Bonus: Carmen Acevedo Butcher on Brother Lawrence

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:08)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley.

Kirsten Oates (0:11)

And I'm Kirsten Oates.

James Finley (0:13)

Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Kirsten Oates (0:23)

Welcome everyone to season 12 of Turning to the Mystics, where we're turning to Practice of the Presence, the teachings of Brother Lawrence. And we're very excited because we have a special guest here today, Carmen Acevedo Butcher, who's the translator for the book we've been using, Practice of the Presence. Before I welcome Carmen, I'll just read a little bit of her bio so you can get a deeper connection to her. Carmen Acevedo Butcher is an award-winning translator, teacher, poet, and workshop leader. Her Cloud of Unknowing translation received a 46th Georgia Author of the Year Award, and Martin Laird calls her translation of Brother Lawrence's Practice of the Presence, The New Standard. And we're certainly loving it on the podcast this season. She holds degrees in Medieval Studies from the University of Georgia, was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of London, and teaches in the College Writing Programs at the University of California, Berkeley. Carmen is also a faculty member at the Center for Action and Contemplation. You can find out more about Carmen on her website, and we have a link to that in the show notes. We're so thrilled to have Carmen with us today. So welcome Carmen. So great to have you here.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher (1:43)

So good to be here, Kirsten.

Kirsten Oates (1:45)

And welcome Jim.

James Finley (1:47)

Yes. I'm looking forward to this time with Carmen.

Kirsten Oates (1:51)

So to get us started, Carmen, I'd love to hear about the first time you encountered Brother Lawrence, and how do you recall being touched by his teaching?

Carmen Acevedo Butcher (2:03)

I was in my early 40s, and I had just gone back to work. I'd been a stay-at-home mom of two young kids for a while. So I was teaching on the tenure track at a small college in Georgia, so that meant my morning started out going to one end of the town, taking one child to one school and to the other end of the town with the other child. And I was really run off my feet, you know, being a teacher and being a mom and just all the things of life. And somehow, and it was, you know, just in translation, I found these snippets of this old guy who I thought was a monk then. I didn't even know he was a friar, but, you know, in this robe, his habit, I just didn't know that much about him. And he had such calm, wise things to say. I didn't even know quite what it was he was offering, but I wanted it. And it struck such a note in me because at the time, I was carrying around a flat rock in my pocket that had rest on it. And I would feel it because it was chiseled into the rock. And I really didn't have much rest in my life. And so he really, he sort of sounded the bell, Kirsten and Jim, in my life of rest. But I didn't quite understand it yet.

Kirsten Oates (3:22)

Wow. And then how many years later when you actually got to translate him?

Carmen Acevedo Butcher (3:28)

Wow. Now that you say that, I've never been asked that. But it was literally in 2020 when the pandemic started. And an editor and I spent two hours, she was giving me all these ideas of things I could translate. And as she was closing up the Zoom, she said, and you know, there's always Brother Lawrence. And something in me tugged. And I always listen to those tugs. You never know when they'll happen. It was a very gentle tug, but very strong. And so I didn't tell her, but I started typing, you know, his words from French to see if he was really genuine. And oh, he was. So that's how it happened.

Kirsten Oates (4:12)

Your story really reminds me of Jim's story in reading Thomas Merton for the first time when he was in high school. That sense of being tagged, this is my teacher, I've got something to learn here.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher (4:22)

It makes sense.

Kirsten Oates (4:23)

Jim, you first encountered Brother Lawrence at the monastery and felt a similar attraction.

James Finley (4:30)

I did. And I think looking back at it, at the time in the monastery and with Merton's guidance, I was going to meet John of the Cross and Teresa and so on. So at the time when I first discovered Brother Lawrence, I recall what struck me at the time was this pattern in all the mystics when he saw the tree, like the initiating event, like he was quickened. And then he lived in fidelity to the quickening. And that's what struck me about him and his simplicity. That was my first impression. But I never really became like stabilized in absorbing him, you know, until just recently I circled back around and started sitting with him again, just how wonderful he is really.