Tag: prayer

Boats

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

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Boats

This is a blog about how experiences we have remain in our memory and can gain new and deeper meaning in our lives simply because of the gift of time. The gift of time can whisper the inexplicable Presence in ways sometimes our unresolved selves could not then hear it. What happens when we pay attention to images that resurface for us, bringing joy and peace? It’s also about finding what ways contemplation happens in our life and then being true to that by simply turning up for it, again and again, imperfectly, unresolved, still questioning and evolving, only partially understanding or partially experiencing, or even sometimes not having any felt sense of God’s love. But showing up anyway, as we are.

When I was an international student at Heidelberg University, thanks to a Rotary Scholarship, I was homesick living in a dorm in Neuenheimer Feld, and many days after classes walked the hills of that lovely city, often alone. I was 22. Almost without knowing it, I fell in love with the barges sailing up the Neckar River and down it, silently, low in the water, with mostly smooth flat tops. Pencil-thin from above, they reminded me of toy boats almost or poetry in action.

A walker since my early teenage years, escaping tumult at home, my walk then was along Philosopher’s Way. The path was across the river from the magnificent ruins of the Heidelberg Castle. At various times of daylight, below me the castle’s red sandstone looked pink as sunrise against the dark green trees. Below it, always in my peripheral vision, was the city’s Old Bridge with its matching red sandstone, elegant curves, and scalloped patterning of the placid blue water.

What made these times of solitude special is that I also walked there not alone sometimes, with Frau Sophie Buschbeck as my companion. At first, “Sie” for the formal “you,” fairly soon she said, “Call me ‘Du’ [the informal ‘you’]. And Mutti Buschbeck.” And later she said: “Call me Mutti, if you wish.” She was a widow at 79, and she’d take my arm and off we went. Climbing the hills, her head down, her saying through quick puffs of breath: “You have to stay fit. You have to have hills to go up.”

I didn’t know then that my walks could be meditation. I had no awareness of that. As I was taught then, prayer was something you did with carefully chosen words, to make yourself a better person, to help you serve others better, to note make mistakes. I was raised with a policeman in my soul. Who was my god then, little g.

I had been raised to be what was called “selfless,” to think of others and their needs first, and not to think on my self. I didn’t know yet that I needed to make space for, cultivate, appreciate, and get acquainted with my self/selves/ego so that I could one day move beyond such. I was too injured to know any of this. I hadn’t yet learned how painful that is.

I used my mind as a buffer against pain. If I kept my mind busy, I could provide some numbing against a pain I couldn’t yet name. And my mind was dyslexic, so it took up quite a lot of my time to keep it busy.

But I could walk, thankfully, in the green trees above the Neckar River. Even though I was miserable, not really consciously taking in the scenery as much as unconsciously absorbing it and being immersed in it healingly. Thankfully I did have friends there who cared for me: Mutti Buschbeck, my kind roommate Gundi, the Buschbeck family who also took me in, and others I met along the path, literally, including one kind-hearted man, a dentist from another country, who took such a liking to me that after just three walks together there he asked me to marry him. I politely declined.

Looking back, I see how much walking meditation has been my path. It has been a true gift. I didn’t plan it this way. I walked because I was lonely and I loved nature, always have. Saying walking meditation is a way to pray was not in the limited vocabulary of my dogmatic evangelical upbringing. I had no idea I was doing anything “right” by walking and in fact felt that my entire life was a failure then.

I walked the way an injured animal will often find a bush and crawl into it and try to rest and heal. Call it instinct.

That I didn’t pass the language test to get into Heidelberg University and had to take remedial German courses there was just the academic component of a much larger failure health-wise, family-wise, and in every other way. I was so not at home inside myself that even every physical step was somehow painful, yet I was given the gift of getting out and walking, even so. Alone and other times with Mutti Buschbeck.

Sometimes I picture what my life might have been like had my young self heard a guest preacher say at one of the small churches I was taken to: “So contemplation is any means you use—walking meditation, rosary, mass, a 20-minute sit—any means you use—to experience this Self. . . . [That] is for me contemplation. And don’t get hung up on the posture or the program or the procedure cause I think as there are so many personalities there’s going to be many ways to experience it.” It would be decades before I heard Richard Rohr say that.

I am still watching the boats on the Neckar River come and go silently, low in the water, pencil-thin and smooth. They do not hurry. They move with ease. They do not zig or zag. They move ahead. With spaciousness. They seem to move without moving. They taught me without teaching me, I caught from them, how calmness can be lived out.

Only much later would I learn that Thomas Keating teaches something about boats. His words gave me words for what I’d learned from the Neckar.

The River is pure consciousness. This makes sense to me because I remember in graduate school walking up to my sixth-floor room after my sister had moved on to work as a nurse, and I was alone there, and I needed to forgive someone for my own sanity, and as I went to put my key in the lock and open the non-refurbished, stained wooden door to that ramshackle, tiny, but wonderfully located apartment, I felt a r(R)iver open my heart and run through my emerging selfhood.

Boats of all sizes float down this River. I remember the barges and boats of all sizes that floated down the beautiful Neckar River, a tributary of the Rhine River, and home for many terraced vineyards. Sometimes I see myself as a diver under the River. I’m not wearing any gear. Somehow I can just breathe under water, with ease. I’m sitting on a rock there below, comfortably, a good way down, and I see the boats now going by above me, some are small, some are long and large, some are medium in size. These are my thoughts. They come and go. New ones appear.

They can be anything, any thought, any feeling. In contemplation I let the boats go by. I don’t react to them or respond to them. I remember the experience of being up on Philosopher’s Way, with the quiet boats below going to and fro along the river, that feeling of being sick, lonesome, lost, and in pain, and yet also held. What a gift.

So in contemplation I don’t leave my cozy rock, swim up, and climb onto a boat, to analyze what it’s carrying, though I may feel that I’d like to. I don’t leave my rock, swim up, climb on, and ride downstream. I let it go. I let it pass by above me.

In contemplation, I don’t engage with these, I don’t judge them. I let them go. This helps me see I’m not what I’m thinking. Space opens up to discover who I am apart from my thoughts, I discover the wonder and the love that that River holds for us.

I sit on my rock, and I notice the River all around me.

Blessings to all of you friends, and thank you for being here,

Carmen

Faillir

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

One of my informal mindfulness practices is I look up the etymologies of words, every day, often. For decades. It’s the meditative version of all-you-can-eat BBQ Lay’s potato chips. I love BBQ potato chips, but at some point I have to say, One bowl is enough. Or one and a half. I can’t eat as many as I want every time I have some. Which by the way is daily with lunch.

But looking up etymologies? I can have another and another and yet another and then one more, and then again, another one. They form fractals of meaning in my awareness.

Every time I look up a word’s etymology, my mind expands in ways that joggle it loose from the larger binary system and into a spacious place of this and that and the other too, rather than this or that. Etymologies take me into the world of story, images, comparison, and yet another detail that complexifies my vision. This-that-and-the-other-too is one of my favorite places to be.

Sometimes I’m almost glad for having grown up with undiagnosed dyslexia. Out of decades of painful school days and feelings of shame, staring at the page with little sense-making, blurry cryptic dark marks moving so my mind could not decipher them, over time I became a lover of etymologies because knowing a word’s story and history gives it ballast. Letters slow, settle the paper, swap places more rarely. Not being able to read well also made me super grateful for kind teachers. Today when a d and b or c and s or now becomes know or know now or sense since or since sense, and etc., it is the uncommon not the every moment.

My dyslexia-cultivated this-that-and-the-other-too mindset taught me much about inclusivity. How truth always seems to have room for one more story, image, comparison, detail. For one more unique person.

I’m meditating on my love of etymology because this weekend I found myself reading truly for fun. First time in a long time. Because I finally finished a major project. I’m up for my 6 Year Excellence Review at UC Berkeley. That’s good fortune in itself, just to be up for it. But doing it has felt worse than stressful. Even though I am fortunate and have kind colleagues who are supportive, and great students, yet articulating what means most to me, teaching, and for public consumption, is my worst nightmare come alive, 24/7, and for months. A part of me always wants to hide, and not be seen, and truly that would not help me apply for a Continuing Lecturer position in College Writing Programs. So I did what I had to do and tried as I went through the process to center students’ voices, be self-compassionate, stay open of spirit, express my teaching philosophy and document my work, and express the gratitude I feel for this community.

Now it’s done. I uploaded it to the folder where it goes. I sent it on its way with a brave orison of well wishes. And celebrated this weekend in high fashion. I walked in the marsh without the burden of creating a self-statement and evidence file for my review. I bought some raspberry Danish rounds from Raley’s. I started reading Abigail Thomas’s What Comes Next and How to Like It: A Memoir. All good choices.

Thomas writes in a collage style I love. It’s like poetry and the best prose, all in one. Lyrical. Also grounded. She makes scenes we can enter. She’s real and kind. And genre-defying works have always been my jam. They resist the binary too.

I won’t spoil your experience of this memoir with any plot reveals. I’ll only say it’s a beautiful and moving work. At one point Thomas meditates on failure, speaking my language:

I am trying to convince myself that failure is interesting. I look the word up in the American Heritage Dictionary to find its earliest incarnation, but it has always been just ‘failure.’ There’s no Indo-European root meaning originally ‘to dare’ or ‘mercy’ or ‘hummingbird’ to make of the whole mess a mysterious poem. I can find no other fossilized remains in the word. Humility comes along on its own dime. (35)

Thomas sent me searching for failure.

It first turns up in the English language in the 1640s. Ironically in “a fayler of Justice in the highest Court of Justice.” This seems prescient. Failure there means “something not-occurring, an omitting to perform something due or required.” I wish we had confined failure to a legal term. An indicator that human rights have not been upheld. Because once it entered the binary slipstream of the English vernacular, it seems to have lost its compass for nuance.

In English, failure early on had different meanings too: “a lapse, a slight fault; weakness,” “the fact of becoming exhausted, breaking down in health, declining in strength,” and what it means mostly today: “not effecting one’s purpose; lack of success.”

That last definition, “not effecting one’s purpose,” seems to have become increasingly separated from a context of growing and recalibrating when we misstep or lapse or need to deepen our approach. Failure seems mostly narrowed today to mean “LOSER.” Against that, a whole industry of self-help books has arisen, like Megan McArdle’s The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success. Which I bought recently when a student recommended it. Even its title leans into the binary of up and down, failure and success.

But what about the roots of failure?

To find these, we go back a few centuries, almost a millennium even. In Old French, in faillir. From the early 12th century on, faillir had abundant meanings: from “lacking,  missing, absent, short of, losing [something]” to “destroying,” “breaking an agreement,” “letting down,” “being unsuccessful,” “collapsing,” “missing a target,” “diminishing,” “being unprofitable,” “weakening,” “ceasing,” “malfunctioning,” “not thriving,” “deceiving,” even “not living a good life” (see an Anglo-Norman Dictionary here).

You find something similar in the seventeenth-century in France. In my much-loved A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues compiled by Randle Cotgrave, faillir means:

To faile; slip, slide; erre, misse; mistake, misunderstand; offend, goe astray, doe amisse; also, to omit; lacke, wante; also, to quaile, decay, fade; faint, or tire; also, to deceive, or disappoint; also, to surcease, leave, end.

If we dig further, we find that our failure comes not only from the Old French faillir, but that faillir is from the Vulgar Latin *faillire, from Latin fallere, “trip, make fall,” and figuratively, “deceive, trick, cheat; be lacking or deficient.”

So, at heart, failure has a pratfall. I like to think of it as we’re doing our best and still stumble. We were aiming for the bullseye but hit the barn instead.

Even “lapse,” one of failure‘s early meanings, has roots in lapsus for “a slipping and falling.” Of course this reminds me of my friend Nicolas Herman. Brother Lawrence says to a friend of his who is discouraged, a nun, in letter 7 of my recent translation Practice of the Presence that we all “stumble,” get distracted and discouraged:

You are telling me nothing new in your letter. You’re not the only one who has distracting thoughts. The mind is extremely likely to wander, but the will is the mistress of all our powers, and must draw the mind back and carry it to God as to its final end.

When the mind has not been taught early on how to return, to be led back to itself, it can develop some unhealthy habits of becoming distracted and scattered. These are difficult to overcome. These tendencies ordinarily drag us off to earthly things, in spite of ourselves.

I think that a solution for this is to admit our stumbles and humble ourselves before God. During set times of silent prayer, I advise you not to use many words. Long discourses often create distractions. Hold still before God in prayer like someone who is poor, who is unable to speak or walk, and who is waiting at the gate of a wealthy person. Do your best to keep your mind in God’s presence. If it wanders or pulls away sometimes, don’t be discouraged. Distress tends to distract the mind rather than to focus it. We must use the will gently to bring it back. If you persevere in this way, God will have mercy on you.

An easy way of bringing your mind back during the set time of prayer and holding it there more at rest, is not to let it wander much during the day. Hold it attentively in God’s presence. As you get used to thinking of God from time to time, it will become easy to remain calm during times of prayer, or at least to bring the mind back when it wanders.

In my other letters I’ve already spoken at length with you about the benefits gained from this practice of the presence of God. Let’s devote ourselves to it seriously and pray for each other.

With his signature gentleness and calmness in mind, and with many talks coming up, recently I have been considering how much I need to feed myself good writing, good words, good reminders of what it means to be human. I think it’s a universal thing. Not just me. People of all faiths, wisdom traditions, and philosophies find such reminders in their various writings, scriptures, images, sculptures, tapestries, and more. Also, there is what some call secular poetry, literature of all kinds, and words of wisdom found here and there in unexpected places, fresh as dew. Some of us find food in all of these.

Lectio divina or “sacred reading” is how monks and nuns ate nourishing words in the communities that grew up around the teachings of Jesus, whose pedagogy was Love. Bede names us “animal ruminando,” or “ruminating creature,” meaning “ones who need nourishing soul food to chew on,” as I like to define it.

Since I have dyslexia still, sometimes it’s still hard for me to remember things, so I make mnemonics. Here’s one I made for lectio divina, which merely means “steeping in nourishing words that you like a lot.”

Although lectio divina is organic and not at all linear, we humans like to intellectualize it, flatten it, make it straight, aka, give it “steps.” Trying to tame the wild. One, two, three, four. Like that. It’s been going on since time out of mind. Looking at you, Guy.

Guigo 2, or Guy, was a French Carthusian monk of the 12th century. He wrote Scala Claustralium: Epistola de vita contemplativa or Ladder of Monks: Letter on the Contemplative Life. It breaks down contemplation into stages, seen below:

Lectio                     Read

Meditatio               Meditate

Oratio                    Pray

Contemplatio       Contemplate

My mind takes that and sees LMOC and RMPC and comes up with, after steeping in it a while:

Recognize            Love

My                         My

Peaceful               Other

Center                   Companions

These are more like clothespins to hold my thoughts on the line in the breeze, to flutter and dry, absorb the fresh smell of sun and wind.

And my dyslexic mind chews on their etymologies:

Lectio has in it legere, “collect, gather up, pick out.” That reminds me reading is an active process. & Read is cognate with reason and riddle. If instead of “Can you read this?” we said, “Can you riddle this?” that to me is reading, riddling.

Meditatio / Meditate is cognate with medicine, from med-, “to take appropriate measures,” and that etymology reminds me that being mindful is good medicine.

Oratio is cognate with orator, oral, and comes from *os- “mouth.” Orare meant “speak before a court or assembly, plead,” also “speak, pray to.” & Pray is cognate with precarious and has roots in “ask earnestly, beg (someone).”

Contemplatio / Contemplation has roots in either *tem- for “cut” or *ten- for “stretch.” 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 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.”

“Reach My Peaceful Center, Love My Other Companions” / Read-Meditate-Pray-Contemplate & Lectio-Meditatio-Oratio-Contemplatio also mean to me self-compassion and recognizing (or remembering) that I (my True Self, or Love) am my own first companion and friend and that all others are made in the image of Love and are my companions. Where etymologically I’m reminded that companion means one or those with whom I break bread (com– “with” and pan “bread”).

Often, we seem to feel a “failure” in contemplation perhaps because our definition of failure needs a reboot and also perhaps because we haven’t fed our minds something nourishing first. Yes, you can do contemplation with a Mary Oliver poem, as one example of many. Whatever you find gives your life meaning. Whether that is scripture, literature of all sorts, or a gem you found in a friend’s story.

Also, whenever scriptures are concerned, it seems that “steeping” in them would also involve at some point reading them through all the way, several times, to get one’s own “gist” of what they are about, and to do so, studying them with diverse commentaries that dig into history, linguistics, and culture. 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.

The experience of all deep reading or listening, meditation or reflecting on it, oratio or opening of the heart there, and contemplation 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. And to chew. Learn to rest. Let go.

Epiousios

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

“Our Father, who art in heaven. . . .” starts a prayer that has echoed down generations. Have you ever wondered what this oft-repeated prayer in the Christian tradition sounded like in one of the earliest English versions? Traditionally named the “Pater Noster,” I remember it as the “Sermon on the Mount Prayer.” How did it sound on the tongues of people who said it hundreds and hundreds of years ago in English? Very Germanic, with some Tolkienesque elfish-like liltings, as we’ll hear.

Here you encounter the beautiful Old English version. This prayer Jesus taught his students is found in the texts called the Gospels or “Good News,” in the books of Matthew at 6:9-13 and Luke at 11:2-4. I will read it in Old English from around the year 1000 C.E. My sources include Professor Roy Liuzza’s brilliant work on the Corpus Christi College Manuscript 140 (1994), translations of the Latin Vulgate, Sarah Ruden’s Gospels: A New Translation, many dictionaries with treasure, and my own experience with the Presence.

Through study, I became aware of the hapax legomenon or “unique use”—literally: “being said once”—here of epiousios, said “eppy-oo-see-ohs” (click here to hear the pronounciation), long translated as “daily.” This word epiousios is only found in Matthew and repeated in Luke in the same context. Translated as “daily” down through the eons in “our daily bread,” epiousios has been handed-down and handed-on doggedly as “daily” year after year after century after millennium, but again, since it’s only technically used once, in one context, in the anthology, there are no other uses to compare it to. Now many scholars don’t think it means “daily.” Imagine that.

Just this one word epiousios makes open-minded, research-loving, and contemplatively regarded translation suddenly seem quite vital to life and our well-being.

Some well-read scholars mention that epiousios may mean “tomorrow.” Which would suggest that Jesus, the man Rabbi Rami Shapiro enthusiastically calls the “God-intoxicated Jewish mystic,” would be recommending in his teaching that his students pray this way: “Give us today our bread for tomorrow.” How would that make sense? For Jesus also says, “Be mindful of the lilies in the field and how they grow—they don’t work and they don’t stress. . . . Don’t worry about tomorrow then. Tomorrow will take care of its own self.” (Matthew 6:28, translated by the author).

So the long and short of it is that no one knows what epiousios means. For thousands of years, this word has been prayed as “daily” when actually there may be more to it than that.

When I say this word, “eppy-oo-see-ohs,” I think of Cheerios, the honey nut kind, which are so delicious, and I am grateful for all food in my life. I was taught that growing up. When I would grumble about my hair not looking right or boyfriend troubles or driving junker cars that had such old batteries we often spent every winter morning jumping each other off to get cranked and going, I’d be told, “Do you have food to eat? Be grateful for that instead of grumbling. People are hungry in the world. Yet you have food.” Now gratitude is a habit that has become a part of my life, admittedly sometimes more than others.

I also think about how we have enough food in the world where everyone could eat and not worry about their next meal/s, if greed and a prevailing scarcity mindset didn’t prevent it and create billionaires instead. If we didn’t have an economic system built out by greed, which the Christian New Testament calls the “root of all evil.” Why is the legal minimum wage in Georgia $5.15? See DOL. Why is the federal minimum wage $7.25?

Why also would this petition—“Give us this day our daily bread”—be what Jesus asked for? Growing up, it never made full sense to me, since I was also taught in Sunday School that “God is love,” and love is generous, while “Give us this day our daily bread” seems repetitive, desperate, and part of a scarcity-based mindset. Which the God-intoxicated Jewish mystic did not have. He had an open-hearted, sharing, and inclusive 5-loaves-of-bread-and-2-fish-can-feed-a-multitude way-of-seeing (Matthew 14). So I moved as a kid toward interpreting this line of the prayer as, “Count your blessings. Be grateful.” Because I was taken to church three times a week, and we prayed this prayer at nearly every gathering at least once, I needed it to chime with Love. Otherwise, mindless repetition would make my brain spasm if the words didn’t feed me in some way.

And when Jesus says, “You always have the poor with you,” I didn’t think he meant that as fact, more like: “But really, why do you still have any who experience poverty among you? Didn’t you share everything out with those less fortunate and afflicted by the unfair systems?”

Today’s research into epiousios revealed that this Greek word is polysemantic, complexifying such questions with its multiple meanings. The ousia in it can mean both the verb “to be” or “I am” (from the verb eimí), and the noun “substance.” Epi- means, among other things, “on, at, besides,” even “intensely so.” So epiousios might mean “be present with.”

I see this lone adjective epiousios in the Sermon on the Mount Prayer as being “present-with-us.” A new translation then might include: “Give us this day our just-being bread” or “Give us this day our awareness-that-You’re-present-with-us bread” or “Give us this day our Nowness bread.”

Some see in epiousios the epi- as meaning only “over” and thus “supersubstantial,” or “transcendent.” But epi- in epiousios can mean “on” and thus “present with” and “immanent”—the sacred in the every day, the sacred in the mundane, the sacred in the silky sound of sugar poured into a mug of fresh coffee. The tang on the tongue and the silkiness of wine. The word Presence means something very similar with its prae- “before” and esse “to be.”

The Douay Rheims Catholic Bible version gives for Matthew 6:11: “Give us this day our supersubstantial bread,” translated from Jerome’s Vulgate: “panem nostrum supersubstantialem da nobis hodie.” Could the “supersubstantial” also mean “life-sustaining”—”Give us this day our life-sustaining bread.” And why might not the God-intoxicated Jewish mystic mean many wisdoms here? We could hold at one time: “Give us,” as in “Let us be aware we’re being given this, living in and from that awareness,” and “Let us be grateful for” our Cheerios and God’s Presence, so thankful for all F/foods.

Many scholars suggest epiousios modifying bread might mean “Eucharistic bread.” That could be true. But since it’s a ritual only happening in institutionalized churches, isn’t there room for more? Wasn’t Jesus inclusive always, always meaning Love is all-the-time and everywHere? And what is divine Presence if not Bread?

Also, I love the word “supersubstantial” because it can mean “superessential,” not merely as in “above or transcending all substance or being,” but as in “exceedingly, very essential,” the essence of Life. And even when our minds fall onto a binary track, as we might tend to do, if a person wants to take super- as “above,” then it is counterbalanced here with the sub- which is “below or under.” So “above” meets “below” in the here-and-now of *sta– in stantial/stance, which means “to make or be firm.” That which is, Is. The past traditional take on this word epiousios seems to be “it’s God’s transcendence,” but I see epiousios as divine immanence, the spirit indwelling all creation, making all creations, all creatures, all humans, and all beyond-humans sacred.

Since one of my best friends asked me to, I’ve read the Sermon on the Mount Prayer in Old English from around 1000 C.E. and posted it and my translation of it in modern English, on my YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/CarmenAcevedoButcherPresence, more specifically here.

I expand the opening direct address to be more inclusive, since the “Our Father” leaves a good many people out. Can the divine only be masculine? Is the divine also feminine? Is it both and also neither? Is it all of these and beyond all of these?

Also, what should we call this prayer? Jesus’s Prayer? The Sermon on the Mount Prayer? The more we move away from the language of domination, slavery, power, and ruling, the more love we can open up to, accept, and share.

Fæder ure, Módor ure, Ældran ure,
þu þe eart on heofonum,
si þin nama gehalgod.
To becume þin rice.
Gewurþe ðin wille on eorðan
swa swa on heofonum.
Urne gedæghwamlican hlaf
syle us todæg.
And forgyf us ure gyltas
swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum.
And ne gelæd þu us on costnunge,
ac alys us of yfele.
Soþlice.

Our Father, our Mother, our Parents,
you who are in the Here-and-Now,
may your name be honored in all we do.
May your Presence be recognized.
May your Love be done on earth
as it is in your Home.
Give us this day our bread
of your Presence.
And forgive us our harmings of others,
as we forgive those who harmed us.
And don’t let us know danger,
but keep us from harm.
So be it.

Thank you for reading and listening, and for your kind presence in the world. Peace to all.

Notes:

“Ældran” means “older ones” or “elders,” translated here as “Parents” in honor of the Christian embodied Trinity.

The “heofon” Sarah Ruden translates as “in the skies.” That ancient cosmogony seems to risks furthering the alienation that comes from only conceiving that divinity is outside our earth, and far from us, when mystics like Hildegard see the viriditas or greenness of divinity in all of earth. And “heaven” has from its first days in English also meant “God’s home” in any place on earth, not just in a no-place “beyond the sky,” also: “celestial space,” “peace, paradise,” and “a state of everlastingness,” even “Love.”

The “ġehālgod” means in Old English “be made holy,” from hālgian, while holy, whole, health, and hale are all cognates with hālig. The “ġehālgod” means “consecrate” and has both intention and action in it. We intend to be whole and we act to love the world whole. “May your name be hallowed” seems to mean “May I become whole in Love, and may I contribute, even in small ways, to the world being whole in Love.” “May I be healthy, whole.” “May the world be healthy, whole.” Because the Presence is healthy, whole.

The “rice” (said “ree-chay”) that is cognate with reich has been tainted with the Nazi’s Third Reich. Rice and reich are related to the verb reichen “to reach” which includes diverse meanings like “extend, pass, serve, and be sufficient” or as nouns: “extension, passing, service, and sufficiency, even presence.” And when we add in power words like “kingdom” and “Lord” to such a commonly repeated prayer, we bow to the existing systems which Jesus counterculturally resisted, and offered healthy alternatives to. So rather than “your Kingdom come” for “To becume þin rice,” the sentence could mean “your Presence and Love be recognized and reach—be sufficient—even here, even now, in this moment, and everywHere.”

“Give us this day our bread / of your Presence” is written with the line break to emphasize that our physical bread and our spiritual bread are included. Being aware that all F/food is a gift, to be shared. There is also space there for including eucharistic bread, if one wishes it.

Sarah Ruden says about “temptation” or costnunge here: “Temptation: The word peirasmos refers to outward tests of all kinds, including those done on inanimate objects; but interrogation under torture could be a reference in some passages of the Gospels. Torture of noncitizens was routine in evidence gathering in the Roman legal system, and large-scale persecutions of Christians had begun before any of the Gospels’ texts were finalized. ‘Test’ or ‘ordeal’ covers this without suggesting sexual tantalization, in which the Gospels evince almost no interest.”

The “yfel” is usually interpreted in an unhelpful binary way. Most mystics teach it as “intending to harm.” The word evil itself has Faustian hints from the Proto-Indo-European *upelos for “going over and beyond acceptable limits.” This root meaning for “evil” of “exceeding due measure” or “overstepping proper limits,” as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, seems helpful as a reminder of what being a decent human means.