I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to our Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Today’s post is an offering from Wisdom Council member Carmen Acevedo Butcher. Read on for Carmen’s reflection on exploring the history of words as a contemplative practice.
Thank you, soul sister Christine, for your friendship, Hildegardian abbess wisdom, invitation into the Wisdom Council, its conversations and belonging among diverse insights, and the joyful dancing. I’m grateful for all the Abbey of the Arts community!
Living in community and awareness of interconnectedness is essential to being human, as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel reminds us. We remember. The year he earned his University of Berlin Ph.D., he witnessed the Reichstag burning and a book burning. Five years later, he was arrested by the Gestapo and deported. His mother, three of his four sisters, and numerous family, friends, and colleagues perished in the Holocaust.
Today we reflect on Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom on the importance of words: “One of the major symptoms of the general crisis existent in our world today is our lack of sensitivity to words. We use words as tools. We forget that words are a repository of the spirit. The tragedy of our times is that the vessels of the spirit are broken. We cannot approach the spirit unless we repair the vessels.”
How might we repair these vessels?
Early on, words and I weren’t friends. They moved endlessly on pages, making reading nearly impossible. I felt stupid. In college I began looking up words’ etymologies, their backstories and histories. Words slowly gained ballast, and I could read with diminishing distress. Only near fifty would I learn I have dyslexia.
Over four decades, my daily exploring of words’ histories shifted from a dyslexic’s lifeline to a contemplative’s practice. Words’ stories remind me I’m an embodied creature living on a Love-made earth. They illuminate our world’s beauty, and fault lines. They invite me to dance with language and live the questions, as Rilke says.
Pick anthology. My pre-teen dyslexic mind blanked hearing anthology used for the Christian Bible. Once a forgettable word meaning “collection of selected literary pieces,” anthology now holds a bouquet of flowers—Greek anthos for ‘flower’ and -logy from an ancient root for ‘collect.’ Anthology’s etymology reveals wildflowers I’ve been lucky to know, thanks to our earthly home from which our wild words also grow.
Or eye contemplation. It holds a temple for viewing, together, the world as it is. Centuries ago, we could’ve said, “We contemple” for “We meditate.”
Also, like the blastoid fossils I found by creeks as a kid, words’ etymologies connect me with history. As etymology uncovers punitive earthly power structures, it helps me be mindful of the dominant system in which I am alive and human.
Consider empire. Its ancient root means “production and procuring.” The empire-related word lord has roots in a system of cruel domination, for it was made by combining the Old English word for ‘bread loaf,’ hlaf, with one for ‘warden,’ weard. Lord meant the “loaf’s-warden.” The few lords owned the ground and controlled the many serfs who worked to produce the crops, and then made the bread procured by lords. From the Latin domus for the ‘lord’s house,’ English inherits many commonplace words: domain, dominion, dominate, dominant, domesticate, dom, dominus, and despot, and serf is from Latin for ‘slave.’ Living with the awareness that our everyday language has largely invisible ties to non-communal, master-slave histories changes me.
Also the word church shares a common root with the Greek kyrios for ‘lord.’ This root means “‘to swell, swollen,’ hence ‘strong, powerful.’” From kyrios, theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza coined kyriarchy, “a complex pyramidal system of intersecting multiplicative social structures of superordination and subordination, of ruling and oppression.” Why is the core of kyrios and of church a “swollenness” associated with arrogance or taking-too-much-and-accumulating-more-than-basic-needs? I reflect.
Other etymologies remind me, Slow down—stretch. Worry, from Old English for ‘strangle,’ and anger, with roots in ‘tight,’ meet attention asking, “What are you stretching toward?” These remind me of our cat Tao, my best teacher, always stretching.
Meanwhile, calm holds a “nap.” From Old Spanish for “heat of the day,” calm has ancestors meaning “a shady resting-place for cattle.” This view of calm takes me beyond abstract “tranquility” to remind me calm includes stopping when life seems white-hot busy, being still, and resting in a cool inner-and/or-outside place.
Daily I meditate to open more calm spaciousness in my life. I used to worry I wasn’t meditating right. Once given to fretting, I’ll never be an “expert,” now I know expert simply means ‘try again,’ sharing a root with experiment. Anyone can be an “expert” if he/she/they experiment. We just Benedict-wise ‘try/begin again.’
I also value words as reminders of our earthy foundation of Love. Human, humane, and humble root in the ancient *dhghem- for “earth.” They remind us we’re earth-and-star dust. Earthlings, we live in and by interbeing, Thich Nhat Hanh’s wonderful neologism for “interwoven.” As temptations multiply for being not-humane and the beautiful earth struggles under our worrying dominion, I hope my practice of looking up etymologies and exploring words’ stories will help me stay human, literally grounded.
Questioning past-and-present language, including my own, is an ordinary practice. Anyone can try. Unlaying ordinary, we find its history in words for “begin weaving, lay the warp,” from ōrdō, ‘a loom thread.’ One good place to start word-exploring and weaving new meaning is the free www.etymonline.com/.
We close with Rabbi Heschel’s down-to-earth humanity:
“When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion—its message becomes meaningless.”
May our shared vessels, words, become voices of compassion.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher is an award-winning translator, poet, and workshop leader. She has been interviewed on the BBC’s Compass, NPR’s Morning Edition, and Dante’s Old South, and many others can be found on her linktree. 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.” Carmen 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. She is an Affiliate Faculty member at the Center for Action and Contemplation and has contributed teaching to the CAC’s Essentials of Engaged Contemplation course. Carmen lives in the Bay Area, and is working on a chapbook of poetry. Visit Carmen’s website here and her YouTube channel here.
