Tag: song

Come

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

This blog pairs well with my YouTube channel meditation / video where you can spend 6 calm minutes listening to it, watching birds fly over blue water in a blue sky, seeing a rivulet flow, and enjoying a container ship slowly entering the horizon. To view, go here.

The practice of Lectio Divina is ancient and simple, and it exists in diverse forms across faith traditions and wisdom traditions. It means sacred reading. It’s a kind of steeping that creates a web of mental associations, sometimes broken up into four non steps.

I think of these as a web.

We read or bite some wise words, and then we chew on them like a cow chewing her cud. And for those of us from the country who’ve seen cows chewing their cud, that’s some very, very excellent chewing. Very serious nourishing chewing and re chewing.

And then the next non step or spot on the web is savoring.

So read or bite, reflect or meditate or chew, and then comes the respond or oratio or prayer. What is it saying to me? And then the final non step is contemplatio, or contemplation, resting, simply letting go of thoughts or finding that thoughts let go of you, of us, and resting.

Sometimes the fourth non step is sort of separated away and packaged as centering prayer. And that can be, as I’ve experienced it and many others, very nourishing.

Also the cloud of unknowing’s author Anonymous says in chapter 35 and elsewhere that Lectio Divina is where we start as contemplatives.

And in my experience, this kind of food or eating is needed throughout the journey of life. And the wise Jesus said, we don’t live by bread alone, but by every word that comes out of the mouth of love or God or mystery, the ultimate source, however a person thinks. Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. What from this seems to be highlighted in your consciousness?

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

What would you feel is speaking to you in this in these wise words from Jesus? What might it make you feel and what might it make you realize you would like to have more of in your life? Or what kind of a relationship is it calling you to with yourself, with God, or love and with others in whatever non aggressive way you wish?

Let this passage of wise words that have meant so much to so many over millennia speak to us, and then we rest.

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Kindness

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

God, to you all hearts are open, to you all longings speak, and to you no secret thing is hidden. I beg you—purify the intentions1 of my heart through the unspeakable2 gift of your grace, so I can love you with all I am and praise you for all you are. Amen.

God, unto Whom alle hertes ben open, and unto Whom alle wille spekith, and unto Whom no privé thing is hid: I beseche Thee so for to clense the entent of myn hert with the unspekable gift of Thi grace that I may parfiteliche love Thee, and worthilich preise Thee. Amen.

Kindness

This past weekend the Very Reverend Gary Jones, Interim Dean at Christ Church Cathedral in Houston, invited me to give some talks, lead an experiential, I did Centering Prayer, and preach twice at 9 and 11. So I did. Gary is exceptionally kind and wise, also brilliant and a contemplative. Those are a combination the world needs more of. Thank you, Gary. He and his wife, Cherry, are so welcoming, as was the whole community. Thank you, everyone, for giving me such a warm welcome. I can’t (yet) say in words how much it meant and means—thank you for gifting me with such genuine dialogue, much appreciated.

So I took a copy of the Cloud of Unknowing and of Practice of the Presence with me. It was the fifth Sunday in Lent, where the community reads about Lazarus being raised from the dead, and I’m always happy to consider resurrections, personal and societal, and for nature, injured as this wonder is by greed.

At another time I will write about my time behind the rood screen and among the mirrored skyscrapers where the blue sky and white clouds were reflected. It was a kind of resurrection for me, for diverse reasons. First I want to have digested the experiences fully. I’m still ruminating on them gratefully.

Right now I want to sing again what I did in the 11am service, known to me as the Prayer for the Preface to the Cloud of Unknowing. For a long time I’ve sung it in Middle English, over ten years now, in fact. But I’d never sung my Modern English translation of it. If you want to see me sing it there in Modern English and listen to my 15-minute sermon, you can go to vimeo here: https://vimeo.com/809526246 “3/26/23 Acevedo Butcher: The Fifth Sunday in Lent.” I so appreciate that they included both my last names.

The song or tune for this prayer was inspired by my preparing as I do by reading and thinking, watching CCC’s third week in Lent’s service (where Bradley read it, in fact, from the communal prayerbook, and that sparked in me), and many times praying “What should I do?” as I walked through the marsh, holding this prayer.

How that song came about was the same as with the Middle English. I start out saying it in lectio divina, on a note card on which I’ve written it. And eventually somehow it becomes singing, sung, a song. Sometimes it sounds one way and then another and eventually it settles into a sort of way that is repeated and now I can sing it in that settled version.

It started, this song, in the marsh. Among egrets flying and squawking plus ducks, geese, red-tailed hawks, swallows, pelicans, too. I sing it first in Modern, then in Middle English, and after that read the two footnotes from my translation of the Cloud. You could also substitute for “God” here “Love” or even “Kindness,” since that’s the heart of all major religions and wisdom traditions—kindness, to ourselves and to others—connecting with our True Self, which is/who is Kindness.

God, to you all hearts are open, to you all longings speak, and to you no secret thing is hidden. I beg you—purify the intentions1 of my heart through the unspeakable2 gift of your grace, so I can love you with all I am and praise you for all you are. Amen.

God, unto Whom alle hertes ben open, and unto Whom alle wille spekith, and unto Whom no privé thing is hid: I beseche Thee so for to clense the entent of myn hert with the unspekable gift of Thi grace that I may parfiteliche love Thee, and worthilich preise Thee. Amen.

Here are the footnotes from my translation:

1. The Cloud author uses the Middle English entent (“intent”) often, reminding us that his theme is the exercise of “stretching” towards God. See Gallacher, ed., The Cloud of Unknowing, 21, line 3. With his background in Latin, he well knew that the word entent (our intent)comes from the Latin in-, “toward,” and from tendere, “to stretch,” so to be “intent” on something is literally “to stretch towards it.” This anonymous monk shows us how we can “stretch” our minds towards God in contemplation and grow spiritually, becoming people who “make peace” (James 3:18). Intense, tendon, attention, attend, attentive,and extend share this Latin root for “to stretch.” 

2. In Middle English, this prayer reads: “God, unto Whom alle hertes ben open, and unto Whom alle wille spekith, and unto Whom no privé thing is hid: I beseche Thee so for to clense the entent of myn hert with the unspekable gift of Thi grace that I may parfiteliche love Thee, and worthilich preise Thee. Amen.” See Gallacher, ed., The Cloud of Unknowing, 21, lines 2-5. Here we find a splendid example of the author’s play on the words “speak” and “unspeakable,” highlighting that God listens to us when “alle wille” (“all longings”)“spekith” (“speak”) to himand that he answers our articulated or “spoken” longings with “the unspekable gift” (“the unspeakable gift”) of his grace. We “speak” and in return are given an “unspekable” (“ineffable”) gift, his grace. This word play deftly suggests the mystery of a dialogue between our chatter and a profound silence. This prayer is also the short opening prayer (or collect) before the epistle in the Roman Catholic votive Mass of the Holy Spirit (Ad postulandam gratiam Spiritus Sancti), with one difference. The anonymous author has slightly changed the original Latin version. Originally, the prayer addressed the unspeakable gift “of your Holy Spirit,” not “of your grace.” The author revised it to focus on God’s grace. His use and revision of this liturgical prayer reveal his belief that grace and the Holy Spirit are closely related, that the Holy Spirit informs contemplative prayer, that grace is the sine qua non of contemplation, and that communal prayer is central to spiritual growth.

God, to you all hearts are open, to you all longings speak, and to you no secret thing is hidden. I beg you—purify the intentions1 of my heart through the unspeakable2 gift of your grace, so I can love you with all I am and praise you for all you are. Amen.

God, unto Whom alle hertes ben open, and unto Whom alle wille spekith, and unto Whom no privé thing is hid: I beseche Thee so for to clense the entent of myn hert with the unspekable gift of Thi grace that I may parfiteliche love Thee, and worthilich preise Thee. Amen

Thank you for being here and I hope these bring peace and joy to you.

HAWNK

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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