Tag: sacred

CÆDMON’S HYMN

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

“Cædmon’s Hymn” is a very early Old English poem, from around 650 to 680 CE, so 7th century. Our only source for it and for Cædmon’s life is Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Bede describes Cædmon very much like the wealthy churchmen of Brother Lawrence’s day described the “uneducated” friar. Bede says Cædmon was an illiterate herdsman who lived at the Whitby monastery on the northeast shore of North Yorkshire. If that is true, we know for sure that he suffered very cold winters there, taking care of livestock.

The story of Cædmon has many versions. One says he couldn’t make music and so never played the harp or sang during gatherings. But one day he had a dream, and in it a man ordered him to “SING” something. Cædmon protested, saying he didn’t know how to sing, but the man in his dream insisted and Cædmon then sang about the Creator and in praise of God. The song he sang very much reminds me of my early childhood days of being in a church choir, and we sang “This is my Father’s world, and to my listening ears, all nature sings and round me rings, the music of the spheres.” I wish it had included “Mother’s world” and “Parents’ world.”

Cædmon had miraculously received the gift of religious song and became (like Brother Lawrence) widely known to the monks as a faithful, singing, and inspiring “lay brother.” According to Bede, Cædmon also composed other religious stories and poems which demonstrated his gift to the monks. But the only surviving one today is “Cædmon’s Hymn.”

Because no tape recorders existed in the 7th century, I created a melody for it two decades ago (while swinging my children on the playground), and I’ve been singing it very often ever since. As meditation. It is calming and I love its theme of gratitude for nature. Every day I’m grateful for the miraculous gift of nature.

You can listen to me sing it on my YouTube Channel here.

After I sing “Cædmon’s Hymn” in Old English, I sing it in my modern English translation.

Nu sculon herigean      heofonrices Weard,                                           

Meotodes meahte     ond his modgeþanc,                                             

weorc Wuldorfæder,     swa he wundra gehwæs,                     

ece Drihten,     or onstealde.                            

He ærest sceop     eorðan bearnum                              

heofon to hrofe,     halig Scyppend.                                                      

þa middangeard     monncynnes Weard,                                               

ece Drihten,     æfter teode                   

firum foldan,     Frea ælmihtig.

Now let’s sing everyday Mystery,

Maker’s matter and kind mindfulness,

our Parent’s gift of Creation and their Presence.

Our Friend made each wonder’s beginning,

first they shaped skies as a roof

for all the earth’s children.

Then sacred Shaper, present Friend

made the middle-world,

the solid ground

for everyone.

For these gifts we thank the kind Beloved!

This was recorded during an atmospheric river. So you hear the sump pump go off for a few seconds and also at the end you slightly hear some rain pattering down.

My translation makes the language more inclusive while cleaving to the original spirit and the words’ etymological roots. You can see the literal translation below if you wish.

Literal Translation:

Now we should praise the heavenly kingdom’s guardian!

The Creator’s power and His thoughts.

The work made by the Glory Father,

the eternal Lord, who established the beginning.

He first shaped, for earth’s children,

Heaven as roof, holy Maker.

Then the eternal Lord, mankind’s guardian,

next made the solid ground, almighty Lord!

Acevedo Butcher

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

When I was 12, I had a well-intentioned teacher who called roll by making a rhyme out of my last name, Acevedo. He mispronounced all but its last long o and rhymed that with “hot potato.”

How do you say Acevedo? My LinkedIn profile has a recording, here. It’s “AH-suh-VAY-dough.” I have no doubt my homeroom teacher was kind-hearted because he was also my basketball coach, and I’ve had basketball coaches who scared me, while he was someone who made me want to play better, and to hustle.

Still.

What I learned from that experience is that names are very important. It’s a lesson that has stayed with me to this day. As a teacher at UC Berkeley in the College Writing Programs, I make an effort to learn what my students’ names are and how they pronounce them, and I try not to be awkward about it.

Along the way, I’ve learned a lot about names in general, and I’ve often had students say, “Thank you so much for learning my name. I’ve never had that before.” While I’m sad to hear that it’s not universal, I know that my colleagues in CWP do the same, as do my friends who teach elsewhere, and also very many other teachers, prioritizing learning their students’ names and how to pronounce them well.

I’m grateful for the chance as a teacher to honor students’ actual names.

I also want to consider how grateful I am personally for those who honor that I myself have two last names. When I first started back into the work force as a college professor after having been a stay-at-home mom for years, I used my maiden name Acevedo and my married name Butcher. I mainly did it for practical reasons. I wanted those who knew me at UGA in graduate school and others who knew me as Carmen Acevedo, to know that I am now Carmen Acevedo Butcher. However, it was an uphill climb. When I was invited to give talks and such, I’d submit all the information with my three names, but no one ever used Acevedo much. So I kind of gave up. I became Carmen Butcher.

When I became a Fulbright Senior Lecturer at Sogang University in Seoul, my husband Sean suggested we make a website so students could have my notes more easily, so we did. But all three names seemed then too long for my website, if I wanted it to be easily memorable for my students, especially from the perspective of teaching English in a country where Hangul was their first script and Korean their first language.

So my website has always been www.carmenbutcher.com. I think today if I had to do it over I’d keep all three. My Acevedo name is that important to me. I know I look light-skinned now, and I’m married to a White man from England. So I very often get slotted into that space, and I can see why.

But, (and this is another reason I try not to assume about my students), as a good, long-time friend said to me recently, “You were so much darker skinned as a kid.” And my mother would always say to me as I was growing up: “You have such beautiful olive skin and complexion.” That is how my identity formed, as that darker-skinned kid who tanned easily playing outside and felt on the margins and/or not-fitting-in growing up in mostly White communities, even as I was proud of my darker skin and loved our summer trips to Miami, to visit my great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins there. I was so proud to eat then and at times at home the Cuban foods of my father’s heritage, and mine. It’s one reason I use more tan-skinned emojis.

Names are complex. Names are sacred. As I began publishing, and admittedly, as society started changing in its attitudes towards names and naming, it became important to me to have my whole self on the cover, even as every book is created by so very many people, and not just one author. For my work and career as a writer, I wanted my whole self, or Carmen Acevedo Butcher there with me. Not to would have felt as if something was missing.

So I looked up to see the history on two last names. I learned that there is a most repulsive phrase for it: “double-barrelled name.” Because of its first use and association with firearms, since 1709, when Richard Steele wrote in the literary and society journal Tatler: “His double-barrelled Pistols.” I prefer “double surname” or simply “two last names.” Many join theirs with a hyphen. I don’t. It’s Acevedo Butcher.

I’m also reminded that today many of my students with Latina, Latine, and Latino backgrounds are honoring their heritage more openly as they include their double surnames in their school records, with the first being their father’s surname and the second their mother’s.

Curious one day to see my author page online, since I’m grateful to be there and wanted to check out my new digs, I couldn’t find myself under the A‘s. My heart sank a little. There I was under Butcher, so I asked the kind people who help me there to please put my author page under Acevedo Butcher. This is also why I’m so thankful when someone I don’t even know emails me to ask, “Do I cite you as Butcher, Carmen, or as Acevedo Butcher, Carmen?” I write back, “Thank you! It’s Acevedo Butcher, Carmen.” And recently, a brilliant, kind, and wise new friend messaged me on social media, “Dr. Butcher,” and I was so thrilled to hear from this friend and to be invited into a conversation with this friend that I didn’t notice until later that there was also right after a second message: “I apologize – Dr. Acevedo Butcher, I should have said.”

I think this kindness reaches so deeply for me because I’ve spent my whole life trying to build selfhood. I started life in childhood trauma that undoes the sacred selfhood, and twig-by-twig, I have been slowly building my own nest of personhood, of dignity, of self-compassion, and of compassion for others.

Meanwhile I was writing a message back, “Please call me Carmen.” However, I’ll not forget that second kind message. As I was reading it, I was thinking to myself: Woah. I hope I can always be so gracious and attentive to others’ names too.

Peace.

Mystics Summit

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

These stories are a taste of the Mystics Summit sponsored by The Shift Network. Aug 15-19, you’re invited to join for free: https://shiftnetwork.infusionsoft.com/go/mts22a24522/a24522

This summer Father Just-call-me-Greg Boyle and I had a conversation—he’s the white-bearded, plain-spoken, best-selling author, and down-to-earth Jesuit priest who founded and runs Homeboy Industries in LA, the largest gang-intervention, rehabilitation, and re-entry program in the world. To say this conversation was life-changing for me would be an understatement.

Near the end, I asked him did he have a story perhaps that sums up his work. He paused. Then Greg told a story “happened 3 days ago” about tragic death, loss, community, love, and a woman pulling a warm burrito out of her bra. It has to be heard to be appreciated so that’s all I’ll say about it.

Over two weeks I had a 35-to-45-minute conversation with each of these seventeen, in this order: Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Andrea Menard, Father Greg Boyle; Dr. James Finley; Rukmini Chaitanya, Grandmaster Mantak Chia; Dr. William Bloom; Rev. Dr. Robyn Henderson-Espinoza, Mike Morrell; Andrew Harvey, Raven Sinclaire, Colette Lafia; Tenley Wallace, Carl McColman; Matthew Fox, Rev. Ana Jones, Mirabai Starr.

When invited to co-host the Mystics Summit for The Shift Network with Mike Morrell, I thought, What a wonderful way to be a student, learn more about spirituality, make new friends, strengthen existing friendships, and have dialogue with those who want the world to be a kinder place. Here’s what I learned.

Since the zoom camera is ultra sensitive, wonderful drivers before each session reminded: “Please don’t talk while the other person is talking, because it switches the camera to you.” Before my 5-4-3-2-1 countdown to start, I’d add my own reassurance to the conversation partner that I’d be listening, albeit quietly, during our time together: “Please know I’m listening very deeply to all you say. I’d rather not switch between mute and unmute, so I’ll resist my Cuban and Southern habits to interject while you talk with ‘Yes, I see,’ ‘Uh-huh,’ ‘How interesting.’ I’ll simply wait for you to pause before I talk again, letting you have the floor so our conversation can unfold organically.”

Turns out, that’s the best way to have a conversation. Chockful of down-to-earth and sometimes surprising stories and always sharing wisdom, these conversations highlighting each person I interviewed and their good work and teaching were also extraordinarily holy and deeply nourishing. Listening is an amazing way to be human. That’s the main thing I learned or rather re-learned.

Here are glimpses into these conversations, in (almost) chronological order:

They are (almost) chronological because my first deep bow is to the amazing inaugural host of the 2021 Mystics Summit, the incomparable Mirabai Starr, whose interview happened to be the final one scheduled. An award-winning author, Mirabai talks about her Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics. Wild Mercy is such a joy to read, or you can listen to her read it (a treat!). Mirabai has also received critical acclaim for her revolutionary new translations of John of the Cross’ Dark Night of the Soul and Teresa of Avila’s The Interior Castle.

An interspiritual teacher with an amazing gift for cultivating community and for making all feel welcome, Mirabai is a teacher’s teacher, an author’s author, a translator’s translator, and a host’s host. I watched a dozen or more of her brilliant, wise 2021 Mystics Summit interviews in preparation for co-hosting this year’s Summit.

In our conversation, Mirabai wanted to discuss translation as a doorway into sacred presence so we did. She also shares her wisdom about the Divine Feminine, how mystics of the past are accessible to you in your life right now, and how you do NOT have to be perfect to qualify as a living mystic yourself. You’ll also hear how Mirabai still owns and plays the flute she got while a student in Spain.

Rabbi Rami Shapiro is author of over 36 books, including Minyan, Ten Principles for Living a Life of Integrity; The Divine Feminine in Biblical Wisdom Literature, sharing his encounters with Chochma/Sophia; and Holy Rascals, which is another wise book of his describing what he calls a “zero-sum worldview rooted in a Strict Father God theology in which God dominates men, men dominate women, the wealthy dominate the poor and middle class, and humans dominate nature.” Rabbi Rami was so kind in the green room as we checked sound and light levels. Then he said at one point in our conversation, “I’m not really all that interested in God the Father,” and we were friends for life.

In our conversation he describes well our biggest challenges today and how we can go “beyond Big Religion,” which he describes as “organized religion focused on patriarchy, power, and control,” and he shares the Perennial Wisdom at the mystic heart of most all religion as key to our collective sustainable future. These include: All life manifests a dynamic non-dual Aliveness called by many names; we humans are born able to wake up in, with, and as this Aliveness; waking up calls us to the Golden Rule of caring for all other creatures; and this service to being a blessing (think: contributing to the common good of ALL creatures) is our highest calling.

Rabbi Rami shared a very simple exercise to help us embody the compassion of the Divine Mother and that will have you looking at a simple ant in never the same way again. After our conversation we talked about a roly-poly I’d tried and succeeded in not stepping on during my walk that morning, and Rami is the kind of kind person who is genuinely interested in such stories. I sent Rabbi Rami a thank you note after, and a few weeks on, in the mail from Tennessee came a red envelope and inside a cheerful Snoopy card with the kindest note.

In fact, Rabbi Rami is so kind that you start to really imagine that religion can be embodied kindness, a language of living-out being compassionate, or, as he says, “Religions are like languages: no language is true or false; all languages are of human origin; each language reflects and shapes the civilization that speaks it; there are things you can say in one language that you cannot say or say as well in another; and the more languages you speak, the more nuanced your understanding of life becomes.”

That same day Andrea Menard entered the zoom room from Nova Scotia where she is filming the Robyn-Carr-based Sullivan’s Crossing (which will make fans of Virgin River happy). Andrea—known in the Sacred realm as Grandmother Wind—reminds us to slow down, respect, and acknowledge, for example, the traditional territory of the Mi’kmaq (in Nova Scotia), the official knowledge keepers of that territory.

In our conversation, she shared her wisdom as a Métis singer, songwriter, actress, TEDx speaker, facilitator of the rise of the Sacred Feminine, and founder of the Sacred Feminine Learning Lodge. Then she sang LIVE a beautiful bilingual water prayer song in Michif and English from her September-releasing album.

My first day of filming interviews ended with Father Greg Boyle and the warm burrito story. He said, “I’m still laughing three days on,” and I can say I’m still laughing weeks on, thoughtfully.

Next I got to interview Dr. James Finley, former Trappist monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, where Thomas Merton was his spiritual director. Jim Finley is also a Core Teacher at the Center for Action and Contemplation with Richard Rohr and others, and host of a “monastery in cyberspace,” as he calls it, his podcast, Turning to the Mystics.

Jim wanted to meet a couple of times beforehand via zoom, so we could have a real conversation. I know his work 100% and was thrilled he wanted to meet, and also petrified. The first time he sent me a zoom link an hour beforehand. The first thing he said when I got on, gobsmacked, was “Hey, let me show you the view.” Which put me at ease.

The second time we pre-met, I zoomed in to see Jim in his book-lined, warmly lit study, and he smiled without saying anything, and then held up a legal pad, wrote his phone number on it big, so I called him. “I’ve got to get someone out to look at my connection,” he said, “but I thought we could talk on the phone and see each other on zoom until it’s fixed, if that’s alright,” so we did.

At the end, he and I had such a laugh because since I’d been holding my phone with my left hand the whole time, I did a half-bow of reverent goodbye where the anjali mudra was my right palm pointing skyward and pressed against the imaginary one (occupied by holding my phone to my face so he could hear me explain this). He did one half-bow, one-palm anjali mudra right back to me, laughing, even though he had his cell phone on speaker, lying flat on the table, so he wasn’t holding it.

Jim is so calm, he reminds me of Brother Lawrence in that way. Both have a calmness that is a muscle, produced by invisible spiritual exercises over a lifetime. It’s a calmness all around them can enter.

In between these pre-meetings with Jim, he sent me his teaching memoir, releasing from Orbis in 2023. It’s titled Finding Our Way Along the Healing Path. I read it in a day. Gobbled its pdf up. CAN’T WAIT for it to come out.

In addition to being a raconteur in our conversation, sharing stories that make you feel you yourself have met Thomas Merton in Kentucky, Jim Finley talks so helpfully about how we can learn to recognize and cultivate the stance that offers the least resistance to being overtaken by mystical oneness with God or Love or Mystery, which he describes as a gift always there, available for the taking up. He speaks from profound experiences with trauma. His words resonate in deep ways since he knows and has healed from trauma, and as a clinical psychologist (retired) he has helped countless others healing from trauma. Now he works primarily with adult survivors of trauma who want their spirituality to be a resource in their healing.

As an adult survivor of trauma myself who wants spirituality to be a resource in my ongoing healing, I’m thankful for Dr. James Finley and his beyond-the-binary perspective. And for how he brings trauma in so it can be healed, be healing. Our conversation features Jim saying so many wonderfully human, wonderfully healing things that it rewards both listening and re-listening.

I am so grateful for Jim Finley. He is, as Mirabai Starr says, “a true mystic,” even a “renegade mystic,” and a kind mentor for all.

My next day of interviews took me to the Bahamas and to Thailand, so to speak, conversing with Rukmini Chaitanya and Grandmaster Mantak Chia. Conversing with Rukmini Chaitanya reminds how practice is so tied to our humanness. Rukmini has a PhD from UC Berkeley, a sunny spirit, and accessible teaching. A senior staff member of the Sivananda Ashram Yoga Retreat Bahamas, she is personal assistant to Acharya/spiritual director Swami Swaroopananda. She shares how anxiety at Cal motivated her into yoga practice. With one of THE best recording rooms ever, yellows, blues, and oranges, with a peaceful, breezy Bahamas-feel, Rukmini teaches the Sivananda Yoga Tradition and Advaita Vedanta Philosophy in a wonderfully accessible way.

Grandmaster Mantak Chia was born to a Chinese family in Thailand and raised in a Christian family—he began studying the Buddhist path of mindfulness as a child, and in our conversation he shares stories from his growing up. He also tells the most important lesson taught him by his Taoist master, and teaches the Inner Smile Meditation. I appreciate that it was 7am for Mantak while it was 5pm for me. He got up early so we could have our conversation, and I appreciate his gracious willingness to describe for us the thousands-of-years-old practices still so incredibly relevant for our modern world.

Dr. William Bloom lives in England, and he was and is a joy to talk with. Dr. Bloom is a groundbreaking UK educator in the field of holistic wellbeing and director of the Spiritual Companions Trust. Though he is very down-to-earth, you immediately sense that, as The Independent says, he has “an encyclopaedic knowledge of meditation” and deep experience of it too. He shared his fascinating background story (which includes publishing his first novel at age 22), and check out his story of the blue sky.

William teaches how spiritual and mystic experiences are accessible and natural for everyone. Some of his books include Meditation Masterclass, The Power of Modern Spirituality, Feeling Safe, and The Encyclopedia of Mind, Body, Spirit. We met on the day news was breaking that Boris Johnson had resigned, which reminded me that in an age of political uncertainty, William’s sharing of timeless, practical wisdom has special relevance.

The next day of interviews, I was in the room with Rev. Dr. Robyn Henderson-Espinoza. Dr. Robyn is a Nashville-based, recently married (congrats, Robyn!) storyteller, professor, public theologian and ethicist, and founder of the Activist Theology Project. Dr. Robyn has a lovely poetic description for combining contemplation and action for a stronger community—a “murmuration of becoming.” Their imagination and vision for an ethical future are compelling, down-to-earth, doable. They have ideas for how we can be human, again, and I also got invited for a porch chat in Nashville, with iced tea or bourbon, my choice. Looking forward to that!

Then I was interviewed that same day by co-host Mike Morrell and got to talk about Brother Lawrence and my new translation of this timeless 17th-century Discalced Carmelite friar who transcends any tradition and has been in-print and beloved for centuries by all people, religious or not. My accessible, accurate translation is the first complete offering of this wisdom, the first by a woman of color, the first that includes all passages, and the first to use non-binary pronouns for the Divinity. I hope it will bring everyone peace and joy as it has done and does me.

After, I interviewed The Mystics Summit co-host Mike Morrell. Mike went to beautiful Berry College, the largest in the world at 27,000 green acres with beautiful eagles (eagle cam too) and wonderful teachers, in the same town where I used to teach. Mike is the collaborating author, with Father Richard Rohr, on The Divine Dance, founder of Wisdom Camp, and a founding organizer of the justice, arts, and spirituality festival Wild Goose in North Carolina. His helpful theological mulch metaphor, his creativity, and his stories are worth tuning in for, as well as his generosity of spirit.

Andrew Harvey astounded next. Internationally acclaimed poet, novelist, translator, mystical scholar, and spiritual teacher, author of over 20 books, and founder of the Institute for Sacred Activism, Andrew discusses AND READS FROM beautifully, the astounding work of the great Christian woman mystic, Hadewijch of Antwerp, exploring five of her greatest poems and meditations from his new book Love is Everything: 365 Poems and Meditations from Hadewijch of Antwerp. A 13th-century Beguine, Hadewijch was silenced for five centuries—her voice now returns through Andrew’s brilliant and moving translations, to inspire us all.

Raven Sinclaire is a writer, teacher, and student of Hermetic wisdom. Co-author of the best-selling anthology: Ready, Set, Live! she has an upcoming book: Old Truths/New Light, and is an internationally known workshop and retreat leader. Raven is also currently working on her Master’s degree at the University of Dundee. In our conversation, Raven shares with us stories of her own initiation into wisdom. She also speaks of Hypatia, one of my heroes. Talking with Raven, what most impressed me is how often we overlook the wisdom within, and how she has developed tools and teachings for recovering and engaging with it, and when her Old Truths/New Light Hermetic Wisdom Oracle Deck arrived, I’ve found it both beautiful and deeply helpful. As author Andrew Harvey says, “Raven is authentic, humble, experienced and inspired.”

Colette Lafia is a San Francisco-based writer, spiritual director, and international retreat leader who dropped in next. She has a gentle, joyful spirit. Her book The Divine Heart is a 2022 Nautilus Award winner, and I had the great joy of reading it earlier this year. Of this gem, author and interspiritual teacher Mirabai Starr says, “In this luminous book, spiritual guide Colette Lafia offers the fruits of her tenderly cultivated inner life to feed people of all genders who thirst for a direct encounter with the embodiment of love, which she recognizes as our own true nature.” Colette does spiritual direction both in person and virtually, and in our conversation Colette’s spiritual-directing wisdom shows as she shares down-to-earth ways to listen, grow, and transform as human beings. She draws from her own stories and experiences as a contemplative and gives you very practical steps to experience your life and all of life as a love story. I’m here for that. I also especially appreciate that Colette teaches a stance of self-acceptance. Her abundant, clear teachings are very practical for everyone who wants more abiding peace and joy in their lives.

Next Tenley Wallace danced into our conversation. Now in Oregon and once from the Bay Area, she and I share this geographical connection. To prepare for our interview, I watched a few of Tenley’s dances online, and they are incredible. Tenley describes herself as a midwife for women’s transformation through dance, yoga, and ancient yogini wisdom from India, Tibet, and Nepal. And even that just scratches the surface of what she’s done and is doing. Tenley is a translator of ancient wisdom, having studied intensively with yoginis, and she has created original embodiment practices for anyone wanting to live with more confidence, grace, and power. Please look up her videos on YouTube to see what I mean! She concludes our conversation with a brief, easy practice that anyone can do at any time to pause and reconnect with their true self.

My friend Carl McColman kindly came on that day after a long stretch of traveling and leading a retreat in New York. Carl is a spiritual director, retreat leader, and author of The Big Book of Christian Mysticism, and many others, including Eternal Heart: The Mystical Path to a Joyful Life and Unteachable Lessons: Why Wisdom Can’t Be Taught (and Why That’s Okay)—it must be “caught” instead.

An internationally known speaker and teacher on mystical spirituality and contemplative living, Carl also co-hosts with Cassidy Hall and Kevin Johnson, Encountering Silence, a podcast about, well, one of my favorite subjects: SILENCE. They listen to (and speak with) everyone there—Amy Frykholm, Nikki Grimes, The Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis, Dr. Beverly Lanzetta, Sister Joyce Rupp, Kevin Quashie, and Barbara Brown Taylor, to name just a few. You can tune in here: http://encounteringsilence.com/

In our conversation, my sage friend Carl talks of the inspiring and instructive life and wisdom of theologian Howard Thurman, how mysticism corrects the religion of dour moralism, and how it inspires social and communal transformation as well. We had a good conversation and hope you’ll join us!

My last day of interviews were with Matthew Fox, Rev. Ana Jones, and Mirabai Starr. If you wanted to go out with a bang, that’s how to do it.

Though he never uses these prefixes much, Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox makes a conversation resemble how the world feels after a parching summer meets rain—the steam that rises from the red earth like magic, the earthy smell of petrichor that fills your nose and body with its fragrance, and the feeling of lightness, like anything is possible, and you’re sure you just spotted a green shoot growing from that bare patch over there—that’s Matthew Fox.

What do I love about Matthew Fox? First, that he had slides of Hildegard’s colorful mandalas to talk about during our conversation: “Egg of the Universe,” “The Human as Microcosm of the Macrocosm,” “Cosmic Tree Cultivation,” and “All Beings Celebrate Creation.” He points out, by the way, in “Cosmic Tree Cultivation” the snake in the border and how Hildegard saw snakes as good, which is also my understanding of snakes, one reason I wear a ouroborous ring made of recycled white gold.

I started our conversation by holding up my dog-eared copy of Matthew’s Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen in tribute to his decades of being my and so many others’ mentor. Mirabai Starr describes him best: “There is not another man on the planet who has championed the sacred feminine with a fraction of the wisdom, scholarship, creative fire, and holy chutzpah as Matthew Fox.”

Via the lens of the Webb Telescope, Matthew asks us: “Might this sharing of the earliest galaxies and stars beaming into our living rooms awaken us to the sacredness of our 13.8 billion year journey?” He turns to “feminist theologian” Hildegard of Bingen, whom he also calls “the grandmother of the Rhineland mystics,” and “a Trojan horse in the Vatican,” because she centers creation and her love of Nature in her viriditas or greening theology, as does Matthew in his Creation Spirituality. (We remember that Pope Benedict silenced Matthew for a time for speaking out on behalf of the Divine Feminine and for Mother Earth.)

Matthew also discusses how the ancient Mesoamerican teaching recognizes the compassionate Divine Feminine: “To be human one must make room in one’s heart for the wonders of the universe.” That reminds me of Death Valley: Life Blooms on PBS, where we follow Baratunde Thurston and time-lapse photographer Harun Mehmedinovic, who talks of how important it is to see the stars, for the wonder of it, and how light pollution prevents us from that experience more and more. I got teary-eyed myself as Matthew described the Webb Telescope scientists getting teary-eyed seeing the awe-inspiring, awesome photographs.

Matthew and I had a laugh near the end after he’d been sharing lyrically about Genesis 1’s Original Blessing, Creation’s birthright of goodness and our interdependence on all creatures. He pointed out how much of theology starts unfortunately with Genesis 2 and an unhealthy Original Sin that has historically made for a narcissistic theology of self-loathing, one where we’ve forgotten the goodness and the sacred nature of Nature that we meant to honor and protect, and from that sacred focus, develop an economic system that works for all beings.

I followed up with something like: “I appreciate how you’ve spent—are devoting—your whole life trying to glue Chapter 1 back into Genesis.” He laughed, and we agreed that super glue might be needed.

My penultimate interview was with Rev. Ana Jones. (Ana is said to rhyme with “Amma.”) Rev. Ana Jones is an internationally renowned Interfaith Minister who speaks to ways that we can listen to the still small voice of intuition. Being with her, you can’t help but notice that she has a profound calmness and optimism. She brings into our conversation allusions to many religious writings that deepen her practices. Ana also shares insightful personal stories, and we see that what she teaches, she lives. Ana helps us better understand what intuition is and how to listen to it, teaches that we need everyone’s inner mystic and intuitive gifts to be honed for co-creating a better and brighter future, and reads a beautiful poem as a benediction. With Facebook communities of over 450,000 members, Ana’s inclusive, listening approach resonates with many and gives me hope.

I am thankful to have worked on this Mystics Summit with so many amazing people. And this is just half of it! Mike interviewed such wonderful souls, including Banafsheh Sayyad, Bushi Yamato Damashii, Alexander John Shaia, Taya Mâ Shere, Rebekah Berndt, Kabir Helminski, Hillary Raining, Tripp Fuller, Micky ScottBey Jones (she/her), Sophie Strand, Juliet Rania, Rabbi Jay Michaelson, Gareth Higgins, Therese Taylor-Stinson, Tada Hozumi, and others, whom I’m also looking forward to tuning into. May you all enjoy all of this wonderful feast!

These stories are a taste of the Mystics Summit sponsored by The Shift Network. It’s August 15-19, join for free here: https://shiftnetwork.infusionsoft.com/go/mts22a24522/a24522

Thank you! Peace to all,

Carmen

Red Dirt, Rilke, & The Sidney Psalter

Posted on | by Carmen 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.