Christine Valters Paintner's Blog, page 46

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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Blessed Feast Day of St. Muirgen(The Mermaid Saint)

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Dearest monks, artists, and pilgrims,

I come to the sea to listen to ancient rhythms and the primordial voice. I come because it is exquisite medicine. I come because in another life I was a mermaid or a Selkie, diving beneath the dark surface of the cold water to find new worlds waiting. I come because this adopted home of mine is an island and the edge where sand and shore meet is always a portal. I come because when I sit and watch the waves roll and roil life makes sense, chatter quiets, I can drink from the well of stillness. Most of all I come because this vast vessel of brine holds the tears I have shed, a sign of how much I have loved this life, this world.

The story of Muirgen says that her village was swallowed in a flood and she and her dog dove under the waves and found a cave. As the only survivor the cave became her temple of grieving. It was the alchemical vessel for her transformation. She became mermaid and her loyal companion became otter. Shapeshifters. Taking new form to express the new identity their journey to the underworld bestowed.

Later she is discovered by monks because of the beauty of her singing and made a saint and given the name Muirgen (of the sea). I love that the Irish tradition has such a wide sense of possibilities and holiness.

If you ask is this story true in the sense of did it literally happen then you have a long way still to travel. But if you ask what truth does this point you to in your own life, there you find the glimmer of yourself, your shining face reflected back in the water’s mirror.

What are the great losses of your life? Where have been the caves calling you to enter, to rest, be, mourn, transform? How did this loss change you so profoundly you felt like your world and perspective shifted? Who companioned you during this time? What song do you long to sing?

And perhaps the cave is still calling. Maybe the floods came and stripped what you loved away and you have resisted diving under the surface of the water and are paddling frantically and choking on brine?

The cave is always waiting. There is always a portal before us. Transformation is our true nature. Dive deep my friends.

With great and growing love,

Christine

Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, REACE

Dancing monk icon by Marcy Hall at Rabbit Room Arts.

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Christine’s Reflection on Honoring the Body

Christine has a new reflection published at Bearings journal online on Honoring the Body:

“My story is not a one-way hero’s journey. I have not overcome or done battle; I don’t want to be anybody’s inspiration. Stories that give the impression that one can achieve victory over the body’s vulnerabilities do a great disservice to the collective imagination by pushing away the discomfort of grief. I want my story to reveal that tenderness and surrender instead of fortitude and domination are signs of strength. I want my story to say that yielding to my body’s needs rather than forcing myself onward is a sign of wisdom. “

Read the whole article here.

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Monk in the World Guest Post: Noelle Boughton

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Noelle Boughton’s reflection, “My COVID Transformation.”

In early 2021, we’d been hearing for a year that COVID was a global time of transformation. That was certainly my sense going into it the previous March, and I was so excited to see how it would transform my life and that around me. In fact, my spirit was dancing with the possibility of what could be! 

Then I smacked into reality.

I was working in a congregation that had never been online, and suddenly had to mount Lent and Easter. It took time to learn the tools, but we did it. Then I was conscripted to start leading prayer groups and spirituality workshops on top of my frenetic communication job.

By then, both my mom – diagnosed with dementia just before the pandemic began – and younger brother, diagnosed soon after, were going sideways 2,000 kilometers away, in a place I couldn’t go because of lockdown. Two weeks into it, my mom suddenly had to move – and I was thrust, long-distance, into the medical/support system of stabilizing and moving her into care. Just as I was sorting that out, my brother disappeared. The police finally found, and hospitalized, him in a COVID hotspot 800 kilometers further west. His kids and I scrambled to get him to their home and line up the care he’d need for his growing list of health issues. 

It was a wild and crazy time, and I was exhausted. Every time I’d hear that COVID was creating a “global pause”, I’d grit my teeth and snarl: “What pause?” The lives I was responsible for – since it no longer felt like “my life” – were rocketing out of control. Privately, I rued the fact that the pandemic would be over before I’d see any transformation in my life! 

I found a Meet-up hiking group and grounded in long forest treks over a few Saturdays. Then, the morning after Mom was ambulanced to hospital for a potential heart attack and I spent half the night connecting by phone with the medical team since no family was allowed in, I broke my ankle in a pothole while walking in my local park. Suddenly, I was sidelined, too!

It was sobering.

I spent most of my holiday reading under a tree, which I hadn’t done in 50 years! Shoved out of my schedule, I even started writing again. And, one day, sitting in the summer shade, it dawned on me that I finally had the COVID-pause that I’d been craving for five months.

It was the beginning of my transformation. I’d started working with a great life coach just before the pandemic – and she was now calling me into myself. Not the less exhausted, pre-COVID version, but the one with a deep sense of call, which had been ramping up for years as I still felt I had a purpose to fulfill before I died, even though I was still trying to figure out what.

I had some clues. Thirty years ago, I’d been feeling misaligned in another communication job while walking in an urban forest. It was a bitter winter day, but I remember shaking my fist at the sky and yelling at God: “What’s my life about?”

Back came the answer: “Write, learn, teach, and heal.” I’d kept it on my do-list since then and noticed those always put me in “the zone”. But, although I’d trained as a spiritual director and become a published author, I’d been working in communications – and seldom felt soul-satisfied. Now, ruminating under my tree, I realized that living how I’d been wasn’t going to get me where I wanted to go. I had to learn to do things differently. 

My coach was imploring me to live by my intuition – my feminine flow – rather than my masculine “doing”/thinking mode, at which I excelled. I’d relied on my intuition to buy peanut butter or choose a direction when lost, but never to make all of my life-shaping daily decisions. 

As I began to consciously live into my flow, I could feel what I intuitively needed – more meditation, yoga, and sleep, and to get on with my call. We discerned that was returning to doing spiritual coaching and workshops, so I started building an online presence. I’ve now returned to writing, too, as it feels like a fundamental cornerstone.

I’ve also started embracing my limitations, which is oddly freeing. I can’t change life for my family. I can’t interest myself in another communications gig. I can’t even hatch a five-year plan if I want to live by what life coach Martha Beck calls my “north star”. It’s scary – letting go and letting flow – but, as American singer-songwriter Carrie Newcomer sings, “If not now, when?”  

Parker Palmer writes in Let Your Life Speak that we can be guided as much by the ways that close as those that open for us. I feel the closed doors behind me even as I start gently pressing again on the ones ahead of me to discern where I’m to go next. I’m very much living as a monk in the world now, awaiting Spirit’s alms, which always illuminate my path as it emerges from the fog. Fulfilling my call is still a work in progress, but I’m dancing, again, with the possibility of what life can be.

Noelle Boughton, author of Margaret Laurence: A Gift of Grace, A Spiritual Biography, is a spiritual alignment coach and workshop facilitator who helps mid-life women learn body, mind, and spiritual techniques to tap into their inner wisdom, clarify what will fulfill them, and clear obstacles to achieve it.

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