As always, if you prefer listening, this blog is also posted, read by Carmen, on her YouTube channel here: CarmenAcevedoButcherPresence.
What happens inside the mind-heart-soul-self-body-&-all-that-makes-you-sing if (for your own healing and out of your own great need for peace and rest and meaning) you’ve spent your entire life focused on and steeped in the mystery of Silence which has always drawn you to it, which is a pure gift, and which some call meditation or prayer, and to you seems as ordinary and regular as flossing your teeth, and if you’ve also been soul-tugged into and focused on and steeped in translating and being translated by some of the major texts in that field, like Cloud of Unknowing, Book of Privy Counsel, Brother Lawrence’s Practice of the Presence, Hildegard, Benedict, Julian, and more, and then a new friend very kind, wise, thoughtful, and smart asks you,
“What is contemplation?”
Recently, Paul Swanson invited me over for a conversation on his cool podcast Contemplify. Again, Paul is gentle of soul, thoughtful, and the kind of profoundly brilliant that is based on active listening and much reading, and he puts you at ease.
Since I deal with severe anxiety on a daily basis, I appreciate such kindness deeply.
We also discovered we have the same Jack Baumwerk “Go on, Brother Lawrence” print.
Again, at one point Paul asked me something like What comes to mind when I hear the word contemplation. This alchemized a cocktail of feelings and thoughts and experiences in me.
His question distilled countless hours of being out in nature growing up, often alone, escaping distress and trauma at home, peering at tadpoles and returning and watching them grow, catching and letting go crawdads, watching them scoot backwards, squinting at red-tailed hawks banking in the sun, picking up fossils, and stalking and steeping in the presence of trees in dense pine forests. Feeling lonely yet not alone.
Paul’s good question sent my mind riffling through digital pages of the OED and etymologies. Reminded my bones of sitting eternities with my little word, itching to get up, restless. Did the timer go off yet? Should I write that thought down? One eye open: How much time is left? Still 15 minutes?
And the most natural form of meditation for someone who has ADHD like me: Walking, walking, walking, walking, walking, walking, in Macedonia, Athens, and Rome, Georgia; London; Hereford; Heidelberg; Seoul; Huntsville, Alabama; Berkeley and Martinez; and so many others. Cycling, too, from Heidelberg to Handschuhsheim, and Heidelberg to Ladenburg past farms and piles of sour smelling mashed grapes as the leaves turned golden beside the path. Often with an index card with a sinewy poem or other beautiful wisdom on it to chew on.
It brought up also the Western feel and history of the word, similarly to how I feel whenever I hear “critical thinking” used in the academy, often as if its definition is obvious. (Which it isn’t.)
But really, as I told my new friend Paul, “I don’t know.” I really don’t know what contemplation is. The experience.
How do you describe how practicing the presence found you before you’d even heard of it or could even admit to yourself what was happening, when you used to leave the house and go out into the silent woods wandering aimlessly, like Mary Oliver says she did, and how nature saved her and nature saved and saves me? How do you put into words that kind Silence?
How do you explain that even as “God protects us from nothing,” as my friend Jim Finley says, how “God does not stop the cruel thing from happening, the unfair thing from happening, the abusive thing from happening,” how “God can’t sometimes do that,” how “the modality of the presence of God is not a God who protects the loss or the pain or the cruelty from happening,” but rather, as Jim continues, “God is the presence that unexplainably sustains us in all things on up to and including the moment of my death and beyond.” Jim reminds us: “I’m unexplainably sustained and I learn to rest in that. Resting in that, I see that God depends on us to do our best to protect ourselves and other people and to heal suffering wherever it occurs. Which is where social justice and the corporal works of mercy touch awakening.”
How do you find words for an experience like that that is both inexplicably Love and as accessible and as common as dust?
It’s Brother Lawrence’s “un je ne sais quoi,” and before him, John of the Cross and his “un no sé qué.”
But if I had to answer in one word? “What is contemplation?” I’d say contemplation is love.
It’s the enduring kindness of my husband with very human me, the also-unconditional tenderness of my mother since forever, and the gentle ways my friends know and support me, and how I support and know my family and friends, or, on personally dodgy days and in every I’m-a-human time, the ways I at least try. It’s the heartbreak of losing those you love, whether to illness or death or other changes or something else, since life has surprising ways to lose the most cherished beloveds. It’s the making it through dark nights of the soul as well as depression, and sometimes becoming confused when the two are not all that clearly delineated.
Love is finding a way through the cult-like raising of anti-therapy, pro-biblical-literalism evangelicalism to therapy, therapy as healthy and normal, and accepting somehow my therapist’s at first D- sounding diagnosis of “high-functioning depressive” and accepting I’d had suicidal ideations for decades, and going to therapy for years, the hardest schooling yet, and finding a way through decades of what D. W. Winnicott calls “the value of depression” and into a world that is now post-depression or, as my doctor says, “You are in remission from depression,” which though I don’t like the word remission much, does admittably make sense. I’m no longer depressed, but every day I work on being gentle with me, having good habits, slowing down, drinking water, eating well, breathing, staying in touch with friends, and in general accepting my place in the human family.
I have alerts in my phone that pop up every morning. Because I tend to forget essentials. One reminds me: “I am safe, I am loved, I am part of this human family.” Another addresses my lingering imposter’s syndrome at work: “They are lucky to have you! You’re the best!” It also reminds me that I am part of a team at Cal, a very kind, very student-centered community. Another alert asks, “What do I need now?” since I coped for years by focusing only on meeting others’ needs and neglecting my own.
Being asked about any word, even contemplation, especially contemplation, sends me as a nerd to the OED to discover where contemplation first occurs in English, or so far, where it’s been found to occur first. It’s in Ancrene Wisse, the 13th-century Guide (or Instructions) for Anchoresses. Ancrene means anchoresses. Think Julian of Norwich. Living in a 12’ x 12’ cell attached to a medieval church, with three windows, one open to the church, one open to the world, and one open to a parlor where food came in and waste went out. And the wisse is cognate with our word wit, so wisse, wit, and wise are rooted in *weid- “to see” and hence “to know.”
So if you ask me “What is contemplation?” I will go read Ancrene Wisse for the first time or might as well be the first time since I remembered nothing much about it.
And doing that, I remembered that my most beloved and enduring image of contemplation as experience is bird flight, with good reason. It’s not just me. It’s part of global mystical vocabulary.
Ancrene Wisse’s anonymous author gives an organic, alive, strong, wise, and gentle image for contemplation, that I translate here into Modern English as “the night-bird or owl flies by night and finds its food in darkness. In a similar way, the anchoress flies toward heaven by night through contemplation (that is, with high thought), and with holy prayers, and in darkness finds her soul food.” In Middle English: “þe niht-fuhel flið bi niht ant biȝet i þeosternesse his fode. Alswa schal ancre fleon wið contemplatiun (þet is, wið heh þoht) ant wið hali bonen bi niht toward heouene, ant biȝeote bi niht hire sawle fode.” Again, in Modern English, we hear: “The night-bird or owl flies by night and finds its food in darkness. In a similar way, the anchoress flies toward heaven by night through contemplation (that is, with high thought), and with holy prayers, and in darkness finds her soul food.”
This image helps me see why I never have identified with the “four steps” (reading, meditation, praying, contemplation) nor the “three stages” (purgation, illumination, union). This very first passage that (so far) in English has contemplation in it does not present contemplation as a step-by-step linear activity nor as some kind of ladder to climb or ascent to make; instead, contemplation is an ongoing flight. It’s recursive, repeated, ongoing, with natural rhythms interconnected with all of daily life.
Which reminds me of Das Jesus Gebet or The Jesus Prayer, given me by seventy-nine-year-old Mutti Buschbeck, my dear friend Sophie (well named, “wise”) whose Lutheran minister husband was contemporary with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and who similarly was imprisoned while a World War II chaplain, spending five years in a Russian prison camp, though he lived into the future and returned to his family, though emaciated.
This book was given me as I was emerging from anorexia. Mutti Buschbeck and I never discussed it, but she was wise and must have seen my fragile recovery and understood I was sick at age 22 when I was a Rotary Scholar at Heidelberg University, my first time abroad, and so homesick too. Every Friday she cooked me a roasted chicken and steaming vegetables, and I rode my little bike over from my dorm in Handshuhsheim.
I began reading this Christmas present she gave me, never having heard of the book or the prayer before. And because it was in German, I could take in its wisdom. Had it been in English I could not have. At the time I was totally burned and burned out by religious and other abuse on any words associated in English with Christianity. Here’s a translation of words that first came to me gently in German. They emphasize gentleness in contemplation, saying:
Even in the act of invocation of the Name, its literal repetition ought not to be continuous. The Name pronounced may be extended and prolonged in seconds or minutes of silent rest and attention. The repetition of the Name may be likened to the beating of the wings by which a bird rises into the air. It must never be labored and forced, or hurried, or in the nature of a flapping. It must be gentle, easy, and—let us give to this word its deepest meaning—graceful. When the bird has reached the desired height it glides in its flight, and only beats its wing from time to time in order to stay in the air. So the soul, having attained to the thought of Jesus and filled herself with the memory of him may discontinue the repetition of the Name and rest in Love. The repetition will only be resumed when other thoughts threaten to crowd out the thought of Jesus or Love. Then the invocation will start again in order to gain fresh impetus.
Wow.
This kind of gentle taming of the mind in Love, with Love, and by Love heals, brings me self-compassion and active compassion for all others. It’s a work in (gentle) progress, and the materials for contemplation are the ways and days of life. All of it.
So when I remember the etymology of contemplation, I also remember Barbara Holmes and her wise emphasis on contemplation as community.
I always think of the C in Contemplation as also being the C in Community. Interdependence. I am you and you are me. I am because you are and you are because I am. The African philosophy of ubuntu. Where humans are seen as humans and interconnected with each other and with all creatures and with the earth.
How there is a Silence found in all noise, all music, all taxi honks, all symphonies, all bird songs, all groups singing, all choirs, all shouting, all deaths, all births, all.
I return too to etymology again, always grounding my dyslexic brain in roots, rootedness: Contemplatio / Contemplation has origins in either *tem- for “cut” or *ten- for “stretch.” Roman scholar Mary Beard reminds us, walking into an ancient temple somewhere, that “the whole purpose of a temple is to house the image of a god,” which here means LOVE.
We read that a temple is “a place dedicated to the service of a deity or deities, ground that is consecrated or set apart for the taking of auspices and the worship of a god,” as one dictionary reminds. In other words, it’s “a place reserved or cut out (*tem-)” from its surroundings and dedicated to such, or “a place where string has been stretched (*ten-) to mark off the consecrated ground.” Think also of your head’s temple, the flattened area on either side of your forehead, and we see temple’s roots here in *temp- from *ten– for “stretch,” meaning “stretched skin.”
To me, this is not speaking to a disconnect or a separation or even an isolation from others or from ourselves, but rather contemplation’s root of “to cut” reminds me to pause or “carve out” an atom of time and return to Love, and its root of “to stretch” reminds me that contemplation is an intention of returning to Love within and living that in my life. In the economy of Love, wanting to pray is also praying.
We don’t have to physically be anchoresses to return to this temple of Love within.
Another way that Paul’s question “What is contemplation?” is beneficial is that it is a reminder that I need good invisible food too. Contemplation, as the Cloud of Unknowing’s author says, is rooted in lectio divina, steeping in wise scripture verses that come from an anthology on love (and also other spiritual writings work like Mary Oliver’s divine poetry, Richard Rohr’s wise work, plus many others). We are humans, we forget the obvious. For the first fourteen or so centuries of the Christian church, lectio divina and contemplation were the path for all. Stepping back onto that wisdom path is not hard.
How was this wisdom lost? I think religious scholars began questioning how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Which is very likely apocryphal as an example but very true as a notion of what scholasticism was about as a theology-philosophy. Meanwhile, people were starving in an unjust economy. I think how Marguerite Porete was burned at the stake on June 1, 1310, just for saying that religious scholars were “arrogant.” Every morning I wake and wonder how should I live and be in a world where people are hungry, where friends are working back-breaking jobs for no-healthcare and low-wages? Where education is not accessible? What can I literally contribute toward a more equitable economy? If one person is hungry and without healthcare, how must I act? And that influences my every decision.
I want to live and act from and “[a]t the still point of the turning world….at the still point, there the dance is,” as T. S. Eliot writes in “Burnt Norton.”
I want to always go back to the roots of contemplation. Even as I remember that it is a Western concept and so is tainted with binaries. While for me it also overflows its origins and conjures up all goodness and kindness that is embodied in the beyond binaries worlds.
I must feed my mind-heart-soul-self-body something nourishing regularly, just like eating good food. Sometimes it’s “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver, sometimes “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” I can take “God is love” and spend hours, or the rest of my life with it. So many good and beautiful wisdom passages exist. We forget we can pick anything wise that resonates. Sometimes it’s a Stoic’s apothegm. Whatever a person finds words-wise that gives your life meaning. Whether that is literature of all sorts, scriptures of all faiths, all wisdom traditions, or a gem you found in a friend’s story.
Also, whenever scriptures are concerned, it seems that “steeping” in them would involve at some point reading them through all the way, several times, to get one’s own “gist” of what they are about, rather than just taking a few phrases out of context. To do so, studying them with diverse commentaries that dig into history, linguistics, and culture has helped me deeply. In the same way, reading all of Mary Oliver (prose and poetry) really helps a person more appreciate just one poem of hers that you might be meditating on repeatedly.
It also seems that if such a study of whatever material I have picked out for the steeping that is lectio divina doesn’t have its core meaning as “Love,” then I should really move on to some other passage or work that does, for meaningful, active, nourishing engagement with and of my True Self.
The experience of lectio divina, which involves lectio or deep reading or listening, meditatio or reflecting on healthy words, oratio or opening of the heart there, and contemplatio or entering the silence, makes us like our creature friends the cows, where juicy green words about the Mystery of Love are chewed until they become our very own milk that feeds the marrow of our own days, growing our self-compassion and active love for others, too.
It’s not hard. We just need an intention to. Hunger. A few good words to munch on. And chew. A desire to learn how to rest. To practice letting go.
And even if I don’t have the hunger sometimes, I can ask to have it or to have it renewed. All is possible.
The Cloud of Unknowing’s Anonymous writes in his sequel, Book of Privy Counsel, that contemplation is life, and he sounds very like Brother Lawrence here:
If your mind lets in any sort of thought about any particular thing outside your naked blind being (which is your God and your goal), it gets sucked into and trapped in the tricks and curiosity of your intellect, distracting your mind and alienating you from yourself and God. That’s why you must persevere in contemplation. Do it as often as you can. Grace will help you. When you persist in it and don’t give up, wisdom strengthens the inner poise you need to hold your soul whole and focused. Remember that contemplation is not an interruption to your daily life.
Instead, as you focus on this unseeing seeing of your naked being uniting you with God, keep doing what you always do: Eat and drink, sleep and wake up, walk and sit, speak and be silent, lie down and get up, stand and kneel, run and ride, work and rest; but at the hub of it all, you’re also offering God the most precious sacrifice you can make, this blind awareness. It’s the most important of all of your activities, active or contemplative. (Page 190 of Carmen Acevedo Butcher’s translation of Book of Privy Counsel, Shambhala, Chapter 7)
In other words, what is contemplation? It’s a habit, a good habit feeding the soul, and the soul is love. It repairs and heals us, as the Cloud’s Anonymous says, in love of self and others, and as we read in Chapter 9 of his Cloud, contemplation “benefits you and all of your friends and acquaintances, both living and dead.” I don’t understand how, but it encourages me endlessly.
To keep at it, cheerfully.
