Christine Valters Paintner's Blog, page 128

Call for Submissions: Monk in the World Guest Post Series

We welcome you to submit your reflection for possible publication in our Monk in the World guest post series. It is a gift to read how ordinary people are living lives of depth and meaning in the midst of the challenges of real life.

There are so many talented writers and artists in this Abbey community, so this is a chance to share your perspective. The reflection will be included in our weekly newsletter which goes out to more than 9000 subscribers.

Please follow these instructions carefully:

Details:

Please click this link to read a selection of the posts and get a feel for the tone and quality.
Submit your own post of 750-1000 words on the general theme of "How do I live as a monk in the world? How do I bring contemplative presence to my work and/or family?" It works best if you focus your reflection on one aspect of your life or a practice you have, or you might reflect on how someone from the monastic tradition has inspired you. We invite reflections on the  practice  of living contemplatively.
Please include a head shot and brief bio (50 words max). You are welcome to include 1-2 additional images if they help to illustrate your reflection in meaningful ways.  All images should be your own.  Please make sure the file size of each the images is smaller than 1MB. You can resize your image for free here – choose the "small size" option and a maximum width of 500).
We will be accepting submissions between now and August 30th for publication sometime in the fall of 2015.  We reserve the right to make edits to the content as needed (or to request you to make edits) and submitting your reflection does not guarantee publication on the Abbey blog, but we will do our best to include as many of you as possible.
Email Christine by August 30th with your submission and include the reflection pasted into the body of your email and attach your photo(s).
We will be back in touch with you by the middle of September to let you know if edits are needed and/or when we have scheduled your post to appear.

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Sing a Rededication of Your Life (a love note)

Now it is time to sit quiet

alone with You

and to Sing

a re-dedication of my life

in this Silent

and overflowing joy.

—Rabindranath Tagore, “A Moment’s Indulgence”

Dearest monks, artists, and pilgrims,

I offer you this excerpt from my new book The Soul of a Pilgrim: Eight Practices for the Inner Journey. These are words which have been coming back to me as I begin my summer sabbatical and offering me consolation and refreshment. May they offer the same to you:

I received the poem above when I attended a silent retreat a couple of years ago at a retreat center in Austria called Die Quelle, a name that means “The Source.” The words called us to sit in silence by the side of God, the Source, and the ground of Love. I attended the retreat soon after my husband and I had moved to Vienna, and so I was feeling acutely the distance from “home.”

“Sing a rededication of my life” is a line from Tagore’s poem that shimmered for me throughout the week. When I read those words, I knew that was why I’d come to this place: to rededicate myself to this path, to deepen into stillness, to commit again to the contemplative way in the midst of life. This is why we embark on pilgrimage, to rediscover what it is we already know most deeply within ourselves. This is a kind of coming home.

I sat in spiritual direction and at the end of our time my retreat guide asked me, “What is

your purpose?” Not what I do for work, but what is my deeper purpose as a human being in this life? Pilgrimage brings us intimately in touch with this question.

I went on a long hike on a hot and humid day. Thankfully, the forest provided some relief as I hiked into the beauty of the silent woods, not a single person around. The only company with me came in the form of a pair of deer and ants scrambling over the ground.

As I climbed the hills, I could feel my heart beat hard in my chest, and I relished the experience of being alive. After about an hour, it was time to turn back so that I wouldn’t be late for evening meditation. I descended to the end of the trail and found a water trough with free-flowing, ice-cold water.

I stood, hot and sweaty from the exertion, under the bright blue sunlit sky. My hands trembled as I plunged them in the pool of water and felt enlivened by the gift. I drank thirstily to quench myself. I splashed the water on my head and blessed myself. I felt alive and grateful. I felt at home in the world.

I returned for silent meditation, feeling the exhilaration of the journey. As I settled into the quiet, the retreat director’s question about my purpose came to me. A phrase shimmered forth in response: “Drink freely of the life you have been given.”

I settled into meditation, savoring the gift of cold mountain water at the end of a long, hot hike. This moment resembled my life: the call to become willing to receive freely the gift of refreshment so generously offered to me.

Ten minutes into our half hour of prayer, I heard the sound of rain beginning to fall outside on the roof. By the time prayer finished and we went to dinner, the sky poured forth water. The storm seemed to come out of nowhere. I felt like God was saying, “See, there is not just a fountain to drink from but an abundance being offered to you.” When we arrive home again, we discover that life is fuller than we had ever noticed before.

The rest of my retreat broke open this invitation, this “word” I had received in prayer:

“Drink freely” meant not to hold back, to allow myself to be quenched, and to give myself over to the offering. Those voices of criticism and judgment are just ways we hold ourselves back from receiving the fullness being offered. When we do, we reject the generous love of God.

“. . . of the life you have been given,” meaning the one, brilliant, beautiful, and unique experience of being me in this moment of time.

This phrase seems so basic and something I already knew. In other ways, I am struck by how hard it is to live a life of not holding ourselves back from God. We also seem to avoid giving ourselves over to the gift of our wondrous experience.

Each day on the retreat, in the morning and evening, we lit a small fire as part of our ritual of reminding ourselves that another twelve hours had passed. The director asked us repeated questions: What choices had we made? How would we live this next twelve hours? How will I drink freely in the hours to come?

How quickly we fall asleep again and again to this truth, that life is extraordinarily precious. Each is a unique expression of the divine, and there is the paradox that within the felt limits of chronological time, there is a generosity beyond our imagining pouring forth life into us.

The question becomes: How do we stay awake? How do we drink freely and abundantly? How do we stop holding back? How do we embrace the home within us that calls us to return?

With great and growing love,

Christine

*This note is excerpted from Christine’s book The Soul of a Pilgrim: Eight Practices for the Inner Journey.

PS. If you missed Joel McKerrow’s fabulous poem last week “We Dance Wild” written just for the Holy Disorder of Dancing Monks please stop by this link to read it and listen to him reading it aloud.

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The Soul of a Pilgrim Summer Blog Book Tour

This summer I am on a blog book tour to share more about my newest book The Soul of a Pilgrim: Eight Practices for the Journey Within .

This week I am being interviewed by Sibyl Dana Reynolds at Sacred Life Arts:

SLA: "Beginning again is essential." Returning to those things that feed the soul…art-making, meditation, etc. Can you suggest some ways to become unstuck to begin to reconnect to one's source of inspiration and spiritual center?

CVP: It may seem counter-intuitive, but for me one of the best ways to get unstuck is to stop trying so hard. We often feel "blocked" and then judge and resist the feeling, getting us even more stuck. Going for a long walk, preferably in nature, whether a city park, in a forest, or along a shoreline, does wonders for the creative juices.

Continue reading the interview at this link>> 

The Soul of a Pilgrim is also the featured book this month at Lacy Ellman’s website A Sacred Journey. She has written a lovely intro and invites others to share their insights from the book.

Click here to join the conversation>>

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Monk in the World guest post: Megan Karlen

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission for the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Megan Karlen's reflection on finding beauty in the most ordinary of places:

Perching Hawk

It’s been a number of years since I signed up for Abbey of the Arts. I receive the newsletters, I read the love notes, I have worked through a few of the online courses and yet I’ve been waiting: waiting to find the right time to delve into practicing the monastic life.

The call for guest bloggers got me thinking about how so much time has passed and I still haven’t accomplished the task I set out for myself when I joined the Abbey: to live more contemplatively, to take time to nurture my inner monk.

What came from the journaling I did on this specific theme was surprising. I realized that I am on the monastic journey, and that I have been for almost a year now.

For 20 years, I’ve been an oil painter. I’ve had day jobs the whole time but I have also sold a number of my works. I paint sea and landscapes and I am grateful that people love them.

Flying Fishes

For many years, I loved painting them but I’ve recently shifted. My journey now is less about painting the beauty of the world and more about finding it in the smallest and most unusual places.

I daily stand humbled in front of the tiny, magical moments that surround us. I post images of things I find on the street. I post what’s called Pareidolia; that is the phenomena of finding recognizable images in random shapes and patterns. I will look at a sidewalk crack, bits of trash, a jumble of leaves, and within them I will find landscapes, full moons, figures, animals, stories. These are moments that explode in beauty and, to me, constitute little miracles.

Walking Man Clutching

They usually exist for the moment you see them (because they are so randomly formed and the materials are completely subject to the whims of the weather and people around). These moments are always right in front of us but hardly ever noticed because we are all too focused on our own tasks to take the time to notice what’s right in front of us.

These little images are gifts, miraculous because they exist and precious because they disappear so quickly.

I didn’t realize it until this writing, that I am following a contemplative, and in some ways a very spiritual, path. I have learned to slow down and honor our world in a different way. And I have to say, every time I walk outside I can not believe the miracles that are just waiting to be experienced.

Megan Karlen is an artist / painter living in Brooklyn, NY. She is an oil painter, who also works in ceramics, and is currently learning to weave. ThePareidoliaProject is her daily meditation on finding beauty in the common things all around us.

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Praying, Singing, and Dancing with Monks and Mystics

If you love the twelve dancing monk icons, you will love this series of multimedia resources we have created!

Praying with Monks and Mystics offers a full-color reproduction of each icon along with Christine’s poetry and song sheets in the back to accompany the music created for each dancing monk.

Singing with Monks and Mystics is a CD or MP3 download of 13 songs, each inspired by one of the dancing monks in our series. Perfect for meditation, retreat, and sharing with groups!

Dancing with Monks and Mystics is a DVD created by Betsey Beckman, who choreographed simple dances and movement prayers to accompany each song. Bring the dance into your prayer!

To order click this link>>

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"We Dance Wild" – A Poem for the Abbey by Joel McKerrow (a love note)

Dearest monks and artists,

We have had an amazing spring full of travel and teaching. In March we led a group of young adults on a pilgrimage to Glendalough. In April, I went back to the Northwest U.S. for three weeks of leading retreats and trainings. May brought us to Vienna to lead a monastic pilgrimage there, and in June we led a group of pilgrims here in Galway. The season has felt richly blessed. This work is at heart about relationship, and to spend time with so many beautiful souls in such amazing places feels abundant beyond measure.

Summer brings some time for spaciousness at the Abbey, time for John and I to rest and renew, as well as do some dreaming together for what is unfolding next. I also have another book project to work on and I am excited to have long stretches of time to sink into the creative process.

Several months ago, an Australian spoken word artist whose work I love, Joel McKerrow, was having a fundraising campaign for his new album. I made a donation at the level where Joel would write a poem for me, and I sent him the web page for the Holy Disorder of Dancing Monks to see what might be inspired. I really love what emerged:

We dance. We dance wild.

Not a two step, structured repetition. We dance large.

We dance flailing arms.

We dance the erratic and the wriggle,

the blunder, stumble and fall with no need to get back up again.

For our fumbles are our dance

and our dance is our rebellion and our declaration and our surrender.

Our falling to the floor is a knowing that it is only in the places

of dust and grime and footprint, only in the failed step and the rusty body, only in the falling

that we can ever truly meet the holy and the sacred.

We meet God on the floor.

So we choose to not rise too quickly,

to not keep ourselves together,

to not think we have this nailed,

this life, this God, this mystery, this question.

Our dancing is our stumbling and our stumbling is our dancing

and how disorderly we may seem,

and how undignified and messy,

we dive headfirst into not having the answers,

giving ourselves to a more spacious rhythm.

The song that is heard only in the silence,

only in the listening ear,

only in the unexplored landscape.

The whisper at the edges.

We find ourselves

when we lose ourselves.

The wilderness and the wild.

The Christ who gathers.

The Christ who descends.

The giving up of control.

The smallness of humility.

The largeness of the mystery.

The immensity of seeking the sacred in everything.

Never running from life

but plunging ourselves more wholly into her.

We dance and we feel our lumbered bodies begin to move.

We dance and we feel the heavy begin to take flight.

We dance to find liberation.

We dance to bring redemption,

the untwisting of the beautiful,

We dance to the new rhythm, the ancient rhythm, the holy rhythm,

the rhythm that holds it all together.

We dance to bring space.

We dance to hold hands.

We dance and we dance and we dance and we dance

until we are dizzy and falling.

We dance. We dance wild.

We are the Holy Disorder of Dancing Monks.

—Joel McKerrow

To hear Joel reading these words himself click here for the audio file>>

I am so grateful to Joel for capturing the spirit of this community so beautifully.

Be sure to visit Joel’s website and check out his first album One Foot in the Clay (I especially love his poem Dweller and often play it for our pilgrimages and the powerful poem God so rooted in mystical tradition) and his newest album Welcome Home (the title track is a powerful anthem for artists and The Search calls us to make journeys to the wild edges). He is a very talented and soulful artist.

Will you dance today dear monks?

 

With great and growing love,

Christine

Photo © Rebecca Browne from our recent pilgrimage in Ireland

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The Soul of a Pilgrim Summer Blog Book Tour

For the next eight weeks I am on a blog book tour for The Soul of a Pilgrim: Eight Practices for the Journey Within, offering guest posts or interviews at a different stop each week.

This first week I am interviewed at Carl McColman’s website. Here is a brief excerpt:

Can you briefly share with the readers the story of the book? Was it directly a result of your own move/pilgrimage, or what other factors may have contributed to its gestation?

Yes, it has really been the fruit of several years of embarking on what my husband and I call ancestral pilgrimages, to lands which shaped the imagination of our ancestors: Austria, England, Germany, Ireland, and Latvia. Our decision in 2012 to make a move overseas and go on a midlife adventure broke open my own deepened appreciation of pilgrimage as a metaphor for daily life. I think even further back, my own diagnosis with an autoimmune illness in my twenties, and then later mother’s sudden death in 2003 which left me bereft for a long time also contributed to my desire to see these experiences as part of something archetypal.

You can read the whole interview here>>

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Monk in the World guest post: Jacqui Avery

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission for the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Jacqui Avery's reflection on the living as a monk in the world in the midst of anger:

Despite numerous attempts over the years to create a more dramatic and exciting persona, the two words most commonly used to describe me continue to be ‘nice’ and ‘calm’. Whenever it comes up in conversation with people that I am interested in contemplative prayer, or that I can think of nothing more refreshing than going on a silent retreat, or that I get up very early in the morning to journal, make art or do breathing exercises, no-one is ever surprised: it all fits in perfectly with the image they have of me as this calm, nice, kind, ‘spiritual’ type.

However, despite a life-long – almost pathological – inability to remain angry for more than a couple of seconds at a time, a situation has arisen at work this year that has me raging, furious, on fire with a burning sense of outrage and a violent, irrepressible need to speak out about what I perceive to be wrong. And I’ve been feeling like this not just for a few seconds, but virtually non-stop for five or six weeks.

It’s not appropriate for me to go into the details here, but it’s a frighteningly typical situation where managers (who have power but are not actually ‘working on the ground’) are making terrible decisions that will have far-reaching consequences for many people, most of whom are vulnerable in some way. It is blindingly obvious to ‘the workers’ that these decisions are wrong, but raising objections and making coherent, valid arguments for different ways forward are met with blank indifference, total lack of understanding and a steely determination to keep going in the wrong direction as fast as possible.

It has been an eye-opening experience for me living through this. I have had many nights being totally unable to sleep – either because I am so furious with what’s happening, or because I am rehearsing argument after argument in my mind as I hope to find a way to make others see sense.

Over these few weeks I have found it almost impossible to sit still or to focus on anything other than the ideas whizzing round my mind. I struggle to remember to breathe, or to look beyond this situation to the God who holds all things together and brings order out of chaos. The nearest I get to prayer is a kind of furious, silent, cry of despair which feels like it’s being wrenched out of me in the midst of some kind of spiritual paralysis.

There have been times when all of this has made me feel despairing. I miss being able to sit in silence, to feel still, present and at rest in my body. I still feel a sense of failure as I tell myself I should be able to move beyond my rage and remain focused on God. But increasingly I realise that this is actually a new way of being present, a new way for me to experience awareness and to be open to God. There has been something empowering in realising that I do not need to be sitting in prayer, to be feeling peaceful, or to be consciously aware of God. God is no more or less present as a result of me doing the things I have always presumed to be more holy. I am learning in a deeper way the truth of the sentence, ‘Bidden or not bidden, God is present.’

There are still moments when I am deeply uncomfortable about feeling and expressing rage, but I am also sensing something new and exciting happening in the midst of all the turmoil. It feels like some fresh capacity is being carved out in me, a new ability to hold a deeper range of emotions, to be able to express myself more fully and with greater authority. Although I couldn’t say I’m enjoying the discomfort, I know that as I age I want to become more concerned about injustice, corruption and unfairness, not just get more complacent, comfortable and resigned to things staying the way they are.

The anger remains, but I sense a growing excitement as I realise that just because I am a middle-aged woman, there is no automatic need for slowing and stagnation: growth continues as we age, and change can still be deep, surprising and dramatic.

I’m still only getting a glimpse of it, but I realise that this experience is making me more whole, more complete. The truth is that there are times living as a monk in the world when being nice and calm is not enough: sometimes the only appropriate response is fury, outrage and learning to speak truth to power.

Jacqui Avery is a writer, artist and teacher living in Kent, UK. She writes on her blog about creativity, spirituality and transformation and you would be very welcome to catch up with her there on www.jacquiavery.com

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The Practice of the Holy Pause (love note from your online abbess)

Dearest monks, artists and pilgrims,

Modern life seems to move at full speed and many of us can hardly catch our breath between the demands of earning a living, nurturing family and friendships, and the hundreds of small daily details like paying our bills, cleaning, grocery shopping. More and more we feel stretched thin by commitments and lament our busyness, but without a clear sense of the alternative. There is no space left to consider other options and the idea of heading off on a retreat to ponder new possibilities may be beyond our reach.

But there are opportunities for breathing spaces within our days. The monastic tradition invites us into the practice of stopping one thing before beginning another. It is the acknowledgment that in the space of transition and threshold is a sacred dimension, a holy pause full of possibility. What might it be like to allow just a ten-minute window to sit in silence between appointments? Or after finishing a phone call or checking your email to take just five long, slow, deep breaths before pushing on to the next thing?

We often think of these in-between times as wasted moments and inconveniences, rather than opportunities to return again and again, to awaken to the gifts right here, not the ones we imagine waiting for us beyond the next door. But what if we built in these thresholds between our daily activities, just for a few minutes to intentionally savor silence and breath?

When we pause between activities or moments in our day, we open ourselves to the possibility of discovering a new kind of presence to the "in-between times." When we rush from one thing to another, we skim over the surface of life losing that sacred attentiveness that brings forth revelations in the most ordinary of moments.

We are continually crossing thresholds in our lives, both the literal kind when moving through doorways, leaving the building, or going to another room, as well as the metaphorical thresholds, when time becomes a transition space of waiting and tending. We hope for news about a friend struggling with illness, we are longing for clarity about our own deepest dreams. This place between is a place of stillness, where we let go of what came before and prepare ourselves to enter fully into what comes next.

The holy pause calls us to a sense of reverence for slowness, for mindfulness, and for the fertile dark spaces between our goals where we can pause and center ourselves, and listen. 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 completing another task.

The holy pause can also be the space of integration and healing. How often do we rush through our lives, not allowing the time to gather the pieces of ourselves, to allow our fragmented selves the space of coming together again? When we allow rest, we awaken to the broken places that often push us to keep doing and producing and striving.

Pause right now and give yourself over to deepening your breath for five full cycles and just notice how you feel after a minute of practice. Could you offer yourself this gift of pausing before each new activity for the span of a day and just notice what happens? What do you discover when you simply stop and enter into your own experience? When we create these tiny windows and opportunities for recognition, we are able to see grace more easily moving through our lives.

Click here to read this article at Patheos and share it with others>

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The Soul of a Pilgrim NEW Printable Graphics

This beautiful graphic was created by Ave Maria Press to offer a visual summary of the eight practices in The Soul of a Pilgrim.

Printable PDF versions are available at this page in both large format and bookmark size. Feel free to print them out and share these with others!

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