Tag: newblog

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.

Unmediated Life

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

You can also listen to this blog on Carmen’s YouTube channel.


I walk about two hours a day so I can feel the ground under my feet. It’s unmediated.

Unmediated is “not mediated: not communicated or transformed by an intervening agency.”

In the middle of unmediated, hidden there, is media. Media is the original plural of medium. Medium is from an ancient root *medhyo– for “middle.”

Mass media is a medium of communication such as newspapers, radio, and television.

Mass media often stands between us and the real news about our lives.

On my walks there’s nothing much between me, my body, and earth. I don’t traverse the earth on Google Earth by moving my mouse. I don’t read of its wonders in an ebook. I don’t watch a colorful documentary on YouTube. I see earth’s flowers, smell its grass, hear its birds, taste its fog on winter days, and touch its soft feathers when they molt to earth.

The media scholar Marshall McLuhan and I became friends when I was eleven. We met at a public library. My mother dropped her four kids off while she went grocery shopping. For the bring-one, take-one bookcase, I took in a paperback ordered at school from Scholastic and took a book home titled The Medium is the Message/Massage.  

Later I found there The Mechanical Bride, The Gutenberg Galaxy, and my favorite, Understanding Media. These changed me. Luckily I had no idea he was a “philosopher” or someone a pre-teen should not read. I understood enough, and he stayed with me. I returned to his work often over decades.

When I read his ideas—that most people are unaware “blissfully” of “what the media do to them” and do not notice that “the medium is also the message [and the massage in that] . . . it literally works over and saturates and molds and transforms every sense ratio,” my seeing was changed forever. I started noticing the radio and the tv in new ways.

In graduate school, much later on, I learned McLuhan did his dissertation on grammar, logic, and rhetoric, all my favorite inquiries, and was himself influenced by Jesuit scientist and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

So I can study media and learn with and from my students, now I teach a course at University of California, Berkeley, titled, “The Meme and the Human (& AI): Digital Literacies,” inspired by that chance encounter in a public library decades ago.

Memorably, the Introduction to the first edition of Understanding Media begins, “After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding.” McLuhan adds, “Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.” He argues that we are approaching (now are in, he might say) “the final phase of the extensions of [hu]man—the technological simulation of consciousness,” and he says that “the creative process of knowing will be collectively” because we have “collectively and corporately extended . . . our senses and nerves by the various media.”

McLuhan is an expert in pointing out the obvious that was not so obvious until he points it out: “Any extension [like a bike, car, cell phone, or social media, I add], whether of skin, hand, or foot, [or consciousness] affects the whole psychic and social complex.”

Sensory overload can prevent us from living in the present, unmediated, as McLuhan observes, “This is the Age of Anxiety for the reason of the electric implosion that compels commitment and participation, quite regardless of any ‘point of view.’” He also gave me hope by naming “[t]he aspiration of our time” as “wholeness, empathy and depth of awareness” as “a natural adjunct of electric technology,” by which he would also have meant our internet and social media today.

The essences of these “electric technology” changes are hard for us to detect, however, while they are happening. McLuhan calls it “the invisibility of any environment during the period of its innovation.” He compares the “content” of a medium to “the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” He adds that while a movie’s content is a novel, a play, or an opera, that the “effect of the movie form is not related to its program content.”

He saw, for example, that these media come to us (as the radio did in his day) “with person-to-person directness that is private and intimate” and that “touch[es] remote and forgotten chords.” This tends “to numb our central nervous system,” he says because when it is “extended and exposed,” we are overwhelmed, and that’s one reason, he notes, that we live so much with a rear-view perspective, what McLuhan calls in one interview “the rearview-mirror view”—because we are numbed by the new technologies as they are making a new environment—we work to make the old environment that much more visible by turning it into an art form and attaching ourselves to its objects and vibes, which explains a good deal of the present-day nostalgia.

Anyone wanting to read more about this can find media scholar Limor Shifman’s Memes in Digital Culture, where she helps us understand today’s “participatory culture.”

All I can say is that awareness for me includes walking the earth and listening to egrets, my family, my friends, my students, and everyone I meet. Trying to be a real listener is a path to walk also.

And I try to listen to my ancestors and these include those I’ve lived with and translated or communed with, like Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510).

It would be wonderful if we could all read Friedrich von Hügel’s The Mystical Element of Religion as Studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and Her Friends published by James Clarke in London in 1908. In fact, I put that there to remind me to one day. Ah, my bucket list of books grows apace.

But we don’t really need to read von Hügel. Instead we can go back to the words of Catherine. It’s one reason I translate or have translated and one reason I look up word etymologies every day. I go to the spring, the source of the Water. It’s also why I read the Bible and other Scriptures with commentaries and history books beside me, to reveal their words’ meanings and their contexts and to reflect on living out the word: “God is Love” into today.

These practices have also been and are life-changing helps with my decades-long-undiagnosed dyslexia.

If I go to the sources of classic works translated in English and read their original words, and if I go to words’ sources, and read their origins, then I can make up my own mind what they mean for me, as factually based as possible.

It’s also why I practice and study Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems, and that’s for another blog piece. I want to go to my own sources, my own parts, because I have experienced and do experience that the pre-packaged, systemically taught monomind paradigm is not true for me. As Beatrice Bruteau (and many past mystics) said and experienced, all of us have “artificial selves” and a “natural self,” and I call these my non-authentic, non-relaxed selves and my True or Authentic Self. Students always say, “You do you” or “Be authentic.” That Self.

About the True Self, in a very encouraging way, Catherine of Genoa gives us a word still as fresh as dew for today. Catherine is famous for saying, according to the translation you read, either, “My Me is God,” or “My deepest me is God!” And I think how she worked at the hospital helping people.

For “God,” “Love” or “Kindness” or “Ultimate Reality” or “Something More” et al., are often preferred.

Her words spark the question: What does it mean to be human?

Not to be a screen.

And what did she actually say in Italian?

“In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.”

Look at how the “Dio” and the twice “mio” rhyme. The Dio meaning God and the mio meaning my. That’s the medium being the message/massage. The è means is and the essere means to be or being. The English words essence, essential, and presence all have the same root: Latin esse for “to be” from the ancient root *es- “to be.”

I go to sleep now saying, “In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.” On mindful repeat.

I walk through the marsh saying, “In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.” Then I stop to listen to the egrets.

Because as Rilke writes, “Through all creatures extends one single space / World space within. Through us the birds fly silently. Oh, wanting to grow, I look outside at the tree / that grows in me.” [From “Durch alle Wesen reicht der eine Raum: Weltinnenraum,” Rainer Maria Rilke, Gedichte 1906–1926, Sämtliche Werke, II]

“In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.”

If I translated Catherine’s word, which I try not to because I’d rather experience it, I’d hear, “In God is my being, my Me.”

I go to sleep now saying, “In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.”

I walk through the marsh saying, “In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.”

I remember how Catherine of Genoa helped people at a hospital. I try to teach and be kind.

“In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.”

I teach, I sleep, I walk through the marsh. I listen. To the beautiful, raucous calls of the egrets.

Unmediated.

Without media.

“In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.”

“In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.”

“In Dio è il mio essere, il mio Me.”

HAWNK

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

You do not have to be good.   
You do not have to walk on your knees   
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.   
You only have to let the soft animal of your body  
love what it loves.   
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.   
Meanwhile the world goes on.   
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain   
are moving across the landscapes,    
over the prairies and the deep trees,   
the mountains and the rivers.   
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,   
are heading home again.    
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,   
the world offers itself to your imagination,   
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –    
over and over announcing your place   
in the family of things.
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

Hear Carmen sing this Mary Oliver poem on her YouTube Channel @CarmenAcevedoButcherPresence.


Mary Oliver’s gentle, beautiful, persistent, persisting, comforting, inspiring, and no-nonsense, clear-eyed, wild voice has been with me, in poetry and prose, for decades. I’m grateful for her presence in the world, ongoing, beyond death.

Sometimes I think she is the United States Rumi. My friend tells me when she goes home to Iran, that’s when she truly reconnects with Rumi, on the streets, in cars and trucks, in homes, on TV, in gatherings, he and his music and love and wisdom are everywhere. Much the same can be said about Mary Oliver, thankfully.

“Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver from Dream Work is a favorite poem for how it invites us to celebrate our interconnectedness with everything, every creature, and every one. It’s renewing in that way. I have lived with it so long that gradually a song came with it. First I read it, then reread it, then recited it, then it became a part of my DNA, I sang a few lines, and then I was singing it, and it was singing me.

First released in 1986 in Mary Oliver’s Dream Work, also a favorite of mine. To understand why, I’ll share with you some alerts in my phone and some notes to my self that are scattered around on my desk on index cards, some folded.  

One daily alert that pops up on my SE2 every morning at 6:15 AM reminds me: “I am safe, I am loved, I am part of this human family.” The last part especially is a theme of “Wild Geese”—“announcing your place / in the family of things.”

Another message pops up at 6 AM. If I see it, it’s the first thing I need to see, because no resume has ever been enough for me to assuage my deep-seated childhood trauma. Not that I look to my resume for that anymore, but the reverberations of insecurity are unavoidably foundational for me and deserve my utmost self-compassion and receive it regularly, too. The result of trauma for me is that I often don’t feel I belong anywhere. There are complex reasons for that. Mostly it’s part of my human condition. This message in my phone encourages me with what kind friends often say to me, so I say it to myself since I forget pretty much 24/7: “They are lucky to have you! You’re the best!”

Then on one 3” x 5” unlined-side white notecard in thick permanent black ink, folded tall-ways, I read in large letters: “CALM & CONFIDENT.” Since my default for decades was to apologize for everything, and outgrowing that is an ongoing process, even as verbally and interiorly it happens significantly less and less. My other default setting, for the same reasons, is fear. That’s another reason I benefited from hanging out with the Guru of Calm, Brother Lawrence. I drank in his calmness in that very intimate way of translating him as he translated me. Thank you, Nic.

Then, on another card folded lengthwise, I tell myself: “You’re amazing, Carmen. A ✯! My inner deafness is a kind that hears kind words from family and friends and almost at once forgets to listen. “Love your neighbor as yourself” for me means I have to work daily on inobtrusively reclaiming my safe feeling of quiet baseline amazing, something a healthy childhood might allow a person to take for granted perhaps, and live their life out of that security.

Over the years, I’ve been fortunate to heal my father wound. I’ve been to therapy, lots of therapy, and yes it was hard, and I’ll likely go back again one day. Doesn’t everyone need and benefit from therapy? My massage therapist gets massages. Therapists get therapy. Reminders of our interconnectedness.

I’ve also been fortunate to have years of rolfing. Getting help was painful at first. It did not come easy to me. I only went to rolfing because I could no longer use my arms and hands. In my 30s and 40s they gave me such constant pain that at night I fantasized about taking off my arms, and propping them against the wall beside my bed so I could sleep. My lifelong inner experience of being crippled that I had often coped with (on the surface) successfully, as my therapist once said, “You are a high-functioning depressive,” which made me mad before it made me aware—the truth of it came out. The fear, the pent-up anger, but mostly the sheer fright, came out in my body.

Carpal tunnel made me desperate. Desperation has so often turned out to be a loyal friend. Thank you, Desperation. Today I stretch my body regularly, rolfing healed me from the inside out, from the inner pain to the outer pain, and I was able to work, teach, write books, and more. Thank you, Karen.

I also met and married my best friend, Sean. Over 31 years ago now, and his kindness and deep love have been exciting, fun, sustaining, and healing, orienting me back to my true self. He is the sine qua non.

And I’m fortunate to have long-time friends, a mother who loves me and is always supportive and kind, and my own self-compassion and friendship with my self-Self. I also have a job I love (most of the time!) and colleagues and students who inspire me (all of the time!). Often they also become my friends. How enriching is that. Thankful.

The truth remains that like most people I remain wounded as I’m healed and healing. So those phone alerts and hand-written messages (in permanent ink!) reveal my humanness. I accept them and try to remember to look at the ones in my phone, which pop up every morning. Sometimes I don’t, but I know they’re there. The two messages on index cards I see regularly throughout my day at the computer. They are good reminders. They make me smile. Self-compassion.

That’s why “You do not have to be good” and Mary Oliver so speak to me and nourish me. It’s a song of self-compassion. A song of belonging in nature. Of me being so grateful the snowy egret who soars over me doesn’t put up a sign at the marsh entrance saying, “You are not allowed here. You may not have noticed, and it’s not exactly comfortable for me to have to point it out to you, but in so many ways I’m superior to you, this is my home, and you and yours have trashed it often. Stay out, please.” Thank you, snowy egret. Thank you, wild geese, that you don’t do the same. Hawnking after me to go away. Thank you, all.

This piece is for all of us “in the family of things.”