Jim Finley: Greetings. I’m Jim Finley.
Kirsten Oates: And I’m Kirsten Oates.
Jim Finley: Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.
Kirsten Oates: Welcome everyone to Season 12 of Turning to the Mystics, where we’re turning to Practice of the Presence, the teachings of Brother Lawrence. And we’re very excited because we have a special guest here today, Carmen Acevedo Butcher, who’s the translator for the book we’ve been using Practice of the Presence. Before I welcome Carmen, I’ll just read a little bit of her bio so you can get a deeper connection to her. Carmen Acevedo Butcher is an award-winning translator, teacher, poet, and workshop leader. Her cloud of Unknowing translation received a 46th Georgia Author of the Year Award. And Martin Laird calls her translation of Brother Lawrence’s Practice of the Presence the new standard, and we’re certainly loving it on the podcast this season.
She holds degrees in Medieval studies from the University of Georgia, was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of London, and teaches in the college writing programs at the University of California Berkeley. Carmen is also a faculty member at the Center for Action and Contemplation. You can find out more about Carmen on her website, and we have a link to that in the show notes. We’re so thrilled to have Carmen with us today. So welcome, Carmen. So great to have you here.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: So good to be here, Kirsten.
Kirsten Oates: And welcome Jim.
Jim Finley: Yes, I’m looking forward to this time with Carmen, yeah.
Kirsten Oates: So to get us started, Carmen, I’d love to hear about the first time you encountered Brother Lawrence, and how do you recall being touched by his teaching?
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: I was in my early forties, and I had just gone back to work. I’d been a stay-at-home mom of two young kids for a while. So I was teaching on the tenure track at a small college in Georgia. So that meant my morning started out going to one end of the town, taking one child to one school, and to the other end of the town with the other child. And I was really run off my feet being a teacher and being a mom and just all of the things of life. And somehow, and it was just in translation, I found these snippets of this old guy, who I thought was a monk then, I didn’t even know he was a friar, but in this robe at his habit, I just didn’t know that much about him, and he had such calm wise things to say.
I didn’t even know quite what it was he was offering, but I wanted it. And it struck such a note in me because at the time I was carrying around a flat rock in my pocket that had rest on it, and I would feel because it was chiseled into the rock. And I really didn’t have much rest in my life. And so he sounded the bell, Kirsten and Jim, in my life of rest, but I didn’t quite understand it yet.
Kirsten Oates: Wow. And then how many years later when you actually got to translate him?
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: Wow, now that you say that, I’ve never been asked that, but it was literally in 2020 when the pandemic started. And an editor and I spent two hours, she was giving me all these ideas of things I could translate. And as she was closing up the zoom, she said, “And you know, there’s always Brother Lawrence,” and something in me tugged. And I always listen to those tugs. You never know when they’ll happen. It was a very gentle tug, but very strong. And so I didn’t tell her, but I started typing his words from French to see if he was really genuine. And oh, he was. So that’s how it happened.
Kirsten Oates: Your story really reminds me of Jim’s story in reading Thomas Merton for the first time when he was in high school, that sense of being tagged, “This is my teacher, I’ve got something to learn here.”
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: That makes sense.
Kirsten Oates: Jim, you first encountered Brother Lawrence at the monastery and felt a similar attraction.
Jim Finley: I did, and I think looking back at it, at the time in the monastery and with Merton’s guidance, I was going through John of the cross and Teresa and so on. So at the time when I first discovered Brother Lawrence, I recall what struck me at the time was this pattern and all the mystics when he saw the tree, like the initiating event, he was quickened. And then he lived in fidelity to the quickening. And that’s what struck me about him and his simplicity. That was my first impression. But I never really became stabilized in absorbing him until just recently, I circled back around and started sitting with him again, just how wonderful he is, really.
Kirsten Oates: I love, Jim, you’re bringing up this idea of the quickening, a huge theme in Turning to the Mystics Podcast and how you recognize that in Brother Lawrence. And when I hear both your stories, Carmen, about you reading Brother Lawrence for the first time, and Jim, thinking back to your first encounter with Thomas Merton, they seemed like quickenings, these teachers. And the teaching they leave behind can enliven us in a similar way.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: Yes, I would say because for me what was so powerful was that the equanimity, the deep down peacefulness of Brother Lawrence came through as a powerful energy very quietly, very real, very invisible, but visible to my soul. And that was at the beginning of the pandemic. And I felt he was sitting right beside me.
Kirsten Oates: Well, Carmen, tell us a little bit about your process for translating a teacher like this.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: Well, the first thing I have to tell you both is that Professor John Aljoe of Blessed Memory is always sitting with me. He was my teacher in graduate school. So there’s first of all the part of me that thinks what would John think? And so I want to get it right. Then there’s the part of me that feels like a spiritual director or a spiritual companion. And I literally pray every time before I start translating. It’s very organic, it’s not formulaic, but I always pray saying, “Please help me get to the side.” And then I’ll talk with Brother Lawrence and say, “What is it you’re saying here?” And so I really try to move to one side. Jim, I’m sure you have this experience, you know as a therapist, I want to move to one side and really let Brother Lawrence’s spirit and words be center. And I’m like the person facilitating it, like the midwife.
And then what that means is, so the nerd part of me, I really embrace because then I go and find all the dictionaries from his period, because words change in meaning, and then I open up the Oxford English Dictionary. And I read a lot of other works from his period to see what other people were meaning by these words. And then I read the history about the wars and all of that. One of the joys of it, Kirsten and Jim, is that I get to study everything about the period. I want to feel like I could walk the street.
It’s like time travel. When I was a little kid, I wanted to travel, have a time machine. I really did, I wrote a little story about this, time travel. And one day I realized, Carmen, you time travel as a translator as best you can. And then the other thing I would say is it’s very, you know Jim, how you say repetition is not redundant when we’re doing it intentionally, and a lot of translation is very, for me, intense lexio divina of returning to the text, and asking again, what does this mean? And revising, going deeper with my understanding of it. It’s a joy, really.
Jim Finley: There’s a lovely in-depth commentary on Meister Eckhart by Reiner Sherman. And so Reiner Sherman was translating Eckhart’s sermons in German into English. So Reiner Sherman wrote some reflections on translating as a spiritual path. And an observation that he made is that he said, “We should always remember that, say if in translating Eckhart or any mystic, that you’re translating the words of a mystic whose words are echoing what can’t be said. Now, as he’s translating the ineffable into a logos, into a language, so when you carry it over… You know what I’m trying to say, the meaning?
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: Yes, I do, I do.
Jim Finley: And then I also think with us when we hear it then we listen to it, those words touch places in us that can’t be said. Do I mean it arcs over into that space in the presence of God that can’t be explained.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: Can I just say thank you for saying that, Jim, because I really feel that when you’re translating that you are setting yourself up in front of this impossible, beautiful task. And if you feel that, what you just explained, that you’re translating the ineffable into the logos, then you capture that sense that hopefully your audience will feel. It’s really like a passing on of the tradition, of this ineffable tradition. That’s beautifully said.
Kirsten Oates: And so Carmen, you had the challenge of translating from French into English and from sixteen-something into 2025, or back in 2020 when you were doing it.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: That’s a really good point, yeah. So one of the things that I did was, like I said before, I typed it with my fingers because I’d never read him in the original. And I always approach it like an empiricist. I go to the text, and it doesn’t matter what I’ve read about it before or what other people have said, but I actually go to the text, and I wanted to feel his words, Jim and Kirsten, in my fingers. So I typed it without the French accents, and translated as I went. And as I was typing, I was like, wow, he is a mystic and he has food I want, and I need to eat. So yeah, it was a joy, really. His writing reminds me of Jim’s. So Jim, I have to get that in there, because his writing is really poetic in a lot of ways.
Jim Finley: It is poetic. Another thought I have about what you’re saying is Kirsten and I, when we were Turning to the Mystics, we started with Thomas Merton. It isn’t just because he was my teacher, but he’s contemporary. That is, he speaks the echoes of our age. But when we’re trying to study John of the Cross or Brother Lawrence, we’re going back into an epoch of tonal qualities of language. And so we’re trying to find that depth that transcends the specificity of the age and carrying it into our age. And I think that’s another thing that’s going on when you translate like that.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: It’s so, so true.
Kirsten Oates: And Carmen, I’d love to do a little bit of time travel with you. Can you take us back to where Brother Lawrence lived and his time and place and what you learned?
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: Yes. Well, the first thing I learned is that he’s very humble in a genuine way. So he is very, very bright, smarter than people I think have ever quite given him credit for. But at the same time, he had a non-privileged background. And so he was part of the 98% who really, education was not something they did. So he was living in a time also of Louis XIV, so it’s empire writ large, and a time where feudalism, you still feel its reality in their lives. And he went off and joined the army to really, I think have a paycheck and to have regular food. And then he had that experience, Jim, even before that of seeing the tree. So he carried that tree experience, that mystical experience of knowing the tree was going to bud again. Even though it was wintertime and didn’t have leaves, he carried that into the army and he never lost it.
And afterwards, and I’m glad, Jim, we’ve been able to talk about this, after his time in the war, and no war is not horrendous, but this was one of the first modern, his injury, because he was injured then, bones were shattered and he was limping the rest of his life in great pain. But the thing that I appreciate about this is he came back to his civilian life because he just left the army, and he literally didn’t know what to do. So he was a failure. This is what makes him so accessible, Brother Lawrence. He tried to be a hermit and he failed at it. He said his emotions were just going too much up and down. And I know, Jim, you’ve mentioned how he had PTSD, which is the way his writing reads also, that very intense suffering.
And then he tried to be a valet. And he called himself a clumsy oaf. And then he had an uncle who had gone into the Discalced Carmelites, and he eventually decided to do that. But he had very low self-esteem. So all of this, I really relate to. He was a nobody in his society. And I’m very blessed person, I have a very kind husband, I’m fortunate to teach at a university now. But as a kid, I was growing up in the south, and as a woman, was just not seen much, and grew up in trauma situation in my home. So I’m a trauma survivor. And Brother Lawrence was too. And so he’s so real. And the other thing I love about him is that he lived through climate crises, he lived through pandemics, and he came through it returning to God.
And he even, during his twenties and thirties for 10 years, didn’t see any results of his practice of the presence much that were visible to him, but he kept returning to love. And so for me, he’s a reminder that, especially at the beginning of our working with practicing the presence or any kind of spiritual practice, we may not see visible results, but things are happening. He’s encouraging, Kirsten and Jim, to me. He makes it accessible for everyone wherever you are.
Kirsten Oates: Yeah, that is encouraging. Jim, some reflections?
Jim Finley: Yes. One of the striking things about him is that Merton once said, he said, “We need to be very careful that we’re not waiting to get zapped by God. They have to prop us up in a corner and fan us this way.” He said, “Because very often, the deep currents, the change are so delicate. It isn’t that we’re being transformed out here that we can grab hold of, we’re being lured into dimensions that go deeper than what we can experience.” And it bears fruit in a quiet way. That’s what strikes me. And I put it another way too. What strikes me too, what Carmen is saying is that when he saw the God’s presence in the tree and in the pots, in the pans, he saw God’s presence in the layers of his endless ordinariness, that somehow that itself was the presence of God. And I think he very much lived in that and trusted it. And that helps us to trust our ordinariness, the unresolved matters of our life deeply accepted and God sustains us there.
Kirsten Oates: It’s interesting to me, Carmen, your calling out his low self-esteem, that to have such a deep and profound connection to God in front of the tree, but then to continue on with the batterings of life and feeling low self-esteem. I’m curious about both your reflections on that.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: Oh, I like how you put that, the batterings of life. And I like, Jim, how you said he really found God in the endless ordinariness of his days. So I really appreciate it because Joseph, his friend of Beaufort, says that he had an aversion, Brother Lawrence, to kitchen work, but there he was assigned. And you think about it in the modern day, would they have assigned a limping man constantly in pain? I think The Disabilities Act probably would’ve kept him out of the kitchen. So he was working in a job that would’ve been physically difficult for him, and he didn’t like it. That was not his cup of tea. And so he continued to have, as you said, these batterings of life, and he kept returning to God at every moment. And he says, “You can do this in any number of ways. You can say, ‘My God, I’m all yours.’ You can say, ‘Here I am, love. Give me your heart. Help me be like you.'” He says, “Or in any words you make up on the spot.”
So what he’s trying to do is exactly what The Cloud of Unknowing author’s trying to do, he’s trying to get us to experiment, to really not be looking for someone else to tell us what to do, but to go experiment with it ourselves, and even to ask, God, “So how do I do this?” And he kept returning. That’s the thing. And he said eventually he established this stability of soul, where for some decades, four decades or more, he had unbroken peace, pretty much. Yeah, he didn’t break the thread, Jim, so much is my impression. Is that what you think?
Jim Finley: Yes. Yeah, I tell you what strikes me when you approach it this way. I think in the moment he was in the presence of God and the presence of the tree, it was dazzling and luminous. There was no room for low self-esteem because he was worth all that God is worth. He’s the beloved. That’s the thing. And so then when the moment fades, the low self-esteem part reinstates itself. But he knows inside, like a flame inside, he knows the truth, it’s always there, how to practice the presence. And so it’s almost as if then we know that our low self-esteem, there’s the woundedness of it, but there’s also the low self-esteem that’s at the essence of Jesus and the whole mystery of the cross.
And so there’s that in us that sees this in the light of the tree, in the light of our own moments. And there’s that in us that doesn’t see it yet, the complexities of our low self-esteem. So the part of us that sees this is to be endlessly tender-hearted toward the part that doesn’t see it yet, the preciousness of our fragility and to walk with it because God walks there with us. So I think that’s another piece of it for me.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: That’s beautiful. And I will say that in that way you just described, Jim, and to answer your question, respond to it a little bit further, Kirsten, for me, as I was translating him, this really unique, for me anyway, experience happened where I started realizing that what he was describing as his path and his practice, I have been doing since a child, partly out of my own experiences with trauma, of what he called practicing the presence, or he just calls it the presence. And what you just described, Jim, I began to see that I was always doing this and was a child of God and was loved and was loved. And so you’re talking about earlier, Jim, translation as a spiritual practice. So as I translated Brother Lawrence, it was a healing experience for me, as more of myself that had really been obliterated by trauma came online. Literally it was a gift to me. And I had, Jim, developed, I was like 50 something, but I developed more self kindness for myself. And that is what I think Brother Lawrence helps us all with.
Kirsten Oates: Yeah. That’s very encouraging to hear, both that Brother Lawrence had these experiences of low self-esteem and struggle, and you both sharing your backgrounds of trauma, and that the pathway forward is not one experience and it’s all fixed, but this ongoing journey of working with the different aspects of yourself. And I love, Carmen, that you’ve found a teacher that really spoke to the depths of your own experience, and through that, you were transformed. And I think that’s what we’re all looking for in a teacher, that they really reach those deeper depths of ourselves, the desire and the hurt that they can reach both places.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: That’s beautiful. And he also reminds me of my mother. My mother was in a family that they couldn’t afford to send her to college, so she never went. I think we realized recently, she has a learning disability like I do. I think she has dyslexia like I do. And so she’s never thought she was smart, and she’s plenty smart. But my mother can sew, she can cook. All the things that Brother Lawrence was, my mother can fix shoes, he fixed shoes. And so I had this experience very young of someone who read her Bible, prayed, and really practiced the presence. And now I’m just realizing, talking with you two, that Brother Lawrence reminds me really of my mother. So there’s no arrogance to him. And there’s also no self-loathing. You know how Howard Thurman talks about when someone has been oppressed or experienced trauma, you need a psychic surgery where you realize you’re a child of God, and this is what Brother Lawrence, I think helps us all with.
Kirsten Oates: Do you see that too, Jim, in his teaching?
Jim Finley: I do, very much so. In the 12th letter, we gave one of the sessions on that 12th letter, and in effect, she’s asking him, really toward the end of his life, “Would you please explain to us how you got this way?” Because I think that’s another thing about being in the presence of a teacher, in the presence of the teacher, you know your heart’s desire is not deceived you because you’re in the presence of someone in whom it’s been realized, like he’s a bitchly stabilized in that. “How do you do that?” And then he starts out by saying, “The friend put me here. I didn’t do it.” And I get this feeling with him too, in the light of that letter also, and you see this to a father Joseph, when Joseph wrote down, when their sessions of spiritual direction, the feeling I have is that Brother Joseph, and I’m thinking when I was with Merton, as if father Joseph, he sensed it when he was with Brother Lawrence, he was in the presence of someone who was very present.
And he also sensed in Brother Lawrence, he was with someone who was very presence in whom he sensed the presence of God in his presence. And I think he also sensed that Brother Lawrence saw the presence of God in him that he couldn’t quite yet see. And when he was with Brother Lawrence, he started arcing over. And so I think the writing is so pure. That happens to us when we read Brother Lawrence, it arcs over. So what shines so bright in him is what’s shining bright in us, and he helps us to see that, which is the presence of God, God’s beloved.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: That’s beautifully said. That’s the thing the translator doesn’t want to get in the way of, Jim.
Jim Finley: That’s right.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: Yeah.
Kirsten Oates: I’m curious, Carmen, how is it to create a book by someone who never intended to create a book?
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: Well, it’s actually really quite special, because first of all, you have these images of how he would never have posted on Instagram. He would never have had a book launch. And so he’s very much writing for his friends. And the thing I always remember is that someone like a Churchman Francois Fenallon, there are hundreds, and I’ve read lots of them as a translator, trying to get a sense of one of Brother Lawrence’s friends who helped him out. But there are hundreds of Francois Fenallon’s letters that are preserved. We just have the very few of Brother Lawrence, which shows their disparate locations in the social hierarchy. But what was so fun about it is that after he died, his friends were like, “Wow, we miss him.” So I remember the year in my life when I went from thinking about my resume years ago, or decades ago, to I hope people miss me when I’m gone.
Your calibration goes from what’s on paper about you to you hope people are really sad to see that you’re not there anymore. And his friends were that way when Brother Lawrence died in 1691. And so they were like, “Hey, we have just these few letters. Father Joseph, can you go look for some more?” So in looking for them, he found Brother Lawrence’s spiritual maxims. And we hear that he wrote these spiritual maxims for himself. And sometimes, he would look at what he had written and it so didn’t match that experience that he had of God’s presence that was so pure and real, that he would just rip them up. And I’ve always had this imaginal experience in my mind where one day I’ll be walking through Paris, and there’ll be an ancient trash can with Brother Lawrence’s ripped up spiritual maxims in it. Do you know?
But what I love is that his book exists and his writings exist because of friendship. And I think friendship is of utmost importance. And so we’re brought back to how important friendship is, how holy it is, how much it is part of the Trinity, is three friends dancing in relationship. It’s a responsibility in a way. But the other thing about it is, before I was translating it, his oeuvre, or however you want to talk about it, all his pieces of writing were really scattered. And if you look at the different publications of his work, there’s a lot of variety. And I tried to regularize it for a popular audience. So Kirsten, to answer your good question, I felt a lot of responsibility, but it was a joyful responsibility. Yeah, it was really joyful.
Kirsten Oates: Really joyful. You put a lot of pieces together in your book that were in disparate places.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: Yes, yes.
Kirsten Oates: Yeah, and added in a lovely commentary not only about his life, but also about each of the pieces of work, helping us get into the mind of the translator and how you experienced Brother Lawrence in that piece of work you were translating.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: Well, I got to give credit where credit’s due. So I have readers like everybody does when you’re writing something. And first of all, my editor was like, “Can you let us into your translation mindset?” And then another one of my friends who read the translation before it was out published is Muslim. And she was like, “I know probably other people…” And she has a PhD in Farsi, so she’s like a Rumi expert, very much a mystic. And she said, “I know a lot of people will understand Brother Lawrence, but could you put something before each section to explain it?” So I’m really grateful. It was a community effort, really, Kirsten.
Kirsten Oates: Yeah, it really adds a lot. Jim, you read the original, a different version of this book for many.
Jim Finley: Yeah, in the monastery.
Kirsten Oates: Yes. And you’re excited to see these additional pieces too.
Jim Finley: Very much so. And you know something else, I’m listening to Carmen and the two of you, is Dan Walsh in medieval philosophy class in the monastery, he said, “You know that when you sense that you belong to a contemplative community, it bears witness that you’re worth what the community is gathered for. And it’s gathered for God.” So we get the feeling that in the affinity on the Turning to the Mystics Podcast, it’s a community of mystics, and we’re not rudely intruding into their world. But the very fact they nourish us shows us that we’re worth what the gathering is for, which is God. And so there’s something like we’re drawn into this.
And another thing I think too, is admittedly that mystics can be daunting. You know what I mean? When you try to take it on, it’s not figureoutable. But in the light of our discussion, when you approach it with devotional sincerity and childlike simplicity, there’s an unexpected simplicity and clarity in it. And when we start to get acclimated to that, that’s really the pedagogy, I think it’s trying to teach us to internalize the intimate simplicity in which the presence of God has realized.
Kirsten Oates: That’s beautiful. So the idea of the spiritual friendship, which is to mirror back to each other that we’re worth all God is worth to see God’s presence in each other.
Jim Finley: Jesus said, “Greater love than this is no one than he lays down his life for his friends.” We’re Jesus’s friends. And the mystics are our friends and we belong here. And that’s why it sits well with us, to be open to them like this, that witness to our own awakening heart about the divinity of ourself and our own ordinariness.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: I love that.
Jim Finley: Turning to the Mystics will continue in a moment.
Kirsten Oates: Carmen, you brought up the Trinity, and I wanted to bring that into your translation. We talked in our introduction about the unique way you referred to God as they in the book, and how refreshing, challenging that is to read they for God. So I loved that. I thought it’s always nice to read spiritual teaching in a way that opens your mind or really strikes you to think more deeply. So it certainly did that for me. I’d love to hear a little bit more about that choice.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: Well, it felt like it chose me in a sense. So when I teach at a university, and often students share their pronouns, and I tell them I’m she, her series, the she series. And so my students are very much open about this, and it’s just part of life. So when I’m translating, I used to translate for all the people above me who are going to decide if I got tenure or not, all the older people above me. And then as I’ve gone and gotten older a bit myself, I now look at all my students, and I think, wow, what kind of world are we leaving them and are they living in? And so I’m translating for my students. I’m translating for all the people that I know. So my community that I’m translating for has grown as I’ve gotten a bit more listening.
So as I was translating, I was like, wow, I’m so tired of it only being God is he. And I don’t mean that as a diss to anybody who that’s totally comfortable for, but for me, my father was very severely abusive. So as Roberta Bondi says, who is at Emory, she always had difficulties with that God is he. And I think that there are a lot of people who have that experience. And then the other thing is I think about the women in the world and how do they find representation in religion and such. But you know how Richard talks about sometimes he’ll use God more instead of the he, he’ll use the word God? And I know Mirabai Starr has talked about how sometimes on one page she’ll use he for God, and in another place she’ll use she.
So she mixes it up. And I know Jim has talked about so eloquently that God is neither he, she, nor they. And I had just had a student of mine whose pronouns are they, and I was like, what will these students be thinking in the future about if they read my work and others? And so I tried translating without pronouns, because, Jim, I have a little bit of that childlike nature as a translator of just trying what works. And I literally found out you cannot live without pronouns in English language.
Jim Finley: That’s true.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: You cannot. And so I just translated it with he. I just gave up. And then I was meeting with my editor and I said, “Well, I’ve translated it.” I finally told her I’d translated the whole thing. She said, “Well, now you’ve got to do your proposal.” And I went, “Okay.” Well, I went to bed. And the next morning, I woke up, I gave it up, I let go of it, of the worry. I thought, well, I’ve done my best, and it will be close to Brother Lawrence’s spirit because he does use he. But his spirit, he’s a Trinitarian. Any person who’s really a Christian would be.
But he’s a Trinitarian. And he’s beyond the binary. He really is. So I woke up the next morning and went upstairs to start translating, and I paused for just a minute before the computer as I do, and it was dark, it was four A.M. The birds were already singing because this was during the pandemic, and no cars were on the road. And all of a sudden, they came up. I thought, wow, I can do that. I knew immediately that I was going to do that.
So it was like the spirit showed up and said, “You could use they.” Now, I’m not saying everybody should use they. So this is not dogma. No, no, no. But the thing is, you cannot do a global search and replace on pronouns. So it wasn’t like I just took all the he’s and put they in there and into them, I really went back through mindfully and it took weeks. It took weeks to make that change. And I felt good about it the whole way. And people have written me or come up to me in workshops online, like sent messages, and it made them cry, people who are in the queer community, I’ve had grandmothers and grandfathers say their grandchild is queer in some way, and that meant a lot to them. So I just did it though because the spirit tugged me, really.
Kirsten Oates: Beautiful. And trying to bring in the essence of Trinity because you found out Brother Lawrence was passionate about that.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: Yes.
Kirsten Oates: Yeah. I remember Richard Raw saying that Christianity today had lost the sense of the Trinity. And he wrote a book, the Divine Dance, to try and bring back the sense of God as a verb, not as a noun.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: Yes. I appreciate that from Richard. So wise.
Kirsten Oates: Yeah. Jim, do you have any reflections on the Trinity?
Jim Finley: Yes, I do. One reflection, this is precisely where Brother Lawrence never goes. Like Maestro Eckhart, he wasn’t theological, he never went this kind of discussion, he just doesn’t even go there, just because it wasn’t in him to do that. But a couple of thoughts, we want to be careful we don’t get lost in this, but just to touch on it, a few thoughts. One is that what the tradition really teaches is that gender does not apply to God. God’s not a he, God’s not a she, and God’s not it either. Yet in some way though, God’s the infinity of the masculine, infinity of the feminine because God is the creator of the men asking the feminine neuter. So there’s that strange thing where he’s beyond gender, yet he’s the infinity of gender itself. But because of the patriarchal nature of society, the masculine dominated in with empire and so on that took that unfortunate turn.
And my last thought is this. The thing about the Trinity too, is you can’t count the persons of the Trinity. They’re transubjective relations because God is one. And here’s the thing about Brother Lawrence and all these mystics is that it isn’t just that from all of eternity, that there’s these transubjective relations of knowledge and love, but from all of eternity, God the Father is eternally contemplating you, hidden with Christ and God forever before the origins of the universe, which is the unborn you. So just like the persons of the Trinity aren’t other than each other, we’re not other than God either. And that’s the mystical experience when he was in the presence of the tree, that we and God mutually disappear as dualistically other than each other in a communal realization. And so I think those are some of the connotations of this to be aware of.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: That’s so good, Jim. Also, I would say that one of the things I appreciated about reading Augustine and people like that, so I did a survey myself of who uses what pronouns during this time, so like how Augustine uses it or what it is. And I always appreciate it when they play with this concept because it expands it in just the ways you’re talking about.
Jim Finley: Another big thing about Augustine when he was writing De Trinitate the Trinity, he was walking along struggling with it, struggling with it. An apocryphal story is he’s walking along the edge of the water and he sees a little child going to the ocean, getting a teaspoon of ocean water and pouring it in a little hole in the sand. He’s doing it over and over. So he goes up and he says, “What are you doing?” He said, “I’m trying to get the ocean into this hole.” And Augustine says, “You can’t do that.” He said, “Neither will you ever figure out the Trinity,” and he disappeared. So the thing about the Trinity is that it’s an impasse and sequential thought. And when you stay with the impasse, that deeper unity flows through. It’s almost intended to be that place.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: And I want to say, I’m glad you brought all that up, Jim and Kirsten, because one of the things that I kept running up against as I was translating Brother Lawrence, is Protestants love Brother Lawrence. And not just Protestants, Buddhists, Hindi, people of no faith, Atheists love Brother Lawrence. But one of the things I noticed in translation is he’s made very much a, this is your spiritual goal. That’s how the translations tend to run. They’re very binary. They’re very good versus evil. They’re very sinner versus saint. And he only uses the word sin or sinner a couple of times. But it’s translated into this binary. So he’s been co-opted by empire in translations I discovered. And he’s not, he’s a mystic.
Kirsten Oates: That’s beautiful. Jim, I’d like to turn to your emphasis on sharing Brother Lawrence’s teaching, this idea of this one note. I’d love to hear you share a little bit about that and have Carmen respond.
Jim Finley: Yes. Brother Lawrence, he’s playing a note, playing just one note. With that one note is the music of the whole orchestra, because presence is the all-encompassing infinity. So everything that is is the modality of presence. And so in the singularity, the all-encompassing singularity of presence. And he stops there. And he’s like Julianne of Norwich too. With John of the Cross and Teresa, they also are mystics, they’re grounded in the oneness. But also, they do something else that he doesn’t. They know by sitting with a lot of people in spiritual direction, a lot of practical questions come up, “But what about this and what about that, and how do I discern this is happening to me? And how do I know I’m not being deceived? Why am I so afraid to surrender to this that in my heart, I know it’s the love of God? And how do I get past that?”
They go into all of that, because we do. There’s a symphonic simplicity that runs through all of that, where they explicate the nuancing of things we can see about it. So when Teresa of Avila, for example, she’s talking about people in the third mansion right on the cusp of mystical union, and she said, “In the third mansion is psychological spiritual maturity. We need more third mansion people.” She said, “But the thing about the third mansion is that reason has not yet been conquered by love is entirely too reasonable.” And she talks about the sweet surrender in prayer.
So John the Cross had these lovely things, but he doesn’t do that. But the thing is this, if we just stay with the purity of what he’s saying, the purity of what he’s saying is the singularity, grounds us in this place. And if we were with him in spiritual… You know what Brother Joseph does? Brother Joseph explicates what got shared in spiritual direction, because he sat with them and he listened to Joseph, just like if we was him, he’d listen to us. But in his own teaching, the singularity of his simplicity, he just stayed there. It’s like dharma. He’s just the Tao.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: Oh, that’s beautiful. I love that symphonic simplicity, Jim. And I love how you’re framing his conversations as Joseph, sharing with us really, that spiritual direction. And that’s beautiful how you say that, his one note holds the whole symphony.
Jim Finley: And another thing, I think for him, he didn’t see himself as a spiritual director, he was a cook. He wasn’t trying to explain anything. He’s just trying to see the soup got done on time, and God’s the infinity of the soup.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: Yeah. You couldn’t have said it better, because even when he writes in his letters, he always puts himself into the shoes of whoever he’s writing. He even refers to himself in third person. And it’s out of a very healthy self-identity, I think, and selfhood. So yeah, what you’re saying is really beautiful, Jim, and so true. He keeps returning to love.
Kirsten Oates: Say more about that selfhood, Carmen.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: Well, for me, my trauma, I’ve been to counseling, to therapy, to intensive times for about a year each. So that has been super helpful for me. But where most of my selfhood formation has come, because I didn’t really get it in childhood, has been in my practicing, returning to love what Brother Lawrence talks about, that he illuminated for me and myself. In other words, I realized, wow, I was always turning to God and saying, please help me. What’s going on? Even as a child, I was trying to read the Bible and I was trying to pray and sing. And Brother Lawrence lit that up for me inside. I had had a blindness towards myself, that because he went through it himself, he walked through that darkness. And he had both, I think, depression or CPTSD and dark night of the soul simultaneously, and he somehow healed it.
He is such a good guide for those of us who are trying to really become selves, this really divine nature of love. He really showed me that I am love, and that others are love, all others. As Greg Boyle says, “Everybody belongs, and everybody is love, no exceptions.” So for me, Brother Lawrence is always saying, “Return to love, however makes sense to you,” has been what I’ve always done. And it reminds me because for example, Kirsten and Jim, I began to treat answering emails as a spiritual practice, because it’s like my achilles heel because you get a lot of emails. I just realized, wow, this could become my pots and pans, emails.
Kirsten Oates: Oh, that’s lovely. That’s a lovely idea. Yeah, choosing something that becomes your pots and pans, just one specific thing rather than the whole of life. I like that. That’s really interesting.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: Because I like washing dishes. And it’s easier to get into meditation, washing dishes.
Kirsten Oates: Yeah. Jim, what do you reflect on that idea of selfhood?
Jim Finley: My sense is there a couple of thoughts. One, I’ll use an example from psychotherapy. You’re sitting in psychotherapy, and say you’re just starting to share why you’re there, whatever you’re working on. And as I listen, I’m listening to you, and I ask, “I have a question.” It’s a real question because I want to get to know you. And the question I ask is such that in order to respond, you have to pause for a moment to listen to yourself. And as you listen to yourself, you’re becoming more present to yourself in my presence. And the healing starts. It’s very, very subtle.
And the latter to heaven, we go the second, Lexio Divina, meditation and prayer. The Lexio is the listening. It’s sustained attentiveness to a beauty not yet thought about. So T.S Eliot says, “To hope too soon is to hope for the wrong thing. To think too soon is to think the wrong thing.” We don’t stay long enough in the attentiveness. And so Brother Lawrence, I think has that invitation to this deep attentiveness, which is really an echo of God’s infinite attentiveness to us. We’re one with each other in the intentiveness this way. So that’s one of the things that strikes me about it.
Kirsten Oates: Yeah, lovely. So reading Brother Lawrence can slow us down and bring us into resonance with what you talked about, Carmen, that love that you knew from childhood but had lost touch with.
Jim Finley: You can’t skim read the mystics. You skip right over them, because the pedagogy, you have to slow down enough to sit deeply with the beauty of what was just said. And then you’re already being lured into the attentiveness that he’s speaking of this way. That’s the intimacy of the learning, I think.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: What I love about it too is that the way Brother Lawrence, Jim, to continue what you’re saying, the way that he talks about the practice of the presence as a dialogue, a spending time, a sitting with God, really. And for me, that experience was, like you said, Jim, slowing to listen, not skimming my own experience. So in other words, hearing in the silence, giving myself the understanding that listening to myself in silence is listening to God listening to me, and is listening to me. And so coming to realize that I matter. I matter because I’m God’s love. And so just having that experience has meant the world to me, really, sitting with Brother Lawrence that way.
Kirsten Oates: Carmen, expand a little bit more on Brother Lawrence’s experience of being in a dialogue, because we read his words and it can feel a little bit like a mindfulness focused practice versus what I’m hearing from you, this beautiful dialogue.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: I think he had an ongoing dialogue with God, and it was like our dialogues with someone who we love really a whole lot. So it’s not always words. So for example, he even says that he recommends in one of his letters, “Before you do something, ask for God’s help with it,” because I can imagine when he started in the kitchen, he didn’t know how to make a soup, he didn’t want to make soup. And I can imagine him saying, “Oh, I hate this kitchen job. Please help me know how to make this soup.” Well, I’ve been doing that my whole life, like, dear God, please help me write this English essay in high school, all that, and even younger. And then he says, “After it’s done, if it went well, thank God. And if it didn’t go well, I did my best and thank you for helping me.”
And so he’s very forgiving. And I’m just thinking, my husband and I, we’ve been together for decades, and sometimes we’re talking with each other, and sometimes we’re just listening, and sometimes we’re just sitting together. And sometimes, we’re just doing things together. And there is still this unbroken conversation. So there is talking, but there’s also that it’s really like, as Jim, you were talking about a minute ago, it really is Lectio Divina as a form of conversation. And that’s how you live your every moment of your life. And you’re always returning to this consciousness. And I love how he says, “So if a friend came to visit you, you wouldn’t leave them alone, would you? So why would you leave God alone? Because why would you do that?” God is so real to Brother Lawrence because he also knew himself so well. It’s so accessible. It’s possible for any one of us, no matter where we are in life.
Kirsten Oates: I hadn’t heard that. I love that idea of you wouldn’t leave a friend alone in house, so you’re always present and attentive, whether you’re talking to them or just sitting next to them or doing something with them. But you feel that relational connection.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: And I know sometimes my husband has given me something. He’s like, “I saw this book at this bookstore and I thought you might like it.” And I look at it, I remember it was a Steve Martin book once, and I was like, I didn’t know Steve Martin wrote books. And then I thought, but my husband knows me. So I look at this book, and it’s super good book. I’m like, “Thank you so much.” And it’s like that kind of an intimate conversation where you’re talking with God in this way, like really with your closest friend.
Kirsten Oates: Do you have anything to add to that, Jim?
Jim Finley: Just one thought just coming to me, is that another way of looking at it as an ongoing conversation is that the constantly shifting patterns of what’s happening is God speaking to us as that pattern. What’s my response, all things considered, to the truth of what’s unfolding right now? And the simplest of things, looking out the window and seeing a child run by down the street, talking to someone. Like you said, my daughters, they call me every night to check up on me. And they want to know what I’m going to have for dinner. And the reason they want to know what I’m going to have for dinner is that they love me. And I want to know what they’re having for dinner. And I really want to know because I love them. So that’s God. And I think Brother Lawrence saw the presence of God presencing itself with that immediacy. It is as if we’re constantly walking right past what we’re looking for becqause it’s always right in front of us. It’s the holiness of what’s actually unfolding and being present. That’s practicing the presence.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: Oh, I love that, Jim.
Kirsten Oates: Big thing I’m hearing in that, Jim, is to say that he was made to be the cook. It probably caused him pain. He didn’t like it, but he saw God in it. In that pattern, like you’re saying, he didn’t see, “I have to get out of the kitchen to find God because I don’t enjoy the kitchen,” he could see in the pattern of what he’d been given to do that God wasn’t absent from him there.
Jim Finley: That’s right.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: I’m so glad you said that, Kirsten, too, because when I’m translating, I’m always looking to see if this person is really living what they’re writing so beautifully about. And Brother Lawrence, we hear from Joseph, he wasn’t cooking for a dinner party. He was cooking for a hundred brothers, and making sure the kitchen ran well. So it was really hectic. And they said everybody appreciated what he cooked, and people thanked him. It’s like when I have a hundred emails in my inbox, I think that’s a hundred ways to be blessing and blessed.
Kirsten Oates: Yeah, lovely. Well, to close, I’d love to hear from each of you. If you could ask Brother Lawrence one question, what would that be, and then what do you think he’d say?
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: Well, for me, I’ve already asked him so many questions. We’ve had so many conversations, like what do you mean here? Hey, I have so many students whose essential worker, family members are dying, and, “I’m trying to translate to you, and can you just help me out here,” that kind of thing, “What’s the best thing to do,” that really, if I had the chance to ask Brother Lawrence a question, it would be one of two things. I would either not ask at all, I would just say, “Can we go have tea together or go sit and watch the sunset,” or I would ask him for his favorite stew recipe. Literally something like, Jim, I was thinking you asking your daughters and them asking you about what you’re having for dinner, I would literally want something tangible to say, “Here, we’re going to have Brother Lawrence’s stew tonight,” or just sit with him and watch the sunset would be really beautiful.
Kirsten Oates: Jim, do you have a question for Brother Lawrence?
Jim Finley: One of the things that comes to me is I might say this, Brother Lawrence, really, I don’t have anything I want to ask you. So I’m asking you if you see God’s presence in that, because see, as almost as if we’re asking for something, there we go again. I’ll write it down, check it out. But what if I have nothing to ask? But then we can sit with that. And there’s nothing to ask because nothing’s missing. I would sit with that and see where it went.
Kirsten Oates: That’s lovely.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: I would want to say though, in person, “I love you, Nick. Thank you so much.”
Jim Finley: That’s true.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: That’s good, Jim.
Kirsten Oates: I’d love to ask him, hold up the book and go, “What do you think of this that happened after you died?”
Jim Finley: Hundreds of years later, holding it up. He’d be amazed. He’d go, “Holy cow.”
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: I think he would say holy cow, I think, Kirsten and Jim.
Kirsten Oates: Well, it’s been a beautiful conversation. Is there any last thoughts on Brother Lawrence before we close?
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: No, just I want to say thank you, Kirsten and Jim, because I’ve listened to all the others that you’ve recorded, and you have beautifully brought Brother Lawrence to life in so many ways. So thank you, Jim, thank you, Kirsten, for sharing your wisdom about this man who’s really one of my favorites.
Jim Finley: And my thought would be this. You were talking earlier about friends. And I think Brother Lawrence, so I considered the two of you my friends, you consider me your friends, and it’s our friendship with Brother Lawrence has brought us together. And in a broader sense, everyone listening to the broadcast, to the podcast, I would hope too that they sense they’re in that community of friendship. We’re kindred spirits together in this community, and Brother Lawrence is blessing all of us in this way.
Kirsten Oates: Yeah. Beautiful.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: Yes, he is.
Kirsten Oates: I love that and this idea of practicing the presence, which is we can even hold everyone listening in our hearts and know that they’re part of this circle of love that Brother Lawrence invites us into.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher: Yes. Well said. Beautiful. Thank you both. I’ve enjoyed it more than I can say.
Jim Finley: Yeah, me too.
Kirsten Oates: Well, thank you, Carmen, thank you, Jim, and thank you Dorothy in the background and the team behind her, always so supportive and helpful. See you next time. Thank you for listening to this episode of Turning to the Mystics, a podcast created by the Center for Action and Contemplation. We’re planning to do episodes that answer your questions. So if you have a question, please email us at [email protected], or send us a voicemail. All this information can be found in the show notes. We’ll see you again soon.
