Always Room at a Round Table

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

This memory is dedicated with love to Sister (Dr.) Linda Kulzer, Benedictine nun, who invited me to present at the Western Michigan University medieval conference at American Benedictine Association sessions. She lived to be 92, dying in 2022. Her humility and kindness made her a good friend to all who knew her. I’m grateful for her hospitality. Father Tom Francis became my friend and email pen pal after we visited many times at the Conyers Monastery, including once with my family. He died aged 96 in 2024. He always talked of and lived from God as friend and had a sparkle in his eye and a light heart filled with kindness. Father William Meninger and I exchanged many emails and he also made and sent me a dried flower card. My life was enriched by his sharing his love of the Cloud of Unknowing. He died in 2021 aged 88.

I’m so grateful for these three. They offered me community. I was also fortunate to find community along the way in places like books, now in the joy of Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation collaborations, and in kind undergraduate and graduate school professors who made class truly communal. Some of my favorite memories are from the time spent with monks and nuns, who invited me in, often reaching out out of the blue. When I was in graduate school, I was living pretty much a nun’s life, studying the Bible with commentaries daily and taking notes, praying, doing lectio divina, or sacred reading, walking two hours daily, so I fit right in with my monastic friends because my heart has always been monastic. I did all this while teaching full time as a TA, first-year composition students, and while being a full-time student.

One reason I walk is because I have dyslexia, undiagnosed until my late 40s, and walking has always helped me learn and digest what I’ve studied in school. It helps me have room and calm to think. I also often carried and still often do carry Bible verses with me. I started, because I was doing what my mom taught me, which is to memorize Bible verses, starting with, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me,” which she gave me and all of us kids in VBS. I’d write them on 3×5 cards, and take them with me on walks, but the memorizing became lectio divina, even before I’d heard of it. Which reminds me always, that God or Love always has a workaround, seriously.

Here’s one memory made possible because Sister Linda Kulzer of blessed memory invited me to give talks for the American Benedictine Association. I was asked about it at a recent workshop, so that kind new friend sent me down memory lane. It’s from my book God of Mercy, which is on the tenth-century Benedictine scholar, translator, monk, and abbot Ælfric of Eynsham, whose emphasis on writing accessible sermons in the vernacular and on communicating that God is Love and Mercy were significant antidotes and healing for me who had been brought up as a child on an unhealthy diet of hellfire and damnation sermons.

One May, I entered Western Michigan University’s teeming Valley III cafeteria holding a tray of barbequed chicken leg, institution-white rice, and asparagus, and scanned the dining room for a friendly face. Remembering my monastic friends’ habit of sitting on the right side of this boisterous room, I shifted my gaze and spotted them at once. Then I noticed with disappointment their circular table was crowded with seven sisters and no empty chairs.

No room for me, I thought, and began looking elsewhere, but I had been spotted. When elderly Sister Teresa Wolking raised an arm in welcome, I shuffled towards their table, still uncertain. Sister Deborah Harmeling rose to meet me with a smile, then disappeared behind my back, and as she left—in one motion—the others took their plates off cement-dull cafeteria trays and stowed these trays under their seats. All this fuss made me ask, “You sure there’s room?” and Sister Deborah answered my question by returning with a chair and placing it firmly under me: “There’s always room at a round table.”

There’s always room at a round table echoed in my head as I unloaded my own plates and stowed the tray under the gift of my chair, and joined the community. This is the world of the tenth-century Benedictine monk and abbot Ælfric, whose sermons I translated from Old English, and it’s the Benedictine idea of Christian community and the blessing of the ordinary (in this case, a chair), which is the foundation too of the teaching of Jesus.

Father Greg Boyle reminds us in Cherished Belonging: “Everyone belongs and everyone is unshakably good, no exceptions.” Having experienced how painful exclusion and bullying are, I deeply remember and cherish the sisters’ act of kindness, which still blesses me in my heart today.

This blog is also read here: https://youtu.be/I24O214OLn0. The story of the kind nuns is from God of Mercy: Ælfric’s Sermons and Theology (Mercer University Press), p. 12.

Joyful Longing

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ©Translated by Carmen Acevedo Butcher

Tell no one, but the wise,
For the crowd will mock straightaway,
I want to praise what is alive,
That which longs for death by flames.

In the coolness of the nights of love,
Which made you, where you made life,
A strange feeling stops you unawares
As the candle burns and is silent.

You stay embraced no more
In the shadow of eclipse,
And new desire pulls you forward
To higher lovemaking and bliss.

You find no distance heavy,
You come flying and yearning,
And finally, to the light so eager,
You are that bright moth, burned.

And as long as you don’t get
This: Die and become!
You are but a dull guest
On the dark earth.

Credits: Please credit the work of the translator Carmen Acevedo Butcher if you share this translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “Selige Sehnsucht” [“Joyful Longing”] as given in the title here: “Joyful Longing by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ©Translated by Carmen Acevedo Butcher.”

“Selige Sehnsucht” is in Buch des Sängers in West-östlicher Divan by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Cotta Publishing House, 1819), 30-31. It is inspired by the poet Hafez.

“Selige Sehnsucht” can also be “Blessed Longing,” but because “selige” can also mean “joy” or “very deep happiness,” as in the beatitudes of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, and because my favorite German song, taught me by Mother Buschbeck, has “selige” in it and expresses “joyful, very happy” there, I chose “Joyful Longing.” The ancient root of “selige” is *selh₂- for “to calm, quiet, be favorable.” In Matthew 5-7, “happy” or “blessed” is makarios (μακάριος). I can also see how “holy” is sometimes chosen for “selige” here, but it is not as close to the heart of “selige” semantically or etymologically as is “joyful.”

I was inspired to look at this Goethe poem in German while rereading several of Connie Zweig’s books. Dr. Zweig is a retired Jungian therapist and author of Meeting the Shadow, The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul, Meeting the Shadow on the Spiritual Path: The Dance of Darkness and Light in Our Search for Awakening, and more. This Goethe poem features in Meeting the Shadow of Spirituality: The Hidden Power of Darkness on the Path (formerly titled The Holy Longing), and it is a powerful reminder of Carl Jung’s teaching on shadow-work and individuation as a process about wholeness, which shares a root with holy, and “holy” is a reminder of all that. My translation of this poem is mindful of Goethe’s original abab rhyme scheme and follows it gently.

Alignment

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher | 1 Comment on Alignment

Recently the Rev. Dr. Margaret Somerville shared with me her excitement over a new tattoo on her arm—it’s a flowing line of classical poetry scansion. Formerly a teacher of translation, Dr. Somerville knows her classical poetry, too! She’d invited me to speak with her warm and brilliant Alignment Interfaith community, so when they arrived online, we stopped talking about tattoos and metrical patterns, or the time recently that Margaret somehow calmly talked with an Alignment Author Visit presenter as a storm brought five large trees crashing down outside her home.

After a wonderful welcome from everyone, we dived into The Cloud of Unknowing by Anonymous in the late 1300’s CE and Brother Lawrence’s Practice of the Presence in the late 1600’s CE. I began by singing, then shared some of my journey, before talking about the subversive power of translation and of contemplation, reading from both books, and sharing dialogue at the end, dancing with everyone’s lyrical, insightful questions that were, as Rilke said, ones to live now. Then most people left, and I stayed a bit longer, because we were all just having such a good conversation. The whole evening included—in addition to Anonymous and Nic Herman / Br. Lawrence—also Jhumpa Lahiri and Bayo Akomolafe.

I don’t know why, but sometimes the best bits happen before and after, even when the main event of being together for a formal gathering is also very meaningful and appreciated. That’s when Margaret shared a wonderful Dr. Barbara Holmes (Dr. B.) story with me and those few there. I felt she’d handed me a golden ingot, as I hadn’t heard or read Dr. B. tell this before. Perhaps someone else has heard it, but I haven’t, and Margaret said I could share it on.

I learned Dr. B. was the first Authors Visit presenter two years ago. That made me smile to know. Margaret also mentioned that during informal conversation with Dr. B. that time, they began talking about the practice of preparing to preach as a contemplative act. Dr. B. shared with Margaret then that “she did not learn how to preach ‘for real’ until she abandoned the way she had been taught to preach by men and learned that a sermon was really a poem.” Dr. B. added that “[w]hen she created sermons as a poem, she felt that she was truly preaching.”

I added to Margaret’s memory Dr. B.’s last words of “Forgive everyone for everything.”

“What a treasure!” Dr. B. was, Margaret said, and as our wise ancestor, she is still with us.

Thank you, Margaret, and Alignment Interfaith community, for your welcoming presence!

View my Alignment Authors Visit here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsFnSfeOj9Y

Who Am I?

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ©Translated by Carmen Acevedo Butcher

Who am I? They often tell me
I step from my cell
calm and cheerful and strong,
like a lord from his castle.

Who am I? They often tell me
I speak with my guards
freely and friendly and frank,
as if I were in command.

Who am I? They also tell me
I bear the days of misfortune
with serenity, smiling and sure,
like someone used to winning.

Am I really what others say of me?
Or am I only what I know myself to be?
Restless, longing, sick, like a bird in a cage,
gasping for breath, as if someone strangled my throat,
starving for colors, flowers, bird songs,
thirsting for kind words, human closeness,
shaking with rage at despotism and the pettiest offense,
haunted waiting for great events to happen,
weak from worrying for friends infinitely far away,
tired and empty at praying, at thinking, at coping,
lifeless, and ready to say goodbye to it all?

Who am I? This person or the other?
Am I one self today and tomorrow someone else?
Am I both at once? Before others a hypocrite,
and before myself a despised, whining weakling?
Or is what’s still in me like a battered army,
retreating in disorder from a victory already won?

Who am I? This lonely question mocks my facade.
Whoever I am, you know me, yours am I, O God!

Credits: Please credit the work of the translator Carmen Acevedo Butcher if you share this translation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Wer bin ich?” [“Who am I?”] as given in the title here: “Who am I? by Dietrich Bonhoeffer ©Translated by Carmen Acevedo Butcher.”

“Wer bin ich?” is from page 179 in Widerstand und Ergebung: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen aus der Haft, edited by Eberhard Bethge (Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn, 1983). It’s also in Band 8 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke, edited by Christian Gremmels, Eberhard Bethge, und Renate Bethge, mit Ilse Tödt. (Chr. Kaiser/Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1998).

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested in April 1943 by the Gestapo and imprisoned by the Nazis in Berlin-Tegel prison for one and a half years. In 1944 he wrote the poem, “Wer bin ich?” [“Who am I?”], and on July 8, 1944, he sent it to his friend Eberhard Bethge. In October 1944, he was transferred to the Gestapo cellar in Prinz-Albert-Strasse, then in February 1945 to Buchenwald, and in April 1945 to Flossenbürg Concentration Camp. He was sentenced to death on April 8, 1945, and hanged.

A kind friend included my translation in his Christmas Eve sermon in Virginia. He sent it to me when I couldn’t find my version, and I revised it. It has always been special to me, and its relevance is perennial. I began reading Bonhoeffer in the German starting in 1983-1984 when I studied at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg [Heidelberg University] on a Rotary Club Graduate Scholarship. In the original that is handwritten, the first three stanzas are indented some five spaces to the right. Please picture those there, which are in my manuscript, but which the formatting here would not hold.

It is interesting how Bonhoeffer ends his non-rhyming poem with a very meaningful rhyming couplet. During the heinous imprisonment that followed his stand against the Nazi Party, and with honest, authentic emotion and in dialogue with the divine, he laments not only his suffering but the suffering of so many others, and he must also be aware that he represents a loving and inclusive spiritual path not endorsed by political powers (remembering Hitler’s 1920-on racist “Positive Christianity”), as reflected in the then contemporary term “Gottgläubig” (“God-believing”), the Nazi Party’s non-denominational deism. Thus the poem also reminds that the small ego (our facades) can be involved in making a murderous mockery of a faith tradition.

So I was trying to capture some of that in my translation of the last lines. We can hear all the lonely doubt and worry “Einsames Fragen” and mockery / ridicule “Spott” dissolve into the word “Gott.” It’s lovely, and also haunting and ironic in the sense that clearly, in spite of the rhyme, nothing has been resolved in his and the world’s earthly situation. We sense and experience in some small way the tension within which he and so many others live and die. Here are the closing lines: “Wer bin ich? Einsames Fragen treibt mit mir Spott, / Wer ich auch bin, Du kennst mich, Dein bin ich, o Gott.”