Tag: TheCloudofUnknowing

Hide-and-Seek Divinity

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

When I was a stay-at-home mom and our daughter was almost three, she loved to play hide-and-seek. One time in Mountain View, California, she and I were playing hide-and-seek, just the two of us, on the dusty, shaded playground a short walk from our rented townhouse. School had just let out, so we had the playground mostly to ourselves. I hid first, and she found me fairly easily. Various anatomical parts of me stuck out from behind a skinny pine tree.

“Your turn to hide!” I sang out, and off she dashed with that nervous look that is the excitement of possibly “being found.” I just saw her back as she pumped her arms and scampered off, head down, searching for shelter.

I was a stickler for following rules then, and, as the oldest of four siblings, I always was; so I turned my back to my toddler and dutifully counted slowly to twenty, out loud. Then I turned around and started searching. I was serious about the search, too. I looked behind the slide, behind the skinny pine tree, behind the bushes, and just as I started across the playground, still searching, out dashed Kate yelling, “Surprise! Here I am! I found you!”

Huh? I said to myself and started to explain to her that that is NOT how the game works, when I stopped and thought, In this surprise is some spiritual lesson, but I’m not sure what. We played several more times, with her “hiding,” only to jump out sooner each time, shouting, “I found you!”

Decades later, I think back on this hide-and-seek game with my then toddler. By temperament, I spent the first fifty years of my life as a rules follower, someone preferring order, but over the years that preference has given way (often whether I’ve wanted it to or not) in the face of life as it is truly lived. My natural temperament that yearns for routine and schedule and predictability has eroded in the waves of living and loving imperfectly, as a wife and as a mom and then as a tenured professor, writer, speaker, now an adjunct professor, and the sand of my once seemingly ordered life has been carried out to sea.

I turn to scripture, wise books, and poetry for nourishment as I always have. They are lighthouses on the rocky part of the shore, faithfully there no matter the weather.

Over time, I forgot those playground games with my daughter. Then, one day not too very long ago, I found myself translating the fourteenth-century classic on lectio divina (sacred reading) and contemplative prayer, The Cloud of Unknowing (also here). In Chapter 46, I read words that reminded me of those hide-and-seek games with our daughter:

And don’t be hard on yourself. By that, I mean don’t overtax yourself emotionally or physically.
Choose to be enthusiastic instead. This discipline [of Bible meditation and contemplative prayer]
doesn’t require brute strength, but joy. As you increase the joy in your contemplative work, you also
increase its humility and genuine spirituality, but if you force it, your efforts sink into a crude
physicality. So beware. Remember that anyone approaching the high mountain of contemplation
with a beastly heart will be driven away with stones. . . . That’s why you should be careful. Instead of
being stubborn as a mule, learn to love with gentleness and joy, kindness and good manners.
Cultivate self-control of body and soul. Accept the will of our Lord gracefully. Never lunge for it like
a hungry dog. Even if you’re starving, don’t be a greedy greyhound. Don’t grab. Let me suggest
how you can do this. I’m going to advise you to play a sort of game with God, seriously. Pretend
you don’t want what you want as much as you want it. When you feel that beast, desire, stirring
inside you with tremendous power, restrain it. Act as if you don’t want God to find out how much
you long to see him, know him, and feel him. Hide all that. Perhaps I sound like a child making up a
game, but I mean it. I’m confident that anyone with the grace to put my advice into practice will
eventually experience the joy of God’s playfulness. God will come to you, the way an earthly father
plays with his child, kissing and hugging, making everything alright. (105-106)

“God will come to you, the way an earthly father [or mother, I say] plays with his [or her or their] child, kissing and hugging, making everything alright” — this wise observation reminded me that my toddler daughter was so confident I would find her that she didn’t even try to hide well. To her, the joy was in not quite hiding and then bursting on me as soon as I began searching. She has always loved to surprise me with her unique presence. Would that I were that child with God my Parent, I thought.

In devotional literature, it’s not unusual to find this hide-and-seek image. Often ancient Christian writers use diction and description to suggest that our relationship with God is not unlike a game of hide-and-seek between parent and child, which ends with the parent’s “finding” the child and covering him, her, or them with kisses and hugs.

In the thirteenth-century spiritual guidebook, Ancrene Riwle, another anonymous author writes, Ure Louerd plaieth mid us, ase the moder mid hire junge deorlinge. (“Our Lord-God plays with us as the mother with her young darling.”) The Ancrene Riwle passage then describes a hide-and-seek game in which God our Mother hides. Her child cries out, “Mother! Mother!” and God jumps out with open arms and cluppeth and cusseth and wipeth (“hugs and kisses and wipes”) our eyes. The Ancrene Riwle author uses this image to describe the experience of how God withdraws or “hides” His grace from us for a time, before returning to “find” us.1

The hide-and-seek image is used, perhaps, because it suggests the intimacy of those who play this child’s game. In the classic The Spirituality of Imperfection, Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham tell a story that helps me understand this experience:


The Medzibozer’s grandson, Yechiel Michael, was playing hide and seek with another child. He hid
himself for some time, but his playmate did not look for him. Little Yechiel ran to Rabbi Baruch and
said amid tears: “He did not look for me!”
The Rabbi said: “This is also God’s complaint, that we seek Him not.” (107)

But perhaps this next story from The Spirituality of Imperfection best helps me understand those games of hide-and-seek with my daughter and also my own dark, difficult, and despairing life experiences where I felt that God was “hiding” from me.

The story is told of a young girl who loves to wander in the nearby forest and one evening becomes lost. Her frantic parents gather their friends and search for her. She herself has become very anxious, after trying several different paths to return home to no avail, and she eventually falls asleep in a clearing. The searchers as well become exhausted and many stop looking. Her father, though, continues searching through the night.


Early in the morning, the father came to the clearing where the girl was asleep. He suddenly
saw his little girl and ran toward her, yelling and making a great noise on the dry branches which
awoke the girl.
The little girl saw her father, and with a great shout of joy she exclaimed, “Daddy, I found you!”
(108)

Kurtz and Ketcham write, “[W]e find what we are looking for only by being looked for” (108). “[W]e find what we are looking for only by being looked for.”

As we played together those many years ago, my toddler daughter found what she was looking for, the assurance of my searching for her, by jumping out and surprising me, upturning the “rules” of hide-and-seek because she could count on my being right there.

Sometimes, when I’ve felt in hard times that Love’s face is turned from me, that God who is my best friend is “hiding” from me, what jumps out at me is often my husband’s listening, a hug or a kiss from my children, a verse or poem, a loving friend checking in, a kind stranger, a deliberately intentional wise comment, my spontaneous wonder before a newly white dogwood or while listening to a poignant podcast, and God says, “Surprise! I found you!”

Or maybe I say, “Father/Mother/Parent/Love, I found you!”

Sometimes, in mutually loving relationships, it is almost impossible to tell who does the finding and who is the found.

So I keep praying that I embrace the grace to keep on seeking. Is the seeking the finding and the being found?

I pray to live in the middle place of Christ’s enduring, loving mystery where grace and seeking meet, in that liminal middle space of the numinous Now.

1. Find this passage in Nicholas Watson’s Anchoritic Spirituality (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1991, page 132). This piece has been revised after being resurrected from my former iteration of this blog (2011).

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.”