Christine Valters Paintner's Blog, page 157

The Call to be a Saint (a love note from your online Abbess)

To receive this love note straight to your in-box, subscribe here (and also receive a free gift!)

Dearest monks and artists,

November is the month of remembrance of all the many saints of our lives.  It is a thin time in the Celtic imagination, when heaven and earth draw closer together. I spent the feasts of All Saints and All Souls at a small gathering at the monastery of  Clonmacnoise, once a great spiritual community and center of learning. During the Dark Ages, it was the Irish monks who brought inspiration and hope back to the continent of Europe. The question our gathering was exploring was whether this tradition of Celtic monasticism might today also offer light in our current Dark Ages and time when institutions are crumbling. From church systems to banking systems, the world is hungering for a new way of being.

It seemed so appropriate to spend these feast days remembering some of the great monastics in whose lineage I follow and I met some wondrous fellow monks in the world.  I felt inspired and renewed in my commitment.

Last year, when John and I embarked on our great life pilgrimage, it was much in the tradition of the great Irish monks who would set out on journeys steered only by wind and current and the Spirit, to bring them to the places of their resurrection.  We have not known the full vision we are moving toward, just glimmers, but as we contemplated in this gathering the way that Ireland really served as a spiritual center during these difficult times, I found myself seeing our own call to live here as part of the same movement, a return to the spiritual center.

We have been called to immerse ourselves here in the landscape and the elements, to be steeped in the ancient monastic wisdom which took its inspiration directly from my beloved desert mothers and fathers, and into an encounter with the God who is revealing something new right now.  And now I feel myself even more aligned with so many others who also share a similar vision, who are carrying this seed and spark forward in their own ways.

In the month of October, our theme at the Abbey was softening and yielding.  How are we called to release our own agendas and expectations and make room for the great unfolding? This practice of making space is an essential step toward receiving the gifts that are ours.

This month's theme is drawing inspiration from the words of Thomas Merton.  For the passage, see the invitation into a practice of Community Lectio Divina.  Merton describes the animals, trees, rivers, and mountains as all saints of creation.  They are saints because they are who they were created to be.

We, however, as poet David Whyte describes, are "the terrible part of creation privileged to refuse our own flowering." Merton says that to be a saint means to be myself. This sounds so simple, and yet we know how challenging it is, how many obstacles we set before ourselves, how many layers of fear and resistance have built up over the years, how much my ego is attached to being viewed in a certain way, and what I am grasping onto.

As you sit with the Merton passage in prayer, I invite you to listen for this call to be fully yourself and how best to get out of your own way. Let the softening of this past month create a supple heart, ready to receive a new insight, a new vision. Listen for the wisdom that arises in the stillness and then share it with our community.

One possible way to pray during this month of remembrance is to call upon the Saints to support you, as well as the souls of your ancestors. Consider beginning each day with a few moments of silence inviting the presence of a favorite Saint or wise ancestor to simply be with you in the day ahead and to help reveal the places where you move away from your own sainthood.

Or you could practice an Ignatian Examen-inspired prayer of ending the day in reflection on the places where you embraced your truest, deepest self and the places where you put on masks.

To become a Saint doesn't mean to be some contrived image of holiness, practicing your faith in ways that imitate others, but to find your own unique expression in the world. You are a revelation of the sacred, and there is only one revelation just like you.

With great and growing love,

Christine

Monk in the World guest post: Ken Peterson

I am delighted to bring you fellow monk in the world Ken Peterson this week. Ken and I first met as part of the Benedictine oblates of St. Placid Priory in Lacey, WA, when I lived in Seattle. He and his wife were recently traveling in Ireland, so it was fun to meet up in one of our favorite Galway pubs for lunch.  Ken has been working for the last couple of years on his new book, which is officially released November 1st: Prayer as Night Falls: Experiencing Compline. It seems especially appropriate that it be published during this season of growing darkness, as Compline is the great night prayer the monks sing to enter into the mystery of silence.  He has been part of the Compline Choir in Seattle for almost 50 years (if you go to this link you can click on podcasts and here past prayers). You can even get a quick taste of this sublime prayer at this YouTube link.

Free Book Giveaway:

Ken is giving away a free copy of his book. To be entered in the drawing leave a comment in the post below by November 8th.  You can share the link to this post on Facebook to receive a second entry, just be sure to first like and then tag this page so Ken can see the posting.

Read on for Ken's reflections:

A recent drive from my native Seattle east to Wenatchee set me to thinking about what I would say about being a “monk in the world.”

The geography of the Pacific Northwest is fascinating, because the Cascade Mountains divide the area into two distinct climates, which are (generally speaking) rain forest and desert. Driving over the mountains, I experience a feeling of expansion in leaving the big city and the cloud cover, and I rejoice in the sunlight and spaciousness of Eastern Washington, with its stark brown hills and sagebrush.

Probably from before recorded history, people sought out some deserted place to pray and meditate, and we, too, seek a place apart from (as Carl McColman put it so well in his guest blog), “our dysfunctional culture.” There are various degrees of physical separation from the world, which run the gamut from living in a physical cloister to just having moments of interior sacred space.  I’m somewhere in the middle, having become a Benedictine oblate three years ago. Although I would never call myself a monk, I am related by my vows to a particular sacred place, the Benedictine Priory of St. Placid, in Lacey, Washington – in a way that is monk-like.

Being a monk in the world is about living a contemplative life in the midst of the world of work and relationships outside a physical cloister. I recently re-read the story of Mary and Martha (Luke 10:38-42). As you remember, Martha was complaining about having to do all the kitchen work while Mary sat listening to Jesus:

But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.” (NRSV).

Reflecting on this reading, I found a meaning that was new for me: that the early Christian monks had conceived the idea of continuous prayer as a way of combining worldly work and contemplation.  In order to pray continuously, the early Christian monks trained themselves to recite a prayer, usually the Jesus Prayer, during all waking hours, until the prayer itself wove itself into the fabric of their every moment.  The Jesus prayer is:  Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Just as there are degrees of being physically cloistered, we also have varying degrees of intensity in our daily contemplation (I’m thinking just of an ordinary day, not special times for retreat or silence).  There are times where we have to focus completely on some task, but many times during the day when we can stop all tasks to just be in stillness.  It helps enormously if there are set times during the day that we stop to be still and to pray.  And we have the opportunity in our daily interactions with others to practice other monk-like virtues, such as compassion and humility.

My own path into monkishness started almost fifty years ago, when I joined a group that sang the monastic office of Compline every Sunday evening at the Episcopal cathedral in Seattle. Long before I became interested in who monks were, I was singing chant – doing what monks do. And I was involving myself in the beauty of sacred music, which I know now is a way of being in the Divine Presence. The constant weekly divine office and the encounter with hundreds of works of great beauty has sort of shaped and formed me, as if I were a rock in one of the Cascade Mountain streams.

The photograph included with this blog was taken in Wenatchee, which is in Eastern Washington on the Columbia River. I drove my wife and three other attorneys over the mountains to give free legal services to immigrants who were permanent residents seeking citizenship. I was free to wander around the surrounding area, which is known for its apples. I saw this orchard, with the morning sunlight coming through, and had to stop to marvel at it. The picture probably doesn’t do justice to the depth and color of the leaves, or convey my feeling of peace and wonder. Here were ordered rows of trees, having brought forth a marvelous harvest, and now entering into the season of rest and transformation. Being a monk in the world is to pause frequently to marvel and to rest.

My book Prayer as Night Falls: Experiencing Compline has just been published as you are reading this post. One of the musical examples in the book illustrates the concept of the world versus the cloister. It’s about having a part of our mind where peace and joy exist apart from the dark side of fear, worry, and despair. This is to have a monastery or cloister of the heart.

All the examples from the book are on a public website, and my concept is that the texts can be used as lectio divina, assisted by music. I would love to hear your comments on how this works for you. You can listen to “If we could shut the gate” here. I recommend headphones, especially if you are listening at work.

Thank you, Christine, for inviting me to write here. I pray that we may all find a cloister within, every day that we are given to live.

Kenneth Peterson has sung with the Compline Choir in Seattle since 1964. He taught music before entering into a career in software engineering, and has had a long interest in chant and early music, performing in and also directing ensembles. In 2010 he became a Benedictine oblate at St. Placid Priory in Lacey, Washington. His book Prayer as Night Falls: Experiencing Compline, will be published in November by Paraclete Press. In it he tells the story of the history and themes of the office, woven together with reflections from his own spiritual journey and links to musical examples that accompany the text. For more information, go to www.prayerasnightfalls.com.

Community Lectio Divina: Thomas Merton

With November comes a new invitation for contemplation. This month I invite you into a lectio divina practice with one of my favorite readings from Thomas Merton. I ran across it again this past week as I was contemplating the feast of All Saints and All Souls and what it means to live into our individual call to become saints, our truest deepest selves created by God.

How Community Lectio Divina works:

Each month there will be a passage selected from scripture, poetry, or other sacred texts (and at some point we will engage in some visio and audio divina as well with art and music).

For the year I am choosing an overarching theme of discernment. I feel like the Abbey is in the midst of some wonderful transition, movement, and expansion.

How amazing it would be to discern together the movements of the Spirit at work in the hearts of monks around the world.

I invite you to set aside some time this week to pray with the text below. Here is a handout with a brief overview (feel free to reproduce this handout and share with others as long as you leave in the attribution at the bottom – thank you!)

Lean into silence, pray the text, listen to what shimmers, allow the images and memories to unfold, tend to the invitation, and then sit in stillness.

The lakes hidden among the hills are saints, and the sea too is a saint who praises God without interruption in her majestic dance. The great, gashed, half-naked mountain is another of God's saints. . . For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self. Trees and animals have no problem. God makes them what they are without consulting them, and they are perfectly satisfied. With us it is different. God leaves us free to be whatever we like. We can be ourselves or not, as we please. We are at liberty to be real, or to be unreal. We may be true or false, the choice is ours.

—Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

After you have prayed with the text (and feel free to pray with it more than once – St. Ignatius wrote about the deep value of repetition in prayer, especially when something feels particularly rich) spend some time journaling what insights arise for you.

How is this text calling to your dancing monk heart in this moment of your life?

What does this text have to offer to your discernment journey of listening moment by moment to the invitation from the Holy?

What wisdom emerged that may be just for you, but may also be for the wider community?

Sharing Your Responses

Please share the fruits of your lectio divina practice in the comments below or at our Holy Disorder of Dancing Monks Facebook group which you can join here. There are over 800 members and it is a wonderful place to find connection and community with others on this path.

You might share the word or phrase that shimmered, the invitation that arose from your prayer, or artwork you created in response. There is something powerful about naming your experience in community and then seeing what threads are woven between all of our responses.

You can see the full fall calendar of invitations here>>

Join the Holy Disorder of Dancing Monks Facebook group here>>

A Time of Remembrance (a love note from your online Abbess)

To receive this love note straight to your in-box, subscribe here (and also receive a free gift!)

Art © Marcy Hall of Rabbit Room Arts

–Henri J. M. Nouwen, Bread for the Journey

Dearest monks and artists,

This is one of my favorite times of year with the darkening days of autumn and the spreading color across the trees.  I have long loved the wisdom of the Celtic Wheel of the Year, but living here in Ireland I experience the turning points more keenly.  In the Celtic tradition, August 1st was the feast of Lughnasa and the beginning of fall and the harvest season.  Here in Galway I could feel the light beginning its shift and the air grow cooler.  Summer offers endless days as we are so far north, but by August 1st, the hints of autumn were already arriving.

Now we approach the cross-quarter feast of Samhain on November 1st which is the end of the harvest and the beginning of winter.  The dark half of the year is beginning, and the nights have grown ever so long.  In the ancient Celtic imagination, this was considered to be a "thin time" when the veil between heaven and earth grew more transparent and the wisdom of our ancestors was closer to us.

It is, of course, the root of our celebration of Halloween (All Hallow's Eve) and All Saints and All Souls Days.  In the Christian tradition, November is the month of remembrance, the time when we remember our blood and spiritual ancestors who walked this earth before us and leave us with their struggles to find meaning here.  We are reassured that we are not alone, that we share the world with a great "cloud of witnesses" and "communion of saints" just across the veil.

If you have been reading here for a while, you know my love of the dark season and working with ancestral energies in my life.  Both invite us into a season of mystery and unknowing, where things don't work according to our logical expectations. My ancestors have been the impulse behind my many travels to Europe in recent years and now my grand life pilgrimage of settling here to live.

October 19th was the tenth anniversary of my mother's death.  It felt like a significant milestone in my own journey, as her sudden death was a loss which wrenched me apart on many levels at the tender age of 33 when I was counting on many more years with her. I longer for her to show me what it means to mature into a woman of wisdom and a fierce sense of who I am called to be.

Certainly my own seasons of grief following her death was a profound journey of descent. Descent is the path of having everything stripped away that offered comfort.  In the mystical tradition, the descent is also the slow revelation of God. And what I am living into now is a deep truth I only sensed at the time: the more I am able to give myself over to the heart-breaking truths and losses of this human life, the more I am carved out for the possibility of the deepest kind of joy.

These days, I am finding that I live more of my hours from this place of profound joy and deep trust, a place we can't simply tell ourselves exists, but need to encounter it with our whole being.  But paradoxically the encounter comes with a journey down into the heart of sorrow, of opening ourselves up to the deepest kind of vulnerability, so we might be broken open for joy – not happiness, which lacks the depth I mean. To know that the pain of feeling orphaned by the loss of my parents, and left without any siblings, has also led me to treasure community in the most dear way, to cherish the intimate friendships which sustain me. I find myself now at the heart of a vibrant and rich community of monks and artists around the world.

And I know that life will offer up more grief to me in time, and all I can do is dwell in the beauty of this moment now, its sheer possibility, its lavish generosity to me, to be alive and to know how blessed I am, to know the incredible grace.

I have been experiencing life very intensely lately, as if something in me knows how essential what is unfolding in me right now is.  My word for the year is "breakthrough" and I have been feeling it all along, but something has been shifting these past few months. My dear friend and teaching partner Kayce joined me on one of my retreats in the Northwest in October and at the end as we embraced and she said "Ireland really agrees with you."  And my heart said yes and I felt tears in my eyes at the truth of it. Ireland has provided a fertile nest to help me bring things to birth.  Ireland is eliciting the poetry of my soul.

I think what I am trying to say – and really what I always am trying to say – is that I am witnessing to the incredible power of allowing life to move through me in all of its messiness and complexity, to stay true to my experience and try as much as I can to follow the leading of the Spirit rather than my own plans or what I think others' expectations of me might be. This unfolding path always has more richness than what I can contrive.

One of these sources of profound joy has been the gift of dance. Ten years ago I never would have imagined myself leading others in the gift of dance, much less be leading a community of dancing monks.  I don't look anything like a dancer, and yet I have opened myself up to the glorious freedom to be found in the dance and know it as the energy that moves the cosmos, and so now I can't help myself and how I look matters little. And I invite others to embrace the joy and freedom of dance in all of life, whether your dance is through friendship or your work or your art.

How will you honor this time of the thinning of the veil?  Will you make space to enter into the gift of holy darkness?

Is there a blood or spiritual ancestor you will remember during these November days?  Is there someone you might call upon for wisdom and guidance, who might lead you into the great dance of life? Will you choose their "ongoing companionship" as Henri Nouwen invites?

I am delighted to share the image above of one of our spiritual ancestors – as Benedictine, monk, Abbess, artist, musician, herbalist, spiritual director, and more – St. Hildegard of Bingen has long been a patron saint of Abbey of the Arts is the first in a series of dancing monk icons.  I love her joyfulness, her naked toes in the fresh green grass, her sense of aliveness.  She was painted by the delightful artist Marcy Hall.

If you would like to join the Honoring Saints and Ancestors online retreat that just began, registration will be available until November 17th at this link.  All of the materials will be accessible to you as well as a wonderful community of fellow monks gathering to remember.

We continue this month at the Abbey with a new Invitation to Dance on the theme of softening and yielding.

We also have a wonderful new monk in the world guest post from spiritual author and novelist Paula Huston.

With great and growing love,

Christine

Monk in the World guest post: Paula Huston

I adore Paula Huston's work and wise spirit.  She is a fellow monastic oblate (Camaldolese Benedictine) and writer of several books on spiritual practice, including my favorites Simplifying the Soul: Lenten Practices to Renew Your Spirit and The Holy Way: Practices for a Simple Life.  I had the gift of participating in a nonfiction writing workshop with her several years ago in New Mexico through the fabulous Glen workshop.  The Glen is a really wonderful gathering of writers and artists wrestling with the questions of meaning and substance in life.  Paula is a gifted teacher and also offers her wisdom for writers through the Image Journal's online manuscript critique in creative nonfiction.

Years ago, a young newspaper reporter showed up at a contemplative hermitage in the wilderness of Big Sur, hoping to interview some of the monks.  Never much in evidence except in the chapel during the Hours, on this particular day they made themselves especially scarce.  She looked in vain for someone she could talk to.  Finally she was rescued by Fr. Bernard, a diminutive French-Canadian who never could resist the sight of woman in distress.  He led her to a bench overlooking the sea, then gallantly invited her to ask him whatever she liked.

Thrilled to have captured a real monk, she said, no doubt a little breathlessly, “You’ve been here for almost fifty years, am I right?”

“You are indeed,” Fr. Bernard responded with his charming blue-eyed twinkle.

“Well, what I really want to know,” she said, “is why a person would ever come to a place like this.”

Without a moment’s pause, as though this were a question he had been thinking about for a very long time indeed, he said, “That is easy. I came here because life is short and I wanted to live it in the best way I could.”

In all the years I have been an oblate member of Fr. Bernard’s community, I have never heard of a better reason for taking up the monastic life. The monk’s life, when it is going well, is a life of discipline and integrity, one that (given enough time and commitment) slowly but inexorably leads to a new kind of person.  And when I first met Bernard and his brothers, that is what I wanted more than anything: to be better than I was.

That longing was so strong that it carried me through several decades of learning about and trying my best to practice (while still living very much in the world) various monastic disciplines: silence, solitude, fasting, chastity, frugality, simplicity, anonymity.  Much of that time was spent in frustration.  My efforts were so weak and I myself so apt to be derailed by the usual stresses of modern life that the task seemed hopeless.  Over and over, I rushed to the sanctuary of the hermitage for refueling, only to re-shoulder all my burdensome responsibilities as soon as I got back home.  Teaching.  Wifehood and motherhood.  Caretaking of elderly parents. Farm work. Writing.  The obstacles to a contemplative life seemed insurmountable.

Yet one of the great teachers of Christian contemplation, the fourth-century Evagrius of Ponticus, believed that the kind of life I was seeking and failing to find came only to those who did what I was doing, no matter how unproductive it seemed.  He called this early, essential stage on the contemplative path “praktikos,” a terms that connotes both “practical” and “practice.”   What it means is that we not only read about becoming less self-centered and egotistical but actually “practice” doing this through a disciplined approach to daily life.

If we persevere long enough, he believed, then we will advance to a stage he called “physikos.”  We will begin to understand created nature, including human beings.  We will begin to see why the world is as it is.  Or as the great British Romantic poet Wordsworth put it, we will learn to “see into the life of things.” More, we will begin to love the universe, including our sometimes irritating, sometimes horrifying fellow creatures, in a way we cannot possibly love them when we truly only love and care about ourselves.

And finally, said Evagrius, we might even become “theologikos,” or whose who are gifted–perhaps like Fr. Bernard was at the end–with the ability to see and comprehend divine realities.  We might become what the Eastern Orthodox call “pneumataphors,” or “bearers of the Holy Spirit.”  We might become pure enough of heart and focused enough in the mind to contemplate God.

As a “monk in the world,” if this is what I really am, and most days I feel like a bit of a fraud in that regard, I know I am a very long way indeed from Evagrius’s definition of a theologikos.  What I do know, however, after nearly twenty years of attempting to incorporate whatever monastic wisdom and practice I can into my everyday modern American life, is that I have indeed changed along the way. I am a little better than I used to be.  And I do, at rare but riveting times, see the world and its tragic beauties and terrible griefs and inexplicable sufferings in a new and unfamiliar way–a way that makes me want to love instead of condemn it.

As an “artist of the everyday,” if that is what I really am, and most days I seriously doubt this too, I know that whatever I once thought the writing life was meant to be has long since burned to ash.  My early aspirations to literary greatness.  My secret conviction that only public praise, and a lot of it, could possibly validate my existence.  Instead, I’ve come to believe that the only writing worth doing anymore  (not that I am yet capable of doing it) is that which helps light the way to theologikos, or genuine contemplation.

What I have learned is that transformation has a way of sneaking up on us.  Whatever happens along the contemplative path is very subtle.  And it is only in looking back at ourselves from the perspective of decades that the change begins to reveal itself.

For this small insight after so much stumbling blindness, I am profoundly grateful.

Paula Huston is the author of two novels, Daughters of Song and A Land Without Sin, plus six works of spiritual nonfiction.  Her essays and short fiction have been honored by Best American Short Stories, Best Spiritual Writing, and the NEA.  She currently teaches in Seattle Pacific University’s MFA in Creative Writing program.

To read other posts in this series click here>>

Invitation to Dance: Softening and Yielding

We continue our theme this month of "Softening and Yielding" which arose from our Community Lectio Divina practice with Yehuda Amichai's poem "The Place Where We Are Right" and continued with this month's Photo Party and Poetry Party.

Dance invites us to soften the armoring of our bodies and yield to the impulse of life moving through us moment by moment.  We spend so much energy trying to control events, dance is an opportunity to practice the deep surrender we are called to as monks in the world

I invite you into a movement practice.  Allow yourself just 5 minutes this day to pause and listen and savor what arises.

Begin with a full minute of slow and deep breathing.  Let your breath bring your awareness down into your body.  When thoughts come up, just let them go and return to your breath. Hold this image of "Softening and Yielding" as the gentlest of intentions, planting a seed as you prepare to step into the dance.
Play the piece of music below (Vivaldi's Spring 2 Recomposed by Max Richter) let your body move in response, without needing to guide the movements. Listen to how your body wants to move through space in response to your breath. Remember that this is a prayer, an act of deep listening. Pause at any time and rest in stillness again.
After the music has finished, sit for another minute in silence, connecting again to your breath. Just notice your energy and any images rising up.
Is there a word or image that could express what you encountered in this time? (You can share about your experience, or even just a single word in the comments section below or join our Holy Disorder of Dancing Monks Facebook group and post there.)
If you have time, spend another five minutes journaling in a free-writing form, just to give some space for what you are discovering.
To extend this practice, sit longer in the silence before and after and feel free to play the song through a second time. Often repetition brings a new depth.

 

You can see the fall calendar of invitations here>>

*Note: If this is your first time posting, or includes a link, your comment will need to be moderated before it appears. This is to prevent spam and should be approved within 24 hours.

Monk in the World guest post: Tonja Reichley

I met Tonja Reichley earlier this year when I first moved to Ireland via internet serendipity. I was searching online for an herbalist in Kinvara (the village I first landed in before Galway) and found Tonja's website.  She is an American (Denver-based) who lives part-time in Ireland and leads herbalism-focused pilgrimages to Ireland.  And it just so happened that she was going to be in Kinvara a few days after I contacted her, so we met for coffee and discovered our mutual love of Hildegard of Bingen.  I wanted to know more about Hildegard's herbal practices and Tonja wanted to know more about her monastic roots, and so a meaningful friendship was born.  I am so delighted to welcome Tonja to our Abbey community, I have been studying herbalism with her this past summer and have been deeply blessed by her presence in my life.

Read more from Tonja about becoming a monk in the world:

The limestone grey stone walls reverberate with our chants of “Awen*, Amen” as we collect stinging nettles and viriditas-infused cleavers.  The echoes of our chants mingle with the ancient melodies of the monks who tended to this place for hundreds of year.    We feel their presence through the herbs and through our chants.   We are a group of pilgrims, monks in the world, harvesting healing herbs in a 12th century infirmary, now sky clad, just as the church it stands next to in the Burren of West Ireland.    The herbs who offer their medicine to us today are the same lineage of plants that the monks would have used hundreds of years ago.  We, too, create nourishing teas and tinctures with these herbs and are nourished body, mind and spirit, just as our ancestors would have been.

I am an herbalist and this is how I walk through the world as monk.   Brighid and Hildegard are my teachers as are the plants themselves who offer thresholds not only to deep healing but to divine connection.

Brighid of Kildare is one of the patron saints of Ireland and prior to her manifestation in human form, she was a triple goddess of this land:  a goddess of healing, smithcraft and poetry.    She was a midwife and a healer and some of her favorite remedies are now mine: dandelion, blackberry, sleep, water and laughter.

Brighid was so relevant to the Irish people that with the coming of Christianity with St Patrick in the 5th century, she was born as a flesh and blood woman.   She traveled the countryside with her white, red-eared cow, offering healing remedies and unlimited amounts of milk from her cow companion.  She established a monastery in Kildare and she and her nuns tended to a sacred flame that still burns to this day.

Brighid, the saint, the monk, the herbalist.  She is my teacher.  I tend to her flame, which burns perpetually  in my botanical shop in Denver, a gift from the nuns in Kildare.   I visit her holy wells and harvest dandelion to use as medicine.  This is how I move through the world as a monk.

I walk in the footsteps of Hildegard of Bingen, a mighty woman who established monasteries and worked with the healing power of herbs 700 years after Brighid of Kildare.  Like Brighid, she and her nuns tended their herb gardens and harvested the wild herbs from hedgerows and forests and fertile fields.    As a monk in the world, I, too, tend to my herb garden and harvest the humble herbs that grow along boreens in Ireland and in the mountains of Colorado and the alleyways of urban Denver.  Tending and harvesting these gifts from God, this is how I walk through the world as a monk.

One of Hildegard’s favorite herbs was rose.  She believed that adding rose to her healing remedies made stronger, deeper medicines.    Rose, in all of her beauty and sweetness, is a great healer for the heart: opening, strengthening, inviting self-love.  I, too, use rose in many of my healing remedies believing in the transformative power that it holds, subtly encouraging  healing from a place of self-love.  Using the herbs that my teachers used, this is how I walk through the world as a monk.

These women, these monks, created and built the paths that I now endeavor to walk.   Paths of deep healing and nourishment, offered by God through the plants and through the alchemy that we, as monks and ritualists, infuse into our herbal medicines.

The sun shines brightly into my Irish cottage, as the hands who harvested nettles and cleavers and blackberry from the  ruins of the monastic infirmary, now transmute the plants into medicine.  We sit in circle as our ancestors did, we look upon a landscape of grey and green and hills and cairns, a landscape little changed in hundreds of years.  We give of our love and intention as we create medicine.  We receive.

This, this is how I walk through the world as a monk.

*Awen is a Gaelic word meaning creative inspiration, divine wholeness, bliss.  I like chanting Awen and Amen together…  the W in Awen representing woman and the M in Amen representing man.  Divine wholeness, yes!

Herbalist (BS, MBA) Tonja Reichley spends her time in the urban alleyways of Denver and on the windswept coast of western Ireland foraging for wild herbs to nourish, heal and revitalize the whole self.   She loves the power and connection of ritual and ancient Celtic monastic traditions.  She created MoonDance Botanicals, a herbal boutique where all products are handcrafted by a collaborative herbal community and is the author of The Way of Brighid Oracle Cards, a 33-card deck dedicated to Irish goddess and saint, Brighid offering reflections, meditations and affirmations..   Her new book The Holy Wildness: Awakening to Ancient Rhythms of Sacred Irish Landscape  explores how the turas, the holy journey, offers thresholds to sensual secrets, deep yearnings and spiraled awakenings.   Visit her website at www.dancingwiththewild.com .

 

Invitation to Poetry: Softening and Yielding

Welcome to Poetry Party #71!

I select an image (*photo above by fellow monk in the world Claudia Gregoire) and suggest a theme/title and invite you to respond with your own poem. Scroll down and add it in the comments section below or join our Holy Disorder of Dancing Monks Facebook group and post there.

Feel free to take your poem in any direction and then post the image and invitation on your blog (if you have one), Facebook, or Twitter, and encourage others to come join the party!  (If you repost the photo, please make sure to include the credit link below it and link back to this post inviting others to join us).

We began this month with a Community Lectio Divina practice and followed up with our Photo Party on the theme of "Softening and Yielding." (You are most welcome to still participate).  We continue this theme in our Poetry Party this month.

Here in the northern hemisphere it is autumn which calls us into the journey of surrender, release, and radical yielding of our own agendas, into the holy direction of letting our grasp soften and open and be spacious, welcoming in whatever comes.

You can post your poem either in the comment section below*or you can join our Holy Disorder of Dancing Monks Facebook group (with over 700 members!) and post there.

*Note: If this is your first time posting, or includes a link, your comment will need to be moderated before it appears. This is to prevent spam and should be approved within 24 hours.

You can see the fall calendar of invitations here>>

*Photo by Claudia Gregoire

Monk in the World guest post: Kent Ira Groff

I have had the pleasure of getting to know Kent Ira Groff through our mutual attendance at Spiritual Directors International conferences.  We have a shared love of poetry which makes us kindred spirits.  Kent teaches and writes about prayer and poetry in inviting and accessible ways and I am delighted to share his insights into becoming a monk in the world:

Behind me as I write this is Vincent van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’—so anyone meeting with me in person or via Skype sees it. The sky and the village are ablaze with lights, yet the church windows are dark. (The church architecture resembles one where his father was pastor in the Netherlands—now superimposed on a French landscape.) Van Gogh consistently painted his churches without lights. Why?

When young Vincent began ministering with the poor coal miners in Belgium, for a time some churches gave financial support, but then withdrew it, even for food and clothing. From then on he rejected institutional church religion, but never Christ. When I tell this at retreats, I say, ‘It’s up to us to put the lights back on in the churches!’ How can we do that?

One way is to link churches and the arts (visual art, pottery, poetry, drama, music, film, dance) with ongoing use of art in sermons, worship, and education. How about a preacher hold up an art object as part of the sermon (or project art on a screen)? Or break into singing, ‘Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen…?’ Or enlist folks to mime a parable of Jesus as it’s read? Or show a movie clip? Or use ‘Scripture Echo?’  These can be done simply.

A major way is to use art to connect churches with poor people all around us. Van Gogh continued to minister this way with his art—potato eaters, empty shoes, and faces of poor folks. With no worldly success, selling only one painting in his lifetime, Vincent literally lived as a monk in the world. What would that look like for you, for me?

The very best way is to become the art: ‘We are God’s work of art (poema in Greek),’ we read in Ephesians 2:10. Your life is a unique work of art. Michael Card reflects this in his moving CD, Poiema. Gandhi said, ‘My life is my message.’ Art can take the brokenness of life and transform it into beauty. Jazz makes the blues joyous. Poetry and yoga-type exercises do that for me.

After surgery for a back injury in 1974, I literally ‘backed’ into disciplined practices of meditation and prayer. Prescribed exercises have become gestures of gratitude or prayers for others. I’ve found ways to incorporate liturgical prayers, scriptures, and breathing meditations. I still go through times of intense pain. Writing creates a way to redirect the body’s pain. Recently, while teaching a writing class at Chautauqua, New York, my wife had to carry my backpack. I wrote in my journal:

Painting Pain

Is there beneath

this pain some gain

that I might miss

if I complain?

Is there within

my complaint some

vibrant pigment

I can use to paint

suffering’s landscape,

to reinvent my pain

into a space for all

humanity to trace

an arc of beauty in

the dust and rain?

Portions are adapted from Kent Ira Groff, Honest to God Prayer.

Kent Ira Groff is a spiritual companion, a retreat director and a writer poet living in Denver, Colorado, USA, who describes his work as “one beggar showing other beggars where to find bread”—his take on being a monk in the world. Serving as founding mentor of Oasis Ministries in Pennsylvania, USA, he also teaches writing in prisons and is author of several books including Writing Tides and Honest to God Prayer. You can see his Weekly Reflections and resources at www.LinkYourSpirituality.com

To read other posts in this series click here>>

New Art for 8th Principle of the Monk Manifesto! (plus revised video meditation)

NEW 8th principle of the Monk Manifesto:

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

And here is the revised version of the Monk Manifesto video with the 8th principle included:

Monk Manifesto Meditation (8 Principles for being a Monk in the World) from Christine Valters Paintner on Vimeo.