, Cloud of Unknowing, Carmen Acevedo Butcher once again breaks open the stilted and patriarchal language that encrusts our most life-giving spiritual treasures and makes the Practice of the Presence easy to grasp and impossible to resist. Its author, the humble seventeenth-century sage Brother Lawrence, reminds us that every task, no matter how ordinary, is a fresh opportunity for drawing near to the Friend. And that the more we take refuge in this intimacy, frequently repeating such phrases as ‘My God, I am all yours,’ or ‘God of love, I love you with all my heart,’ or ‘Love, create in me a new heart,’ the more often we find ourselves simply resting in the presence of Love Itself.”
—Mirabai Starr, translator of John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila and Julian of Norwich, author of God of Love and Wild Mercy
“The greatest mystics, like Kabir and Rumi, have a simplicity and electric directness that both takes our breath away and points us to the true north of our essential divine identity and the radiance of the Divine Presence in and as everything. Brother Lawrence is one of these universal visionaries, and reminds us relentlessly, in his soberly ecstatic and humble way, that what we search for with such anxiety and longing is always alive in us, and that the divine presence soaks and invigorates all things at all times. In a time of such devastation and rabid confusion, Brother Lawrence’s testimony is of sublime help, and a source of radical encouragement to all seekers on all paths. In these wonderful, naked, luminous translations he lives afresh inviting us with every word into the reality he knows and embodies so simply and fully. Do not miss this book and give it to everyone you know.”
—Andrew Harvey, author of The Hope and Turn Me to Gold: 108 Translations of Kabir
“To live guided by true presence. To pray as an invitation to embodied authenticity. To orient heart and mind in the direction of kindness. This is the theology of Brother Lawrence brought alive in this beautiful translation of The Practice of Presence by Carmen Acevedo Butcher. Accessible and freshly relevant, the book is a bell of mindfulness to accompany readers in deeper contemplation, making it an important guide to self-understanding, spiritual exploration, and Unity. Pause as you read. Breathe. Practice presence. Allow this profoundly invitational book to settle into your heart.”
—Valerie Brown, JD, MA, PCC, Dharma teacher, Plum Village; faculty, Georgetown University, School of Continuing Studies; author of Hope Leans Forward
“A vibrant, urgent, and earthy translation of a timeless classic.”
—James Martin, SJ, author of Learning to Pray
“In this radiant new translation Carmen Acevedo Butcher puts her acclaimed skills as a translator fully in the service of her listening heart to deliver Brother Lawrence’s timeless teaching on simplicity and presence to a world desperately in need of it. More than a translation, this is a transmission, conveying not only Lawrence’s words, but the spirit of inclusivity and kindness from which he wrote them. It is her faithfulness to the fragrance of his presence that makes her translation so inviting, even as we watch her take a few risks to reach a whole new world of seekers. It was a joy to watch Carmen and Brother Lawrence making such sweet music together.”
—Cynthia Bourgeault, author of The Heart of Centering Prayer, The Meaning of Mary Magdalene
“How to live in the presence of God is of the essence of the Christian mystical tradition. Few mystical texts have presented a practical method for attaining God’s presence as effectively as the collection of letters, conversations, and biographical materials known as The Practice of the Presence of God, stemming from the Carmelite brother, Lawrence of the Resurrection (d. 1691). This gem of the Christian mystical tradition has now been made available in a striking new translation and study by Carmen Acevedo Butcher. It is a book to be treasured by all who are devoted to the inner life.”
—Bernard McGinn, Naomi Shenstone Donnelley Professor emeritus, Divinity School, University of Chicago
“Carmen Acevedo Butcher’s powerful translation of Brother Lawrence’s Spiritual Maxims, letters, and conversations opens our hearts to experience God through the lens of a humble seventeenth-century friar, one who had very little to say about institutional religion and very much to say about the presence of God in the everyday lives of ordinary people. At a time when institutionalized religion often fails us, this translation reminds us that we are constantly surrounded by the divine presence and that God is accessible to us at any moment of life and far beyond the confines of churches, temples, and synagogues. It is a timely translation that holds enormous possibility for the reformation of a religious faith that desperately needs it.”
—Rob Nash, associate dean for doctoral programs and professor of comparative religion and mission at the McAfee School of Theology of Mercer University, Atlanta, Georgia
“Carmen Acevedo Butcher brings scholarly expertise and abundant love to this fresh rendering of a classic work of Christian literature. Brother Lawrence’s spiritual insights are as timely now as they were when first written centuries ago, making this beautiful translation a much-needed gift to the world today. With its inclusion of helpful historical and biographical context, this edition deserves a place in every personal and public library.”
—Karen Swallow Prior, research professor of English and Christianity & Culture, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary; author of On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books
“Brother Lawrence, a seventeenth-century French monk, persists as a powerful force and resource in Christian tradition. His testimony, in letters and conversations, is marked by humility, vulnerability, simplicity, and a focus on love. In this welcome new edition Carmen Acevedo Butcher has made the work of Brother Lawrence freshly available in a most accessible and compelling way. In our world marked by speed, convenience, and hostility, no doubt Brother Lawrence is a persuasive antidote and alternative to a culture of alienation. We may be grateful to Acevedo Butcher for her careful, attentive work in this contemporary offer of ancient trustful wisdom.”
—Walter Brueggemann, Columbia Theological Seminary, author of Money and Possessions
“Presence, not often or easily practiced, is made, once more, available to us. Each of us can practice presence by embodying all that we inhabit. May we come closer to ourselves and to God by a newly found practice of presence. This book is one such tool to inhabit a profound presence.”
—Robyn Henderson-Espinoza, PhD, author of Body Becoming: A Path to our Liberation
“Brother Lawrence is not only a great Christian mystic, he’s also charming and accessible—a sage whose wisdom is thoroughly down-to-earth and relevant to today. Carmen Acevedo Butcher’s fresh, richly embodied, and at times surprising translation makes the words of this Carmelite contemplative truly come alive.” —Carl McColman, author of Eternal Heart and The Big Book of Christian Mysticism
“Carmen Acevedo Butcher listens across the centuries and finds a companion for all of us in a disabled, veteran of war, shoe-mending, soup-making monk. Brother Lawrence’s ‘sacred, ordinary, and necessary’ way of prayer can help all of us to pause, and more importantly, to bring our minds back to love. This translation is a joyful conversation with Brother Lawrence, one in which we can all participate.”
—Kaya Oakes, author of The Defiant Middle
“In these pages, I sat across from a blue-collar saint whose temple is a kitchen. Brother Lawrence has bequeathed to us that rare wisdom that weds the celestial to the terrestrial. He teaches us how to punctuate the ordinary tasks of life with petition, thanksgiving, and the practice of standing in the presence of Jesus, even as he flips omelets for the Almighty. This splendid book, exquisitely written and scintillating with wisdom, will breathe divine life into the sacred ordinary of the Christian.”
—Chad Bird, Scholar in Residence at 1517
“As time goes on, new translations of classic works are desirable. Carmen Acevedo Butcher has provided one for our times. Her work reflects her love of Brother Lawrence and her familiarity with the Practice of the Presence of God. Her comprehensive version is quite extensive and full.”
—Father Salvatore Sciurba, OCD, Discalced Carmelite Friars, Monastery of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Washington, DC
“Many have an acquaintance with Brother Lawrence but Carmen Acevedo Butcher helps us to know him far better in this new translation. We not only experience a fresh, contemporary, and accessible translation of The Practice of the Presence of God but we also get a greater understanding of this legendary yet simple man who guides us on a path of contemplation of the greatest love of all.”
—Vincent Bacote, director of the Center for Applied Christian Ethics, and professor of theology, Wheaton College
“Carmen Acevedo Butcher has given us a careful and luminous translation of a spiritual classic. This great book still has the power to bring us into the Presence.”
—Don Brophy, author of One Hundred Great Catholic Books
“This is Presence come alive for a new generation, for our conflicted spirits. Reveals the most durable way of prayer not dependent on words I’ve ever found. Highly recommended!”
—Jon M. Sweeney, author of Nicholas Black Elk and Feed the Wolf
“One’s whole life is in the work, in the writing and in the play.”
That’s Donna Haraway, a scientist-cultural activist-professor. In the documentary Story Telling for Earthly Survival by Fabrizio Terranova (58:02), Haraway presents my favorite beyond-colonial, beyond-patriarchal approach to being in the now, on earth, in community. It’s all about being present, embodied, here, now.
Her words also resonate with my translating. My whole life is in it.
It’s like the story of the shucked corn cobs Earcell would bring my family. She’d call about 5:30 of an evening: “Git your pot on, water a-boiling. I’m heading to the field. Be over tirectly.” That corn, with the freshest sugar, grown by our thoughtful generous neighbor, walked over and shared with us, then cooked by my mother, well, no other corn on the cob has ever, and I mean ever, tasted as delicious.
Translating sometimes reminds me of that freshest taste of the gift of just-picked corn.
The snow leopard, called “the ghost of the mountains,” is elusive and beautiful. Evolved to thrive in some of the harshest environments on our planet. Elusive also because its grey, yellow, brown-spotted pelage blends in with its rocky, snowy environment.
A good translator is a little like a snow leopard. If doing the job well, the translator may disappear into the text.
A beautiful series of unending acts. Sometimes a translator sits down at a desk and respectfully makes the alchemy happen that slowly turns this text into another one. Other times translating is walking in the marsh or washing dishes or listening to students who’ve faced guns pointed at them merely because their skin is Black. Sometimes translating is resting.
In a world that worships this-or-that, one thing over another, translation is neither and both and something else entirely, all at once. Its essential nature is on the move. “Across and beyond,” trans places, trans times, trans people, it magically carries meaning and beauty and joy between multiple complex points, existing everywhere and nowhere.
Always in complex motion, and outside simplistic categorizing. Translators may be patted on the head and called “clever,” or praised for their “areas of expertise,” but only 44% of books carry their translator’s name on the front cover. That’s from Pamela Paul’s “Stop Pretending All Books Are Written in English” (May 29, 2022, NYT). Thankfully, Jennifer Croft, Jhumpa Lahiri, and many others are pointing out this “unique form of neglect.”
Author, critic, and translator working from Polish, Ukrainian, and Argentine Spanish, Croft asserts, “[I]t’s still considered almost a threat to name anyone other than the author.” Croft’s own Man Booker International Prize-winning translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights doesn’t have Translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft on the front cover, and Croft resolved, “I’m not translating any more books without my name on the cover” (Oct. 15, 2021, PW).
You’d also not know that the novelist and translator Jhumpa Lahiri translated Domenico Starnone’s novel Trust, because you don’t see Translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri on the front cover. Lahiri argues in Translating Myself and Others: “Translators are often described as being invisible, discreet, self-sacrificing presences. Their names are frequently absent on book covers; their roles are meant to be supportive. . . . Indeed, feminist scholars have argued that the practice of translation corresponds to traditional feminine archetypes in which a woman’s position and identity were subservient to a man’s” (May 12, 2022, TCC).
Lahiri adds that writing and translating are “two aspects of the same activity, two faces of the same coin, or maybe two strokes, that allow me to swim greater distances, and at greater depths” (May 29, 2022, NYT). Isn’t that superlative, I think to myself, another third way to look at the creative process that is writing and translating.
In the lyrical This Little Art translator and author Kate Briggs explores that third way in writing. Her book is fun to read, even if you don’t care about translation one bit, if you just love words and history and joy and walking around in Europe. My favorite books are genre-bursting, like Briggs’ essay, scholarship, novel, poetry, and philosophy all rolled into beautiful words, words you like, words I take in like I eat barbeque potato chips. Happily, simply.
I am blushingly, deeply in love with words. I admit it. When I translate, the sound of the words and their rhythms matter to me as much as their meanings.
As a kind friend and colleague, also a professional editor, pointed out to me recently, I am not likely meant to say, as on the About webpage I remade recently: “Carmen is the author of x-number-of books,” if some are translations. Aren’t translations books?
When my translation of Practice of thePresence is published by Broadleaf Books, I will have worked on, written, revised, translated, been translated by, and put my body, mind, heart, and soul into ten books, not even counting time invested in reissues, new editions, Audible releases, and the like, and even so, I can’t say I’m the author of ten books? Ah, words. Ah, world.
When I think of translating a work from one language and one time period into English and now, I think of how my “whole life” is in that translating, in the writing and in the high-serious play and joy of the countless little acts. I’m looking up innumerable etymologies of words, lovingly finding old dictionaries that offer words in their timely habitats of sentences from that period so I can see how they were used then. I’m also studying history and who knew Paris experienced a Little Ice Age and then floods in the late seventeenth-century.
And I’m letting the words and their meanings “happen” to me by entering into the entire wisdom of the work that translates me, so where past translations of Nicolas Herman see a word like bonté in French and just hear “goodness,” as a binary-system antithesis of “evil,” the Spirit shows me the “kindness” that exists outside a binary view and that is omnipresent in Brother Lawrence’s teaching. Which helps us create all sorts of relationships that Haraway sees as kinships she calls oddkins. These relationships include animals, trees, and yes, relationships human-to-human, with each other.
Noble laureate Olga Tokarczuk in the essay “Ognosia” translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft, calls this “multiorganismicity” (June 6, 2022), at Words Without Borders: “Complexity, multiplicity, diversity, mutual influence, metasymbiosis—these are the new perspectives from which we observe the world.” This essay is a must-read.
Alice Walker dedicates The Color Purple:
“To the Spirit: / Without whose assistance / Neither this book / Nor I / Would have been / Written.”
That dedication speaks to me and my experience of translating. How I best listen to the palpable silence. With my body, mind, heart, and soul alert to the Spirit, who seems a friend, and the Spirit is also my body, mind, heart, and soul, a third way, a fourth way, a fifth way opening. Way opens, meaning kindness.
Translation is how I find my way to more kindness.
Translating is bodyful. A term I take from Christine Caldwell’s Bodyfulness (Shambhala). New days need new terms. New ways of being-awake need new words.
Bodyfulness is her neologism. Caldwell says, “The body isn’t a thing we have but an experience we are” (xxv). She calls bodyfulness “attention during action,” “a purposeful and athletic ability to alter our attentional focus” so that “the amount and type of sensations we work with can be nourishing and deeply informative.”
Body as experience is a complex process of my capillaries, my acetylcholinesterase, my toes, my thinking, the water I drink, my breathing, grief, tears, saying sorry, meaning it and changing, my listening, my joy that we have the right to vote and have our votes counted, my worries for America, my love for others, my love for my self, the tang of coffee, the getting up, the sitting down, the walking, the snowy egrets, and always the dancing.
Caldwell is wise like Haraway. She says, “Humans invent words because we need language to articulate and share our experience with others, yet our words also actively shape how we perceive and move in the world.”
When a friend asked me to write down my translation philosophy recently, I thought, Translation philosophy? because until that moment I translated almost unselfconsciously, but when I sat down to do the task my friend suggested, out came the words embodied mysticism, which after reading Caldwell became bodyful mysticism. I translate because I love words and wisdom and kindness and self-compassion and changing and making community. Because I actually love making space in me for listening to an other, and then sharing their beauty, and it’s a puzzle I respect and it makes me sway and shimmy and spin . . . with myself and others.
Mysticism is not an elite word. Though it’s become rarefied. Treated like champagne when it’s really clean water and oxygen. It merely means my translation listens for mystery and makes room for mystery and respects mystery and honors mystery and opens for the kind Other in others, which cannot be worded, just as the mystic Marguerite Porete’s Loing Près is a Far Nearness happily decentering-Me while embracing me, and I others. This is the Something More healer Ann Bedford Ulanov often mentions, the Source of the Source.
Mysticism is ordinary. It’s a cup of tea, its steam rising. It’s not exclusive. Not housed in institutions. It’s certainly no gatekeeper. It’s a cup of coffee, its steam rising. It’s my breath on a cold day. Your breath. It’s working to make sure everyone can breathe.
Translation is also making oddkins. A portmanteau from Old Norse oddi, “third or additional number,” and Old English cynn, “family,” plus a soupçon of Octavia Butler’s parables, this neologism articulates Haraway’s vision of surprising ways of kin-making. She sees kin as “a wild category” that people “do their best to domesticate” but can’t. Oddkins expresses our need for “unexpected collaborations and combinations,” for “becom[ing]-with each other or not at all.” Making oddkins is “cultivating multispecies justice” among humans, dolphins, ants, corals of the seas and lichens of the land, orchids, bees, you name it.
Living on “Terra” during “disturbing” and “mixed-up” times, Haraway describes our “task” as learning to respond well by inventive kin-making, finding connections with each other, even though as humans we’re all a little “bumptious,” which is a sweet way of saying obnoxious, or as Merriam-Webster‘s puts it: “presumptuously, obtusely, and often noisily self-assertive.” Aren’t we all.
She sees oddkinning as a “practice,” a “response-ability” to make a “thick, ongoing present.” Echoing the wise Georgia Congressman John Lewis, she says, “Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.” She teaches that “staying with the trouble” requires not focusing on an “awful or edenic” past nor an “apocalyptic or salvific” future, but instead on “learning to be truly present.”
“Learning to be truly present” is what Practice of the Presence is about. I spent the quarantine summer of 2020 and beyond in seventeenth-century Paris with Brother Lawrence, translating solidly. This dedication of my time deepened my lifelong walk with this simple practice that heals complexly. When out of the blue on June 9th, someone who read my translation of the Cloud of Unknowing, also a Companion of Julian of Norwich emailed me a gut-wrenching breath prayer: Slowly inhale, I can’t breathe and slowly out, Come, Spirit.
George Floyd’s presence is in Practice of the Presence too. So is Ahmaud Arbery’s and Breonna Taylor’s. As I translated, I began seeing Brother Lawrence, disabled veteran and an unremarkable Carmelite friar then, slipping into his self-repaired sandals, picking up a homemade #LesViesNoiresComptent sign, and marching down the ruede Vaugirard, with a profound limp.
Making oddkins happens where, when, how? Here, now, being present. Haraway translates her vision into a new word. To learn to be present and stay with what Lewis names “trouble,” Haraway renames our present age, seeing the traditional term for our “current geological age,” Anthropocene, as limited, limiting. For our “transformative . . . timeplace” Haraway makes the “simple word” Chthulucene, pronounced, / ˈTHOO luh scene / (Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene).
Chthulucene envisions our present moment, with its “vastly unjust patterns of pain and joy,” as the time “to make trouble” by “staying with the trouble . . . [through] learning to be truly present.” Chthulucene is the present moment where we take the third way of sym-poiesis, or making-with all other creatures. Haraway believes, “We become-with each other or not at all.” That’s why she coined Chthulucene by marrying the Greek khthôn/χθών or “earth,” with kainos/καινός or “now . . . thick, ongoing presence.” (Which is very much what the friar’s practicing the presence is: “being present now on earth.”)
Brits keep the initial “k” for χ, but mostly it’s dropped from khthôn/χθών, and the word starts with θ or “th.” A fun word to say, it’s also beautiful. It lands on the tongue like life and love: / ˈTHOO luh scene /. Its sound doesn’t match its looks, which is just the kind of vertigo love makes. Like the word kin, Chthulucene is a “wild category” open to untold healthy possibilities. It’s more inclusive and generates more joy and more opportunities to connect in “unexpected collaborations and combinations,” rather than Anthropocene, which centers man in anthro and excludes other creatures.
We’re all kin and wildly, wonderfully odd. We’re here now, on earth, made of dust, together.
And as my very bones know, translation is a process some may also call, yes, love.
