Tag: centeringprayer

Always Room at a Round Table

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

This memory is dedicated with love to Sister (Dr.) Linda Kulzer, Benedictine nun, who invited me to present at the Western Michigan University medieval conference at American Benedictine Association sessions. She lived to be 92, dying in 2022. Her humility and kindness made her a good friend to all who knew her. I’m grateful for her hospitality. Father Tom Francis became my friend and email pen pal after we visited many times at the Conyers Monastery, including once with my family. He died aged 96 in 2024. He always talked of and lived from God as friend and had a sparkle in his eye and a light heart filled with kindness. Father William Meninger and I exchanged many emails and he also made and sent me a dried flower card. My life was enriched by his sharing his love of the Cloud of Unknowing. He died in 2021 aged 88.

I’m so grateful for these three. They offered me community. I was also fortunate to find community along the way in places like books, now in the joy of Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation collaborations, and in kind undergraduate and graduate school professors who made class truly communal. Some of my favorite memories are from the time spent with monks and nuns, who invited me in, often reaching out out of the blue. When I was in graduate school, I was living pretty much a nun’s life, studying the Bible with commentaries daily and taking notes, praying, doing lectio divina, or sacred reading, walking two hours daily, so I fit right in with my monastic friends because my heart has always been monastic. I did all this while teaching full time as a TA, first-year composition students, and while being a full-time student.

One reason I walk is because I have dyslexia, undiagnosed until my late 40s, and walking has always helped me learn and digest what I’ve studied in school. It helps me have room and calm to think. I also often carried and still often do carry Bible verses with me. I started, because I was doing what my mom taught me, which is to memorize Bible verses, starting with, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me,” which she gave me and all of us kids in VBS. I’d write them on 3×5 cards, and take them with me on walks, but the memorizing became lectio divina, even before I’d heard of it. Which reminds me always, that God or Love always has a workaround, seriously.

Here’s one memory made possible because Sister Linda Kulzer of blessed memory invited me to give talks for the American Benedictine Association. I was asked about it at a recent workshop, so that kind new friend sent me down memory lane. It’s from my book God of Mercy, which is on the tenth-century Benedictine scholar, translator, monk, and abbot Ælfric of Eynsham, whose emphasis on writing accessible sermons in the vernacular and on communicating that God is Love and Mercy were significant antidotes and healing for me who had been brought up as a child on an unhealthy diet of hellfire and damnation sermons.

One May, I entered Western Michigan University’s teeming Valley III cafeteria holding a tray of barbequed chicken leg, institution-white rice, and asparagus, and scanned the dining room for a friendly face. Remembering my monastic friends’ habit of sitting on the right side of this boisterous room, I shifted my gaze and spotted them at once. Then I noticed with disappointment their circular table was crowded with seven sisters and no empty chairs.

No room for me, I thought, and began looking elsewhere, but I had been spotted. When elderly Sister Teresa Wolking raised an arm in welcome, I shuffled towards their table, still uncertain. Sister Deborah Harmeling rose to meet me with a smile, then disappeared behind my back, and as she left—in one motion—the others took their plates off cement-dull cafeteria trays and stowed these trays under their seats. All this fuss made me ask, “You sure there’s room?” and Sister Deborah answered my question by returning with a chair and placing it firmly under me: “There’s always room at a round table.”

There’s always room at a round table echoed in my head as I unloaded my own plates and stowed the tray under the gift of my chair, and joined the community. This is the world of the tenth-century Benedictine monk and abbot Ælfric, whose sermons I translated from Old English, and it’s the Benedictine idea of Christian community and the blessing of the ordinary (in this case, a chair), which is the foundation too of the teaching of Jesus.

Father Greg Boyle reminds us in Cherished Belonging: “Everyone belongs and everyone is unshakably good, no exceptions.” Having experienced how painful exclusion and bullying are, I deeply remember and cherish the sisters’ act of kindness, which still blesses me in my heart today.

This blog is also read here: https://youtu.be/I24O214OLn0. The story of the kind nuns is from God of Mercy: Ælfric’s Sermons and Theology (Mercer University Press), p. 12.

Welcoming Practice

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

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

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

— Mary Mrozowski, creator of the Welcoming Prayer

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

It has three movements:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cynthia Bourgeault sums it up well:

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

Come

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

This blog pairs well with my YouTube channel meditation / video where you can spend 6 calm minutes listening to it, watching birds fly over blue water in a blue sky, seeing a rivulet flow, and enjoying a container ship slowly entering the horizon. To view, go here.

The practice of Lectio Divina is ancient and simple, and it exists in diverse forms across faith traditions and wisdom traditions. It means sacred reading. It’s a kind of steeping that creates a web of mental associations, sometimes broken up into four non steps.

I think of these as a web.

We read or bite some wise words, and then we chew on them like a cow chewing her cud. And for those of us from the country who’ve seen cows chewing their cud, that’s some very, very excellent chewing. Very serious nourishing chewing and re chewing.

And then the next non step or spot on the web is savoring.

So read or bite, reflect or meditate or chew, and then comes the respond or oratio or prayer. What is it saying to me? And then the final non step is contemplatio, or contemplation, resting, simply letting go of thoughts or finding that thoughts let go of you, of us, and resting.

Sometimes the fourth non step is sort of separated away and packaged as centering prayer. And that can be, as I’ve experienced it and many others, very nourishing.

Also the cloud of unknowing’s author Anonymous says in chapter 35 and elsewhere that Lectio Divina is where we start as contemplatives.

And in my experience, this kind of food or eating is needed throughout the journey of life. And the wise Jesus said, we don’t live by bread alone, but by every word that comes out of the mouth of love or God or mystery, the ultimate source, however a person thinks. Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. What from this seems to be highlighted in your consciousness?

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

What would you feel is speaking to you in this in these wise words from Jesus? What might it make you feel and what might it make you realize you would like to have more of in your life? Or what kind of a relationship is it calling you to with yourself, with God, or love and with others in whatever non aggressive way you wish?

Let this passage of wise words that have meant so much to so many over millennia speak to us, and then we rest.

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Kindness

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

God, to you all hearts are open, to you all longings speak, and to you no secret thing is hidden. I beg you—purify the intentions1 of my heart through the unspeakable2 gift of your grace, so I can love you with all I am and praise you for all you are. Amen.

God, unto Whom alle hertes ben open, and unto Whom alle wille spekith, and unto Whom no privé thing is hid: I beseche Thee so for to clense the entent of myn hert with the unspekable gift of Thi grace that I may parfiteliche love Thee, and worthilich preise Thee. Amen.

Kindness

This past weekend the Very Reverend Gary Jones, Interim Dean at Christ Church Cathedral in Houston, invited me to give some talks, lead an experiential, I did Centering Prayer, and preach twice at 9 and 11. So I did. Gary is exceptionally kind and wise, also brilliant and a contemplative. Those are a combination the world needs more of. Thank you, Gary. He and his wife, Cherry, are so welcoming, as was the whole community. Thank you, everyone, for giving me such a warm welcome. I can’t (yet) say in words how much it meant and means—thank you for gifting me with such genuine dialogue, much appreciated.

So I took a copy of the Cloud of Unknowing and of Practice of the Presence with me. It was the fifth Sunday in Lent, where the community reads about Lazarus being raised from the dead, and I’m always happy to consider resurrections, personal and societal, and for nature, injured as this wonder is by greed.

At another time I will write about my time behind the rood screen and among the mirrored skyscrapers where the blue sky and white clouds were reflected. It was a kind of resurrection for me, for diverse reasons. First I want to have digested the experiences fully. I’m still ruminating on them gratefully.

Right now I want to sing again what I did in the 11am service, known to me as the Prayer for the Preface to the Cloud of Unknowing. For a long time I’ve sung it in Middle English, over ten years now, in fact. But I’d never sung my Modern English translation of it. If you want to see me sing it there in Modern English and listen to my 15-minute sermon, you can go to vimeo here: https://vimeo.com/809526246 “3/26/23 Acevedo Butcher: The Fifth Sunday in Lent.” I so appreciate that they included both my last names.

The song or tune for this prayer was inspired by my preparing as I do by reading and thinking, watching CCC’s third week in Lent’s service (where Bradley read it, in fact, from the communal prayerbook, and that sparked in me), and many times praying “What should I do?” as I walked through the marsh, holding this prayer.

How that song came about was the same as with the Middle English. I start out saying it in lectio divina, on a note card on which I’ve written it. And eventually somehow it becomes singing, sung, a song. Sometimes it sounds one way and then another and eventually it settles into a sort of way that is repeated and now I can sing it in that settled version.

It started, this song, in the marsh. Among egrets flying and squawking plus ducks, geese, red-tailed hawks, swallows, pelicans, too. I sing it first in Modern, then in Middle English, and after that read the two footnotes from my translation of the Cloud. You could also substitute for “God” here “Love” or even “Kindness,” since that’s the heart of all major religions and wisdom traditions—kindness, to ourselves and to others—connecting with our True Self, which is/who is Kindness.

God, to you all hearts are open, to you all longings speak, and to you no secret thing is hidden. I beg you—purify the intentions1 of my heart through the unspeakable2 gift of your grace, so I can love you with all I am and praise you for all you are. Amen.

God, unto Whom alle hertes ben open, and unto Whom alle wille spekith, and unto Whom no privé thing is hid: I beseche Thee so for to clense the entent of myn hert with the unspekable gift of Thi grace that I may parfiteliche love Thee, and worthilich preise Thee. Amen.

Here are the footnotes from my translation:

1. The Cloud author uses the Middle English entent (“intent”) often, reminding us that his theme is the exercise of “stretching” towards God. See Gallacher, ed., The Cloud of Unknowing, 21, line 3. With his background in Latin, he well knew that the word entent (our intent)comes from the Latin in-, “toward,” and from tendere, “to stretch,” so to be “intent” on something is literally “to stretch towards it.” This anonymous monk shows us how we can “stretch” our minds towards God in contemplation and grow spiritually, becoming people who “make peace” (James 3:18). Intense, tendon, attention, attend, attentive,and extend share this Latin root for “to stretch.” 

2. In Middle English, this prayer reads: “God, unto Whom alle hertes ben open, and unto Whom alle wille spekith, and unto Whom no privé thing is hid: I beseche Thee so for to clense the entent of myn hert with the unspekable gift of Thi grace that I may parfiteliche love Thee, and worthilich preise Thee. Amen.” See Gallacher, ed., The Cloud of Unknowing, 21, lines 2-5. Here we find a splendid example of the author’s play on the words “speak” and “unspeakable,” highlighting that God listens to us when “alle wille” (“all longings”)“spekith” (“speak”) to himand that he answers our articulated or “spoken” longings with “the unspekable gift” (“the unspeakable gift”) of his grace. We “speak” and in return are given an “unspekable” (“ineffable”) gift, his grace. This word play deftly suggests the mystery of a dialogue between our chatter and a profound silence. This prayer is also the short opening prayer (or collect) before the epistle in the Roman Catholic votive Mass of the Holy Spirit (Ad postulandam gratiam Spiritus Sancti), with one difference. The anonymous author has slightly changed the original Latin version. Originally, the prayer addressed the unspeakable gift “of your Holy Spirit,” not “of your grace.” The author revised it to focus on God’s grace. His use and revision of this liturgical prayer reveal his belief that grace and the Holy Spirit are closely related, that the Holy Spirit informs contemplative prayer, that grace is the sine qua non of contemplation, and that communal prayer is central to spiritual growth.

God, to you all hearts are open, to you all longings speak, and to you no secret thing is hidden. I beg you—purify the intentions1 of my heart through the unspeakable2 gift of your grace, so I can love you with all I am and praise you for all you are. Amen.

God, unto Whom alle hertes ben open, and unto Whom alle wille spekith, and unto Whom no privé thing is hid: I beseche Thee so for to clense the entent of myn hert with the unspekable gift of Thi grace that I may parfiteliche love Thee, and worthilich preise Thee. Amen

Thank you for being here and I hope these bring peace and joy to you.