Christine Valters Paintner's Blog, page 124

Monk in the World guest post: Sherri Hansen

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission for the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Sherri Hansen's reflection on composting as a spiritual practice.

[Jesus said,] “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit”—John 12:24

Spring in Upper Midwest is highly welcomed after long months of cold dark nights and seemingly endless snow. As ice melts and the world becomes green, I never ceased to be amazed and grateful at this promise of rebirth. Like many gardeners, I am eager to get out in my beds and prepare for the new season. Gardening, for me is a spiritual and contemplative practice in being in the present moment. Each day brings the ritual of watering each plant, carefully pinching away spent buds, pulling errant weeds, and reveling in their fleeting beauty.

One of the most important parts of my garden is my compost pile. Compost builds biomass and adds nutrients to flower and vegetable beds. It also recycles compostable materials, keeping them out of rivers, lakes, and landfills. One of the many gardening tasks done each spring is to turn the now thawed compost pile to redistribute oxygen and moisture. This spring, as I raked and turned through the pile, I saw many fragments of flowers and vegetable matter caught betwixt and between the many stages of decomposition and I paused to consider the legacy it provided.

The compost pile seems full of dead foliage and long faded blooms, but it is a reservoir of memories of joy and happiness. It contains roses given to me on Valentine’s Day, irises given to me for my birthday, Christmas poinsettias and Easter lilies. In it are bouquets of flowers that graced my piano at the release concert to celebrate my first solo piano collection publication. The stems of basil plants, now blackened from frost, kept me well supplied for pesto throughout summer. Vegetable trimmings are souvenirs from home-cooked meals shared with friends. Peelings from bushels of apples, cucumbers and tomatoes testify to the work needed to create pickles and sauces to sustain through the long winter.

Yet there is sadness and regret in it, too. My compost contains flowers from relationships also dead and gone. In it are petals which bloomed “more brilliantly than Solomon in all his glory,” but were noticed only after faded from beauty. Brown, withered leaves abound from fleeting crimson autumn glory. Produce that was shoved to the back of the refrigerator and forgotten until spoiled reminds me to be more mindful of the amount I select to consume. The most painful reminder of death, however, were the flowers that once graced my mother’s casket and like we will one day, have returned to dust.

Yet numerous plants have sprouted from seeds to laid rest, often serendipitously. I discovered muskmelons in a flower bed one year and gently laid them to ripen in the summer sun of my sidewalk. I once noticed several unidentified plants from the squash family and was delighted when several varieties of winter squash appeared as well as giant orange pumpkins. For several seasons, plum tomatoes grew directly out of the bin, vines squeezing themselves out of the air vents and supplied all of my tomatoes for dehydrating.

In the Gospel of John, Christ says that one must die in order to gain new life. But death is not absolute. A seed dies and its outer coat decays to reveal new life within. But in order for that life to sprout and blossom, it must be nourished by the compost that once also began as seeds and now is recycled back to the earth. Joy and sadness mingle together to create life anew.

What is in my compost pile? Resurrection.

Sherri Hansen, MD, OblSB, is a psychiatrist in private practice, a Benedictine Oblate, a church musician and composer, and passionate gardener in Madison, Wisconsin. You can learn more about her and her music at: www.sherrihansencomposer.com

The post Monk in the World guest post: Sherri Hansen appeared first on Abbey of the Arts.

The Call to Savor + Join us for Coming Home to Your Body ~ A love note from your online abbess

Dearest monks and artists,

Our upcoming online retreat for women Coming Home to Your Body  starts on Monday, September 21st. I have been offering you very brief excerpts to ponder your own ways of contemplative embodiment. Here is the last installment:

Only by welcoming uncertainty from the get-go can we acclimate ourselves to the shattering wonder that enfolds us. This animal body, for all its susceptibility and vertigo, remains the primary instrument of all our knowing, as the capricious earth remains our primary cosmos.

—David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

One of my favorite poets is Rainer Maria Rilke.  A central motivation of his poetry is to explore what it means to live this human life we are given, to discover the inner nature of my particular experience, knowing that this familiar life and body will not ever come again.

This life and body with which I wrestle, but have also grown so fond and familiar are not permanent.  I had an encounter with the stark reality of my own mortality five years ago when I was hospitalized with a pulmonary embolism while traveling alone in Vienna, and that experience thrust me into a far more intense appreciation for everything in my life.

As I ponder this reality, a phrase begins to form:  “savor this life and this body."  Then a question began to shimmer: What if the meaning of my life is to experience my particular life, my unique body, my lens on the world, my encounters with grief and loss, delight and joy, but all as my unique story never to be repeated again? What might I discover by remembering this daily? How might my relationship to my own experience and to this wondrous vessel that carries me through it all be transformed if I not just offer gratitude for my life, but savor it with relish, knowing that this moment will never again happen.  What if I were to honor my senses as the sacred thresholds that bring me into communion with the gift that I am in the world? And to trust that this moment carries profound wisdom I need to transform my service to the world.

In the winter days following my hospitalization, with my beloved husband who rushed from the States to be by my side, were incredibly sweet and rich.  We walked hand in hand through parks with bare trees, so grateful to be together and be alive and again I found myself deeply in love with this man, in this moment, and I savored the feel of his rough skin against mine.  I savored his gaze over at me, so full of love and familiarity. I savored the way his breath made a faint cloud with each exhale on that chilly evening. Food tasted all the more incredible and music so full of sweetness and longing.

Out of this near encounter with death arose a sense of urgency for me in my life.  The things I have wanted to do someday, like live overseas, suddenly became much more important to pay attention to now (and was certainly part of the impetus to finally move to Europe a couple of years later as we had longed to do).

The root of the word savor comes from the Latin word saporem which means to taste and is also the root of sapient which is the word for wisdom.  Another definition I love is "to give oneself over to the enjoyment of something."  When I give myself over to the experience of savoring, wisdom emerges.  Savoring calls for a kind of surrender. We have all kinds of stories in our minds about why we perhaps shouldn’t give ourselves over to enjoyment, whether out of guilt or shame or a sense of fear out of what might happen. Yet I would suggest that the monk is called to yield to the goodness of life, to bask in it. It is an affirmation and celebration of God’s creation and an echo of “that’s good” from Genesis.

Savoring calls me to slowness: I can't savor quickly.

Savoring calls me to spaciousness:  I can't savor everything at once.

Savoring calls me to mindfulness: I can't savor without being fully present.

It also calls for a fierce and wise discernment about how I spend my time and energy.  Now that I know deep in my bones the limits of my life breaths, how do I choose to spend those dazzling hours?  What are the experiences ripening within me that long for exploration? Do I want to waste my time skating on the surface of things, in a breathless rush to get everything done when all I need is here in this moment?

There is also a seasonal quality to savoring – this season, what is right before me, right now, is to be savored.  It will rise and fall, come into fullness and then slip away.  When I savor I pay attention to all the moments of that experience without trying to change it.

And finally, there is a tremendous sweetness to this open-hearted way of being in the world.  Everything becomes grace because I recognize it could all be different, it could all be gone.  Rather than grasp at how I think this moment should be, I savor the way things are.

Would you like to savor life more deeply in a community of kindred souls? Join me this fall for the journey home again: Coming Home to Your Body: A Woman’s Contemplative Journey to Wholeness. The retreat starts tomorrow! My apologies to the amazing men monks in our community. You will be warmly invited to join us for the Advent online retreat.

With great and growing love,

Christine

Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, REACE

Photo: ©

The post The Call to Savor + Join us for Coming Home to Your Body ~ A love note from your online abbess appeared first on Abbey of the Arts.

Monk in the World guest post: Linda Lyzenga

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission for the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Linda Lyzenga' reflection on the practice of hospitality in the face of illness.

 I had no idea when I signed the Monk Manifesto here at Abbey of the Arts three years ago how a broadened, deepened practice of hospitality would free me from much struggle and anxiety.

Seven years prior, following St. Benedicts example, I had written my own rule of life when I began a course in spiritual formation followed by a spiritual direction practicum. There had been much unlearning to make room for new understandings and I was learning to hold all of life loosely so as to welcome ongoing conversion and transformation. Even then I committed to daily spiritual practices that invited silence and solitude, cultivated community, kinship with creation, and Sabbath rest.

For several years, then, my life was orderly and structured as I framed my quiet contemplative life with spiritual practices. Then early last year, as my health faltered and failed, I found myself in the tension of putting all these spiritual practices to the test and asking, what was the point?

The first shoe dropped and I found myself waiting. The other shoe dropped. Again and again – How many times did I consult with yet another doctor, asking, what now?

As each new complaint presented itself, the practice of gratitude helped keep things in perspective but I must admit that when pain and discomfort were off the chart – songs of lament – born out of loneliness and isolation found their way into my repertoire. 

Here was a threshold that invited me to ponder the fact that others have gone before me and they could become companions on the journey of illness and dis-ease.

Now, after much recovery and restoration I’m left with one disorder that is, in the words of my neurologist, “notoriously difficult to treat.”

A treatment plan has been prescribed that holds hope for remission.

The initial prescription was for 2 grams of immune globulin extracted from serum. A gram is an exceedingly small amount. These two grams are diluted – instilled in a liter or so of Dextrose. So, what’s the big deal about these 2 grams? Imagine this – it takes over one thousand plasma donors to contribute to just one gram of the IVIg therapy that I am undergoing.

As I sat tethered to an IV pole for the first five hour treatment, a sense of overwhelming resistance washed over me as I considered the thousands of individuals who helped supply the medicine that was dripping into my veins. Who were these people that this collective infusion represented? I felt swamped and engulfed by all that energy. Nearly drowning in the liter of infused fluids over so many hours, I knew my focus needed to shift if I were to survive more of the same the next day – and in the months (and perhaps years that followed.)

The following day, I arrived at the infusion center with a courageous and hospitable heart and the intention of accepting the gift that these thousands of souls were bringing to me.

The clock ticked in tandem to the drips and for a time, I sat in deep contemplation and simply received the blessing of potentially healing energy made possible by these generous human beings. Rich or poor. Black or white. Gentile or Jew.  None of that mattered. We were linked in a profound sacred union. I am not alone. My body as a container now houses the DNA of a multitude of unknown persons – each bearers of God’s image-each one a holy soul. 

This experience has taught me much of hospitality – of radical acts of hospitality which welcome the stranger both without and within. And now, a year since the diagnosis with multiple treatments under my belt, there is hope borne of gratitude and the joy of being very much alive.

I now fully commit to being a dancing monk, in the holy disorder that is this online community called Abbey of the Arts – cultivating creative joy and letting my body and heart overflow with inexpressible delights of love. 

As I go deeper on the contemplative journey, hospitality abounds as I surrender into Mystery. In him I live and move and have my being.

May it be so for you.

Linda Lyzenga hails from Michigan in the USA. Now that her husband is retired she loves to travel – especially to see her California kids and grand babies. She is a spiritual director, mentor, and occasional blogger. You can find some of her writing at her blog, or on Facebook.

The post Monk in the World guest post: Linda Lyzenga appeared first on Abbey of the Arts.

Featured Self-Study for September: Hildegard of Bingen

To celebrate the feast of St Hildegard of Bingen we are offering a $10 discount off the cost of the Creative Flourishing in the Desert self-study retreat. It includes rich reflections from Christine on Hildegard’s spirituality for today, daily invitations to draw mandalas, links to her music, and invitations into body prayer with Betsey Beckman.

Or join us in the Rhine Valley of Germany May 29-June 6, 2016 for a pilgrimage walking in the landscape which shaped her. Your registration for the pilgrimage includes access to the self-study retreat above to help you prepare for the journey.

Details and registration here>>

The post Featured Self-Study for September: Hildegard of Bingen appeared first on Abbey of the Arts.

Celebrate the Feast of St. Hildegard! ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dearest monks and artists,

September 17th will be the Feast of Holy Hildegard, one of the patron saints of our work here in Abbey because of her roots as a Benedictine monk and Abbess, and her incredible commitment to creative expression and nurturing aliveness. She is featured in our upcoming online retreat for women Coming Home to Your Body. I offer you this brief excerpt:

I am the living breath in a human being placed in a tabernacle of marrow, veins, bones, and flesh, giving it vitality and supporting its every movement.

—St. Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias I 4:4

Hildegard of Bingen was a 12th century Benedictine Abbess, who was also a theologian, visionary, musical composer, spiritual director, preacher, and healer. For centuries monasteries have been centers of healing and herbal medicine. Monks would grow the herbs and learn their applications, so that people would come for both spiritual and physical healing.

We have lost this connection, with medicine taking place in the efficient and sterile halls of hospitals. Please don’t misunderstand me, I am profoundly grateful for the gifts of modern medicine, and rely on it to some degree to maintain my own quality of life.  And yet, we have lost so much in this shift from the model of slow medicine and healing to the pursuit of quick cures. In the process we have come to compartmentalize ourselves, seeking the fix for the headache or the stomach trouble, without considering the whole of our bodies and our lives. We become impatient when illness descends, rather than yielding to body’s needs and desires.

We rarely have a relationship with our doctors, spending only minutes with them each visit, whereas Hildegard, and other monastics like her, would have come to know her patients. She would have seen the profound connection between body and soul. She would have practiced slow medicine.

One of the fundamental principles of Hildegard’s worldview is viriditas, which means the “greening power of God.” But even more than that, it refers to a lushness and fecundity in the world, a greening life force we can witness in forests and gardens and farmland. Hildegard, who lived in the valley around the river Rhine in Germany, was profoundly impacted by her witness to the profusion of greenness and how this green life energy was a sign of abundance and life. It is what sustains and animates us.

Greenness became not just a physical reality, but a spiritual one as well. Hildegard believed that viriditas was something to be cultivated in both body and soul. Her language is filled with metaphors for seeking out the moistness and fruitfulness of the soul. The sign of our aliveness is this participation in the life force of the Creator. Anything that blocks this flow through us contributes both to physical disease as well as spiritual unrest.

For Hildegard, viriditas was always experienced in tension with ariditas, which is the opposite experience of dryness, barrenness, shriveling up. She would keep asking how to bring the flow of greening life energy back in fullness to a person.

Victoria Sweet, a medical doctor in San Francisco and researcher in medieval history, wrote a wonderful book called God’s Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine in which she explored Hildegard’s principles of greening in her own medical practice. Dr. Sweet worked in a long-term care facility and began to ask the question of what was blocking a patient’s access to this life-giving greening energy and shifting her perspective enabled her to find healing paths that were previously unseen. She also discovered that simply being in relationship with her patients over time allowed her to see patterns and behaviors which revealed far more into their care than a quick visit could ever do.

There is a story from the desert fathers where an Abba says to a seeker, “Do not feed your heart what does not nourish it.” This can be easier said than done, since we are inclined to so many “comforts” which only serve to numb and distract us from life.  How often do we try to satisfy ourselves with that which depletes us?

What if your fundamental commitment was to only offer your body and soul that which is nourishing and to listen to what depletes you and say no to those things.

I invite you to hold this question in all things: Does this nourish me or does this deplete me? 

To read my poem about Hildegard of Bingen and find more links at the Abbey about her click this link

Would you like to nourish your body with God’s greening in a community of kindred souls? Join me this fall for the journey home again: Coming Home to Your Body: A Woman’s Contemplative Journey to Wholeness My apologies to the amazing men monks in our community. You will be warmly invited to join us for the Advent online retreat.

With great and growing love,

Christine

Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, REACE

Photo: © Icon of Hildegard of Bingen by Marcy Hall Order prints here>>

The post Celebrate the Feast of St. Hildegard! ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess appeared first on Abbey of the Arts.

Monk in the World guest post: Gerry O’Neill

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission for the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Gerry O'Neill's poem about ways to practice the sacrament of Communion.

Strange Communion

No altar,

No bread or wine,

No priest,

No word spoken

To stir the dangerous memory of Jesus (John Baptist Metz)

The drama is enacted

Under a different form:

Paper cup, coffee and hot roll,

Offered up

In a liturgy of love.

The salivated cup passes,

From lip to lip,

Measured bites so all may have food

For the journey

To the sheltered workshop.

Real presence in the sharing,

Joy that is blind

To the disapproving glances

Of those who fail to see

The depth in this encounter.

Tears well up

And overflow in gratitude,

For the gift of Eucharist

Made present,

In strange communion,

Do this in memory of me!

Gerry holds Masters’ Degree in both Education and Theology. In recent years he has served as Director of Mission for St John of God Health Care in Western Australia and currently holds the position of Regional Formation Manager for the Sisters of St John of God Ministries.

He has been key-note speaker at a number of conferences, published work in the Enneagram, Leadership and Visioning. Currently, he is offering a range of formation workshops that are designed to support those who are charged with the responsibility of continuing the healing mission of Jesus Christ in education, health, welfare and outreach to those on the margins of society.

 

The post Monk in the World guest post: Gerry O’Neill appeared first on Abbey of the Arts.

Coming Home to Your Body: A Woman’s Contemplative Journey to Wholeness ~ A Love Note

Dearest monks and artists,

I offer you a brief excerpt from our upcoming online retreat for women Coming Home to Your Body:

Every breath is a resurrection.

—Gregory Orr (excerpt from poem “Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved”)

In the Benedictine tradition there is a monastic practice called statio, which is the practice of stopping one thing before beginning another.  Imagine, instead of rushing from one appointment to the next, that between each one you pause, you breathe just five long slow breaths. Imagine how this might transform your movement from one activity to another. Or even if you move from one room to another, to allow a brief pause on the threshold between spaces. God lives inside our breath and so every breath can become a resurrection.

For the Celtic monks, thresholds were sacred places. The space or the moment between – whether physical places or experiences –  is a place of possibility. Rather than waiting being a nuisance, or a sense that you are wasting time, it is an invitation to breathe into the now and receive its gifts.

Each moment of the breath is a threshold – the movement from inhale to fullness to exhale to emptiness. The breath can help us stay present to all of the moments of transition in our lives, when we feel tempted to rush breathlessly to the next thing. Instead, what happens in our bodies and hearts when we intentionally pause? When we honor this threshold as sacred? When we breathe deeply and slowly for even a single minute?

Statio calls us to a sense of reverence for slowness and mindfulness. We can open up a space within for God to work. We can become fully conscious of what we are about to do rather than mindlessly starting and completing another task. We call upon the breath as an ancient soul friend to help us to witness our lives unfolding, rather than being carried along until we aren’t sure where our lives are going. We can return again and again to our bodies and their endless wisdom and listen at every threshold.

We often think of these in between times as wasted moments and inconveniences, rather than opportunities to return again and again to the expansiveness of the present moment and the body’s opening to us right now, to awaken to the gifts right here, not the ones we imagine waiting for us beyond the next door.

Would you like to breathe into wholeness in a community of kindred souls? Join me this fall for the journey home again: Coming Home to Your Body: A Woman’s Contemplative Journey to Wholeness. My apologies to the amazing men monks in our community. You will be warmly invited to join us for the Advent online retreat.

With great and growing love,

Christine

Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, REACE

Photo: © Christine Valters Paintner in Paris, France outside of Notre Dame

The post Coming Home to Your Body: A Woman’s Contemplative Journey to Wholeness ~ A Love Note appeared first on Abbey of the Arts.

Monk in the World guest post: Rich Lewis

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission for the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Rich Lewis' reflection on contemplative prayer.

When I slow myself down I remember I am a divine being.  One way I slow myself down is through the practice of centering prayer.  I have been practicing centering prayer since June 1, 2014.  The recommended guidelines are twice per day, twenty minutes each time.  Previously, I dabbled with centering prayer.  For a few months, I practiced once per night.  Each session lasted no longer than ten minutes.  I knew this was not enough.  I knew God was calling me.  I knew God wanted me to experience more and more of Her Spirit.  On June 1, 2014, I decided to stop experimenting.  I decided to consent to the presence and action of God within.  I knew that the only way to do this was to follow the recommended guidelines.

​I now center first thing before I begin my day.  My second session is usually in the evening. Each time I center, I am refreshed.  I call this time “sitting with Jesus.”  My sacred word is a mental picture of Jesus from an icon.  As my thoughts wander or my emotions reflect about the past day or upcoming events, I ever so gently return to this mental image to bring me back to the purpose for centering.  I am consenting to the presence and action of God within.

I am allowing myself to enter the fourth stage of prayer that I read about in a recent blog article, Finding Your Inner Room by Irwin J. Boudreaux. The first three stages are:  One – We speak, God listens, Two – God Speaks, we listen, Three – No one speaks, both listen.

Centering Prayer is a practice which leads me into contemplative prayer or the fourth stage, No one speaks, no one listens.  I am simply resting in God.  I am letting God act in me.  Do I know what God is doing?  No, I do not.  My job is to simply rest and trust.  How God is acting within me, will reveal itself in my non-silent actions throughout the day.

Many times throughout the day, I ever so gently return to my sacred symbol when I find my thoughts and emotions are distracting me from what I need to do.  I re-center myself even during my non-centering portion of the day.  When I find myself becoming anxious, angry or frustrated, I mentally visualize my sacred symbol and bring myself back to the task at hand.  During Centering Prayer, I consent to the Divine so the big D and me, the little d, simply sit with with each other.  We become united.  During my non silent parts of the day, I do the same.  My little d recognizes that I need to become one with the big D.  I mentally visualize my sacred symbol and allow myself to become united with God.  At that moment I can get back to the task at hand.  At that moment I partner with God to accomplish the tasks ahead.

Since I began my centering prayer practice I have noticed a few new things about myself.  I am much calmer.  Yes, I still become anxious, nervous, frustrated and upset just like everyone else.  Yet, I notice that I am able to re-center myself much more quickly and resume whatever tasks are in front of me.  I no longer panic when I have an enormous list of tasks that need to get done in a short period of time.  For example, at work, I will have at least 20 or more items that need to get done.  I find that I am able to calmly review my list and one by one make my way through this list.  At the end of each day, I am always amazed by what I have accomplished.  I know the calmness and fluidity of this process is because of my centering prayer practice!  God and I are partnering throughout the day.

Centering prayer slows me down.  I bring this slowness into my daily life.   I am calm yet more productive.  I am calm and make wiser decisions.  Because I am calm and make wiser decisions, I am able to get more done.  It is a paradox.  Working faster and harder should lead to getting more done. I am finding that this is not true.  When I work slowly but with a calm intensity, I am always more productive.

Rich Lewis is daily practitioner of centering prayer since June 1, 2014. Rich enjoys writing short quotes and small articles that share the centering prayer fruits he has experienced.  Rich is on the RCMR team (www.amossmith.org) and is currently writing a book with Amos Smith, author of Healing the Divide.

 

 

The post Monk in the World guest post: Rich Lewis appeared first on Abbey of the Arts.

One-Day Writing Retreat in Galway City

Saturday, September 19, 2015
10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

with Christine Valters Paintner, PhD and John Valters Paintner, MTS

Join us for a daylong immersion in the creative process. We will draw on contemplative practice and mindfulness principles, stories from Celtic monastic tradition, free-writing prompts, poetry explorations, and the expressive arts to create a safe and supportive container for diving deep into your creative heart through writing. This day is designed to inspire and generate new writing, ideas, and tools for personal practice. It is not a critique or workshopping group, although there will be opportunity to share your work. Open to writers of any genre or level.

Click here for more details and registration>>

The post One-Day Writing Retreat in Galway City appeared first on Abbey of the Arts.

Monk Manifesto appears at the On Being Blog

I am delighted that the Monk Manifesto appeared this past week on the On Being blog as well as a reflection by me about it. I submitted this to them quite a while ago, so it doesn’t include our 8th added principle:

8. I commit to being a dancing monk, cultivating creative joy and letting my body and "heart overflow with the inexpressible delights of love."

(You can see the full Monk Manifesto here)

But worth a stop by their site to see the dancing monk community around the web. Stop here to read the article>>

The post Monk Manifesto appears at the On Being Blog appeared first on Abbey of the Arts.