A couple of years ago, I retranslated for my own personal meditation, some of Rilke’s letters to Franz Xaver Kappus. As I was revising my talk for an upcoming Center for Action and Contemplation gathering, I realized that I’d like to share from these on my blog here. You may enjoy to meditate on them too, in a bilingual way.
Living the questions now has been since my twenties a large part of my imaginal world. I have been meditating my whole life, with increasing frequency and intentionality. Isn’t that simply what it means to be human? In my experience, living the questions now and pray without ceasing can be synonymous. And we see below that Rilke also says we may gradually, eventually live the answer, or embody love. Which reminds me that Anonymous writes in the Cloud of Unknowing that contemplation is love and is healing myself and others and also stirs my heart to love myself and others.
May our pausing to be still and to taste the peace we already are in our hearts bring you and me to compassionate living in our chaotic and hurting world.
You are so young, your life just beginning. I wish to ask you, best I can, dear friend, have patience with everything unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like closed rooms and like books written in a very strange language.
Don’t search for the answers now. They can’t be given to you, because you wouldn’t be able to live them. And living everything is the point. Live the questions now. Perhaps gradually, without knowing it, some day in the future you’ll live the answer. Perhaps you have the power within you to see and shape a very sacred and simple way of life.
Study and train for that. But whatever comes, accept it with great confidence, and if it comes from your own True Self, from some need of your inner being, accept it as who you are. And hate nothing.
Sie sind so jung, so vor allem Anfang, und ich möchte Sie, so gut ich es kann, bitten, lieber Herr, Geduld zu haben gegen alles Ungelöste in Ihrem Herzen und zu versuchen, die Fragen selbst liebzuhaben wie verschlossene Stuben und wie Bücher, die in einer sehr fremden Sprache geschrieben sind.
Forschen Sie jetzt nicht nach den Antworten, die Ihnen nicht gegeben werden können, weil Sie sie nicht leben könnten. Und es handelt sich darum alles zu leben. Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen. Vielleicht leben Sie dann allmählich, ohne es zu merken, eines fernen Tages in die Antwort hinein. Vielleicht tragen Sie ja in sich die Möglichkeit zu bilden und zu formen, als eine besonders selige und reine Art des Lebens[.]
[E]rziehen Sie sich dazu, – aber nehmen Sie das was kommt in großem Vertrauen hin und wenn es nur aus Ihrem Willen kommt, aus irgendeiner Not Ihres Innern, so nehmen Sie es auf sich und hassen Sie nichts.
Translated by Carmen Acevedo Butcher, from Rainer Maria Rilke. Briefe an einen Jungen Dichter: Mit den Briefen von Franz Xaver Kappus, Wallstein Verlag, 2021, p. 32. Hg. und mit Kommentar und Nachwort von Erich Unglaub.
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.
When I studied for a year in Heidelberg at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, it wasn’t my teachers who taught me to speak German, it was the children in my life and also a septuagenarian. The teachers scared me. Combine dyslexia with I-can-write-and-read-German-but-I-can’t-speak-it-or-understand-it, and I was a mess in class. Walking down Plöckgasse to the main library to review, I studied the cobblestones and feared the next class session when I’d be called on to speak haltingly.
Meanwhile, the Buschbeck family took me in. Sophie Buschbeck was 79 to my 22. She was a widow. She lived on Mozartstrasse and loved music. She took me with her to the blind Gemüsefrau to buy vegetables, she took me on walks up and along scenic and historic Philosophenweg, she took me to church, she took me to visit shut-ins, including one famous former concert pianist who’d only play for Sophie, she took me to art museums, she invited me to a Christmas with a real tree and beeswax candles burning on it, and she had me clean her rugs and her toilet and wash her steps. And she cooked a roast chicken for me every Friday since “Americans like roast chicken.”
She went from Frau Buschbeck and the formal “Sie,” to asking me to call her Mutti and use the intimate “Du.” And her grandchildren said things to me like (except, in German): “You speak as if you have a hot potato in your mouth!” Which is apparently how my Southern accent elongated the crisp German syllables to their ears. And “We don’t say it like that!” Meanwhile, their parents kept telling me my German was “hervorragend!” “terrific!” When it wasn’t.
Her husband was a Lutheran minister in World War II and was five years in a Russian prison camp. She said that every day she asked God to send her “Mann”—her husband home, and one day she looked out from her balcony and saw an unrecognizable figure but with a gait she knew, a way of walking she went to embrace. Haggard, underweight, his face disheveled and marked with suffering.
“And,” she told me (also in German), “for every time I asked God to send him home to me, I now try to thank God as many times. Which is what you must do, Carmen. You must thank as often as you ask for something.”
So when I use German, after all those asks to “Please help me speak and hear/understand it,” I am thankful, every single time I use German in any way, I feel gratitude to Mutti Buschbeck and her family.
[I]ch möchte Sie, so gut ich es kann, bitten, lieber Herr, Geduld zu haben gegen alles Ungelöste in Ihrem Herzen und zu versuchen, die Fragen selbst liebzuhaben wie verschlossene Stuben und wie Bücher, die in einer sehr fremden Sprache geschrieben sind. . . .
Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen.
From Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe an Einen Jungen Dichter
I wish to ask you, as gently as I can, dear friend, please have patience with everything unresolved in your heart. And try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, and like books written in a very unknown language. . . .
Live the questions now. From Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Translated by Carmen Acevedo Butcher
Alexandria “Lexi,” Alithia, Amerie, Annabell, Eliahna “Ellie,” Eliahna, Jackie, Jailah, Jayce, Jose, Layla, Maite, Makenna, Maranda, Nevaeh, Rogelio, Tess, Uziyah, and Xavier, plus educators Eva and Irma. Grieving the deaths of nineteen children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, and more than a dozen people wounded.
I remember an international student from England who asked me once in disbelief during an office hour conference: “Why do you allow guns here like you do? My father was in the secret service, and when he retired, he had to turn his firearms back in. We don’t have guns, and we don’t have gun violence.”
I had no answer. I have no answer.
I turned to other questions I can begin to answer on an incredibly still gorgeous blue-sky Sunday morning. Contemplating how growing up in the South influenced me as a writer and translator. And, because I’m always up for learning more about how women navigated systemic obstructions, reading a dissertation by Dr. Han VanderHart on seventeenth-century women poets, thanks to Twitter.
Which tells me that writing and rewriting, reading and taking notes are sometimes more comforting to me than even walking in sunshine. Putting good ideas/feelings, and healthy challenges into my brain is a kind of nourishment when my self is existentially frustrated. Being a focused student is soothing, healing.
My good friend Darrell Z. Grizzle invited me to do a future online interview for his blog, Story & Spirit in the Shadow-Haunted South. His kind idea, to help get the word out about my translation of the spiritual classic Practice of the Presence by Brother Lawrence, releasing on August 23, 2022. Two of his questions, “What is your connection to the American South?” and “How has that connection to the South informed your work as a writer?” got red dirt on my knees again.
I grew up in the rolling ancient hills of northwest Georgia. If you haven’t felt and seen and walked through the lacy soft mist embracing those hills when they’re green and it’s early morning and it wraps you up in its beautiful mystery, you haven’t yet lived. The purple of those morning glories will teach you the meaning of glory like nothing else can or will. And its long-weathered, rust-shaded dirt is hard, packed by history. The ack-swat-whack at unassailable horse flies down deserted, asphalted back roads where I walked regularly taught me the meaning of persistence and made the pesky gnats of my mother’s south Georgia seem nowhere near vexing.
My much-loved neighbors influenced me a lot. I grew up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and they taught me Southern Mountain English and culture, how neighbors help each other, or as they said, holp each other. Beautiful language—How over there is over yunder way and a photo is a pitcher and there’s a joke my classmates told me in 5th grade about did I know that the wise men in the Christmas story were actually firemen because they came “from afar.”
Partial to bib overalls, my neighbors worked at deafening looms making denim for the cotton mill owners, and grew and canned their own vegetables. And raised sardined yellow chicks in long stinking chicken houses. While rocks and trees deep in the woods where I played had Cherokee carvings on them. And several of my high school friends who are Black whispered to me they had been shot at driving through a town nearby. And church was a screed or screech or scree of brimstone from a booming pulpit while women quietly tended nursery. And my childhood held other trauma for me. While I also found school almost impossible during decades of undiagnosed dyslexia and deep anxiety.
But the homemade ice tea was so sweet, so cold, and so delicious I can still feel my teeth set on delicious edge just by thinking of its amber light in a clear pitcher. Peaches were worth eating with the fuzz on, so juicy they drip down the chin. A neighbor called me into her garden one summer afternoon, pulled and offered stunned me a huge ripe red tomato, said, “Bite hit,” and only then tasting that deep sweetness did I learn why tomatoes are indeed fruit. I watched a neighbor’s house burn slap to the ground and then other neighbors took off work and built them a new one, while I helped clean the trailer they lived in until it was done. And, yes, the guns that were everywhere made me as nervous as Fiver. I have stories about guns I’ve written down for myself but don’t tell.
How do all of these stories and more shape a writer/author and a translator of spiritual texts?
I think of Rilke’s reminder to Franz Xaver Kappus—”Herr Kappus”—in Briefe an Einen Jungen Dichter (Letters to a Young Poet). I “try to have love for the questions themselves,” and I hear Rilke say again, “Live the questions now.” But how do we live the very hard questions now facing us all?
So often quoted, Rilke’s wisdom has become a bit of a blunt saw, so I refresh its teeth by looking at the original German, both beautiful and useful: “zu versuchen, die Fragen selbst liebzuhaben” (“try to have love for the questions themselves“) and “Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen” (“Live the questions now”). “Perhaps then,” Rilke adds, and I translate, “one day far from now you can gradually, without realizing it, be able to live into the answer.” This is dependent, he says, on the possibility that his young letter-writer does exercise his inherent power for “conceiving and shaping a sacred, healthy way of life.” If you like, you can read Rilke’s July 16, 1903 letter yourself at poetryintranslation or in German at Google books.
And what does Rilke have to do with my reading Dr. Han VanderHart’s dissertation this morning? Living the question for me means staying open to all I don’t know. Especially to that which doesn’t seem to be of any immediate practical use to me, but that pulls me to it for some unknown reason. Through all of life’s ups and downs, my journey has been profoundly enriched by listening to what and/or who I don’t know. Just being curious and genuinely interested in what others are doing is worthwhile, which today included this: “Gender and Collaboration in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry: Philip and Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer, Katherine Philips and Mary, Lady Chudleigh.” Listen to that title. I’m a fan of dissertation titles. Just reading it reminds me how solitary and brave and vertigo-inducing writing a dissertation is. (Yes, it’s also quite a community effort, but paradoxically, at its core, writing a dissertation is one long terrifying leap off a cliff, just you.)
Through Twitter logic, I stumbled happily onto VanderHart’s Twitter page: @hmvanderhart. I checked out linktr.ee/hanvanderhart, then ordered their What Pecan Light book of poetry, because I have spent countless hours in hushed, dense pecan groves, picking pecans for hours on end for my elderly neighbor for quarters that I stacked up very high, when I was ten or so in Perry, Georgia, and I fell in love with the way the light comes through pecan tree leaves, and anyway picking pecans is very meditative if you’re the meditative type. Then I went in search of VanderHart’s work on these four women writers: Mary, Aemilia, Katherine, Mary. Let’s admit it: One of the unsung, quiet joys of the truly chaotic, clamoring internet is you can access and read as-yet-unpublished dissertations and masters theses.
What is so great about VanderHart’s dissertation is it brings Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; Aemilia Lanyer; Katherine Philips; and Lady Mary Chudleigh to light, to breathe today’s air. I’d never heard of these writers. Or if I did hear of Mary Sidney Herbert, it was in passing, because of course I read Herbert’s brother Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy and Astrophel and Stella, but his younger sister would’ve been sadly soon forgotten on the high-altitude hike to a PhD Phi Beta Kappa.
VanderHart’s work elevates the poetry of these women, which they describe as “explicitly and warmly interested in the other.” We need more empathy and more interest in “the other”—in each other, I thought. To my delight, the dissertation’s through line demonstrates that the poetry of Herbert, Lanyer, Philips, and Chudleigh “does not merely resist, challenge or subvert male patriarchy networks, but that their poetries enact an engagement with them that creates literary and social spaces for women readers and writers.”
These poets made healthy community through writing. That’s it in seven words. I was happy to learn about their “collaborative writing,” and loved following VanderHart’s analysis of how the work of these women “acknowledges social bonds and community and, in fact, sees these practices as essential to the writing of poetry itself.” My teaching and writing keep me grounded in community, and seeing this example from several centuries ago inspires me, I mused.
My favorite chapter was on Mary Sidney Herbert. What a good Sunday morning read. Mary collaborated with her brother Philip Sidney in making psalm verse paraphrases. When he died in battle at thirty-one during the Eighty Years’ War, over 100 psalms were left for her to finish. She was grief-stricken, but carried on. In this chapter VanderHart directs keen attention to the act of revision—to “re-seeing” itself, a process I love for being so intimate with who I am (becoming) as a writer and a person.
VanderHart shows us Mary Sidney Herbert’s loving, brilliant work up close. Previously, Herbert was branded by scholars as a so-called “inveterate tinkerer who found it difficult to make up her mind” (quoting William Ringler, but also an epithet, VanderHart notes, used by Gary Waller, Harold Love, J.C.A. Rathmell, et al.). This chapter’s discussion of “the joy of revision,” particularly of Herbert’s “joy” in her “care[ful,] attenti[ve]” revisions of Philip’s psalms, and of revision itself as an activity “closer to that of a musician playing variations on a favourite theme” (quoting Harold Love) reminds me of the unfinished nature of all writing that is truly alive, even the most polished.
When I read that Margaret P. Hannay describes the Psalms in the Tanakh as a “divinely inspired expression of human experience,” I thought how I feel just the same about Brother Lawrence’s Practice of the Presence. It’s genuine wisdom. Always universal.
I loved discovering that Philip Sidney chose not “sinners” but “bad mates” in his poetic paraphrasing of Psalm 1, making the language “richer and more steeped in early modern life practices than the more abstract language of the English Bible translations,” as VanderHart observes. John Donne would later say that in The Sidney Psalter Philip and Mary “teach us how to sing.”
Next, VanderHart’s chapter on Aemilia Lanyer explores the life and writing of this Londoner, whose poetry was “expressly concerned” with cultivating a community of reading, writing women. Lanyer wrote from the margins. VanderHart discusses that she was “probably a Jew, married to a gentile instrumentalist associated with the production of royal music.” Lanyer reminds us that “to write from the margins, . . . is to write from a perspective of self-deprecation and unworthiness. Or at least a performance of humilitas.” As an olive-skinned woman coming of age in the South, margins are familiar terra firma.
Poet Katherine Philips intrigues VanderHart for how she “amends the concept of Stoic retreat by making sociability central to its conception as well as central to her writing process.” Philips’ poetry centers relationship and friendship rather than the expected Stoic retirement for self-discovery, self-healing. And poet Mary Chudleigh is fascinating for how she creates a “collaborative conversation” in the unlikeliest of places, with minister John Sprint, and her “Ladies Defence” is a wonderful argument for self-kindness.
VanderHart’s engaging dissertation ends with this paragraph about these remarkable poets they’ve brought blinking and bright-eyed into the klieg lights of the twenty-first century:
“With or without rooms of their own in which to write, early modern women in seventeenth-century England wrote with and for each other. To bring the modern language of collaboration to their poetry is to highlight an attention to audience and community integral to the production of their texts. The four women whose work this dissertation examines did not view themselves as writing alone but in a company of other women, readers and writers. These chapters argue that these four poets did not have the luxury or privilege—despite some of their aristocratic statuses—of considering themselves as working alone or autonomously. Whether the aim in addressing each other by name was praise, invitation or, as in the case of Lady Chudleigh’s poetry, a deployment of ‘reciprocal esteem’ taking the form of corrective dialogue, the recognition of specific others forms the occasion of the poem itself.”
Thankful for these poets, I reflect. I also do not consider myself writing alone but in the company of others, readers and writers, present and past, connecting these diverse strands: Grizzle, Rilke, VanderHart.
My friend Darrell Z. Grizzle and I write in different genres, but share similar interests, especially concerning books and kindness. Long ago, in a galaxy far away, he emailed me out of the blue to ask would I come to his book group discussing my Cloud of Unknowing translation. I hesitated because I was really busy teaching full-time and raising two young children, until Darrell said, “And I have to tell you I LOVE your footnotes.” Done. Our friendship and collaboration expand my world, helping me enter more deeply into “living the questions,” as Rilke says to his epistolary companion, while the seventeenth-century women poets also “lived the questions” against all odds, as Dr. Han VanderHart’s excellent work brings to life. How? Community. That’s what they all share. Sacred, healthy community is oxygen.
The same is true for Brother Lawrence. He was living as a friar in a Paris monastery at the same time, and right across the channel from the amazing women writers Herbert, Lanyer, Philips, and Chudleigh, who elevate community in their poetry. Community made and kept the friar’s spiritual classic Practice of the Presence alive. It has endured, been in print, read, and loved over 300 years, yet was only published in 1692, a year after his death, because of his friendship with Joseph of Beaufort, because of their conversations, and because Joseph and other friends wanted to read more of their friend’s writings.
Brother Lawrence also spent his days “living the questions” in community. He asked himself, and others asked him: “How can I heal? How can I find peace? How can I develop a friendship with the Divine? How can I become more like Love? How can I become Love?” His response was simple: “Practice the presence.”
Sacred, healthy community is oxygen.
Thank goodness Love is closer to us than we may think. Brother Lawrence experienced that 24/7, and when he writes, “God,” I think “Love,” because as we read his work, we realize it’s all about true love (amour is one of his favorite words). The Divine is Love to him, and for anyone hankering for more of God, Love, Wisdom, or however a person might conceive of Meaning or Ultimate Reality, the friar’s Practice of the Presence is balm.
Clicking into news, Love is easy to forget these days. I remind myself, it’s worthwhile to remember that, as Brother Lawrence also says, “Everything is possible for those who believe, even more for those who hope, still more for those who love, and most of all for those who practice and persevere in these three powerful paths.”
I see him limping toward the kitchen to begin cracking eggs for omelettes when that line came to him.
