Carmen Acevedo Butcher interview

Carmen: She says, “For women, pride is not the exaltation of self, but it is instead, not claiming the self, the divine self that they’ve been given. Instead, it’s giving away their own agency and authority to someone else, like a preacher or a teacher.” And that was what I was inculcated to do.

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. If you’re familiar with this show, you will have heard me say the following many, many times. If you’re not familiar, I need to say it for your sake. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done over 700 of them, and if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones. You can poke around in YouTube and I encourage you to subscribe and click that little bell thing. And go to batgap.com where we have them all categorized and organized in a variety of ways with different ways of searching the content. For instance, we have this thing called video content search where if you type in a particular phrase like Kundalini or Jesus or whatever, you immediately see a list of all the interviews in which that word or phrase was mentioned, and if you click on anything in that list, it takes you straight to the point in the interview where the word was mentioned, and you can watch it from that point. And then there are a bunch of other things. There’s an AI chatbot that has nearly 500,000 documents of spiritual content in it. You can explore that. All kinds of things, and we keep adding to it. Anyway, the whole thing is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you appreciate it and would like to support it in any amount, even like some people donate five dollars a month, that’s fine. Those tend to add up. There are PayPal buttons on every page of the website and a page that explains alternatives to PayPal. So, my guest today is award-winning translator, author, poet, teacher, and workshop leader, Carmen Acevedo Butcher, PhD. Carmen is core faculty and dean at the Center for Action and Contemplation, founded by Father Richard Rohr, who has been on BatGap. Her translation for Shambhala publications of the 14th century contemplative classic, The Cloud of Unknowing, received a 46th Georgia Author of the Year Award. Martin Laird calls her translation of Brother Lawrence’s Practice of the Presence, the new standard, and it was named by Spirituality and Practice to its best books list. At the University of Georgia, Carmen earned an MA and PhD in Medieval Studies, and as a Fulbright scholar at the University of London, she worked with monastic manuscripts in London and Oxbridge libraries and translated homilies by the 10th century Benedictine abbot. You say it, Carmen.

Carmen: Ælfric of Eynsham.

Rick: Thanks. Published as God of Mercy, Ælfric’s Sermons and Theology. Carmen has been interviewed on the BBC World Service, The Compass, NPR Morning Edition, Center for Action and Contemplation’s Everything Belongs, Turning to the Mystics and Learning How to See, and many other podcasts. She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley in the college writing programs, and she is often found in the marsh chanting Psalm 46:10 in Old English. Would you like to do that right now? How does it go?

Carmen: How if we do, what if we do the very first hymn in Christianity, which is “In Praise of the Earth”?

Rick: And you do that in Old English?

Carmen: Yes, it goes like this. [singing in Old English] Nu sculon herigean, heofonrices Weard, Meotodes meahte, ond his modgeþanc, weorc Wuldorfæder, swa he wundra gehwæs, ece Drihten, or onstealde. He ærest sceop eorðan bearnum, heofon to hrofe, halig Scyppend, þa middangeard monncynnes Weard, ece Drihten, æfter teode firum foldan, Frea ælmihtig. [singing in Old English] And all that’s doing is saying “thank you God for the beauty of creation.”

Rick: Huh, my transcription software is gonna have a hell of a time with it. (

Carmen and Rick: (laughing)

Carmen: It will yes, I’ve seen it do that before.

Rick: I’m gonna have to have you type that out for me.

Carmen: I will send it to you

Rick: So Old English. When was the Old English spoken?

Carmen: So this was around four to five hundred CE and on through About 1066 around in there and then we had Middle English after that But Old English is the one that’s closer to the German and it’s really a very emotional language. You know how Latin, Rick, is so abstract and useful for those things. But Old English really, that’s where we get our words love. Like you can’t say I love you without Old English. You can’t say God, none of the pronouns. They’re all, all the basic really feeling words that we have. Sad are all Old English based. So it’s one of my favorite languages.

Rick: But if you went back there in a time machine someone like me you wouldn’t understand a word anybody was saying that was completely Incomprehensible to me.

Carmen: Yeah. Well there was in there. There wasn’t there Tolkien loved it. You heard midden yard and that’s Middle-earth. Okay, so you would you would actually be able to if you read it, go: “Oh, I think I know what that is.” But when you hear it, it sounds different doesn’t it? Yeah,

Rick: Interesting Okay, so there’s a lot for us to unpack and we’ll be talking for a couple of hours

Carmen: I’m looking forward to it.

Rick: So Carmen, how did you get started with all this spiritual and Christianity stuff? What was your earliest inspiration?

Carmen: I would say it’s a tie between growing up in the country and being outside a lot, doing chores or just being outside because we didn’t have air conditioning, so it was cooler under the pines. And also, my mother. My mother’s a woman of faith and she always studied her Bible and she really prayed and she had a presence and she’s super kind. And she would pay me quarters, Rick, to memorize Bible verses as a kid. And I remember this was back in the day of the typewriter. She would, for vacation Bible school, because I was raised in the Southern Baptist Church, and she would type up Philippians 4.13, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” And because I have dyslexia, which was undiagnosed then, I would sit with “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” and in order to memorize it, it actually became Lectio Divina, as the Catholics put it, or “steeping in the words.” And so, it became something else entirely. But then also at the same time I would be outside. And inside my home was often very scary because my father was violent, to me, my brother, two sisters – younger – and my mother. And so being outside it’s a lot like what Mary Oliver said, she felt safer outside. To this day I prefer being outside of a building rather than inside it even though I’ve been fortunate to heal and survive. So, I’m a trauma survivor and going outside and walking and having the… Like, you notice everything when you’re a kid and you’re going for walks or you’re doing the raking and that’s your chore, because I would always volunteer to rake rather than vacuum, you know, and nobody else wanted to, so I got to do that. And literally I came to have mystical experiences that I didn’t have language for. Partly I think because there was violence in the home and partly just because we humans are wired to have mystical, they’re not unusual, you know, and so it was between those two things, because I was always a good student and I wanted to save my family and please people. And so, I really studied hard how to be a good Christian. And that meant memorizing a lot of Bible verses. And have you ever heard, Rick, of sword drills?

Rick: No. It was like sword fencing or something?

Carmen: No, that’s a really good guess, but it was something that we did in the Southern Baptist Church. I’m not a member of that church anymore, but, like, you would take your Bible and the  I don’t even know if Habakkuk, the first chapter has 13 verses, but it would be something like one of the books, very hard to find in the Old Testament or the New Testament, and whoever got there first, won. Like they’d say-

Rick: So, you had to open your Bible and find it.

Carmen: Yeah, you had to open your mouth. And I was super good at that then, and I really studied the Bible. So I had these conflicting messages, Rick. So I was raised in a church that told me I couldn’t preach and I could keep the nursery. And they preached that God is love, but mostly what they preached was like Wulfstan in Ælfric’s age, back in 900 and something, they preached hellfire and damnation. So I really grew up a perfectionist. Like if I don’t… For many reasons, for the trauma in the family and the violence and also just the religious background, it was a really high control religion. And I just grew up thinking, if I do one thing wrong, everything could fall apart. And it really was existential, you know, at times. So I developed this sort of theology of survival where I, little by little, and by God’s grace, I discovered language for my experiences and friends. And some of those friends were dead but alive. So over time I just came to spend time with a lot of wise dead people. Literally. And I feel so grateful. And you know, I went to therapy two times very intensively. And I have just, like when I, can I skip ahead just to Brother Lawrence a minute as one of my friends?

Rick: Sure, and I have some questions brewing in my brain.

Carmen: Yeah, yeah, because I just, I found, for example, when I was fortunate to translate Brother Lawrence, I discovered that he had this practice of the presence, and I had never been able to see inside myself that I had always done that practice. And Brother Lawrence, through communing with him, through the act of translating his French, I realized that I saw the gold in my shadow and I was able to reclaim that. So for me, selfhood has been a very gradual process because I learned by studying psychologists and psychiatrists like Judith Herman, that when you’re raised with childhood trauma, you really don’t develop a healthy self. You can develop a malignant sense of self and it’s fragmented. And that was me. So I had decades of severe depression and undiagnosed. I was just like, “What’s wrong with me?” I didn’t… And the preachers would say, Rick, because I grew up in an age and in a culture where a therapy was looked on as… it was stigmatized. So one time this preacher said in church, I guess people have been talking about having depression and needing help for it or something. He said, “I’ll tell you from the pulpit what you need to do about depression. You just take the DE off. take the ‘I’ out and become selfless and you press on.” Well that’s not really good advice, you know. And it was that kind of advice, though, that was given me. And I had to find with friends and kind people along the way and a lot of them being dead like Nick, my Brother Lawrence, Nicola Herman, who really helped me to find my selfhood and to help me have a self. You know since the self is individual and also transcendent and mystical and communal, right? So it’s ongoing, by the way, this having a selfhood for me.

Rick: Yeah, yeah there was some of that stigma about therapy in the TM movement also. It’s like if you were going to a therapist, well “maybe you’re unstable, you can’t go on a course now,” or you know. And then they eventually got over that because there were suicides, plenty of, normal amount of divorces, everything else and people said “hey, this is, this is crazy. If we need therapy it doesn’t mean there’s something that should debar us from participation,”

Carmen: right.

Rick: It’s just, you know, one of the tools in your toolkit.

Carmen: yes, right.

Rick: How many languages do you speak?

Carmen: Well, like if, you mean other languages other people speak?

Rick: You know well obviously English, probably Spanish, French, yeah.

Carmen: Well, it’s like I would say I’m better at, with my dyslexia, I find that I really need, in order to speak a language, I need to have been in the country. I’m one of those people. So, German for sure, although it’s a bit rusty, because I spent a year at Heidelberg University on a Rotary and the children in Mother Bushbeck’s family taught me German. Because all the adults, Rick, would tell me, “Your German is hervorragend (outstanding). It’s just beautiful.” And the little children would say in German, “Your words in German sound like you have a hot potato in your mouth.” (laughing) Which they meant I spoke it, I spoke German not so well and with a Southern accent.

Rick: Right.

Carmen: And so, the children would say, “we don’t say that.” And so actually the children in Germany in the Bushbeck family taught me my German. So I would say I can read French and I can read Spanish and I can hear, hear them a lot. Like I’ve just been watching the Astrid show about this woman who’s autistic on PBS, and I can get a lot of the French, right? But if you put me in France, it would take me a while to really speak it. And I actually count Old English and Middle English and all the Englishes, just because they’re all so different in a way. And I like to read Greek and Coptic and things like that. It’s very soothing for me to translate.

Rick: And Latin? Do you also speak Latin?

Carmen: And Latin, yeah. Oh yeah, Latin is like the mother tongue,  is I was never around Spanish speakers. The only time I spoke it was when I was in Spanish class and then I’m out playing baseball or something.

Carmen: That’s it.

Rick: Yeah.

Carmen: That’s what I mean. You need to be immersed.

Rick: Yeah. So you grew up in Southern Baptist Church, which, as you said fire and brimstone and hellfire and all that, and which also would have had the attitude that Jesus is the only way, and if you’re not right with Jesus, you’re going to hell anyway. All the Hindus, Buddhists, they’re all going to hell. So how did you kind of evolve out of that into what is undoubtedly now a much more ecumenical or eclectic, broad understanding of religion and spirituality?

Carmen: Right, that’s such a really good question. The first thing I would say is I was really gifted because my father was Cuban-American. So my grandfather, who volunteered to fight in World War II, right after he became a U.S. citizen, he was Cuban. So he was an immigrant. And so, when we would visit my family in Little Havana, I saw they were Catholics. Like they had these tall candles. Like we had no alcohol. I mean, we had difficulties in our home and many difficulties. Like my family, my parents thought they were super good because they had no alcohol in the home, you know, and so there were all these. And when I would visit Miami, you know, they would have a big jug of something and I was like, wow, people lived it. I always thought when people live differently because we got to drink coffee. We had Demitasse Cuban coffee and coffee con leche as children. We were allowed coffee when we went to Miami and we got to eat guava paste between cheese chunks. So, I grew up thinking that, if your culture was different from mine, you did things different from me, you may worship different from me, so that’s really cool. But the societal pressures were definitely, you know, even Catholics, anybody who had some sort of guru, all that was suspect, do you know? But for me what made it different, and I think this ended up being sort of a gateway was: I was desperate. I was in such pain and I was looking for, in addition to what my mother has shared with me very authentically, how do people do it in other faiths and wisdom traditions and even outside of those, like atheists who seem to have wisdom or agnostics or whoever, what do they do that really works for them? And so, like in college I took world religions and then I just started reading, because you can read and nobody can forbid you. That’s one of the great things about books, nobody knows what you’re reading. And I just found a lot of kindred spirits in other faiths and wisdom traditions. Especially like Sufis and just a lot of wisdom in all of them. And I guess it was because I was desperate to heal. I just remember telling God, what will it take for me to heal. I’m just in such pain. And that was the gateway, was the pain, really.

Rick: I guess a lot of fundamentalist religions would say, “Don’t read other stuff and don’t think too much, don’t intellectualize too much. That’s the devil, you know, trying to get you.” I’ve had discussions with people like that.

Carmen: No, but I’ve even had… but you know what that makes me think of, Rick? I, one time, you know, I translated or I was translated by “The Cloud of Unknowing” from the 14th century in Middle English. Such a great text on meditation and Lectio Divina. And I had someone tell me once who was a minister at a college, he said, “Congratulations on publishing that book, but aren’t you afraid once you empty your mind that the devil will enter in and take hold of it?” And I was like, I didn’t, I just didn’t know even like what. I was so shocked by that thought of how that was so totally different from what The Cloud of Knowing is about, that I just didn’t say anything. I was just, like, I think I just said “no” and just turned around, because I thought I’m gonna have to think about a measured response, because it’s so different from that. You know, it’s just not at all like that.

Rick: Yeah, do you think there’s actually any such thing as the devil?

Carmen: Well, I definitely think, I was just listening to Susan Neiman, the philosopher, who just has put out a book on evil. And I think that the root of evil means to reach beyond what you need, like greed. So I definitely think there’s evil. I’m not so concerned about looking at it from the perspective of, “is there a devil?” I don’t know why, that just doesn’t interest me. So I don’t really have much thoughts on that. I do know I like Elaine Pagel’s ideas about that, where she talks about Satan meaning the adversary. And so, if I looked at that today I would think of all the students I know of who want to go to graduate school. And in our capitalistic system, that is set to greed, they can’t afford to, because maybe they have low socio-economic backgrounds. And this is, Rick, why I write over 300 letters of recommendation a year, trying to help students to go to school if they want to. So for me, when we talk, when you say, “Is there a devil?” I think more of all the ways that students and others are gate-kept out of things, when everybody should have a fair chance. And then just evil. People behave, and I’m always like, “Please deliver me from evil. Help me to be kind.” Yeah.

Rick: I saw a quote recently. I didn’t fact-check it. I think it was from Bernie Sanders. He said, “The amount of money we’ve spent in the last few months on this Iran war would have paid for free full college tuition for anybody who wants to go to college.

Carmen: Right.

Rick: You know, and Eisenhower had a great quote about every battleship we build is that many fewer hospitals or schools or, you know, other good things. So…

Carmen: yes,

Rick: yeah.

Carmen: This mindset of scarcity as opposed to, “why don’t we wisely and lovingly apportion the money to do the most good.”

Rick: Yes. Regarding the devil thing, I’ll just pop in a thought for…

Carmen: Yeah.

Rick: I believe there are subtler levels to creation and astral and all that stuff and I think there are both positive and negative entities, like angels and then more malefic beings who play their part. And I know people who have perceived these things, some quite routinely. And it’s obviously in all the religious iconography and traditions all over the world. So I think there’s actually something to that. It’s not just mythology.

Carmen: yeah

Rick: I don’t know if there’s some kingpin, chief devil of them all. I doubt it. And that brings me to a question about God, actually. We’re going to talk about God a lot in this conversation. Does it say someplace in the Bible that God is omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent?

Carmen: I’m sure it does, somewhere. Okay. Like, I mean, yeah.

Rick: So, in terms of the omnipresent thing, if God is omnipresent, that means there’s no place where God doesn’t exist. And that means that if there’s anything which is not God, there’s a hole in God where that thing is. And there couldn’t be, because God is omnipresent. So, from that perspective, the whole thing is God’s play, including the negative stuff that God has to have these polarities within the totality that God is, in order for there to be a relative creation. So that was just one of my little pontifications.

Carmen: Yeah, I know, I like that because when I think of God, what I love about this word God, because I know a lot of young people are like, “We don’t like the God words,” you know, and I get that because there’s so much baggage attached to it. I always think how in Old English, God and good are the same spelling, and you don’t uppercase it in Old English. So, it just looks like G-O-D, but good has a macron above it, so it’s said a little bit longer like “good” and so it’s just a little bit longer word. But what I like about that is that “good” and “God” kind of are associated with each other in Old English. For me, God is a useful concept, in the sense of: it reminds me that there’s mystery. And at the same time, because I’m a teacher who cares about her students and I’ve listened to so many student stories of horror and things like that, there are some things that I just cannot explain. Like your pontification just then was so good and so smart, and also, I just think there are things I cannot explain. You know, years ago I actually asked God, I was like, “you know, God,” when I was in college, I was like, “I want to publish a book so bad, and I don’t even know about what, but I just want to, I want to try to have a self and try to say something that helps people. But, would you please, above all, help me to become a real person who is kind?” And I think God took me at my word, because I was really serious about that. So for me, it’s almost like: defining God is not as useful as trying to be human, if that makes any sense. It’s very – the main thing that growing up in a high-control religion taught me is that I’m more interested in mystery than, much more interested in mystery and kindness, than I am in certainty and being right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Rick: Yes, a friend of mine told me recently that she was 100% certain about something which I consider to be kind of a conspiracy theory. And I thought, golly, I’m not 100% certain about anything, especially something so unsubstantiated as that. How can you be 100% certain? It’s unscientific to suggest that. Scientists aren’t 100% certain about things. They’re always open to the possibility of there being a, what’s the saying, you know, a white crow or something like that.

Carmen: Right, right. And I used to be a very reactive person, and I suppose we all still can be. But one of the things that contemplation, and I do a lot of walking, I guess we have to call it something, so we’ll call it walking meditation, but I just think of it as going for a walk. I sometimes have a Bible, like Psalm 46:10 in Old English, or something like that I sing or just say. And over time, I remember, because I was being rolfed when we had our first child, I was being rolfed, and it was really making me go through these intense emotional experiences when I was in my 40s. And as I left rolfing one day, Rick, somebody jetted out in front of me like at a, not at a crosswalk. And instead of being reactive and being like, “you so-and-so,” you know, like “what are you doing?” I remember thinking, “okay, just slow down and make sure they’re safe,” and I wasn’t even so upset. And anytime you can go back into that reactive mode, but what I’m saying is: in my arch, over time, I realized that I became less reactive. I just think that’s worth a lot, do you know?

Rick: yeah

Carmen: When we talk about meditation, something like that changes your perspective.

Rick: I think the way in which meditation can make you less reactive, at least one way, is that it cultures the mind to function at a subtler level and thus, to catch thoughts before they become more manifest. Sort of like if you can think of bubbles in an ocean, you’re catching the bubble just as it emerges from the bottom of the ocean rather than after it’s gone through the whole thing and popped on the surface. And if you can catch them there, then you can just say, “Nope, not gonna do that.” You know? Rather than having it take control of you.

Carmen: That’s beautiful. That’s like, there are these medieval women mystics that I did a devotional on once. And so, I just got to immerse myself in Julian of Norwich and Catherine of Siena and a lot of…, Gertrude. And one of the things that they do is they look at their thoughts, like what you just described, and they’ll say, “Okay, so, you know, it’s best not to be angry, but when you are angry, look at it.

Rick: Yeah.

Carmen: And, and then don’t act. And then don’t say something. And they, and they actually break down the process between getting angered and actually hurting someone, you know, physically. And I just, yeah, I found that very helpful because when I was young, my mother used to come in and like scratch our backs before we go to sleep at night. She was really sweet. And she would say, “you can’t go to sleep?” And I’d be like, “no.” She was like, “well, I read this the other day,” and you know what Rick, I bet it was in Guidepost or maybe Readers Digest because those are the magazines we took and so she said, “I read that…” She said, “just try this Carmen.” She said, “make a blackboard in your mind.” I mean, this is 1970, okay? So this is advanced stuff for the South! She said, “picture a blackboard or a whiteboard in your mind and as your thoughts come up, erase them!” I was like fu… “I can finally have peace with my, what I call my squirrel mind, okay, since we have a lot of squirrels in the South. And so, I would erase. So I’m lying there trying to, my mother’s there and I’m erasing the thoughts with my little, you know, that fuzzy eraser thing you used to have. And as I’m erasing the thought, I’m thinking, “I’m seeing on the blackboard: you are erasing your thought.” But what I’m saying is, it started me doing what you’re just saying, seeing the bubbles, like really starting to sit with the thoughts, which is what every tradition talks about. Thoughts will come, they’re like weather, and how do we sit with them, and how do we let go of them, and how do we receive this mystery and this love? So yes, to all that, Rick. Yeah,

Rick: Another good analogy is if you want to change the course of a river, let’s say the Mississippi, you’re not gonna be able to do it in New Orleans. You have to, you know, maybe up in Minnesota you could do it at the headwaters where, you know, it hasn’t already run its course. So, picture that with regard to thoughts. If you’re not in touch with the source, then you express your thoughts when they’ve already gone through a whole process that you were unconscious of and it’s too late to do anything about ’em.

Carmen: Yes.

Rick: Pretty much.

Carmen: And this is like an ongoing thing, isn’t it?

Rick: Yeah, absolutely, yep.

Carmen: Cause, I used to be super, you know, you’re kinda raised in this Southern Baptist, at least in the churches I was in. There were a lot of nice people there, but we were kind of raised to be judgmental. I mean, I know the Bible says just the opposite, but that’s not what, that’s not. And so, you know, I was kind of raised, I had to be perfect, which was super painful. And then also, ’cause you know, Anne Lamott says that perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor and in “Bird by Bird” and boy, is she right. But literally, I would look at other people and I just knew exactly everything that was wrong with them. And then I changed over the decades of suffering, depression, and you know for that, I would say, three decades and such. And I just, my soul softened through meditation. But even so, there’s always further to go. And I don’t mean that as aggressive or self-improvement. I don’t mean it like that at all. I just mean there’s always something else that I can open to.

Rick: Yeah.

Carmen: You know.

Rick: I was just listening to your interview with Swami Padmanabha.

Carmen: I love him.

Rick: Yeah, me too. He was saying the same thing and you guys were talking about it in terms of there’s no end to refinement and wisdom and deepening and all these qualities. I mean, some people, they want to get to the end or they like teachers who say, “Give up the search. You’re done. You’re already enlightened.” And to me, that really, you sell yourself short if you buy into that.

Carmen: Yeah. And it seems like life, if you look at life as your greatest teacher and that your life is what is the material for your awakening, because that’s one thing I really love in your tagline. It says “for spiritually awakening people,” so this is the progressive tent, so it’s ongoing. There’s always something in today that is going to be an opportunity to respond gracefully. And if I don’t, to be kind to myself, you know, as I go along. To, if I do something wrong, to make amends with somebody. In other words, it seems like every day is a new day, is all I’m saying. Do you know?

Rick: Yeah. Somehow that reminds me of a song, but I don’t remember. It might be a Beatles song. Every day is a new day. In any case, back to God here for a second. So, you know, a lot of people, obviously they reject religion at a certain point because it was so, you know, the things we’ve been discussing and they reject the notion of some big scary sadist in the sky with a beard that smites people and all that stuff. And so maybe they decide they’re… And they also say things like, “If there’s a God, how could there be a Holocaust or famine or all these other things?” And so, I obviously, and you, both, we feel that there is something called God. And you were saying earlier about an old Middle English God and good were closely associated as words. So, what would you say to somebody who brings up those kinds of objections? I sometimes think of Sam Harris, you know, who I like a lot. I listen to his podcast frequently. And if I were to talk to him, I would say, well, and he’s written a book. He’s one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, he calls himself, along with Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett and one other prominent atheist, the new atheists. And I would say, “Well, Sam, I don’t believe in the same God you don’t believe in. That doesn’t mean I don’t think there is such a thing. We just need to understand what we mean by it.”

Carmen: Right. Yeah. And you’re saying, “What do we do if there is a God and it’s related to good, but then …”

Rick: How do you reconcile

Carmen: “these evil things.”

Rick: (How do you reconcile) these unpleasant paradoxes and incongruities?

Carmen: Yeah. Don’t you think the only answer to that is really and truly “I don’t know.” The thing that I’ve learned about it is that I, as an oldest child in a family that was struggling mightily, always was trying to fix things. And to this day, I have a long to-do list. So, one of the ways I would respond to your good question is first  don’t necessarily need to know that but everybody’s living with something hard and or often seem to be. And so, I would just want to know more about what they mean by that first. Like what do they specifically, like in other words, “yes” is very frustrating and I don’t understand it and just do you want to share with me. Because I used to listen and my friends and family have helped me to see this. I used to listen to fix. It’s not just men who listen to fix. I mean, you know that that’s to fix things like

Rick: In order to fix things.

Carmen: Yeah, like so you know that’s often stereotyped one way or another with just, often with men, but I used to listen and I now listen and just think, “well this person needs to vent,” and things like that. But on a metaphysical level, I don’t know. I do know that the God that befriends me and that I befriend within myself and in the earth and the earth’s  falling to hit rock bottom there was love. Even my friend Jim Finley who’s been on your wonderful batgap, he often says, “God is that presence that protects us from nothing, even as God unexplainably sustains us in all things.” So, I can’t explain that paradox. I can only say that I do know for myself that God has been very kind to me. And I have had times, I used to have arguments with my mom, Rick, because my mother, you know, back in the day would say, “God is in control of everything.” I’m like, “Really?” I’m the person who said, “Are you kidding me, Mother? Because if God’s in control of everything, it’s not going well, and I have a few complaints.” And so, one of the things that my mother and I were able to talk about over the years was, I would say, “Why,” you know, one of my favorite Bible verses is when Jesus says, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” So, there are those, I have had those moments where I have felt forsaken, absolutely at the very bottom. A verse would come to mind or a friend, like that’s how I met Mother Bushbeck, who really saved my life. So at every turn when I have felt that, it’s like Ellie Wiesel said. I just love Ellie Wiesel. You know he says that Jews often, he says, “I don’t just talk with God, I argue with God.” And I have argued with God. Like when I go for my walk, when I say I’m in the marsh and chanting 46:10 in Old English, that’s not a nerdy thing. It just happens to be: I love Old English. And I may be saying to God, “Wait, how can I have this peace? When, have you read the news lately God? Like, do you know what’s happening?” Like I have this litany of woes that are happening in the world. And then the next thing I have is, “what can I do to be a help? Is there something I can do?” So, for me, it’s not just prayer and something you hear about in church. It’s also arguing with God some and trying to live out love as I can, because so many people have been kind to me.

Rick: Yeah, you’re probably quite familiar with the Bhagavad Gita. I don’t know if you’ve ever read the whole thing, but Krishna is supposed to be an incarnation of God. He’s like an avatar. And he has this kind of chummy relationship with Arjuna. Arjuna says, “I’m your devotee, but I’m also your friend.” But in the 11th chapter, Arjuna says, “But I know you’re really more than that, and I really wanna know fully who you are. I wanna see your divine form.” And Krishna says, “Sorry, Charlie, you can’t handle it. That would be much too much for you.” And but Arjuna is persistent, And finally, Krishna shows him his divine form and it’s just, whoa, it’s this kind of like shit show of, you know, beautiful things and horrific things and, you know, heavenly things and violent things and all this stuff. And Arjuna begs to have it taken away again. So, if God is omnipresent, then all of this is God. It all, everything is, God is the totality which contains all of this stuff. And one might say, “Well, why can’t it all just be nice and good?” But then, could you have a relative creation? If you’re going to have a relative creation, don’t you have to have pairs of opposites and contrasts and all the diversities? So that’s kind of how I come to terms with it, including the yucky stuff. But I would also try to zoom out and say, “Okay,” and I think probably even Krishna says this in the Gita, “Ultimately, as difficult as some of this might seem, everything is evolving.” All beings or all souls are evolving and sometimes it’s, it might not seem like love at all, but it is really tough love that people go through when they’re going through a really hard time and in the end, it will be seen to be conducive to their evolution.

Carmen: Yeah I definitely think that I’m not such a fan of tough love. That concept only because of the… I I don’t know. Yeah.

Rick: Well, you had a rough childhood.

Carmen: Yeah,

Rick: And so did I, alcoholic father…

Carmen: I know, I know, I know. It’s just, I think, I think for me, there’s a part of it all where I have to say, “I just don’t know.” And I’m living in this mystery. So, I’m really a panentheist, I think, if I had to pick a word.

Rick: I think I am too. Yeah, right? Define the word for us.

Carmen: So, well, it’s hard to define. Like, every time I go for a walk, I think that, and I think, do I have to define it? But like literally, like God is transcendent, God is imminent and transcendent. But it’s like some people think that, yeah, some people limit it and just say, like, can you define pantheism for us, Rick? Because that’s the thing. Yeah, I’m sure you can, but I’m just saying, do you mind to do it? Because like, literally, I think that’s what it gets confused with. With me, I’ll tell you how I knew I’m a panentheist. When I was, one time, riding with my family in the back of a station wagon. And the way we used to do it, if you wanted to lie down, you would climb up behind the back seat between the shelf there and the window and lie there. Do you remember that? You know, like literally you’d be okay. And I remember looking out the window and thinking, “God,” I must have been about, I don’t know, nine or something and I remember thinking, “Wait! God made that tree and God made that rock and God made the sun and the sky. Wait, God made…” you know, it doesn’t sound like much, but I realized that God made everything. And then I thought, “but wait, He didn’t make that trash can.” But then I thought, “wait, He made whatever goes into making that trash can.” And I literally had this moment of realizing that God was everywhere and in me. So, like both. For me, it means that God is both imminent and transcendent and in a mysterious way. See, I’m okay with mystery. Does that make any sense? Like, I’m really okay with not quite knowing and trying to be kind because life is sometimes a shit show. Like, really, sometimes, like I have so many students Rick, who have such hard backgrounds. Do you know what I’m saying? Like, and because I’m a kind teacher, I hear about these things and often I can be kind to them, but I can’t quite fix it at all. I mean, you know, and so I really, this is something like during the pandemic I had so many students whose parents were essential workers and they died. So when I sit with a question like this, I have hundreds of students who come to mind, if that makes sense, who are really struggling. Yeah. But how would you define pantheism then?

Rick: Doesn’t pantheism mean that God is in everything, but it doesn’t mean necessarily that everything is God. Is that correct? Yeah, yeah,

Carmen: yeah, because I just looked it up. So, and with panentheism, it is, if you want to put into clean, easy words, the philosophical and theological belief that the divine permeates every part of the universe but also extends beyond it in time and space. So yes, what you just said.

Rick: I think Michael Murphy coined the term evolutionary panentheism, which means that not only… And so, when you say God is in everything, can you find anything, if you go down microscopically or in any other way, that is other than God?

Carmen: No, and that’s what I love, like you have these…

Rick: So, it’s not like God is in things the way your foot is in your sock. It’s that, you know, the foot is God, the sock is God. There’s nothing but God, just taking these different roles or forms or levels of manifestation.

Carmen: Yes, that exactly. Yeah.

Rick: What were you about to say?

Carmen: It’s… I don’t know, but it’s just, it’s all a mystery to me.

Rick: Yeah, but it’s fun to contemplate.

Carmen: No, it is. It is.

Rick: Maybe what we’re doing is something the old Christian mystics did, and we’ll get on to them more in this conversation, but I’m sure that for thousands of years people have been sitting around having these conversations, and I find that this kind of, it’s a spiritual practice in addition to non-contemplative things in a way that you’re not thinking about ideas, but also thinking about them is just another aspect of this process.

Carmen: Kind of like making it visible and more stable in your life is giving it some language for it, even though you always know that the language will be, will fall short. So, I mean, but you kind of give in to the fact that you know you’re going to fail and in knowing you’re going to fail, you’re successful.

Rick: Yeah, but you know, like, let’s say we had a conversation about mangoes and we’d both eaten mangoes but somebody in the audience hasn’t eaten them. So, we can use all kinds of words and doing that evokes the experience of having eaten one. We can remember it and kind of viscerally, intuitively grok what the other is saying. Somebody who’s never eaten one, it’s just words. So, it’s not like words are totally inadequate because they can’t do justice to experience. They can actually be a way of communicating with people who share a common experience and they can actually enliven or evoke the experience, I think.

Carmen: Yeah. It’s like, I love The Cloud of Unknowing for that.

Rick: Let’s get on to that. We’re supposed to talk about that.

Carmen: Yeah, because he literally, throughout, he’s like a really great writer, and he’s such a seasoned contemplative, and he’s very much wanting to empower what I think is a woman. It could have been Julian of Norwich, even, because they lived at the same time. But, I mean, he’s anonymous, but he really wants to empower his student. And so, he goes throughout there and he will say something, then he’ll unsay it. So throughout, and he uses these really down-to-earth images. So, he’s very well aware that he can’t put into language his experience. And so, for me, how this comes across is, when I first heard that Thomas Keating and John of the Cross and others talked about God as being, you know, the first, God’s first language is silence. I was like, that, because that was my experience as a child. So that’s the thing that I want to say is that I think sometimes you and I talking and other people talking like this, I think sometimes people think they have to have the language, when actually they’ve already had the experiences and they just need to pause and realize they’ve already had these experiences with silence. It could even be while you’re washing dishes. Do you know, where you’ve just felt this, you felt this moment of, you can’t explain it. Like the je ne sais quoi. You just don’t know what it is. And we get so caught up, rightly so, in trying to get through our to-do list and then kind of in this empire consciousness that we just kind of skim over the surface of things. But yeah, I love The Cloud of Unknowing for how he’s always letting go of language. Yeah.

Rick: Is it the Bible or is it one of the Gnostic Gospels where it says, “Be still and know I am God”?

Carmen: Yeah, that’s Psalm 46.10.

Rick: Okay, there you go.

Carmen: That’s it. You bingoed it there. Yeah. That’s it.

Rick: And what does that mean really? That “be still.” It doesn’t mean just shut your mouth and sit rigidly. I think it means, because the mind is not still. And the second verse of the Yoga Sutras is, “Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind.” So that’s being still, allowing the pond, the ripples to settle down to placidity or stillness. And then, what happens when the pond is perfectly still? It can clearly reflect the trees and the sun and anything. So, if the mind could become still enough, perhaps God could be clearly reflected.

Carmen: Yeah, I love that. And I love the fact this “be still,” I like that it’s ontological too. So, like if you’re walking and doing walking meditation, you’re still being still. Be still and know that I am God. Or if you’re washing dishes. So, there’s an ontological stillness. And I like the fact too, that the thoughts can become part of the stillness in a kind of a paradoxical way. Like as the thoughts, and this is what The Cloud of Unknowing teaches, right? I mean, he says in chapter 7, “thoughts will come” and if you find yourself obsessed with one, he tells us different ways. He says “have a conversation with your thoughts or let them go.” But I was really relieved, Rick, when I discovered that this, because I used to feel like Teresa of Ávila. She used to, and other women mystics, they would describe the overwhelming thoughts they had and that was me. I had such painful overwhelming thoughts and you know just left over from like PTSD and things. And then I realized one day, I actually could use those as fuel for my meditation. Like those could become part of, “as they come in, let them go.” You know, there’s that story that Father Thomas Keating would tell and I believe Cynthia Bourgeau put this, I’m certain she put this in one of her books. A nun was coming to Centering Prayer, which is the prayer, as you know, based on The Cloud of Unknowing mostly. And this nun was at a Centering Prayer workshop and she had just sat a 20-minute session and she came to Father Keating and she said, and I love that it’s a nun, she said to him, “I give up. This is too hard. You know, in 20 minutes I have had 10,000 thoughts.” And he clapped his hands and he, Father Thomas said, “Terrific. 10,000 chances to return to God.” And so for me, one of the things that The Cloud of Unknowing anonymous says is even the desire to pray is praying. In other words, you’re trying too hard, you know, a little bit. And I just love, you know, you have Catherine of Genoa who said that “in Dio e il mio essere il mio me,” that’s one of my koans. She said, “my deepest me is God.” And Julian of Norwich, she said “God is nerer to us den uron sulle.” God is closer to us than our own soul. And that’s what The Cloud of Unknowing is teaching. And can we talk at some point about Lectio Divina? Because that’s what I think is missing when we talk about The Cloud sometimes.

Rick: Yeah, let’s…”

Carmen: So, for me, I grew up literally with my mother giving me Bible verses to memorize. And because my mother’s kind, even though she had difficulties in many ways, my mother’s dad drove a bread truck, she didn’t get to go to college, lots of things, hardships she had. But because she tried to live out kindness and she was kind to everybody. So my mother was a real trailblazer in the South in that way. She loved everybody. And my mother’s still with us, she’s 89, I feel really fortunate. Yeah, but I learned from that, of learning Bible verses, that you know how Father Thomas Keating and William Meninger and Basil Pennington started doing in the 70s, the Centering Prayer, and they were consulting with TM experts and practitioners.

Rick: Yeah, I think Father Keating, or maybe it was Basil, came here to Fairfield and visited the University and they were all doing TM for a while and then I think Father Keating realized, “Wait a minute, something like this must be in our tradition.” And I guess he looked into it and found the Centering Prayer.

Carmen: In The Cloud, yeah. I know because William Meninger and I, we used to email each other at the end of his life, which was really a gift to me. And he sent me a card he made out of flowers once. But one of the things that William Meninger always said was, when they taught the Centering Prayer, they always taught Lectio Divina. And the thing that I find that’s missing, while there’s a tendency for us all to doom scroll these days and be on our phones, is that often Lectio Divina, which is talked about in the Cloud of Unknowing, this steeping in Scripture, is not talked about as an essential piece. So, The Cloud of…

Rick: Is that what Lectio Divina is? Is it steeping in Scripture?

Carmen: It’s steeping in Scripture. So, it’s like reading it thoughtfully, slowly, rereading it, and then reflecting on it, and then responding to it. So, in other words, reflecting what comes up for me, as my friend Christine Walters-Paintner says, “what is shimmering in the text, and then responding, like in prayer.” So that’s the things that I’m doing out in the marsh, where if I’m doing, you know, “be still and know that I am God,” I’m also praying around that and repeating it. And then he would say the fourth movement, so it’s not linear, right? But no meditation is, but it’s like the fourth movement of this is rest or contemplation. But often we start at contemplation, and in the Christian tradition it really starts, and I know others too, but I’m just speaking to the one in The Cloud. It starts with eating some, and they use this analogy of eating and ruminating. So you eat the scripture. And that has healed me a lot. I have so many cards, or I put it in my phone, and I’ve diagrammed scripture with Reed Kellogg, and I just have spent time meditating on scripture that has helped me a lot. And that is a part of what The Cloud teaches. He says in one chapter, Lectio Divina, or reading, reflecting, and responding, is taught elsewhere. I know you already know about it, but that is the basic entry level. And he says all beginners will know and practice that. But you know, as my friend Jim Finley says, we’re all seasoned beginners. I mean if we’re wise, right? So, for me I never have gotten away from Lectio Divina. I think that, in fact, lately I was asking myself “what do you really put your attention on?” And I’ll have to say I’m really taking an inventory of that lately. What do I have my attention on? Super important. Yeah.

Rick: This thing you just said reminds me of something in Advaita Vedanta which they have these three stages of the spiritual path, Shravana, Manana and Nididhyasana. And Shravana is like just sort of checking it out, listening to a talk or something. Like, “oh that’s a that’s an interesting idea.” But then Manana is going really deep into it, eating it as you would say, chewing on it, pondering it, discussing it, listening to the talk ten times, whatever it takes to just really have it sink deep. But then a further step is nididhyasana, which is doing something which makes it a living experience rather than just a concept, even if it’s a subtle concept. But there could be a distinction between subtly understanding something and actually viscerally living it, even when you’re not thinking about it.

Carmen: I really like that because for me the thing that comes after contemplation, the rest part, is love. I mean, I know that all of that is love, but it’s also that living it out towards myself and others, right? Yeah, so that it all becomes one piece. Yeah. I like that, Rick. Yeah,

Rick: This thing about “be still and know I am God,” and you were talking about being able to do that while washing the dishes or whatever. I think that, you know, someone who is, let’s say, really highly enlightened, Jesus or someone like that, or we can think of other examples from other traditions, had cultivated a stillness that was rock-like and that couldn’t be perturbed by even the most dire and traumatic experiences, like getting crucified. On some level that was there in all of its stability and clarity despite the anguish on a more manifest, physical level.

Carmen: That was Brother Lawrence.

Rick: Yeah, he was like that too. Right, he had that leg wound. Yeah.

Carmen: But that, like they say, that he would not be disturbed much at all. It’s just like a little straw fire that would catch and then go out.

Rick: Yeah.

Carmen: So yeah but, and that’s one of the things you do notice about yourself, is it what you’re hoping for is, you might be reactive but then it goes away sooner.

Rick: Yeah, there’s that analogy, “line in stone, line in sand, line in water, line in air.”

Carmen: Yeah.

Rick: Each of those lines can actually go deeper but is more ephemeral. It just disappears more, more and more quickly.

Carmen: I love that and I should give you the, you asked me the question and I just wanted to write it down to make sure I got it right. So this is Psalm 46:10 in Old English and I say it because it actually has a a different translation to it. It goes, “Geæmetgiað eow nu, and gesioð þæt ic eom ana God.” And the “Geæmetgiað” means “empty.” So in Old English, that psalm actually says, “Empty yourself now.” And it has “now” in it. “Empty yourself now, be still, and see,” and it uses like the vision, “and see that I am one God.”

Rick: Mm. Nice.

Carmen: Isn’t that beautiful?

Rick: Again, if you, you know, if you’re sort of full of agitation and incoherence, you won’t be able to see it. Like the choppy pond can’t reflect the sun.

Carmen: Right. And you know, sometimes I find that the spirit just meditates for me, because I will maybe have had a day at the computer teaching, because I teach online, and I can tell the wind is up outside. And I know if I go two blocks away, there’s this tree that makes the most beautiful music. When the the wind is up and I will literally walk down the block just to stand under this tree. And that tree has an ontological silence or stillness to it as it makes this beautiful sound and I’m reminded that wow, you know it’s like you have that, I think you said like a screensaver of the galaxies and it just, it reminds me that I’m a small part of this big beautiful mysterious creation.

Rick: Yeah, nice. Yeah, I could go off on a Brother Lawrence tangent here about the tree.

Carmen: You can, please do.

Rick: Well, the tree. He had this experience of a tree in winter and it gave him this revelation about God and you can elaborate on that a little bit if you like.

Carmen: Yeah, no, I mean that’s the thing where I think we’ve gotten kind of, where we think that a mystic is somebody special. Well, that’s true if you count every human being special, you know. So, Brother Lawrence was a “nobody” in his day, that’s in quotes, I don’t think he was a nobody. But there were about 98% of the people who couldn’t afford an education and life was full of precarities and he was one of them. So, he joined the army and was wounded terribly and was in pain for almost 50 years of his life and limped. And the last two he couldn’t even walk. But before he joined the army when he was maybe 18 or so. And they had an ice age then, and they had a volcanic issue too. And so, they had one, one or two or three winters that just didn’t stop.

Rick: Yeah, let me just clarify that. There wasn’t a literal ice age like happened hundreds of thousands of years ago, but there was a little ice age, because there had been some volcanoes in the world and the global climate just dropped precipitously, and so they had, you know, really cold winters and cold summers. The crops didn’t fructify, and so people were starving. About a third of the world’s population died. Not only because of that, but they also had several plagues thrown in the mix and a nice 30-year war. Fun time to be alive.

Carmen: Religious war, yeah, that’s well said. So I always think he, you know, knew about how, wow, spring is miraculous. And so, Brother Lawrence, then, Nicolas Herman, or Nick as I think of him, he was standing in front of this tree and it was in the winter. And as he described to his younger friend Joseph, who was a priest, he said, “I, all of a sudden, felt and knew through and through me in such a powerful way that the feeling has not diminished to this day, that God would make that green and the flowers and the fruits come from that tree, and I knew the love of God.” And so, he had this experience that I really think is not uncommon for anyone, you know. That’s always there and possible, and that sustained him through the rest of his life, even though he did have a dark night of the soul in his mid-20s through mid-30s for about a decade. And I really relate to this. It says in his book, “Practice of the Presence” that I got to translate, that he literally, when he was done working in the kitchen or whatever his chore was at the monastery in Paris, he would get on his knees and pray and ask God for help, because he felt such distress. And we don’t know, Rick, if maybe he had to do something in the war or saw something in the war. I mean, we know he was a prisoner of war at one point. We just don’t know, but he seemed to be experiencing PTSD. And so, he just kept practicing the presence, meaning just having these very brief conversations with God. Like, you know, one thing I love about Nick, Rick, is that he didn’t like to do kitchen work.

Rick: But he did it anyway.

Carmen: But he did it anyway. And I always think part of it might have been because he was disabled. You know, that was really hard work, too. But I also think he just didn’t like it. Okay. He says that he would ask God, and I’ve made the specificity of it, he would ask God for help before he would do something. So, I just picture Nick going, “God, I gotta make this stew, okay. So, I don’t even know how to do it, would you please help me know how to do it?” And then when it went well, he was thankful. And we learn from Joseph, and if it didn’t go well, he would say, “I would say to God, ‘Well, I did my best.’” That’s really healthy, you know? And we hear from Joseph that he became such a good cook, that every–because this was about a hundred brothers.

Rick: Joseph was his friend.

Carmen: His friend, Joseph Beaufort, who was a priest, who was about, you know, 20 years younger than him. We learn that he did it so well in the end. I mean, the cook is an important position in a monastery, but that he did it well, and people loved, you know, his food and things like that. So, I just think Nick is a lot, – my mother always says, my mother loves Nick better than-

Rick: Nick is your nickname for Brother Lawrence.

Carmen: Yeah, because his name is Nicolas Herman.

Rick: Because that was his original name, yeah.

Carmen: Yeah, yeah. So his, because literally when you spend so much time with somebody, it’s like you’ve really gone to a coffee shop with them for a very long time and just hung out. You know, Jim Finley asked me once on his podcast, “What would you want to ask Jim and Kirsten? What would you want to ask Brother Lawrence if you could be in person with Brother Lawrence?” And I gave it a thought, and I thought, “You know, I just want to hang out with him. I don’t have anything. You would just want to hang out.”

Rick: Just to be in his presence.

Carmen: Yes. I just would want to just hang out.

Rick: Yeah. That’s the most profound thing, actually, with somebody like that, is being in their… In fact, that’s what darshan means in Sanskrit. It means to see or to sit in the presence of. And it’s said that there’s some kind of osmotic effect where if you’re in the presence of someone like that, you resonate, you entrain with their consciousness and actually can get enlightened through that proximity.

Carmen: And don’t you think that’s why healthy community is so important?

Rick: Absolutely.

Carmen: Right? Like that entraining I take very seriously. I think we, I think we really… That is part of being human, is being in community. Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, it’s, it’s extremely important. I want to come back to the trash can for a minute. You’re riding in the station wagon, you look at a trash can and I guess you were saying, well that’s not so much God, compared to this other stuff, is it? Was that it?

Carmen: Yeah.

Rick: One little game I play with myself is, you know, now, in light of what we know from modern science, I contemplate what I’m actually looking at when I’m looking at a trash can or a piece of dog poop in the yard or a flower or, you know, a sunset or anything else. And consider the chemistry and the physics and everything that’s actually going on in those things and how much intelligence it takes to orchestrate that, intelligence in laws of nature which we don’t fully understand, despite all of our modern understanding. So, everything from the most vile to the most sublime, if you look deeply enough, is like a play and display of infinite intelligence, divine intelligence, divine creativity, and there’s no place you could imagine in the entire universe where that would not be the case. And so, when you think that way, you can think of yourself as just, the whole thing is just one solid mass of that intelligence permeating you entirely. There’s really no division between you and it. As one teacher once said, “God may be omnipotent, but he’s also omnipresent, so the one thing he can’t do is remove himself from your heart.” So, and Muktananda used to say, “God dwells within you as you.” So, if you’re looking for God, the first place to start is deep within, because God is deep within everything. And you might find then more readily deep within yourself, initially, than deep within everything else. But eventually, God will be seen there too, and then there’ll be absolute unity or oneness.

Carmen: I think that’s beautiful. I totally, that’s my experience too. And you know, Wisdom 11 in the Catholic Bible, in the Apocrypha, talks about, you know, God made the world and the love of God keeps it going. And I find that that’s absolutely beautiful, Rick. Yeah.

Rick: Yeah. Well, I didn’t make up all that, but that’s kind of like…

Carmen: No, but it’s well said. It’s really well said. Yeah.

Rick: We can always keep coming back to things, but is there anything more at this juncture that you want to say about The Cloud of Unknowing?

Carmen: Well, the only thing I would say is that one of the ways I have discovered meditation, contemplation, is that I realized along the way, that the way I read as a dyslexic is Lectio Divina or Sacred Reading. Because as a dyslexic, I mean, I didn’t know I was dyslexic until my late 40s, and I was helping a student then who was dyslexic, and they shared that with me, and I was like, that makes so much sense. And then I went and looked into it and all that. But if you are dyslexic, you have to read repeatedly. And it ends up it’s a really great thing for somebody who wants…

Rick: You mean you have to read a sentence three or four times before you move on to the next one.

Carmen: Yeah, and also come back to it.

Rick: Right.

Carmen: Like in other words, there’s a lot of meaningful intent, attentive repetition.

Rick: It’s a good way to learn.

Carmen: Yes, but what I realized was that it was kind of like where I am weak, God is strong. There’s that, you know, I think as Paul wrote about that. Literally, I realized that dyslexia helped me to experience Lectio Divina. So, I often have this image in my mind that when Father Thomas Keating and his friends were doing the Centering Prayer, he had no idea that there was this teenager in South and North Georgia, which is where I mostly grew up, who was actually practicing Lectio Divina and contemplation unknowingly, because of her dyslexia. And that to me, do you know what I’m saying? Because they were really concerned that the lost Christian meditation lineage, which as a medievalist, that’s all it is from the beginning, the first century through, you know, 15 centuries. And one of the things I did want to add about following up on what you just said a minute ago is that recently I translated and was translated by the Gospel of Thomas from the Coptic and from the Greek. And along with Elaine Pagels, I am really sad that that wasn’t kept in Christianity’s memory as like say the Gospel of John was. Because the Gospel of Thomas talks about how important it is to have a self, because the self is divine.

Rick: What does it mean by a self, as opposed to not having a self? What are they actually saying there?

Carmen: Like, in other words, if Jesus is, for many faiths, an amazing guru, and slightly different, right, for the Christian, depending on what type of Christian one is, but Jesus teaches love, right? In the Sermon on the Mount, and “Love your enemy,” all the hard things. And so, Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas, to Thomas, he’s like, well, you know, he asked his disciples, “Who do you think? Compare me to someone.” And you know, Peter and Matthew say, “Oh you’re this great, like, messenger. Oh you’re this great philosopher.” And he asked Thomas, and Thomas stammers. I just love Thomas. I I just love Thomas. I’m like: Thomas, you and me. And Jesus takes him aside. Well first he says, “Teacher, I just can’t say what you’re like.” And he’s stammering. And Jesus says to him, “I am NOT your teacher. I am your friend.” And he takes him aside and tells him three words. What are those three words? Oh, people have gotten academic careers spilling ink on what those three words were. But I think the point is, we don’t know. It’s like, it could have even been something as simple as, I love you, which between friends means a lot, you know. But I mean, people have really good guesses for it. But what I think is what Jesus represented, that selfhood with all of its mystery and humanness, ’cause I really think it’s much harder to be human than it is to be spiritual. I’m telling you, does that make any sense?

Rick: It is, yeah.

Carmen: I think it’s really, in my experience.

Rick: I think spirituality can make being human a lot easier.

Carmen: Yeah, right. But what I mean is, to be human is the whole thing.

Rick: Yeah, to be– Yeah, and there are a lot of people who claim to be spiritual who could use a bit more humanity.

Carmen: Yeah, I’m trying to be human is what I’m saying, Rick. I’m definitely thinking that is the thing. That’s the quiz, in a general way.

Rick: So, do you think this thing about having a self might relate to the concept of self-realization as it’s understood in the East. “Know thyself” as the Oracle of Delphi said.

Carmen: The Gnosis. Yes, because I mean, Jesus says, “If you birth that which is within you, it will save you.” Not “He will save you.” It. The Gnosis. The Gnosis of the divine image. And I don’t even want to use the word image, but the divine within. And if you don’t birth what is within you, it will kill you.

Rick: Yeah, there’s an identical verse in the Bhagavad Gita just like that. Yeah, right.

Carmen: He doesn’t say hurt you. He said it will kill you. Like he’s trying to make the point of, you know, like I have had these experiences where, according to, you know, the way we word it now, individuation, where – and I’ve talked with Jim about this, Jim Finley – and we often, and Jim will often say, from his clinical psychologist position, so, “individuation is hard, but what’s worse is not doing it.” Right? I mean, what’s more painful than not individuating?

Rick: Yeah.

Carmen: Yeah.

Rick: There’s a question here. I was thinking about how, in Christianity, there’s a lot of focus on God, obviously, but not much focus, as I understand it, on what in the East would be called self-realization. And in the East, in Buddhism in particular, but also in Advaita Vedanta; which talks about God but it’s not like center stage; there’s this focus… well, and there are certain aspects of Eastern tradition which are very much about God, but at least the non-duality that’s commonly taught these days, it’s not mentioned very much, and yet the whole focus is on self-realization. So, I’m wondering if… so, just to repeat that, in the West, God, not much self-realization. In the East, self-realization, not much God. I’m wondering if the two can be melded together and to form a more complete spirituality.

Carmen: I think the Gospel of Thomas does a good job with that, especially if you include it with the other Gospels. I’m just talking about the Christian tradition. You have much more balance. And I’m sorry that the Gospel of Thomas was banned, you know, really. I mean, because monks loved it back in its day. So, I don’t see anything. I mean, it is all about this self-realization. And one of the things I would want to say, Rick, is that I was raised that, what you were supposed to do to show that you were a good Christian was: you were supposed to bow to the authority of the preachers in your lives. That was really mostly it, as they were representatives of God and Jesus and it was all male. And then, I started reading Anne Ullinoff, the Jungian Psychoanalyst, and I read everything she ever wrote, because it helped to save me. And she says for women, like you know I was always told don’t be prideful, don’t have pride. And honestly, Rick, growing up in the 60s and 70s I just did not have a self. That’s why I’m so talking about this and people would say, from the pulpit they would preach, they would say be selfless and I would think how can I be selfless if I don’t have a self yet? And I saw my mother.

Rick: What was your subjective experience exactly?

Carmen: It was, it was painful. How do you mean?

Rick: So, someone was experiencing pain, was that a self?

Carmen: Well, it was too painful to consider, almost. That was, you know, when, when you’re entire… Like when you are told that, “you need to be only thinking about others always, and what did they need?” That’s what you’re taught and that’s what your mother models, because she’s trying to save the family in the middle of this violence and that’s what she knows to do at that time. It’s just pain on pain, and you are trying not to shake the boat, and you don’t really even think about your pain. So, I developed. I remember going to graduate school mostly because my sister was going to go to nursing school there. And I thought I’d just work as a secretary, but that job wasn’t there, so I went into graduate school. And literally, I discovered one day I need to have a bigger mind. Like I realized that I had too much pain and I needed to make my mind bigger, like lift weights in school so I could get my mind wrapped around all the paradoxes you talked about earlier. And so, I did that, but then I got trapped in it. So, I did, I read, I studied, I taught as a TA at University of Georgia. I did it Phi Beta Kappa somehow, by the grace of the divine. But I got trapped in it so that the way that I prevented myself from feeling the pain was: I sublimated it and I just lived in my mind. Hmm More, and then, when I translated or was translated by The Cloud of Unknowing, I really did a lot of shadow work. I really spent a lot of time with Thomas Keating then, reading, you know, Open Mind, Open Heart, and other of his works, and Cynthia’s, Cynthia Bourgeau’s. And I began to do shadow work and feel the pain and go to therapy. So, for me, that’s why I talk about the self and why I think – because one of the things that Anne Ulanoff says is, for women, to get back to her, she says, “for women, pride is not the exaltation of self, but it is instead, not claiming the self, the divine self that they’ve been given. Instead, it’s giving away their own agency and authority to someone else, like a preacher or a teacher.” And that was what I was inculcated to do. And that’s actually what our education system teaches us, too. You know, because I really want my students to think for themselves. And they come into my class and if they’ve been a good student, they’ve already been programmed to: “what is this teacher? How does she want me to think.” And I’m like, here are some principles and best practices. Try, see what works for you. You come up with new ones, let me know and I want you to think for yourself. But that’s not the usual.

Rick: So, when you say you didn’t have a self, so you were self-abnegating, you were not thinking independently, you didn’t know what, who you were. I mean you were just sort of not self-actualized in the Abraham Maslow sense. And there was just a lot of stuff to work out and now you feel you have a self. Which means you kind of know who and what you are, at least in a human sense. There’s a kind of all that trauma, a lot of that trauma has been worked out. And you know your mind isn’t kind of just full of somebody else’s thoughts. You just, I don’t know, does that do justice to what you said?

Carmen: That does more than justice to it. That’s actually beautiful and true in my experience. And you know, I have a really kind husband and really good friends and just I have learned to be kind to myself. And I do give Brother Lawrence or Nick a lot of, he’s super good at helping us know how to to be kind to ourselves. So, and you know, Mirabai Starr, who you’ve interviewed a couple times, she says that the best thing you can do for yourself right now is to give your own-sweet-self grace. You know, I think we forget that, right? I mean, it’s easy to forget that.

Rick: It’s interesting because, you know, as you said, for thousands of years, both in the East and in the West, this is true of Hinduism and Buddhism and Islam also, as far as I know, women have been put in the back seat. They’ve been suppressed, not allowed to take positions of authority, considered to be subservient and inferior and all this jazz. And so, hopefully we’re in a time now where that imbalance is being rectified.

Carmen: Do you know, I’m glad you bring that up, because that’s something that I sit with a lot. Especially given my background. Recently, at the Center for Action and Contemplation, we did this gathering where we asked, “What do women do with Christianity?” And it was with my friend Christine Walters Paintner and Bishop Jennifer Baskerville Burroughs and Kasti Hall and Jennifer Tompos. And literally, I’m hoping with you, that we are all beginning, because you know how Father Richard Rohr says, “The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.” And I don’t think you can practice the better, but in company with other people trying to do it. I mean, it really is helpful, you know. And so, I’m hoping, because it is not healthy for the world to keep thinking that women go in the back seat, is it? It’s just, you know, yeah, we just cannot.

Rick: I mean, a lot of people have said this now in recent decades, but if we had more women in positions of leadership; and not necessarily women who try to act like men, like Margaret Thatcher, but women who really bring forth the highest and most sublime aspects of womanhood; I think a lot better decisions would be made, a lot fewer wars initiated, and a lot more social welfare provided, and all that stuff.

Carmen: You know, my friends Randy and Edith Woodley talk about that a lot, from the indigenous perspective. And I just think also we would take better care of the earth.

Rick: Yeah, exactly. That’s a big one.

Carmen: Yeah.

Rick: Hmm,

Carmen: I agree.

Rick: Well, we seem to be at a tipping point now and maybe we’re gonna see that hopefully within our lifetimes.

Carmen: Yeah I hope

Rick: There’s a lot of things that have to change pretty radically and pretty fast, if we’re gonna make it.

Carmen: Yeah, I just think it’s, you know, if somebody said that Dolly Parton was super good at collaborating, I mean, she was a superstar, right? But really everybody loved working with her.

Rick: Sure.

Carmen: You know because she was really all about listening to other people. Have you ever seen her, I forget who it was she was with, but, I forget who it was, but they played their nails together. There’s just something about, she could…

Rick: They clicked their nails?

Carmen: They clicked their nails together

Rick: Like a washboard?

Carmen: As their, as their percussive instrument that they then sang to.

Rick: I think I might have seen that.

Carmen: I mean you can, you can find that clip on YouTube. It is, it will make you feel alive again and grateful for life. But literally she was all about, I think her secret sauce was: she was all about collaboration. And then behind the scenes, I mean, she was donating books and just, I just think that is that energy that you’re talking about,

Rick: Yeah

Carmen: that we need in leadership.

Rick: Well, it was appropriate that she was in Nine-to-Five with you know with…

Carmen: Right

Rick: Well, who was it, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin? Yeah, you know, yeah

Carmen: It was so good. It was so, yeah, she, I think her spirit is the kind of leadership I’m looking for. Yeah.

Rick: Yeah. So you’ve said several times in this conversation that you translated The Cloud of Unknowing and it translated you. Did you do you mean like transformed you, is that what you mean by translate?

Carmen: Yeah. Yeah, and literally for me, translation is a form, like you have Lexio Divina which is sacred reading and then I think of it as Translatio Divina or sacred translating. So, when I translated The Cloud of Unknowing, it was almost like, I was really having a very difficult, I was trying to learn to integrate my trauma. And I was pulled to this book and I was asking publishers, “do you need this book translated” and when I talked with Shambhala, they were the second people I contacted. They were like, “We were looking for somebody to do that.” How weird is that?

Rick: No one had done it before?

Carmen: No, they hadn’t had “The Cloud of Unknowing” and “The Book of Privy Council” translated. And Dave told me, O’Neal, he said, “We were looking for somebody.” I’m like, “Okay.” And literally, what that did for me was, as I’m translating, I’m also able to drop into my heart. And things come up. Some of the neglected shadow parts of me that I had, the pain was able to come up. And that’s why, right after I finished translating it, I had to go to therapy. Because it’s almost like so much had been loosened in my soul from  that experience of, “okay it’ll catch, right?” It’ll, won’t it catch? And it did not catch. And so, I went into therapy and I remember her saying, “why are you here?” And I remember that made me so angry, as therapy does, and I said I’m here to integrate my childhood trauma. And so, yes, that’s what I’m, what I’m talking about is it translated me. It was almost like I could not have been a human without integrating my pain.

Rick: Yeah, it seems to me that if you’re really gonna translate something properly, you have to be able to approximate the mindset of the person you’re translating. You have to kind of get into his or her shoes and walk a mile in those moccasins and understand, see the world as they saw it. Otherwise, you’re gonna mistranslate.

Carmen: That’s so well said, and you see, what I realized, as I grew up, was that as a teenager, I used to go for walks two to three hours a day. Still to this day I go for an hour or two a day. And I literally take verses with me. And I was, during graduate school I read the Bible through three times with commentaries, so I really was living kind of a nun’s life. Like so, and so when I would read these people like Ælfric of Eynsham who wrote 10th century sermons, he was Benedictine, they all made more sense to me. They weren’t Hellfire and Damnation. They were all about God’s mercy. And so, when I met The Cloud of Unknowing author, he made sense to me.

Rick: Yeah.

Carmen: So yeah, right.

Rick: Tell me if we’ve covered this. The heart of The Cloud of Unknowing is the phrase that God can be loved but not thought. Have we done justice to that? Let’s do that.

Carmen: Oh well, I guess we have covered it in a way.

Rick: Kind of like you can, yeah, it’s different to eat an orange than to think about an orange.

Carmen: I love how you say that, yeah, like you were talking about mangoes before.

Rick: Right, I like fruit.

Carmen: Yeah, like God can be loved but not thought. That was freeing to me. Because I was raised that if I didn’t do a good job on the SAT, I couldn’t go to college because my dad had told me we can’t afford to send you to college. So, a lot of people’s literal escaping things depends on doing well in school, right? In many ways. And I literally thought I had to find the right answer. And so, I think we take that to God sometimes of like, “Well I think I could get to know God better if I just passed the test on God.” Like if I could just think right. And being raised in evangelical churches, it was all about right belief. And it was all about believing the exact correct thing. And it was often that, that often changed, but nobody quite acknowledged that. So, this notion that God can’t be thought, this apophatic notion of “you can’t say God really, but God can be loved,” that puts me back into the mode of trying to be human and trying to love people. And that makes me cheerful. Then I’m out of my mind just trying to figure everything out and instead it’s more like, how can I turn up for that student who may have aggravated me? Do you know, like I love all my students and they say I’m kind, okay? But let’s just say you have a student who, and this is to give an example of that quote, “God can be loved but not thought.” So, let’s say I have a student who just is immature and a little bit difficult, but I love all my students. And so, if I can figure out a way to keep my boundaries as a teacher and be gentle and kind with this student, that for me is “God can be loved but not thought.” That for me is the experience of that quote, because it’s not something I made up, it’s something I encountered and it’s something that I want that student to feel God’s love. I don’t have to say this is God’s love I’m giving you, at all. I mean I don’t say that, but I want them to feel seen. And isn’t that what it’s about, love, right? You feel seen and respected. So yeah, that’s exactly what the whole book is about, The Cloud of Unknowing.

Rick: Sri Ramakrishna was Vivekananda’s guru and the inspiration for the Vedanta Society, which continues to this day. And he had a nice quote about a loving God and/or knowing God, which is that you can be sugar or you can taste sugar. And if you are sugar, you might not necessarily be able to taste it. In other words, if you’re so one with God, you might not get quite the joy that you do from being a little separate from God and tasting God. And Shankara said a similar thing. He said, “The intellect imagines duality for the sake of devotion.”

Carmen: Yeah, that’s good.

Rick: So, this thing about, you know, God can be loved but not thought, it reminded me of that quote.

Carmen: I love it.

Rick: Yeah. And I do believe that, you know, Jesus said, “I and my Father are one.” I think it’s entirely possible for a person to become actually consciously united with God so that there’s really no… I mean, it’s not to say that you become God, “now I think I’m God.” It’s more like you recognize your essential oneness with God while yet functioning as an individual representative, or you could say a sense organ of the infinite.

Carmen: Yeah. And the way I boil that down too is like when I go to the post office to mail a letter, does that person feel seen? Do you know what I’m saying? For me it’s like every moment of like, and I don’t mean it as a performative thing, but just, was I in the moment at the post office enjoying it and just being there with this person who always helps me. Same person and I love her so much. So yeah, I think we’re saying the same thing and I just, I want to be the sugar. I definitely, I definitely want, it may not mean I taste it all the time but I, I definitely would hope to. That would be a, that’s a good prayer, Rick.

Rick: Yeah, it’s nice that you keep bringing up these practical examples like, you know, shopping and post office and washing dishes and all this stuff, because that’s, that’s where it really has to hold up.

Carmen: Well, it’s like, you know, you have your thing, it’s named Buddha at the Gas Pump. It made me start thinking how, whenever I go to pump gas, it’s like, you know, things can happen when you’re pumping gas. Like where something doesn’t open or something like this. And like, how patient can I be with that? And how can I see that as a beautiful, poetic– like, I’m just– I’m kind of teasing myself. But like, how can I lean into those small frustrations that happen at the gas pump? Or somebody is blocking– I mean, all the things. But how can I try to be–

Rick: Can you be a Buddha at the gas pump?

Carmen: Right. That is the– for me, that’s the thing that keeps me close to the ground also, because, sometimes I’m not, you know? But I do know that I’ve gotten to be more at peace about things like that, more enjoying it. More enjoying, I enjoy more being at the gas pump, is what I’m trying to say.

Rick: Yeah.

Carmen: Yeah.

Rick: Well, the whole reason that we came up with that name is that, you know, I live in a town where a lot of people have been meditating for decades and some people have had profound and abiding spiritual awakenings. And they would sometimes tell their friends that such a thing had happened to them. And friends would reject it because they know this guy and he’s, you’re an ordinary dude, it couldn’t happen to you. You can’t float off the ground or you don’t glow in the dark. And so, I just thought, okay, I’m gonna start interviewing people here and just show people that their peers are actually undergoing these transformations and that might make them more confident that they could have them too. And then of course it expanded out to the whole world and not just Fairfield.

Carmen: But what you’re saying there reminds me of Ram Dass, if you think you’re really spiritual, just go home.

Rick: Spend a week with your parents.

Carmen: To your parents. (

Rick: laughing)

Carmen: I mean, and it’s like, yeah, that. So, I’m with you. And then that fact of how he always says, “We’re just walking each other home.”

Rick: I like that.

Carmen: To me, in other words, we’re all at the gas pump together. You know, I mean, it’s like that sort of thing. Like, and you interviewing everybody to say,  in some beautiful broken way, together.” So yeah, I think it’s wonderful the community you’ve made through this podcast, because I think it gives us all a bit more hope that this is normal, that this is human, I guess is a better way to put it, that this is human to be this way.

Rick: Yeah. Yeah. And that it’s possible.

Carmen: Yes, yes. And that our weaknesses can help us in it, even.

Rick: Yeah. One of the main things I got from the Brother Lawrence book is that, I think we used this phrase earlier, that to which you give your attention grows stronger in your life. I mean, he just kept his attention on the presence, or on God. And that, you know, I mean, modern neurophysiology would tell us that that’s going to, you know, neuroplasticity, that’s going to change your brain over time. If you do anything that you do consistently, whether it’s playing tennis or taking heroin or anything else, is going to make a certain groove. And so, if you do the God groove by keeping your attention on God, on presence, on spirituality… I heard a story recently where some young person met an old monk who was in his 90s, and the monk was so serene and impressive and loving, and the young fellow said, “Well, you know, I want to be like you when I’m 90. How can I do that? And the old fellow said, “start now.”

Carmen: Yes, and start, Brother Lawrence says that. Start where you are. Yeah, just like Pema Chödrön. And what I love about Brother Lawrence is that he’s so gentle-hearted. So, like I, I used to come to things thinking I have to do it really hard and I would overdo. And Brother Lawrence is always gentle, gentle. Be gentle about this. He says if you forget, it’s okay, just come back when you remember. And he says eventually you’ll discover that, and it’s, I always compare this, Rick, to learning to floss my teeth. Because I wanted to learn to floss my teeth when I was younger, because we had well water, and I learned that we didn’t have fluoride. And so, we lived out in the country. And so, I would try to floss my teeth and then I’d lie down in bed and I’d think I didn’t do it and I have to get up. And then, over time, I couldn’t go to bed without wanting to floss my teeth and it became a joy instead of a chore. Now, then I never did forget. It became, I mean and that’s what Teresa of Ávila says and Brother Lawrence, as one of her, quote, students in her lineage, he always says you want to become accustomed. So you’re really, you’re making, like you said, where’s your attention? You’re making this kind of habit. And I was reading recently and you find other people to help you with this. So, for me, like Father Richard Rohr and others and also, like, there is Tsoknyi Rinpoche, and Daniel Goleman have this book, “Why We Meditate,” and other books. And you just find different ways to look at this, what do you do with your attention. But you’re right, Brother Lawrence, he just kept returning to God until, as he says, and Joseph, his friend, Joseph of Beaufort, says he had an unbroken, a mostly unbroken kind of peace that everybody around him could feel. Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, it just gets ingrained. I had a corny joke there about that tooth flossing. You became a “Flossopher.”

Carmen: That was worth this whole interview for me, actually. This whole conversation was working towards that point. So, thank you, Rick. That’s a gift. That’s a real gift.

Rick: Yeah.

Carmen: A Flossopher!

Rick: There’s also the one about the guy who refused Novocain at the dentist’s office because he wanted to transcend dental medication.

Carmen: Okay, that’s good too. I’m a punster, so that, yes. It’s not one of my qualities my friends are often encouraging, but yes, I love it.

Rick: Irene keeps telling me that, you’re like, you know, there’s this um  “well, I am an old man, so I’m entitled to it.”

Carmen: I’m with you on that! You know, I was never so happy when I discovered that like Ælfric of Eynsham uses kind of like puns in his writing, and that’s like actually a rhetorical thing called Paronomasia. And I was, like, I would just tell my students. I know y’all think I’m just telling puns. But I’m actually using examples of Paronomasia. So there! So, so do you know I used to tease and say that, but the thing is, puns are really fun. They’re just…

Rick: I heard that in Shakespeare’s day they were considered the height of humor, but these days everybody groans.

Carmen: Yes, that’s the thing. I always used to say to students when they would share one with me like “oh we’re gonna, we heard an even worse one.” I was like, the worse the pun is, the better. Do you know, the worse it is the better it is. There’s just an inversely proportional That’s so good.

Rick: It’s what you’re saying a bit, a moment ago about straining. I think that’s really important. Yeah, I’ve seen so many examples where people strained too much and cracked, you know, actually became psychotic, needed hospitalization or medication or something. Willoughby Britton with Cheetah House in Rhode Island is a center for people who have flipped out because of too much spiritual practice, or too much strain, or engaging in intense spiritual practice without adequate maturity or preparation or mental stability, things like that. So, safety first is a good motto on the spiritual path. Don’t be lackadaisical, be persistent and diligent and go at it, but it should be enjoyable. It really should.

Carmen: Yes, and if you, I often say when I’m doing a workshop, and if you need to see a spiritual director or a therapist, then please do. Because we all need people to come alongside us. And do you know The Cloud of Unknowing is really, talks about “don’t strain.” He actually says, “you don’t want to over-” I mean, it’s all about being gentle and kind. So, I’m glad you mentioned that because that to me is something that’s always on my mind.

Rick: Yeah. And there was a principle in TM which was that the mind has a natural tendency to seek a field of greater happiness. And so, strain is not necessary, because if you take the correct angle, you’re going to encounter greater and greater charm as you proceed. And so, your mind will just naturally gravitate toward that greater charm, kind of like taking the correct angle off a diving board and just letting gravity do the rest.

Carmen: And you don’t make a   body will follow. And I had no idea what he was teaching me, but he taught me how not to make a splash with just what you’re describing. And it’s not doing more, it’s doing different.

Rick: Yeah, taking the correct angle and then of course Joseph Campbell said, “Follow your bliss,” and that doesn’t mean just do whatever the heck you please, you know, to hell with everybody else. It means it’s more subtle than that. Because if it’s just hedonism, it’s not going to be bliss. It’s going to end up in unhappiness. But if you actually move in the direction… There’s a reason Jesus talked about the kingdom of heaven is within you. And similar traditions have said similar things. Brahman is sat-chit-ananda, bliss. So, there is a kind of a wellspring of bliss within all of us and that can be discovered and integrated and stabilized so that it becomes the baseline of your life.

Carmen: I love that. I really do. I think that’s… and for someone like me that kind of like the Campbell  your own way and enjoy it.” Because I had always been focused outside me on others and doing for others. And I had to really learn that there were things I liked. And that seems like an obvious thing, but it is something some of us have to really learn. So, I’m glad you make that point. Yeah.

Rick: So, I have about 10 pages of notes here, and we’ve gotten through two of them.

Carmen: Excellent. Does that mean I get to come back, maybe?

Rick: No, it means we’re going to talk for another five hours.

Carmen: Exactly. I think it’s suppertime there, isn’t it, for you?

Rick: Not quite, but we have a little time left here, but maybe five minutes more. Is there anything that we really haven’t touched upon that you would like to?

Carmen: Well, there’s just one thing. I don’t know, there is the opening prayer that’s in some Episcopal churches. It’s the opening prayer to The Cloud of Unknowing, and it has brought me much bliss. And I was wondering, can I say it?

Rick: Oh yes, please.

Carmen: Can I say it and then sing it? Because it’s one of the things that has helped me. I mean, my life is an ongoing trying to befriend my anxiety from PTSD, but this kind of practice, and, of course, therapists and things, have really helped me. And so, I like to share this because it’s part of my joy. Here’s the translation of it from The Cloud of Unknowing, and this is also from the 10th Century Latin, and he kind of changed it a bit. Where you hear grace, it originally said Holy Spirit, but he changes it to grace because he’s all about, anonymous is grace. And maybe he was a Carthusian monk.

Rick: But he, you mean The Cloud of Unknowing guy?

Carmen: Yeah, The Cloud of Unknowing guy who maybe was a Carthusian monk or priest or something. So here it is in English, and then I’m going to sing it in Middle English.

Rick: Okay, great.

Carmen: So it says, “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 intentions of my heart through the unspeakable gift of your grace, so I can love you with all I am and praise you for all you are.” And this is how it goes in the Middle English. God Unto whom alle hertes ben open, And unto whom alle wille spekith, And unto whom no privé thing is hid.

Rick: I can actually understand most of that, I guess because that’s Middle English and not Old English.

Carmen: See, you’re an expert now, seriously. See, do you know one time I was translating the Kalimantan, our daughter was in middle school, I think, our older daughter, and she went behind me while I was doing it. She looked over my shoulder at the Middle English and was like, “Why is that taking you so long? I can read that.”

Rick: Hmm, interesting.

Carmen: Because you can see cognates. I mean, she meant it funny, like, you know, I can read it, but it’s a little more complicated than that. But I always encourage people, go look at it in the Middle English because you can read more than you think.

Rick: Nice.

Carmen: Yeah. Yeah.

Rick: So, before we conclude, let me just give you an opportunity to tell people how they can interact with you. You have a bunch of books, and I’ll be linking to them on your page on BatGap. And you do stuff with the Center for Action and Contemplation. You have a podcast. You have a YouTube channel. Do you occasionally teach courses? What am I leaving out?

Carmen: Yeah. Yeah. I would definitely say the Center for Action and Contemplation with my friends Brian and Jim, Brian McLaren and Jim Finley, Father Richard Rohr and others is one place and then my Carmen Acevedo Butcher YouTube channel and then I do courses different times that I guess if you go to my IG, Carmen, I think it’s CAB, underline PhD, so it’s just CAB, my initials, and PhD is at IG and Facebook and that’s where I post if I’m doing things.

Rick: I don’t understand what you’re saying, IG, What does that mean?

Carmen: Yeah, Instagram.

Rick: Instagram, okay.

Carmen: Yeah, you can find me.

Rick: Well, send me a link to that and I will add it to your web page.

Carmen: But it’s been such a joy to be here with your community, Rick, and thank you for having me.

Rick: Yeah, thanks, Carmen. I’ve had a good time.

Carmen: I have too.

Rick: Both preparing for this and doing it.

Carmen: Me too.

Rick: Let’s stay in touch.

Carmen: I would love it. Thank you.

Rick: All right. Thanks to those who have been listening or watching. We’ll see you for the next one.

Carmen: Thank you, Rick.

Rick: You’re welcome. Thank you.