Christine Valters Paintner's Blog, page 12

Monk in the World Guest Post: Kelly Sollinger

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Kelly Sollinger’s reflection and poem on finding silence.

The days leading up to this poem brought one heartbreak after another. I was dealing with personal griefs in the midst of serving as a pastoral presence to a community enduring an impossible loss. Early one morning I fled the house and the phone and the email, desperately seeking an inner silence that eluded me. The longer I walked, the more I became aware of the birds. At first, their songs felt like yet another assault on my search for solitude and silence. Gradually, I was able to hear the Spirit’s gentle whisper: that God is in the noise as much as God is in the profound silence. It helped me begin to see God in the grief. So often we think conditions must be perfect: the silence must be absolute, the solitude complete, the joy overflowing. We miss the lesson of the hawk, who finds God in the very midst of the noise of life.

“silence”
so noisy out here
in the early morning

one bird insists
on her love for you
over and over and over
plaintive and longing

while a flock
insists their praise of you
loud and long

a hawk sits silently
surveying all the sound
bearing witness
that silence
has its own things to say

Kelly Sollinger is a poet, author, teacher, and artist. A Texas native, she currently lives in Ohio with her daughter and three cats. She recently published her first collection of poetry, The Gift of the Dragonfly: Poems of Transformation. Learn more about Kelly and her work at DancingOwlStudio.com.

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Writing Your Spiritual Memoir ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dearest dancing monks, artists, and pilgrims,

This Friday, September 13th, we are pleased to welcome Wisdom Council member, clinical trauma specialist and expressive arts therapist Dr. Jamie Marich to lead us in a mini-retreat on Writing Your Spiritual Memoir. In this mini-retreat experience, Jamie will use several expressive arts facilitation strategies to help us start or continue the process of writing our own spiritual memoir. 

Fresh off the experience of writing her own memoir You Lied to Me About God about her experience of growing up in a mixed Catholic-Protestant home and experiencing spiritual abuse in other settings, Jamie has a great deal to share with you about the power of expressive arts process in embracing your spiritual story.

Read an excerpt from Jamie Marich’s memoir You Lied to Me About God:

My Story Is a Cautionary Tale

Whenever a writer decides to unearth another layer of truth about her own life, the experience can be cathartic and therapeutic. Catharsis is part of my intention in bringing this full narrative to life. I also feel that by telling the truth of my experiences unapologetically, I may also help shed some light on the impact of conservative, dogmatic religions on the human experience and in society. While my perspective is lim- ited because it is, admittedly, Christian, I believe that there are some common threads in all spiritual abuse stories. I hope that people from other global faith traditions or spiritual paths can resonate with the themes in my own story and teaching. Because the battles I experienced were within Christianity, I see tremendous value in what I have to share for modern America. At times in my childhood I even shrugged my shoulders in desperation, saying to myself, “We all believe that Jesus is the Son of God, can’t we keep it that simple and get along?”

At some point in my late teens, I remember my mother and father fighting over something to do with my spiritual formation. Both of them would regularly say things like, “I’m going to lose you yet,” making me feel like the pawn in their holy war once again. Although I can’t pinpoint the exact fight, because there were many, after one of them I plopped down on my bed and the mauve-patterned wallpaper in my room seemed to keep spinning around me. I was exhausted. And I said to myself, “I don’t know if spiritual abuse is a real thing but if it isn’t, I’m going to write it up some day. Because that has to be what this is.”

During my graduate training in clinical counseling I sensed back to that moment. In having an open invitation to write a paper on anything in my class on human development, I went to the library at Franciscan University of Steubenville and looked up spiritual abuse on the library search engine. Sure enough, it was a real thing, and others had written about it. The very first book I picked up on the topic was Jeff VanVon- deren and David Johnson’s The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse, originally written in 1991 by these two former pastors. To know that spiritual abuse was an already established construct validated me. There was not a great deal of material written about that exact phrase at the time, except for a burgeoning scholarship on cult studies, which also resonated with me. In those early moments of discovering that this kind of abuse I experienced was real, it became a mission for me to acknowledge people like me who were living in what could subjectively be defined as more mainstream experiences. And experiencing it all on earth in the name of religion, God, or anything spiritual.

I write this book not as a theologian. My training is clinical and psychological in nature, and I’m sure that when this book reaches the world, theologians from a variety of perspectives will pick apart my arguments. I don’t see them as arguments; they are simply the notes of our experiences that we’ve been yearning to sing out. As writer and preacher Emily Joy Allison taught me in one of our online collaborations around her work in founding the #ChurchToo movement, everyone is a theologian. If we are a person or people of faith with lived human experience, then we have something to share. We are all reverently and wonderfully made, and the voice or voices we add to the chorus matters.

And I invite you all into my solo recital. It’s been a long time coming.

In every chapter of this book, I include an invitation for reflection that you may find useful in helping you engage in your own work related to spirituality. For me, memoir is working at its best when it inspires readers to tap into their own stories and unearth something in themselves that may need to be more fully explored. Your story never has to be shared publicly—crafting it can be something that you do for yourself and your healing only.

(You Lied to Me About God: A Memoir by Jamie Marich, PhD, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2024. Reprinted by permission of publisher.)

Join Jamie on Friday for a mini-retreat on writing your spiritual memoir. Read their poem The Great Lie in Jamie’s Monk in the World guest post.

With great and growing love, 

Christine

Christine Valters Paintner, OblSB, PhD, REACE

P.S. We are pleased to offer a reflection guide for my forthcoming book A Midwinter God: Encountering the Divine in Seasons of Darkness which will be released this Friday! Download the guide here.

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A Midwinter God Reflection Guide

We are pleased to offer a reflection guide for my latest book A Midwinter God: Encountering the Divine in Seasons of Darkness which releases on Friday, September 13th.

Download the reflection guide here.

About A Midwinter God:

“I believe we all carry grief that has gone unnamed and unmourned,” writes best-selling author Christine Valters Paintner. “Nothing in our culture prepares us to deal with darkness and grief. We are told to cheer up and move on, to shop or drink our way to forgetting the pain we carry. Yet I believe that being faithful to our own dark moments is the path of true prayer.” In her book, A Midwinter God: Encountering the Divine in Seasons of Darkness, Paintner offers an invitation to enter the wisdom of holy darkness and to find there a path toward hope and spiritual maturity.

Paintner has experienced multiple journeys through grief that have brought her face-to-face with what she calls the “midwinter God”—the seeming absence of the God of life in dark and fallow seasons of loss. She has learned to confront her own terror in that darkness and to approach it with curiosity to see what it has to teach her. This endeavor has illuminated a path for her to embrace a life of profound depth, one that honors both the trials of suffering and the richness of joy.

With her characteristic integrative and creative practices, Paintner, abbess of the online Abbey of the Arts, guides her readers to view darkness as a place where seeds of holiness begin to germinate. Each chapter of this book unfolds as an invitation to grow in understanding of holy darkness and also meditate, reflect, and create with these elements:

Paintner’s reflections on various themes of loss and acceptance Insights on a scripture passage written by Paintner’s husband, John A guided meditation to bring the teachings into your heart Prompts for an expressive arts practice to process these insights through creativity Reflection questions to integrate what you have experienced Writing samples from people who have worked through this material in an online retreat

Autumn and winter are vital to the health of nature and to our own bodies. It is a time of releasing and letting go—a season that invites us to slow down, to welcome the growing darkness, and to grow stiller and quieter. Darkness can be an uncomfortable and uneasy place, but it is also a place of profound incubation and gestation, a source of tremendous and hard-wrought wisdom. With Paintner as our guide, we can encounter this midwinter God with vulnerable courage that leads us to hope-filled wholeness.

Pre-order A Midwinter God. Join us for the book launch on September 16th.

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Monk in the World Guest Post: Jamie Marich

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to the Monk in the World guest post series. Today’s poem is by Wisdom Council member Jamie Marich who will lead a mini-retreat on September 13th on Writing Your Spiritual Memoir. Read on for her poem The Great Lie. Jamie is fresh off of writing her memoir, You Lied to Me About God: A Memoir, and has a great deal to share with the world about her spiritual formation process. This poem is one small reflection that flowed from her own expressive arts processes in preparing the book for publication.

The Great Lie

There are many lies about God going around
—yet one strikes me as the great lie.

The great lie is that God fits inside any one religion
or any one church building.

God is bigger than any one religion,
any one institution
any one spiritual practice
any one nationality or
any one person.

God lives in my heart, and in the hearts of
the beautiful and sometimes
challenging humans that we meet.

God dwells in the tabernacles of human flesh,
in the temples of humanity
as LOVE most pure.

god may not even want you to capitalize
their name!
they exist beyond the name…

God dances in the laughter,
the strife
the tears
the messiness, even the
boring and mundane.

God hears us when we curse them and
deny their existence and ask
how they could let such horrid things happen
especially in their name.

God, perhaps,
doesn’t understand it
any more than we do.

God is imperfect like the humanity
they so treasure
for God created us in their image.

God is not an abusive boyfriend
demanding love and loyalty
in exchange for breadcrumbs.

God does not punish and threaten
and say things like,
“Look at all I’ve done for you.”

God scratches their mystical head
when they see what
others have written about them.

God is just as mystified as
I am that so many
gaslight in god’s name.

God doesn’t play favorites—
there are no true churches
and no children most golden.

Praying for a miracle—
that is what we do
as people of faith.

Perhaps the god of our understanding
is waiting on us
to be the miracle.
Photograph by Jamie on her first visit to Sarajevo, Bosnia-Hercegovina in 2000. This occasion also marks the first time that Jamie saw the now famous COEXIST logo.

Jamie Marich, Ph.D., LPCC-S, REAT, RYT-500, RMT travels internationally speaking on topics related to EMDR therapy, trauma, addiction, expressive arts, LGBTQ issues, spirituality and mindfulness while maintaining a private practice in her home base of Northeast Ohio. Jamie is also the developer of the Dancing Mindfulness expressive arts practice. Jamie is the author of several books including Dancing Mindfulness: A Creative Path to Healing and Transformation (2015, with foreword by Christine Valters Paintner) and Process Not Perfection: Expressive Arts Solutions for Trauma Recovery released in 2019, heavily influenced by the growth she has experienced through her study with Abbey of the Arts! Now primarily a North Atlantic Book author, she has recently released Trauma and the 12 Steps: An Inclusive Guide to Recovery(2020), Transforming Trauma with Jiu-Jitsu (2022), and Dissociation Made Simple: A Stigma-Free Guide to Embracing Your Dissociative Mind and Navigating Life (2023). Visit Jamie’s website here.

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A Blessing for Trust in Abundance ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

A Blessing for Trust in Abundance*

Spirit of generous abundance,
remind us there is always more than enough,
enough food, enough love, enough time, enough resources.
Help us to see how our patterns of living
separate and disconnected amplifies our scarcity.
Bring us into the joy and challenge of community
where bread divided multiplies, where laughter shared overflows.
Empower us to share freely from our own abundance
with others in need. Slow us down to see how time expands
when we breathe and pay attention.
Bless us in our efforts to trust
in the goodness and love that pulses through the world
sustaining it moment by moment.
Give us the courage to speak out
when resources are distributed unfairly,
so we may remind others there is more to share.
Encourage us to release that which we no longer
need to hold onto so tightly.
Inspire us to live in a way that witnesses
to our trust in the lavish fullness of life.

Dearest dancing monks, artists, and pilgrims,

This is a special week for my husband John and me. On September 3rd we celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary! John is actually working with a theater production in Galway all this week, so we plan to take some time away later this month to celebrate fully.

I have been engaged in contemplative practice and retreat work for 30 years as well (the year John and I got married I started teaching theology at a Catholic high school in Sacramento and was co-campus minister). This past May we celebrated 18 years since Abbey of the Arts was founded and we are already planning ahead to our 20th year and what special gifts and celebrations we might offer.

I have been contemplating harvest a lot lately and what comes from endurance and steadiness, staying the course over a long span of time. I am beyond grateful to recognize this rich harvest over the course of my marriage, my professional life, as well as my own contemplative journey. (As part of our 20th year we hope to tell this story in more fullness).

When I started Abbey of the Arts, it was initially a blog to share my reflections on the contemplative life and a way for me to untrain myself from academic writing! After working several years to earn a PhD I discovered academic life wasn’t where my heart was. I wanted to engage with people and their lived experience. I still have a strong scholarly heart and love to bring that in service of opening up ancient wisdom for our current lives and world.

Over the years, the Abbey has grown, mostly by word of mouth. We often have people join us who say their spiritual director or pastor or friend pointed them our way, and that is the highest compliment we could receive.

One of the gifts of steadiness over time is the amazing group of artists and teachers we have been blessed to partner with. Many of them are on our Wisdom Council, or offering retreats and programs, or part of our prayer cycles. This community of kindred souls longing to offer this inclusive vision of a place to celebrate slow rhythms and creative expression is a wonder to me still. Add in our amazing dancing monks who show up with such open-heartedness, kindness, appreciation, care, and a desire to be a force for Love in the world, each day I am grateful. You are each in my prayers every morning. You help to sustain and nourish me when things feel hard or challenging.

At Abbey of the Arts, in addition to being a place to nourish our contemplative hearts and creative visions, and in addition to being a welcoming and inclusive place for everyone who desires to live this path of Love, is also fiercely committed to financial inclusivity. We strive to make all our programs accessible to anyone who wants to join us, regardless of financial means. We have a sliding scale fee lower than many other similar programs and also full scholarships available.

If you have the means to support us financially, we invite you to consider joining our Sustainers Circle for 2024-2025. This is one way to help keep our programs affordable while also allowing us to pay a living wage to the many artists and teachers we partner with. Please read over the options available for this support.

If you prefer to make a one-time donation or a recurring donation without receiving programs in return, please visit this page for more details.

For those of you who don’t have financial means right now, please know there are so many other ways you can support what we do. Your presence is a gift in itself, truly. Your words of appreciation for our programs inspire us. When you tell a friend about our work, you light a spark. Your positive reviews on my books left at Amazon, Goodreads, and other online booksellers is another free way to help this work continue to thrive. Thank you. 

The harvest is rich and plenty. The banquet table is piled high with sweet fruits. A spirit of generosity pervades the air and says a powerful “no” to all the forces that tell us we do not have enough or that we need to hoard to survive. We are so grateful for all the ways you practice your generosity with us and with the world.

With great and growing love, 

Christine

Christine Valters Paintner, OblSB, PhD, REACE

*Blessing written by Christine for a book of blessings (due to be published in spring 2026) 

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Monk in the World Guest Post: Jean Wise

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Jean Wise’s reflection The Spiritual Practice of Writing a Poem Each Day.

At the end of my third-grade year, my teacher gave me a book of poetry. “When I saw this book, I thought of you,” she said. “Keep writing, Jeanie.”

This is the first memory I have of someone else recognizing me as a writer. Even though I was young yet and as life unfolded, took different routes, her encouragement and gift of poetry seeded deep roots in my heart.

Later in life I rediscovered my call to write, but it was years later before poetry began to blossom. Reading others’ creative words woke something deep inside of me, stirred my creativity, matched my love to play with words and helped me capture moments of my life I may have missed otherwise. I learned that poems heal. Poems dance and swirl. Their sounds and rhythms soothe my soul. 

On my table next to where I sit with God each morning is a collection of poetry books from Mary Oliver, Macrina Wiederkehr, Maya Angelou, Joyce Rupp, and Padraig O’Tuama.  I have long been a fan of Robert Lewis Stevenson and Robert Frost.  Emails from Abbey of the Arts and Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer share poems on a regular basis. I am in awe of new young poets like Amanda Gorman.

A few years ago, I started a new spiritual practice – writing a poem a day. My goal was just to complete one year, but I have continued with this disciple as a form of expressing myself, capturing and acknowledging the present moment, and noticing and naming deep emotions bubbling within my heart. 

I begin each entry with the date, then write freely what pours from my spirit. I don’t force the words. I write freely and creatively, usually early in the day describing something I am experiencing or feeling. I rarely edit, but sometimes will change a word or try a new style of poetry. Metaphors appear without effort and offer insights I didn’t see before. My spirit quiets as I gaze out my office window, listening for God’s voice and my own inner yearnings. 

In 2023, I didn’t create 365 poems as I missed some holidays and vacation days and plain just forgot a few days, but on a regular basis I have wrestled with words and played with various forms of poems that capture ordinary moments in my life. These poems complemented my journaling and I found more “musical” than my prose. Could writing poems hear melodies within my heart I missed before?

I plan to continue dancing with words in the form of poetry as a spiritual practice. I sense at some point I will revisit past years, edit them, and maybe print them out for myself as a keepsake, but most are not publishable or shareable. 

I have collected various ways of writing poetry. For example, I experimented with this style to create a poem that comes from Imaginative Writing by Janet Burroway. You end up with a three-line poem using this template:

Line 1: abstraction + verb + placeLine 2: describe attireLine 3: summarize an action

This method inspired these words:

My phone sleeps on my desk near my reach,
Dressed in blackened screen, quiet yet screaming for attention.
Luring me to wake it up and play with its distracting apps.

I have used Haikus with five, seven, then five syllables and Dekaaz with ten syllables, two, three, then five. Sometimes the date inspires me, or I remember a loved one’s birthday. Often my mood or what is swirling in my heart leads the words. Some poems have been a list of questions I am considering. Others name emotions erupting within me.

Another type of prompt is a quote or open-ended sentence. I was inspired by Mirabai Starr when she shared this writing prompt: The Medicine of Surrender Is ____.  I wrote:

The medicine of surrender sounds like an awful taste.
I recoil.
My nose wrinkles.
I wonder if I could actually swallow.
Surrender creates vulnerability.
But openness too.
Surrender invites partnership,
Working together, not alone.
Surrender and medicine are necessary for good health,
And healing.
And hope.
A spoonful of medicine for future life.

The spiritual practice of writing a poem a day opens my heart to creativity, meaning-finding, connection with the Divine and is a powerful life-giving practice. Not only have I expressed some deep emotions, gathered ordinary moments, and learned more about poetry, writing each day has been fun and life-giving. Try it and see what unfolds for you.  

Jean Wise is a writer and speaker at retreats, gatherings, and seminars. She is a spiritual director and Deacon for her local church. Her latest book is: Sacred Surroundings: Finding Grace in Every Place. Find out more at her blog: HealthySpirituality.org and connect with her on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. 

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Sabbath as Contemplative Practice ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dearest dancing monks, artists, and pilgrims,

One of the things that makes contemplative life so counter-cultural is the active resistance against living a life of busyness and exhaustion, of not making that a badge of pride, of making time to ponder, to be more present, and to live life more slowly and attentively. 

We are surrounded by messages of scarcity and so our anxiety gets fuelled. One of the most profound practices to resist this kind of anxiety, to fast from its hold on me, is the practice of Sabbath. Walter Brueggemann, in his wonderful book Sabbath as Resistance, writes that the practice of Sabbath emerges from the Exodus story, where the Israelites are freed from the relentless labor and productivity of the Pharaoh-system in which the people are enslaved and full of the anxiety that deprivation brings.

Yahweh enters in and liberates them from this exhaustion, commanding that they take rest each week. Today, we essentially live in this self-made, insatiable Pharaoh-system. We are not literally enslaved the way the Israelites were, but we are symbolically enslaved to a system which does not care for our well-being. So weary are we, so burdened by consumer debt, working long hours with very little time off. 

So many take pride in wearing the badge of “busy.” So many are stretched thin to the very edges of their resources and capacity.

When we practice Sabbath, we are making a visible statement that our lives are not defined by this perpetual anxiety. At the heart of this relationship is a God who celebrates the gift of rest and abundance. But, Brueggemann says we are so beholden to “accomplishing and achieving and possessing” that we refuse the gift of simply being given to us.

The Israelites, and we ourselves, must leave Egypt and our enslavement to be able to dance and sing in freedom the way Miriam did with her timbrel after crossing the red sea. Dance is a celebratory act—not “productive” but restorative. When we don’t allow ourselves the gift of Sabbath rest, we deny the foundational joy that is our birthright as children of God. To dance in freedom is a prophetic act.

We are called to regularly cease, to trust the world will continue on without us, and to know this embodiment of grace and gift is revolutionary. Nothing else needs to be done. We fool ourselves so easily into thinking if we only work hard enough, we will earn our freedom. But the practice of freedom comes now, amid the demands of the world. 

Thomas Merton wrote in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander: “Here is an unspeakable secret: paradise is all around us and we do not understand.” This is a thoroughly monastic vision, to recognize that paradise or heaven is not some reality after we die, but a living presence now for all. Capitalism tells us the opposite, that we can buy paradise if we only work hard enough and that it is only for a select few.

This experience of divine abundance can make us feel both immense – connected to this lavish extravagance – and small, meaning human and limited in our capacity to fully understand. 

If you are in a position in life to practice financial generosity to support our programs, the doors to our Sustainers Circle will be open for two more weeks. Thank you to everyone who has joined us and helps us to support our many free offerings and scholarship support. We believe this contemplative path should be as accessible as possible and are grateful for those who are able to help us with this. 

If you are U.S.-based and prefer to give a tax-deductible donation without any programs included, please visit our Donation page to find out how you can do this through our fiscal sponsorship. 

If you are unable to support financially in this way, please know of our gratitude for all the other ways you support us and help this vision to thrive. 

With great and growing love, 

Christine

Christine Valters Paintner, OblSB, PhD, REACE

Image © Christine Valters Paintner – Brigit’s Garden, Galway, Ireland

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Monk in the World Guest Post: Carmen Acevedo Butcher

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.

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Writing as a Spiritual Practice ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dearest dancing monks, artists, and pilgrims

Tomorrow we begin a 4-week series on Writing as a Spiritual Practice. The online program begins with a live Zoom retreat and then offers 27 days to follow with a daily pre-recorded writing prompt designed to take you about 20 minutes as a way to cultivate a writing habit. There are two additional prompts each day as well for when you have more time to spend diving into your creative well. 

I am deeply inspired by monastic tradition, one of the great contemplative and mystical strands of Christian heritage, and also present in other religions. Monks were the keepers of wisdom through their commitment to spiritual practice and to the art of writing. Manuscripts were illuminated, bringing word and image together, to shine a light on the poetry, stories, and other wise words that shape our western cultural imagination. 

I have been a writer for as long as I can remember. My journal is an intimate companion to my days. Writing is often a doorway of discovery to what I didn’t know before. When I write with openness to the unfolding journey, surprises await me on the page. When I fell in love with monasticism in graduate school 30 years ago, I discovered a set of practices that resonated with the part of me that loves spaciousness and slowness. I slowly came to realize that the contemplative way can also be a gift for our creativity as well, nurturing it in powerful ways.

Sacred Tools and Rituals

The Benedictine tradition encourages us to consider all things, people, and time as sacred. Benedict’s Rule states that the tools of the kitchen are to be treated with as much reverence as the sacred vessels of the altar. What if we treated the tools of our writing practice as sacred tools as well?

Blessing is an act of gratitude that honors the capacity for something to offer more than we expect in return. What if we began our writing time with a blessing for our creative work, blessing our hands as vessels, blessing the pen and paper (or laptop) as the implements of our expression?

Sacred Encounters and Hospitality

Benedict also wrote that every stranger who comes to the door is to be treated as the face of the divine. Creativity has a way of stirring up a multitude of inner voices, whether the perfectionist, the critic, or the judge. When we resist those voices we often end up feeling stuck or blocked. Writing as a contemplative practice calls us to make room for whatever shows up in a given moment and to treat it with respect, even as it may cause us some fear and trembling.

When the strangers arrive into our lives, whether circumstances that make us uncomfortable, or parts of ourselves longing for integration, what would happen if we treated these guests as doorways to the divine presence? All of life has the potential to become a meeting place for the sacred. This can become the foundation for our writing.

Sacred Rhythms and Time

In the monastery, the unfolding of time is honored as sacred. The monks would pause about every three hours to gather together for prayer. This was a way of remembering throughout the day their source and mission. When we honor the rhythms integral to nature, we allow our own creativity to flourish. Nature can’t sustain a perpetual spring and summer, so why do we expect the same from our creative life? What if blocks were simply times the soul was lying fallow in preparation for a future harvest? What if stepping away from our work and allowing some time for silence was necessary to keep the inspiration flowing? Sometimes we try to fit our creativity into a pre-designed mold rather than listening to our own creative rhythms and how they want to unfold.

Writing as Pilgrimage

In the Celtic monastic tradition, one of the unique and key features was peregrinatio, a practice of stepping into a coracle without an oar or a rudder and letting the winds and the currents carry them to the “place of their resurrection.”  At heart this was a practice of pilgrimage which signaled a profound surrender to the heart of mystery and where it might lead them. Our writing practice might garner some wisdom from this ancient way of wandering. What if we tried to direct things less and yield more to the flow of the current of creativity at work in our lives? What if we became less concerned with product and more so with process?

Always a Beginner

Buddhism counsels “beginner’s mind” and Benedict advises that we always we begin again. Essential to the creative process is the humility to recognize our own humanness. When we fall away from our practice, instead of endlessly berating ourselves, the invitation is to ever so gently return. When writing becomes a spiritual practice, it opens us up to the possibility of discovery, of gentleness with ourselves, and of following rhythms which are renewing rather than exhausting. Our writing then can help us to break open the ordinary wonders of daily life.

Please join me for Writing as a Spiritual Practice which starts tomorrow. 

With great and growing love, 

Christine

Christine Valters Paintner, OblSB, PhD, REACE

Image Paid License with Canva

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Tea with the Abbess August 2024

Note: Click CC to turn closed captions on or off.

We had a lovely time as a community gathering for tea, poetry, lectio divina, writing exploration, program updates, and questions. View our calendar for full listings of our 2024-2025 academic year. You are most welcome to join us!

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