Tag: cloud

Fog

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

When a reader says your book helped them or thank you for your book, words can’t be found to say how wonderful that is. Today an email came from a reader about my translation of the Cloud of Unknowing by Anonymous. It moved me deeply. I have anonymized this kind email, and I’d like to share it and my response here on my blog. The reader is referencing the fourteenth-century spiritual classic on prayer as written by an experienced contemplative, perhaps a Carthusian monk or a priest, and that I translated for Shambhala Publications. For more information please see my website here: https://www.carmenbutcher.com/books.html

Dear Carmen,

having read several translations of this wonderful book I keep coming back to your version.
It speaks to me the most.

During my studies of English I had to follow a course of Middle English. Of course, as a young student, I did not understand why I should be bothered with this.We students saw it as additional chicanery to reduce the high number of students. But I quickly realized that reading Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in its original version was quite different from reading its rendering in modern English.

When I came across The Cloud of Unknowing for the first time – it was Ravi Ravindra who quoted from it in his webinars – I bought the William Johnston edition of it. Then I read Evelyn Underhill’s rendition. But when I got your translation of it I was suddenly touched in a quite different way. The text spoke more to my heart than to my brain while reading.

So I decided to get the original in the Phyllis Hodgson edition. And now I know why I had to do Middle English as part of my studies. Reading this wonderful text in the words of its author is a completely different experience. There might be words where the meaning is not clear or different in modern English. That’s where modern translations help. But what really makes the difference: it’s a SLOW reading which takes you much deeper into the text.

Being a seeker on the spiritual path I enjoy this text as soul-food. With each reading some concepts become clearer. Yet I still do not know if I have really understood what contemplation is … even after all these readings. I’ve been practicing going into stillness, letting all inner talk coming to a halt for some time, just focussing on God, Love, Light. But I’m still not sure whether this is meditation or contemplation. I need some more clarity there. But as long as there are still more questions than answers I suppose I’m on the right way.

Thank you for this wonderful translation of this spiritual classic. . . .

Best wishes,

My response:

Dear ,

Thank you for your kind and thoughtful email. It is wise and speaks to what I hoped and prayed for my translation of the Cloud. I’m delighted you decided to share this with me. Thank you! 

Until fairly recently, I spent most of my time in a fog of mystery about this text. It generated more obscurities than anything I know, like the purple fog coming out from around the hills nearby and blanketing the water, and these were not discrete rational questions but more a kind and gentle atmosphere of letting go that is questioning’s openness and humility, a true cloud of unknowing. 

I would be bemused when someone asked me to speak about the Cloud, as I myself wasn’t sure what it was about, not really, not its essence. This was true, even as I was someone practicing meditation daily, in both ways of which I was aware and unaware then, and even as someone who has practiced diverse types of meditation for decades. I see now I was living in this life-nourishing fog that resembles the low-suspended clouds Bay Area residents are so grateful for. At the time, I was hesitant to mention this uncertainty aloud, as I suspected it could be heard as my not knowing some information about the text, like say where it was written, etc., which of course was not the case since I have spent untold hours studying it academically. 

This was most perplexing, and I see now how I had protected myself, I thought, by growing my mind as a kind of carapace between me and my pain. And this gentle fog was active in, as the actual fog does here, cooling off my mind and greening it like our hills here in spring. I often say that I translated the Cloud as it translated me, and this is true. My whole life has been one of living my childhood question, How can I pray without ceasing? In this journey, the Cloud stands as the text that most healed and heals my understanding as it increases the kind mystery. Perhaps that is because of when I translated it, my age, needs, and life circumstances then, but also it is because of its bedrock presentation of the loving mystery loving us all. It is “soul-food,” as you say. Anonymous’ rhetoric, teacherly kindness, and encouragement are wonderful invitations to enter the text and slow down and steep in the mystery.

I appreciate that you point out, “it’s a SLOW reading which takes you much deeper into the text.” I grew to understand as I gave talks, led workshops, and responded to attendees’ questions, that whenever consternation about the Cloud was present, it was most often coming from the split mind of dualism we all share and would be helped by more time in contemplation. It seems that my need to understand grows less as my feeling of being loved grows more.

Your very kind email, as you can see, has occasioned a lengthy response, and again I am grateful for your wise words and wish you the great joy of the Cloud. . . .

Best,

Carmen

Hide-and-Seek Divinity

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

When I was a stay-at-home mom and our daughter was almost three, she loved to play hide-and-seek. One time in Mountain View, California, she and I were playing hide-and-seek, just the two of us, on the dusty, shaded playground a short walk from our rented townhouse. School had just let out, so we had the playground mostly to ourselves. I hid first, and she found me fairly easily. Various anatomical parts of me stuck out from behind a skinny pine tree.

“Your turn to hide!” I sang out, and off she dashed with that nervous look that is the excitement of possibly “being found.” I just saw her back as she pumped her arms and scampered off, head down, searching for shelter.

I was a stickler for following rules then, and, as the oldest of four siblings, I always was; so I turned my back to my toddler and dutifully counted slowly to twenty, out loud. Then I turned around and started searching. I was serious about the search, too. I looked behind the slide, behind the skinny pine tree, behind the bushes, and just as I started across the playground, still searching, out dashed Kate yelling, “Surprise! Here I am! I found you!”

Huh? I said to myself and started to explain to her that that is NOT how the game works, when I stopped and thought, In this surprise is some spiritual lesson, but I’m not sure what. We played several more times, with her “hiding,” only to jump out sooner each time, shouting, “I found you!”

Decades later, I think back on this hide-and-seek game with my then toddler. By temperament, I spent the first fifty years of my life as a rules follower, someone preferring order, but over the years that preference has given way (often whether I’ve wanted it to or not) in the face of life as it is truly lived. My natural temperament that yearns for routine and schedule and predictability has eroded in the waves of living and loving imperfectly, as a wife and as a mom and then as a tenured professor, writer, speaker, now an adjunct professor, and the sand of my once seemingly ordered life has been carried out to sea.

I turn to scripture, wise books, and poetry for nourishment as I always have. They are lighthouses on the rocky part of the shore, faithfully there no matter the weather.

Over time, I forgot those playground games with my daughter. Then, one day not too very long ago, I found myself translating the fourteenth-century classic on lectio divina (sacred reading) and contemplative prayer, The Cloud of Unknowing (also here). In Chapter 46, I read words that reminded me of those hide-and-seek games with our daughter:

And don’t be hard on yourself. By that, I mean don’t overtax yourself emotionally or physically.
Choose to be enthusiastic instead. This discipline [of Bible meditation and contemplative prayer]
doesn’t require brute strength, but joy. As you increase the joy in your contemplative work, you also
increase its humility and genuine spirituality, but if you force it, your efforts sink into a crude
physicality. So beware. Remember that anyone approaching the high mountain of contemplation
with a beastly heart will be driven away with stones. . . . That’s why you should be careful. Instead of
being stubborn as a mule, learn to love with gentleness and joy, kindness and good manners.
Cultivate self-control of body and soul. Accept the will of our Lord gracefully. Never lunge for it like
a hungry dog. Even if you’re starving, don’t be a greedy greyhound. Don’t grab. Let me suggest
how you can do this. I’m going to advise you to play a sort of game with God, seriously. Pretend
you don’t want what you want as much as you want it. When you feel that beast, desire, stirring
inside you with tremendous power, restrain it. Act as if you don’t want God to find out how much
you long to see him, know him, and feel him. Hide all that. Perhaps I sound like a child making up a
game, but I mean it. I’m confident that anyone with the grace to put my advice into practice will
eventually experience the joy of God’s playfulness. God will come to you, the way an earthly father
plays with his child, kissing and hugging, making everything alright. (105-106)

“God will come to you, the way an earthly father [or mother, I say] plays with his [or her or their] child, kissing and hugging, making everything alright” — this wise observation reminded me that my toddler daughter was so confident I would find her that she didn’t even try to hide well. To her, the joy was in not quite hiding and then bursting on me as soon as I began searching. She has always loved to surprise me with her unique presence. Would that I were that child with God my Parent, I thought.

In devotional literature, it’s not unusual to find this hide-and-seek image. Often ancient Christian writers use diction and description to suggest that our relationship with God is not unlike a game of hide-and-seek between parent and child, which ends with the parent’s “finding” the child and covering him, her, or them with kisses and hugs.

In the thirteenth-century spiritual guidebook, Ancrene Riwle, another anonymous author writes, Ure Louerd plaieth mid us, ase the moder mid hire junge deorlinge. (“Our Lord-God plays with us as the mother with her young darling.”) The Ancrene Riwle passage then describes a hide-and-seek game in which God our Mother hides. Her child cries out, “Mother! Mother!” and God jumps out with open arms and cluppeth and cusseth and wipeth (“hugs and kisses and wipes”) our eyes. The Ancrene Riwle author uses this image to describe the experience of how God withdraws or “hides” His grace from us for a time, before returning to “find” us.1

The hide-and-seek image is used, perhaps, because it suggests the intimacy of those who play this child’s game. In the classic The Spirituality of Imperfection, Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham tell a story that helps me understand this experience:


The Medzibozer’s grandson, Yechiel Michael, was playing hide and seek with another child. He hid
himself for some time, but his playmate did not look for him. Little Yechiel ran to Rabbi Baruch and
said amid tears: “He did not look for me!”
The Rabbi said: “This is also God’s complaint, that we seek Him not.” (107)

But perhaps this next story from The Spirituality of Imperfection best helps me understand those games of hide-and-seek with my daughter and also my own dark, difficult, and despairing life experiences where I felt that God was “hiding” from me.

The story is told of a young girl who loves to wander in the nearby forest and one evening becomes lost. Her frantic parents gather their friends and search for her. She herself has become very anxious, after trying several different paths to return home to no avail, and she eventually falls asleep in a clearing. The searchers as well become exhausted and many stop looking. Her father, though, continues searching through the night.


Early in the morning, the father came to the clearing where the girl was asleep. He suddenly
saw his little girl and ran toward her, yelling and making a great noise on the dry branches which
awoke the girl.
The little girl saw her father, and with a great shout of joy she exclaimed, “Daddy, I found you!”
(108)

Kurtz and Ketcham write, “[W]e find what we are looking for only by being looked for” (108). “[W]e find what we are looking for only by being looked for.”

As we played together those many years ago, my toddler daughter found what she was looking for, the assurance of my searching for her, by jumping out and surprising me, upturning the “rules” of hide-and-seek because she could count on my being right there.

Sometimes, when I’ve felt in hard times that Love’s face is turned from me, that God who is my best friend is “hiding” from me, what jumps out at me is often my husband’s listening, a hug or a kiss from my children, a verse or poem, a loving friend checking in, a kind stranger, a deliberately intentional wise comment, my spontaneous wonder before a newly white dogwood or while listening to a poignant podcast, and God says, “Surprise! I found you!”

Or maybe I say, “Father/Mother/Parent/Love, I found you!”

Sometimes, in mutually loving relationships, it is almost impossible to tell who does the finding and who is the found.

So I keep praying that I embrace the grace to keep on seeking. Is the seeking the finding and the being found?

I pray to live in the middle place of Christ’s enduring, loving mystery where grace and seeking meet, in that liminal middle space of the numinous Now.

1. Find this passage in Nicholas Watson’s Anchoritic Spirituality (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1991, page 132). This piece has been revised after being resurrected from my former iteration of this blog (2011).