Christine Valters Paintner's Blog, page 44

Monk in the World Guest Post: Karen Luke Jackson

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Karen Luke Jackson’s reflection “Lovers of God: Free Women.”

A ten-foot wall separated the small red brick retreat house from the forty-year-old monastery, home to cloistered nuns in Greenville, South Carolina. Sister Mary waved as I pulled into the driveway. She wore a tan tunic belted at her waist with a rope. Her hair, cropped short and combed away from her face, hinted of gray. I guessed she was in her early fifties, a few years older than I.

I’d telephoned in early December, 1998, and asked Mary, who was in charge of the retreat house, if I could come for New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. I knew nothing about the Poor Clare order but my spiritual director had suggested I visit.  I didn’t tell her that my marriage was failing and that bringing in a new year alone would be hard to bear. Several years later, she shared that the community seldom hosted anyone the week after Christmas.  Something in my voice had made her say yes. “A God thing,” Mary laughingly added.

That night I walked a path from the back porch, through a gate unlocked for retreatants, and up concrete steps leading to the monastery’s chapel. As I opened the door to attend evening prayers, the hinges squeaked. Embarrassed, I quickly scanned the candlelit space. Mary was sitting in the choir stall to my left. I moved to sit beside her. A few sisters acknowledged my presence with a nod but maintained silence.

I came to learn that these women, with their more than 20,000 Poor Clare sisters throughout the world, dedicate themselves to a life of poverty, obedience, silence, and prayer. Clare of Assisi, their founder and a follower of Francis, is the only woman to have penned a monastic rule of life approved by a pope. She declared “Only the lovers of God are free everywhere and at all times, because their center is in the Lord within.” 

What followed that first stay was five years of personal retreats centering in God’s love. Seeking freedom. During those years, the nuns prayed for me as I dissolved my marriage, sold the family home, and resigned my community college position to become a facilitator with the Center for Courage & Renewal, an organization founded by Quaker writer and activist, Parker J. Palmer. The sisters rejoiced with me at the birth of my first grandchild and celebrated my daughter’s marriage to the baby’s father. 

During one trip, Mary caught me off guard. “While you’re here, Sister Carolyn, our abbess, and Sister Nancy, who looks after our property, want to speak with you.”

Had I done something inappropriate?

That afternoon, in the retreat house’s library, Sister Carolyn broke the silence.

“For the past year, the sisters have been in discernment about whether to renovate the existing monastery or to build a new one.  Nancy and I feel we need a facilitator and think you may be able to help.”

I took a moment to digest her words. “Why me?” 

“Mary has told us about your work with other communities and we’ve witnessed your growth these past few years.”

“But I’m a Protestant lay person.”

“Neither Francis nor Clare was ordained,” Carolyn reassured me, “and sometimes it’s good to have an outsider.”

The book I’d left on my nightstand at home was Discerning God’s Will Together. That synchronicity was not lost on me. What better way to learn than in the presence of a praying community of free women?

Thus began a six-month journey delving into literature about discernment practices and soaking in what the sisters had to teach me about the Franciscan and Clarian tradition. God took us where books could not and taught me to trust my gift of intuition and sense of Spirit’s movement. I fell in love with these women, each with her deeply held values, beliefs, and apprehensions, each dedicated to caring for all creation and living out her call to a communal life of prayer. Eventually they came to one mind: God was asking them to move forward in faith and build a new monastery.

At a gathering to acknowledge that my time inside the cloistered walls was at an end, Sister Marie, a scholar who’d deepened my understanding of the Clarian theology of place, named my path an apostolic one. “You offer your gifts to a community.  When it’s time to move to another community, you take what you’ve learned and share that wisdom with others.” 

A pollinator of sorts, I thought.

Soon the sisters purchased property near Travelers Rest, South Carolina, (a name they loved) and raised more than five million dollars to build a LEED certified monastery with a womb-like chapel. 

I wholeheartedly embraced my new vocation, offering contemplative and leadership retreats for clergy and nonprofit leaders, writing, and serving as a spiritual companion to people in the midst of life’s transitions. I now live in a cottage on a goat pasture, less than an hour’s drive from that new monastery. 

I am forever grateful that these women sent me back into the world with one of their founder’s blessings, a blessing I now offer others. “May God be with you at all times and may you always be found in God.”

Karen Luke Jackson draws upon contemplative practices, oral history, and nature for inspiration. Author of two poetry collections, The View Ever Changing and GRIT, and co-editor with Dr. Sally Z. Hare of The Story Mandala: Finding Wholeness in a Divided World, Karen companions people on their spiritual journeys. Visit her at KarenLukeJackson.com

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The Love of Thousands Lent Retreat ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dearest monks, artists, and pilgrims,

Ash Wednesday is March 2nd and when will embark on our Lenten journey The Love of Thousands: Honoring Angels, Saints, and Ancestors.

Two significant things about this retreat – first it is content I am working on for a book that will be published in fall 2023 around some of my favorite topics.  

The second is that I will be having a major surgery in March and will be recovering through April, so we are only hosting one live session for the community to begin the journey. The rest of the content will be delivered through written reflections, audio meditations, and video recordings of interview conversations between myself and several guest teachers, as well as our dance prayers. I have been working on preparing the content for months and I am thrilled to share this topic close to my heart with you. 

Here is an excerpt from The Love of Thousands for Lent:

“Angels are central to that same history of yearning and the search to connect the visible with invisible. In cultures stretching back tens of thousands of years, there have been winged creatures who serve the gods and who make a bridge, or ladder, between the divine realm and the earthly one.” 

-Peter Stanford, Angels: A History (page 7) 

A Bridge Between Worlds

Angels appear throughout the Hebrew and Christian scriptures as well as in the Qur’an. All three Abrahamic traditions affirm the existence of these invisible beings who serve as protectors, messengers, healers, and bearers of wisdom. 

According to the Talmud, the essence of angels is fire. Psalm 104 tells us God “makes the winds his messengers, fire and flame his ministers.” Angels are made by fire and sustained by fire. In Islam angels are made from light itself, they are light beings. St. Augustine claimed that angels were created when God uttered the words “Let there be light.” 

In the Celtic tradition in Ireland, the Otherworld is the dwelling place of gods, other supernatural beings, and ancestors. It is an elusive place of beauty and abundance as well as a threshold place. There is no direct portal to it, but there are moments when the doorway appears and we are able to experience a connection to the sacred in a more concrete way than in ordinary time. There are openings that break through our everyday vision so we can see angels at work in the world. 

As author Peter Stanford writes in the opening quote, angels create bridges and ladders between the heavenly and earthly worlds. We might think of the story of Jacob’s dream of a ladder in Genesis 28:10-12

“He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place. And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.”

God then appears in the dream and promises Jacob many descendants and that God will abide with him. When Jacob awakens from his dream he says, “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!” And goes on to say, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”

The angels are ascending and descending the ladder that connects the divine and human. Jacob’s dream reveals it as the very gate of heaven, a threshold place that reflects this very human desire to connect with the invisible realms and the beings who dwell there. 

Peter Stanford goes on to write: 

“Yet angels have been, for millennia, in scriptures and myths, hearts and minds, an expression of human aspiration, hope and expectation, an in-built instinct to engage not only with invisible worlds, but with invisible beings too, as a way of relieving anxiety about living, and about the inevitability of death. Angels speak of and to something all too real and all too urgent in the human experience.” (page 9) 

Having a way to connect with these celestial messengers and guides is a way to reassure ourselves that we have not been left alone in this world. The wisdom traditions make this clear, there is a multitude of presences, and the love of thousands available to us. 

Please join us for a Lenten retreat embracing the love of thousands. 

With great and growing love,

Christine

Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, REACE

Image © Christine Valters Paintner

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Monk in the World Guest Post: Joanie McMahon

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to our Monk in the World guest post series. Read on for Joanie McMahon’s reflection and illustrations inspired by Christine’s poem, “St.Gobnait and the Place of Her Resurrection.”

During my university experience, I had the opportunity to study the Irish language for two years, and I reveled in all the songs, whimsical idioms, and stories that were passed down through oral tradition. My first Irish teacher told us about St. Gobnait, the nine white deer, and her miraculous bees. I was intrigued by the mystery and symbolism surrounding St. Gobnait’s story, and when I was asked to create a series of illustrations for my studio art degree, I remembered St. Gobnait and her remarkable life. However, I am strictly an illustrator, not a writer, and I needed to find a text that told her story concisely. That’s when I found Christine Valters Paintner’s poem, “St. Gobnait and the Place of her Resurrection,” which was not only a succinct telling of St. Gobnait’s life, but also spiritually and visually compelling. Using the poem as a framework, I built nine illustrations around Christine’s words. The process of drawing these illustrations fused my love of Irish folklore, nature, and my Catholic faith, all of which was beautifully wrapped into Christine’s poem.

St. Gobnait and the Place of Her Resurrection

On the tiny limestone island
an angel buzzes to Gobnait
in a dream, disrupts her plans,
sends her in search of nine white deer.

She wanders for miles across
sea and land until at last
they appear and rather than
running toward them

she falls gently to wet ground,
sits in silence as light crawls across sky,
lets their long legs approach
and their soft, curious noses surround her.

Breathing slowly, she slides back
onto grass and clover and knows
nothing surpasses this moment,
a heaven of hooves and dew.

Is there a place for each of us,
where we no longer yearn to be elsewhere?
Where our work is to simply soften,
wait, and pay close attention?

She smiles as bees gather eagerly
around her too, wings humming softly
as they collect essence of wildflowers,
transmuting labor into gold.

~ Christine Valters Paintner, Dreaming of Stones: Poems

Joanie McMahon is an artist and illustrator from Upstate New York. She earned her bachelors in studio art from The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, and she now serves as a domestic volunteer with Franciscan Mission Service. She believes in uplifting the beauty of the ordinary, and can often be found befriending and illustrating the squirrels that terrorize her backyard.

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Midrash and the Psalms ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dearest monks, artists, and pilgrims,

Next Saturday, February 19th we are delighted to welcome Wisdom Council member, musician, and psalmist Richard Bruxvoort Colligan to lead a Midrash Lab on Psalm 23. Richard’s music is featured on our CDs and in many of our retreats. Midrash is the practice of bringing sacred imagination to a scriptural text to engage it on a deep and personal level.

Read on for Richard’s introduction to midrash practice celebrating God as Midwife.

As a student of the psalms, one thing that keeps me enthralled is the wildly diverse models and metaphors for the Holy One. Shepherd, Holy City, Gardener, Warrior, Night Song… 

One of my favorites came up the lectionary a couple of weeks ago in Psalm 71: “You are the midwife that took me from my mother’s womb.” Another translation goes, “You cut the cord when I came out of the womb.” There’s a very similar line in Psalm 22. God is present at our birthing. 

Our son Sam was born in a water tank in our basement in Minneapolis, attended by our midwife Lynn and our doula Michelle. There were just a few complications, but our birth plan pretty much worked out. There were two of us in that big tub. Then there were three! My wife probably could have managed her labor and delivery without our midwife and doula, but as trusted, skilled people, they were invaluable partners in the work. Plus, they were witnesses to one of the greatest moments of our family’s life. Your own experience of being born, as much as you may have heard the story, may be a little fuzzy in your mind.

Picture this possibility on the day you were born: Her hands are wet and warm and eagerly ready for your emerging. Is she tending your mother with a joyous face? Is there an intensity about her? What does her voice sound like? Imagine that as you are born, it is she who sees you and touches you first. Catching you, she gathers you with cord and placenta and places you on your mother’s chest. 

Not only is the psalmist singing of her own birth history, she’s witnessing a lifelong and passionate relationship with this Midwifing God: “O my God, you caught me when I was naked and tiny. You still attend me today, ushering me into new crazy seasons of life as they come.” This God is ready helper, confident usher, fierce healer, comforting, joyous waymaker, big sister, wise auntie.

Throughout these 150 ancient songs, the psalmists sing of deep transitions. Experiences of joy and loss are affirmed as part of faith life. Whatever season you are in right now, the psalms are for you as a companion. 

A last word of blessing from Psalm 121. Within the transition you’re smack in the middle of now, God will keep your going out and your coming in today and every day. 

It is this rich conversation between personal history, sacred imagination and biblical text that will guide us to encounter Psalm 23 in a fresh way. Join us next Saturday, February 19th.

With great and growing love,

Christine

Christine Valters Paintner, PhD REACE

Image © Christine Valters Paintner

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Monk in the World Guest Post: Julie Cicora

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Julie Cicora’s reflection on Contemplative Knitting Practice

After I was ordained to the priesthood, a good friend gave me the book Beginning to Pray by Anthony Bloom. She knew I was relatively new to prayer and that I was struggling to maintain a regular prayer practice.  I was delighted to find a story in the book about a woman who complains to the author that she feels an absence in the silence every time she tries to pray.  The author invites her to knit before the face of God.  The woman takes up her knitting and soon she becomes aware of a presence in the silence. After I read this story, I wondered, “Could knitting be a way into a contemplative prayer practice? “

Knitting for me has always been about love and connection.  Every time I sit down with needles and yarn, I remember my grandmother.  I would snuggle up against her on the couch and she would put her hands over mine and show me how to knit each stitch.  Every time she picked up my dropped stitches, she would hand me back the needles and encourage me to keep at it.  “Results will come with time,” she said.  Of course, she was right, over time I learned how to knit, and the stitches collected on my needles.  At first, I knit for myself and then I began to knit for others.  I tried to put the love I felt from my grandmother into each hat, mittens, or scarf that I knit.  I thought about the women who had knit socks for their loved ones during the wars.  How they must have prayed for safety and comfort. Intentionally putting love into each stitch for the recipient is a prayer. 

The idea of knitting prayers into shawls started in the late nineties. Prayer shawls were a way to make intercessory prayers visible.  Sometimes I would knit a shawl for someone I knew who was suffering.  I would pray for healing for that person every time I knit a stitch.  Sometimes I would knit a shawl not knowing who would receive it and I prayed for healing for the stranger I hadn’t met.  These prayers made me long for a deeper relationship with God.  I realized after reading the story of the knitting woman in Anthony Bloom’s book that starting a contemplative knitting practice could be a way to spend time in the presence of God.  I decided I would sit and knit in silence.  I had tried to have a contemplative prayer practice in the past.  This time, I wanted to figure out how I could stick with it once my initial enthusiasm waned.  I decided I would be intentional about how to conduct this new spiritual discipline and I began to research both knitting and prayer.  I discovered knitting stories about love and connection.  I found advice on establishing and sustaining a habit.  I began a practice of contemplative knitting that has lasted for years.

Each day, I sit and knit in silence before the face of God.  The repetitive movement calms the thoughts that fly unbidden into my mind.  The rhythm helps me go deeper into that place where the head meets the heart.  My grandmother was right.  I began to see a change in myself.  The stitches and prayers accumulated and as the yarn was transformed into a garment, I was feeling a sense of healing and wholeness.  

Knitting has helped me sustain a daily prayer practice.  I knew from other areas of my life that practice is about repetition and consistency.  My piano teacher told me it was better if I practiced ten minutes a day instead of an hour once a week.  It’s the daily repetition that enables the fingers to memorize the movements. It is the daily repetition of contemplative prayer that works to enable me to be in the present moment. 

I am a work in progress.  Just like a knitting project, I sometimes throw my prayer life in a corner when it gets tough to keep the commitment to pray. I know that consistency is about the ability to restart.  It hasn’t been that difficult.  My passion for knitting keeps me coming back.  I make sure I have a sacred knitting project that I only knit during prayer time.  I pick luxury yarn and a pattern that I really want to make.  I knit in silence until my needles fall to my lap and I rest in the presence of God.

Julie Cicora is an avid knitter who believes in the power of prayer. She has written two books on prayer – All I Can do is Pray and Contemplative Knitting.  She is an Episcopal Priest who enjoys leading knitting retreats, teaching the art of contemplative knitting, and riding her motorcycle.

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Exploring the Wild Land Within – A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dearest monks, artists, and pilgrims,

We are delighted to be returning to our monthly Lift Every Voice book club exploring contemplative voices of color and enriching our perspective on the mystical tradition. Our featured book for February is The Wild Land Within: Cultivating Wholeness through Spiritual Practice by Lisa Colón Delay and she joined Claudia Love Mair and myself for a video conversation. (You can also now listen to these episodes as audio podcasts and view the weekly reflection questions on the book page and in the Facebook group.) 

As always it was very meaningful to discuss the book with the author and help break open some of its layers together. The Wild Land Within uses the metaphor of our inner terrain and climate to help guide the reader toward embracing contemplative practices that are rooted in ancient writers like Evagrius and the desert elders as well as more contemporary writers of color. 

Lisa is also a spiritual companion so she brings a sensitivity to the lived experience of people when engaging in spiritual practice and I loved her reminder at the start of our conversation about how spiritual practices bring up our “stuff” – wounds we need to heal. When we begin on the journey we’re often surprised that we may be feeling worse than better. The contemplative life offers ways to be with our wounds in loving, generative, and life-giving ways but that takes time and perseverance. 

We also discussed how the tradition of liberation theology gives us a new lens with which to look upon our faith. Lisa writes: “Being a student of Jesus is a lifelong apprenticeship, not just a series of services to attend or beliefs to learn. This apprenticeship is also an ongoing, intimate communion with the Living One.” I love this image of apprenticeship especially in light of the divine presence who chose to be incarnated as a man living on the edges of empire in oppression, without worldly power and resources, and who was executed at the hands of the state. This is who we are called to be in apprenticeship with. The living example of Jesus shows us the way forward in our spiritual journeys is to disrupt the power systems, examine our own privilege, and question why those who are impoverished and suffering have to live in those circumstances. 

In writing about one Gustavo Gutierrez’s contributions to liberation theology, Lisa writes that “(i)n his commentary on Job, Gutierrez expounds on unjust suffering as it relates to the contemplative life. In the anguishes of lived-out realities, the lowly people can find God and can deeply rest in God, who cherishes them and meets them where they are.” When I was in college, a liberation theology course was my doorway into being able to embrace Christian tradition and practice. I love this image of how the contemplative life meets the reality of pain and struggle and can offer an experience of being held and cherished when the rest of the world turns away. 

The theme that has been running like a powerful river through all the books we have explored is summed up for me well in Lisa’ statement here: “Given the horrors that many people of color have endured, spiritual insights from these traditions can breathe wisdom, life, and hope into the most desperate of life’s situations. By their resilience, continued survival, and instances of thriving, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and people of color (BILPOC) are a testament to the most potent parts of what it means to be human. BILPOC spiritualities embody ways to be sustained by the Divine and enlighten us about the power of community.” 

Toward the end of our time together Lisa led us in a lovely meditation. As some of you know Claudia is grieving the loss of her oldest son last fall and shared in a very raw and honest way what the meditation brought up for her. It was a beautiful moment of transparency and sharing the need for profound expressions of loss. 

We have so much to learn from our siblings on the margins and anyone who has been oppressed in any way, about strength, courage, and resilience as well as the power of community and how spiritual practice can deepen our trust in the divine and resource us in our own difficult seasons of life. 

With great and growing love,

Christine

Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, REACE

Image © Christine Valters Paintner

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Monk in the World Guest Post: Jan Spragge

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to the Monk in the World guest post series. Read on for Jan Spragge’s reflection on “Desert-ing.”

It’s 3am and I’m standing on my back porch looking out at thick fog edging the water. Somewhere out there is a lone goose. I hear her. I hear honking her plaintiff call. Does she hear mine? Does she feel my increased bodily restlessness in these nights, and the way I rise to meet myself with conscious intention to create the space to stay in this moment and let go of the old sticky ‘need to know’? 

My dog rustles somewhere in the yard. Maybe he feels it too, this tension between ‘knowing’ and ‘not knowing’ and the desire to drop old perceptions that feel like prying a pigtailed girl’s sticky hands off an icecream cone. At once, I want my camera in my hands, to take pictures into the night out over the water and see what emerges behind the mist. 

It’s not simple or easy to remind my long-trained staticy mind that I want to fall beneath it and move into my body and her wisdom. My mind’s need to freeze and lock things up is longstanding and well won, with lines of ‘how to’ books on shelves and courses to prove her worth. She’s been trying to keep me safe. Trying to understand and plan out life with her careful movements, I suppose. But, in the process it has felt like dying on the vine. My memory. My creativity. My love of life. Where did it all go?

Craving presence through movement and image instead of running ahead with a ‘need to know’ isn’t new for me. But, hosting presence and spaciousness on an ongoing basis is, and I am loving it. As an odd twist of fate, I am finding this new spaciousness through my allowance ‘not to know’ what method works best for me to access it, and instead to allow for a pulsing of a variety of practices that centre on the visual arts and movement, and approach them all with one intent – to ‘let go’ and ‘create space’. I call it desert-ing, and it is working for me in ways I have longed for. 

What is this desert-ing, you ask? Will you try this with me? Reach and push your arms out in front of you with an exhale, and spread your arms wide while a natural inhalation comes to you, moving the staticy world out of the way. And, feel that. The natural expansion and space that is formed in the newly created space in front of you, and in you. Spaciousness. Presence. That’s desert-ing. 

Some days and moments this takes the form of practices that look like opening my laptop to enter an offering of writing and image on the Abbey of the Arts course platform with curiosity, or meandering down a forest path with my dog trusting we will zig when the spirit calls us to. Trusting the pull to pick up the phone to call without knowing what cascading miracles will ensue, and stopping to breathe and pray deeply at the sight of God’s gifts in nature. Sometimes this cultivation looks like dipping paint brushes in rich coloured paint to depict some unknown feeling as it emerges, and leaving space between heartbeats when I can’t remember where I put my car keys yet again. It’s slowing down to the speed of life as I was meant to live it, and taking my body and creativity with me in tow. ‘Creating space’ where there was no room before. 

It took me a while to allow this, or perhaps better said, to ‘hear this’ need from my bodily core. The first few decades of intentional practice were wrought with trying too hard to fit into this practice of movement or that practice of art, and my mind making me stick with it, instead of cultivating my God’s grace as evidenced in trusting bodily emergence and a natural dropping away. To trust. To pulse intention and presence with the creativity of the body until they were one, much like a bird on bended wing that can hang on the wind forever in a dance of flow. Don’t get me wrong, I often land on terra firma with a thud and feathers flying, but hey, isn’t that life? I figure I am in good company. Those who have traveled paths of spiritual intention seem to have their share of wiggle moments on the balance beam of life.

In this moment while looking out into the nothingness of elephant grey fog I wonder about that pull for my camera and the twitching of my fingers to click away and find something ‘out there’. That old ‘need to know’. Instead, I drop down into my body by literally dropping down to sit on the porch beside my dog and look out at the nothingness. I close my eyes and feel the dewy air on my face as I listen and wait for the goose to cry. And there she is, somewhere in mist. Calling. I choose to stay in the spaciousness of this moment. And, I trust by lifting my arms and spreading them wide, that I am creating spacious room for the many unknown blessings already on their way to my life. 

As a contemplative photographer, Jan Spragge weaves divergent threads of experience into her trademark ‘Woven Images’. Her photographs have been widely displayed in galleries, and are utilized by therapists for their evocative qualities. Jan conducts her Spiritual Care practice from the north shore of Lake Ontario, Canada. JanSpragge.com

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Lift Every Voice: Contemplative Writers of Color – February Video Discussion and Book Group Materials Now Available

Join Abbey of the Arts for a monthly conversation on how increasing our diversity of perspectives on contemplative practice can enrich our understanding and experience of the Christian mystical tradition. 

Christine Valters Paintner is joined by author Claudia Love Mair for a series of video conversations. Each month they take up a new book by or about a voice of color. The community is invited to purchase and read the books in advance and participate actively in this journey of deepening, discovery, and transformation. 

Click here to view this month’s video discussion along with questions for reflection. 

In The Wild Land Within, spiritual companion and podcast host Lisa Colón DeLay offers a map to our often-bewildering inner terrain, inviting us to deepen and expand our encounters with God. Through specific spiritual practices from early desert monastics, as well as Latinx, Black, and Indigenous contemplatives, she guides us in cultivating lives of devotion.

In opening ourselves up to God’s healing, we will inevitably come across wounds we didn’t even know we had. Colón DeLay uses theology and neuroscience to help us work through buried fear or pain and find embodied spiritual healing from trauma.

A contemplative map to the wilderness of the heart, The Wild Land Within guides us through intimate geography in which God dwells.

Join our Lift Every Voice Facebook Group for more engagement and discussion.

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Join Us for a Virtual Celtic Pilgrimage ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dearest monks, artists, and pilgrims,

Tomorrow is the eve of St. Brigid’s feast day, a threshold time in the Celtic imagination where the doors to the Otherworld open wider and we are invited to rest into this liminal space and listen for our heart’s true calling. 

As the pandemic continues on, many of you have asked us if we would consider creating a virtual pilgrimage. We are delighted to invite you into this sacred space with us. Nine days of giving yourself the gift of dwelling in time outside of time and letting your imagination bring you on a journey of the heart. 

This is an excerpt from my book The Soul’s Slow Ripening: 12 Celtic Practices for Seeking the Sacred:

In Ireland, Brigid is one of the three patron Saints of the land alongside Patrick and Columba. We don’t know many details of her life, and there is great evidence that she is part of a much older lineage extending back to the Irish triple goddess Brigid of pre-Christian times who was the goddess of poets, smithwork, and healing. 

The saint is said to have been born on a threshold. Her mother was standing straddling a doorway when Brigid came into her earthly form. There is a tradition from this of midwives calling upon the presence of Brigid at the time of birth, honoring her reality as a midwife of the threshold place. 

Most of what we know about St. Brigid comes from the Life of Brigid written by the monk Cogitosis in the second half of the 7th century. The Life emphasizes her healing, her kinship with animals, her profound sense of hospitality and generosity, and concern for those oppressed. These stories of the Saints are not meant to be literal or historical, but spiritual, mythical, archetypal, and psychological, resonating with the deepest parts of our souls. 

Her feast day is February 1st which in the Celtic calendar is also the feast of Imbolc and the threshold into springtime. It is the time when the ewes begin to give birth and give forth their milk, and heralds the coming of longer and warmer days. She is the first sign of life after the long dark nights of winter. She breathes into the landscape so that it begins to awaken. Snowdrops, the first flowers of spring are one of her symbols. 

Often in Ireland, I have heard Brigid described as a bridge between the pre-Christian and Christian traditions, between the other world and this one. She bridges the thresholds between traditions and draws them together under her mantle. 

Consider calling upon Brigid each morning of the coming days, asking her to help you tend the threshold of your life right now.

If you are feeling in a place of transition, our virtual Celtic pilgrimage which starts tomorrow is a beautiful way to offer yourself a sacred holding space in community to journey through the disorientation that thresholds can bring. 

With great and growing love,

Christine

Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, REACE

Dancing Monk Icon by

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The sky poured down beauty this morning

“The breezes at dawn have secrets to tell you, don’t go back to sleep.” – Rumi

Photos at Silver Strand Beach, Barna, County Galway, Ireland © Christine Valters Paintner

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