Christine Valters Paintner's Blog, page 76

Poetry and the Sacred Garden of the World Participant Poems: Carol Everson

Last spring a sweet gather of creative souls joined with us for our retreat Poetry and the Sacred Garden of the World in Chartres, France. We had a wonderful group with participants and I am delighted to share some of their poems. Pour a cup of tea and savor for a while.

From Carol Everyone

Ode to Nurses' Aides

Here's to the handler of bedpans

and colostomy bags

whose fingernails grow

fertilized by feces.

To the bather and dresser

and undresser and put-to-bedder

who wishes sweet dreams

to the departing.

To the listener to stories

told a thousand times,

who knows what really matters

are memories of past joys.

To the humble servant

whose minimum wage

supports, or almost supports,

a family of five.

Blessings on thee, humble servant.

May you receive as much as you give,

and come to know God's glory

in the everyday tasks of taking care.

The Zoo

When she was very small

we took her to the zoo.

In her stroller we pointed

her towards zebras and elephants,

wanting to amuse her with

the rare, the exotic.

But she was uninterested.

She wanted to see,

and to touch,

the pigeons that gathered round her stroller,

hoping for the crumbs

that always followed in her wake.

They were common pigeons,

but still exotic to her in her holy innocence.

Lord, give me the innocence to see

your nearby, everyday people,

as more interesting, more exotic,

than zebras or elephants.

Carol Everson is a retired City of Seattle employee. She worked mainly in the Finance area, consistent with her training as an economist.  When she turned 50, she decided that she didn't have to be "good" at something to enjoy doing it.  It was then that she began to explore her creative side through writing poetry and painting in watercolor. She loves the serendipity of both and enjoys the fun of discovery of what is being created!  

Both of the poems here began as exercises in the June poetry writing workshop with Christine in Chartres, France.

 

Monk in the World Guided Meditation by Christine (Silence and Solitude) + AUDIO ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dear pilgrims, monks, and artists,

During this Jubilee year of sabbatical we are revisiting our Monk Manifesto by moving slowly through the Monk in the World retreat materials together every Sunday. Each week will offer new reflections on the theme and every six weeks will introduce a new principle. This week we pray Lectio Divina with a text from Psalms. You can listen an audio recording of the practice below.

We will be praying with this text: Be still and know that I am God – Psalm 46:10

https://abbeyofthearts.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/1-Silence-Monk-in-the-World-lectio-divina.mp3

 

First Movement – Lectio: Settling & Shimmering

For now, find a comfortable position where you can remain alert and yet also relax your body. Bring your attention to your breath and allow a few moments to become centered. If you find yourself distracted at any time, gently return to the rhythm of your breath as an anchor for your awareness. Allow yourself to settle into this moment and become fully present.

Read the line from the Psalms once or twice through slowly and listen for a word that feels significant right now, is capturing your attention even if you don't know why. Gently repeat this word to yourself in the silence.

Second Movement – Meditatio: Savoring & Stirring

Read the text again and then allow the word or phrase which caught your attention in the first movement to spark your imagination. Savor the word or phrase with all of your senses, notice what smells, sounds, tastes, sights, and feelings are evoked. Then listen for what images, feelings, and memories are stirring, welcoming them in, and then savoring and resting into this experience.

Third Movement – Oratio: Summoning & Serving

Read the text a third time and then listen for an invitation rising up from your experience of prayer so far. Considering the word or phrase and what it has evoked for you in memory, image, or feeling, what is the invitation? This invitation may be a summons toward a new awareness or action.

Fourth Movement – Contemplatio: Slowing & Stilling

Move into a time for simply resting in God and allowing your heart to fill with gratitude for God's presence in this time of prayer. Slow your thoughts and reflections even further and sink into the experience of stillness. Rest in the presence of God and allow yourself to simply be. Rest here for several minutes. Return to your breath if you find yourself distracted.

Silence also has an integrative function. Lectio divina can stir up a great deal of images and symbols which speak to the new thing being birthed within us. In this fourth movement we recognize the need to step back and simply be with what is happening in us, releasing our desire to be actively working on it, and allow it to ripen slowly. We enter the wisdom of night, the place where we can honor that which is nameless within us, that which is still seed and not blossom. We release all of our thoughts and desires and striving and simply rest in the presence of the One Who Is already there with us in the sacred space of our hearts.

Closing

Gently connect with your breath again and slowly bring your awareness back to the room, moving from inner experience to outer experience. Give yourself some time of transition between these moments of contemplative depth and your everyday life. Consider taking a few minutes to journal about what you experienced in your prayer.

With great and growing love,

Christine

Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, REACE

Featured Poet: Marjorie Maddox

Last spring we launched a series with poets whose work we love and want to feature and will continue it moving forward.

Our next poet is Marjorie Maddox, whose work focuses on the intersection of body and spirit.  You can hear Marjorie reading her poem "Prayer" below and read more about the connections she makes between poetry and the sacred.

https://abbeyofthearts.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Prayer-by-Marjorie-Maddox.m4a



And the Topic for Today Is Environmentalism . . . .

Teaching "God's Grandeur"

More politically correct than divine grandeur,

it too flames out in this small Pennsylvania town

where fracking hijacks the headlines. Good reason

and good enough to bring the state students trodding

heavily into a poem piled high with God and earth,

with "responsibilities" they hear each morning

as the gas industry trucks rattle past our windows,

their tired drivers knowing nothing

of iambic pentameter or sestets but much

about food on the table, a steady job.

The freshmen, eager now,

blurt out dilemma, paradox, instress—

and all those other new-sounding ideas

suddenly connected to their lives,

their parents, the sonnet

they think was written last week,

even with its 19th century,

sound-packed syllables they don't get

until slowing down, thinking.

And so, after playing with light, foil, sound;

the way trade "sears," "blears," and "smears";

and how and why shoes separate us from ground,

we detour to Genesis, Cat Stevens, and a heavy metal rendition

that almost drowns out Hopkins with bass.

All this before rounding the terrain-raked bend

to solution, which is what—they are surprised to discover—

we all most want: the eloquent octet, the bright wings,

the ah! that opens the mind to talk

at long last, about the holy.

Previously published in True, False, None of the Above (Poiema Poetry Series and Illumination Book Award Medalist)

Themes of Her Work

I write poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and children's literature and address such diverse topics as baseball, my father's unsuccessful heart transplant, art, identity, living in an unsafe world, and the writing and teaching of literature. And yet—because faith is a central component of who I am—much of my work focuses on the intersection of body and spirit.

In my current book project, Seeing Things, I address memory within several parent/child relationships, including the beginning stages of my mother's dementia and my daughter's health issues. The manuscript also examines the ways we distort or preserve memory, define or alter reality, see or don't see those around us. I look forward to learning—through poetry and God's grace—what I will discover along the way.

Rocking Chair Hymn

And praise be this chair

with its waltz of the heart

that dips with the breeze

and the lilt of the lark.

And praise the pulse there

in the stretch of the limbs

in both person and tree

as we two-step with Him

in the motion of nature,

the beat we breathe in,

the rhythm of earth,

the dance and the hymn.

from True, False, None of the Above (Poiema Poetry Series and winner of the Illumination Book Award)

Poetry and the Sacred

In the dizzying spinning of our lives, poetry has the ability to lead us—as T. S. Eliot might say—to "the still point of the turning world," that place of quiet contemplation where the natural and spiritual often intersect. Although I would not equate prayer with poetry, the two share the need for sustained pause and meditation, a slowing down of our hectic lifestyles, an openness to discovery, and a desire for communion with the Divine. "Be still and know" is also true with poetry. Here, if you listen, you may hear the voice of God.

You also will hear the cries, laughter, and struggles of those like and unlike yourself. This, too, is the work of poetry: empathy and epiphany. The process of writing and reading allows us to better understand this world and the next. Poetry connects the local and universal, the mundane and the miraculous. It gives us those ears to hear and eyes to see that we might, then, head back into the turning world sustained, nourished, and willing to learn more. And will this not lead us to the Sacred? Yes, I say. Yes.

Eucharist

Host

the small circle of face

we see by

in light of wine

the sliver of why

that bends the bones

begs "Come!"

the orbed cross

bright in the palm

of the poor

the crucified moon

nailed high

on the night of tongue

Chalice

To sip is to sing the Amen

into veins, sweeten

the soured tongue.

But first: lips

pursed with it,

hollowed mouth brimming

with want.

This is the swallowing

of what spewed out: spears

stuck long in the side,

thorns thick in the skin.

No trickle.

A Hallelujah

torrent down the throat.

previously published in Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Yellowglen Prize; reissued 2018 Wipf and Stock)

About Marjorie Maddox

Winner of America Magazine's 2019 Foley Poetry Prize, Sage Graduate Fellow of Cornell University (MFA), and Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published 11 collections of poetry—including Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Yellowglen Prize); True, False, None of the Above (Poiema Poetry Series; Illumination Book Award Medalist); Local News from Someplace Else; Perpendicular As I (Sandstone Book Award)—the short story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite); children's books; Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (co-editor); Presence (assistant editor); and 550+ stories, essays, and poems in journals and anthologies. She gives readings and workshops around the country. Please see MarjorieMaddox.com

Books

Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation

True, False, None of the Above

Local News from Someplace Else

Wives' Tales

Dreaming of Stones

Christine Valters Paintner's new collection of poems Dreaming of Stones has just been published by Paraclete Press.

The poems in Dreaming of Stones are about what endures: hope and desire, changing seasons, wild places, love, and the wisdom of mystics. Inspired by the poet's time living in Ireland these readings invite you into deeper ways of seeing the world. They have an incantational quality. Drawing on her commitment as a Benedictine oblate, the poems arise out of a practice of sitting in silence and lectio divina, in which life becomes the holy text.

[image error]

Monk in the World Reflection by Christine (Silence and Solitude) + AUDIO ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dear pilgrims, monks, artists,

Please note:  This reflection was written when we lived in Seattle and had a dog named Winter. We currently live in Galway, Ireland with our dog Sourney.

If you'd prefer to listen to Christine on silence here is the audio version.

https://abbeyofthearts.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/1-Monk-in-the-World-Silence.mp3

 

Being a monk in the world means, for me, choosing to live contemplatively in resistance to the demand for speed, to live mindfully and with intention instead of rushing through life, to savor my experience rather than consume it, and to remember that my self-worth is not defined by how much I do or achieve, and so I am called to make time for simply being.

At the heart of contemplative prayer is an encounter with the Holy One who mystics like John of the Cross tell us dwells in our hearts as a "living flame of love". Contemplative living is about relationship and extending that infinite source of compassion within us to self, others, and creation.

Those of you who know my love for animals, and especially my canine companion Winter, know that any poet who can write about the wisdom of dogs is guaranteed a place on my bookshelf. Of course, dogs are known for their heightened sense of hearing and smell. I often wonder how Winter experiences the world, what she notices that I remain oblivious to in a wash of the urban hum. I wonder at what subtleties I miss.  I ponder the possibilities:

What does a flower sound like as its shoot first breaks through the soil of newly warmed earth?

What is the noise a sea turtle makes as it slides its fins through the salty water of ocean depths?

Can you hear the music of your ancestors dancing, surrounding you, calling you to a greater vision?

Do you listen for the song your own body sings as it grows older, its skin stretching to make room for all the wisdom contained within?

Could it be as beautiful as the whisper of the stars exploding galaxies away in a profusion of color?

Or as lovely as the grace of a dog who comes and puts her paw on your lap, her own not very subtle way of asking to be taken into your arms and reassured of love through word and touch?

Are you listening?

A few wise words from Thomas Merton (from A Year with Thomas Merton):

When your tongue is silent, you can rest in the silence of the forest. When your imagination is silent, the forest speaks to you, tells you of its unreality and of the Reality of God. But when your mind is silent, then the forest becomes magnificently real and blazes transparently with the Reality of God.

Silence requires practice because in the course of our everyday lives noise is the norm rather than silence.  Sometimes when we sit down to a time of silence we can be overwhelmed by the chatter of our minds.

Through practice we can become fully present to this inner chatter, being compassionate with ourselves.  We resist the silence often because we are afraid of what will be revealed and yet the only way is to awaken fully to ourselves.

We may be tempted to think that those who live in monasteries have the advantage over those of us living "in the world."  We might even begin to dismiss our own capacity or desire for silence because it feels so hard wherever we are. But I love being an urban monk, precisely because I know that being a contemplative is not dependent upon location.  While times of retreat are essential as ways to return us deeply to ourselves, ultimately it is in our daily lives that we discover the deep stillness offered to us.

The desert mothers and fathers who were the early Christians of the 3rd to 5th centuries have much wisdom to offer us.

Amma Syncletica said, "There are many who live in the mountains and behave as if they were in town, and they are wasting their time.  It is possible to be a solitary in one's mind while living in a crowd, and it is possible for one who is a solitary to live in the crowd of his own thoughts."  (Syncletica 19)

I live in the heart of Seattle in its most densely populated neighborhood.  My monastic cell is a small 2-bedroom apartment which I share with my husband and dog.  I love to go away on retreat, especially by the sea, but I would be fooling myself if I believed that living by the sea all the time would necessarily foster more inner silence.  We may be tempted to think that those who live in monasteries have the advantage over those of us living "in the world."  We might even begin to dismiss our own capacity or desire for silence because it feels so hard wherever we are.

Most of us have probably had the experience of sitting down to meditate and our minds are noisy with chatter, never seeming to rest.  Equally so, we have also likely had moments in the midst of life's frenzied pace when suddenly we were overcome by a deep inner stillness and peace about things.  It may have been the way the light was reflecting off a loved one's face or remembering to take a deep breath that called us back to ourselves.

The ancient desert monks wrote extensively about the kinds of thoughts we are likely to encounter in the stillness of prayer.   From anger to laziness to lustfulness, the practice was to meet these thoughts and name them for what they are—perversions of ourselves, distractions from the movement toward our deepest, most authentic self.  How they worked with these is to cultivate their opposites, the virtues. When we find ourselves impatient, we seek to bring in the quality of patience to our lives.  When we find ourselves angry or resentful we bring in the quality of gratitude.  The work is to first notice the thoughts rising and meet them with compassion and curiosity.

If our mind is racing or we feel filled with anxiety or uneasiness, we return to the breath as a way of calming both body and mind.  We then seek to cultivate the virtue in our hearts that helps us to quell the insistence of this voice within us.  We slowly move to the place of releasing thoughts altogether, where we open ourselves to the Holy Other in which we find rest.

When I show up each morning for my own practice of being with silence in meditation, sometimes that time is filled with abiding stillness and more often there are waves of emotion rising. Sometimes those feelings are unexpected, ones I wasn't anticipating and would rather not experience.  The emotions are a bridge between our minds and bodies.  When we feel sad or angry, we experience it both as a thought and as an experience in our bodies.  What we often do is to let our thoughts carry us far away from our actual experience and avoid feeling deeply what is happening in the body.

My husband and I adopted a dog named Winter in early January.  She was rescued after being abandoned on a farm and left to freeze to death.  She survived but her puppies did not.  It has taken time and the slow building of trust, but now nearly a year later she has settled in with us well.  I like to call her Amma Winter because of the wilderness experience she had and because my dogs are always sources of great wisdom in my life.  Winter is a very quiet dog, she doesn't bark when someone comes to the door or when left alone for a little while.  When we first took her in we joked that she had perhaps taken a vow of silence.  Now that she has become more at ease we have found that the only time she does bark is out at the dog park when she wants to play with another dog.  Her voice comes alive in those moments of inviting play, attention, and delight.

I have been thinking about her a great deal these last few days in light of the desert commitment to seeking silence.  She offers me wisdom about what it means to be selective about my words.  Cultivating silence is about making space for another voice to speak.  Silence is a presence rather than an absence.   I can fill my day with endless words or I can choose when to speak and when to keep silent.  How often do I engage in conversation and anticipate my next words without truly attending to what is being said in that moment?



For the desert elders, silence isn't just the absence of sound but a form of human consciousness.

It was said of Abba Agathon that for three years he lived with a stone in his mouth, until he had learnt to keep silence. (Agathon 15)

This silence of the heart is a profound place of moving beyond ego, judgments, and dualistic thinking to witness the presence of the divine.  In the Rule of St Benedict, he writes in chapter 42 that "1Monks should diligently cultivate silence at all times, but especially at night."  This is the heart of being a monk in the world, carrying this silence into everything we do, letting go of the endless chatter that fills our minds and hearts and takes away our clarity.  Even when we cannot control the external noise of the world, we can cultivate an internal silence and peace.

The heart is the source of words and actions.  It was considered to be an "axial" organ that centers the physical and spiritual dimensions of human life.  Silence makes space within our hearts for grace to cultivate our lives like a fertile field.  In silence we can experience a sense of inner expansiveness which makes more room for God's presence.

We practice silence not just for its own sake. We cultivate silence so that we might hear another voice deeper than our own. We cultivate the conditions to encounter the presence of God.

The only thing we can do is practice, show up every day, for just a few moments. Turn off the TV, the radio, the computer, the phone, go into a room and close the door, it might even be your car. Close your eyes and rest.  Voices will arise, but gently and compassionately let them go and simply dwell in the space of silence.

"You stand outside the door, reading one more book about how to open the door. You note in your journal one more thought about what it might be like. Yet the longings of your heart remain . . . Let today be the day you open the door of your heart to God." -Joyce Rupp, Open the Door: A Journey to the True Self

That door is usually the door to silence.  You perhaps read many wise and wonderful books about being contemplative, you journal about what it would be like to have more silence in your life, you think all kinds of beautiful thoughts about silence, and yet how often do you actually make the space for silence to enter your being?  How often do you simply let go of all the striving, the desire to do and achieve and make perfect, and simply rest into the one who is already perfect, the one who holds you in a stillness more beautiful than anything you can imagine for yourself.  It is simply a gift to receive.  Let today be the day you open the door of your heart and simply receive the silence.  Simply listen to what is shimmering there for you.

Pay attention to the longings they stir in you. And most important of all, keep showing up to practice.

With great and growing love,

Christine

Christine Valters Painter, PhD, REACE

Monk in the World Guest Post: Nicole Walters

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Nicole Walters' reflection "The Rhythms of the Dawn."

The quiet of the morning is broken by the alarm that starts off on the periphery of a dream and shifts to a nagging pull into reality. I stumble out of bed, untangling the little limbs wrapped around my body. 

In the dark I can't decipher which child is to my right and who is to my left but I don't want to wake either one. My husband lies across the abyss, cradling the far edge of the bed to make room for our children who found their way between us sometime in the night.

Everything in me wants to return to the comfort of sheets tangled up and to little blond heads waiting to cuddle up against my chest for a couple more hours. Most days that is exactly what I do: I shut the world out for a while longer, find my way back to the quiet and simple hours before the chaos of the day starts to pull me in four different directions away from them.

The days I allow myself to hit snooze I wake feeling defeated, knowing I failed at my first attempt at self-discipline for the day. I am desperate to bend my will to the call of the early morning.

I know I will handle all that chaos better if I prepare myself now, so today at least, I make my way downstairs in the dark, just the light from the moon illuminating the path.

***

I move through the space, my body waking up before my mind. My muscles remember the patterns without much effort. Downward Dog anchors me back to a place of quiet, both waking me and allowing me to find rest. The dichotomy isn't lost on me. It is the kind of rhythm I am trying to find in the remainder of my day—finding ways to be still inside even when I race around in the raging world.

Once my mind catches up to my muscles I find my way to the chair in the corner, blanket thrown across my lap and Bible open before me. My mind remembers the words without too much effort. I have read them, in varying degrees of regularity, since I was a young adult. My heart takes a little longer to follow suit, to remember the ways these verses anchor me back to a place of quiet trust. I practice being still and knowing in this place, hoping it will carry me through another day.

***

The light starts to filter in through the crack under the door and I make my way outside into my favorite part of the day. Every morning that I manage to wake up before my family, quietly moving through these rhythms, I tell myself that this moment is worth it all. This is that thin place between night and day. The light tugs on the horizon, not yet day but breaking through the stillness of night. The birds know it is coming before I do, already singing by the time the first rays peek over the branches.

I close my eyes and try to internalize this moment as I breathe out the sacred word that brings me back to my centering prayer. I relish the way the sun takes its time bringing day into the world. The day breaks gently, like that alarm clock that slowly makes its way into my consciousness. I find myself wishing more of life were slow and simple like the dawn. Then I remember the rhythm I created this morning and I realize it's my choice to create the slow, the simple. 

The sound of little feet on the stairs tells me that the rest of the house is waking up. I return inside and smile as I scoop him up in my arms. We head back upstairs, the sunlight now illuminating the path. I head into the day, carrying a little bit of the dawn with me.

Nicole T. Walters is a writer who lives somewhere in the tension between wanderlust and rootedness. She makes her home in Georgia with her husband and two children but has lived and left parts of her heart in the Middle East and South Asia. Connect with her at NicoleTWalters.com

Reflection by John (Silence and Solitude) ~ A Note from Your Online Prior

Dear pilgrims, monks, and artists,

During this Jubilee year of sabbatical we are revisiting our Monk Manifesto by moving slowly through the Monk in the World retreat materials together every Sunday. Each week will offer new reflections on the theme and every six weeks will introduce a new principle.

Mark 6:31-33

He said to them, 'Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.' For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. And they went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves. Now many saw them going and recognized them, and they hurried there on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them.

Background

The sixth chapter of the Gospel of Mark begins with Jesus returning to his home town. He goes to the synagogue on the Sabbath and preaches to his old neighbours and relatives, people he grew up with. The community is astonished! But it's not a good, amazed kind of stunned. What really shocks them is that such wisdom could come from someone they know, from someone who grew up in the same small village they did. They couldn't get past the child they knew to take in the man he'd become. Ultimately, Jesus had to leave, as the people wouldn't allow him to go about his mission.

And so Jesus decides to branch out by going to other villages. He sends the Apostles, in pairs, to villages around the region. Jesus sends them out with very little in way of provisions and tells them not to stay in a place if they are not wanted. The Apostles preach and heal and perform miracles, spreading the Good News of the Messiah.

Because of the miracles Jesus performs, rumours began to circulate that he was John the Baptist or perhaps even Elijah returned. Jesus is a local celebrity, growing in fame and popularity.

When the Apostles returned to Jesus and told him everything they had done, Jesus said to them: "Come away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while."

Jesus, finding himself suddenly surrounded by a growing horde of admiring and even just curious crowds, must get away. He needs time to rest before he can continue. Jesus can't be "on" all the time. It's not good for Jesus or the Apostles. Silence and solitude is needed.

Reflection

There are several examples of Jesus trying to get away from the crowds, away from the noise and confusion of civilization. Even before he began his public ministry, Jesus famously went alone into the wilderness for forty days.

But what is remarkable about this particular incident is that Jesus tells his disciples, fresh back from their own missionary work, to go on retreat. Jesus tells his followers to come away with him to a quiet place and rest.

It is a reinforcement of the importance of silence and solitude. Rest, true rest, when one is alone in the silence is more than just a nice and relaxing thing to do. It is something one's body and soul needs. It is a craving as important as food and water.

Christine, and I often joke about being "cohabitating hermits." It's not just that we're introverts (although, that does intensify the issue) or that we live and work together from home. It's that, like everyone, we need silence and we need solitude, even as we live and work together so closely.

Don't get me wrong. Christine and I work well together. It's been a real blessing to have joined her at Abbey of the Arts. I love helping with the online retreats and co-leading pilgrimages with her. And we're both home-bodies who love cooking dinner together and watching some shows, curled up on the couch with our dog. But we're not permanently attached at the hip and that's a great thing.

Time alone and away from our work together means that we are refreshed and renewed upon our return.

With great and growing love,

Christine and John

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

Photo © Christine Valters Paintner

Featured Poet: Mark Burrows

Last spring we launched a series with poets whose work we love and want to feature and will continue it moving forward.

Our next poet is Mark Burrows, whose work is deeply inspired by the idea of home and stability of place.  You can hear Mark reading his poem "I Still Marvel" below and read more about the connections he makes between poetry and the sacred.

https://abbeyofthearts.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Evangelische-Fachhochschule-Rheinland-Westfalen-Lippe.m4a



I STILL MARVEL

Each spring I wait for the crocuses to come,

eager to greet their purple bursts as they rise

from the soggy earth and stubborn patches

of late-lingering snow, and while I know

what their veils will show of radiance,

this does nothing to blunt my wonder

at their shining spread across the lawn.

They never bother to argue or complain,

but simply spear their greening blades

up beyond the hold of winter's grip,

as if to sing in a gentle soundless way.

And though I've seen all this before,

I still marvel when they come, stem and

leaf and flower unfurling themselves

from the clutch of roots, a solitude we

yearn for, the lure of this long listening.

Themes of His Work

Seven years ago, I left the United States to live and work in Europe. It was, in some ways, a homecoming, returning to the land my grandparents had left a century ago to find a new life in America. In a sense, I found myself living my way back into my ancestral homeland, with all that suggests. "Home" is an abiding theme for me, in the deepest sense: it points to our yearning to belong to something larger than our own lives. It calls us to accept our place as creatures in a larger realm of life. It invites us to sense how the plant and animal world embody for us a sense of stabilitas loci, or "stability of place," the bedrock of monastic life as St. Benedict understood it. My poems have been circling such themes for some years now.

NOTHING LESS

—a late-afternoon reverie in Taizé on a gentle hill looking westward

The world of things is what it is, no more or less,

yet we imagine we're more important than the rest—

like trees rooted where a seed once fell, aspiring to no

other place or nobler form, or winds that blow wherever

they will without a trace of fear; like well-worn stones

that lie here and there in the field where I idly sit, warmed

all day by the late-spring sun, or the flow of the creek that

I can see but not hear, swollen by weeks of steady rain.

Across the gleaming field a herd of cows stands grazing

contentedly, giving themselves to the day's needs without

a single thought, while on and on a swoop of swallows darts

through clouds of gnats that come from no place I could see.

All these are what they are without a worry in the world—

as we also long to be who are often uneasy with our lives;

each lives within a presence not theirs, each teaching us to

seek nothing less than the ordinary miracle of everything.

Poetry and the Sacred

In her marvelous recent collection of essays on poetry, Jane Hirshfield suggests that "the desire of monks and mystics is not unlike that of artists: to perceive the extraordinary in the ordinary by changing not the world but the eyes that look." She goes on to suggest that poetry is the means by which "the inner reaches out to transform the outer, and the outer reaches back to transform the one who sees" (Ten Windows.  How Great Poems Transform the World[New York: Knopf, 2015]). Poems carry the magic of conversion, the energy of transformation, bending the imagination in both directions—from inner to outer to inner, and around again.  They change the way we learn to look, and thereby shape how—and what—we see. They call us to reach into our inner being. They invite us into the power of change.

In writing as in reading poems, what matters has nothing to do with information. It is about transformation. About an allurement into the mystery present in ordinary moments. It is an awakening into a presence we call "divine," but know only in and through the texture of human experience. It lures us to value the outward order (and disorder) of life as the only means we have of sensing something of the unseeable depths among which we ever live. Good poems invite us into the slow, meditative journey that the poet Rainer Maria Rilke called "heart-work" (Herz-Werk), by which he meant coming to inhabit our lives with greater awareness and opening ourselves to those glimpses of the sacred present in all that is. Call it the path of creativity. Call it the journey into insight. Call it salvation.

WHAT WE'RE MADE FOR

Song opposes the power of distance.

—Jean-Louis Chrétien

There are at least three reasons to sing:

because we can, sometimes because we

must, and yes, because in the deep-down

truth at the heart of things, silence does

not deserve the last word, because after

all is said and done we're not made for

the clarities of prose alone, but for what

song can bring of solace and delight.

About Mark Burrows

Mark S. Burrows is well-known as a speaker and much in demand as a retreat leader in Europe, Australia, and the United States. A poet by nature and disposition, he has taught historical theology at the graduate and undergraduate level, always with a keen interest in religion and literature, mysticism and poetics. His recent collection of poems, The Chance of Home, has been described as a gathering of "wise and tender poems [that] practice 'long listening,' [voicing the poet's] ongoing record of those instances of connectedness when we are at home in what the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa called 'the astonishing reality of things,' a reality which is, as Burrows so touchingly knows, 'nothing less than / the ordinary miracle of everything."

He is also an award-winning translator of modern German poetry and literature, having published the only English translation of Rilke's Prayers, which eventually became the opening part of his Book of Hours (Prayers of a Young Poet), 2016. He has also translated a remarkable book of poem/prayers by the Iranian-German poet SAID, published as 99 Psalms. More recently, he published with Jon M. Sweeney a collection of poems inspired by Meister Eckhart's writings, Meister Eckhart's Book of the Heart. Meditations for the Restless Soul . His forthcoming sequel to this, Meister Eckhart's Book of Secrets. Meditations on Letting Go and Finding True Freedom, due out in October.

He is the recent recipient of the Witter Bynner Prize in Poetry, with a residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute. A member of the Bochumer Literaten, a circle of professional writers in the Ruhr Region of Germany, Burrows currently lives between Bochum, Germany, where he teaches theology and literature at the Protestant University of Applied Sciences, and Camden, Maine. He edits poetry for the journals Spiritus and Arts, and is poetry editor at Paraclete Press. msburrows.com

 

Dreaming of Stones

Christine Valters Paintner's new collection of poems Dreaming of Stones has just been published by Paraclete Press.

The poems in Dreaming of Stones are about what endures: hope and desire, changing seasons, wild places, love, and the wisdom of mystics. Inspired by the poet's time living in Ireland these readings invite you into deeper ways of seeing the world. They have an incantational quality. Drawing on her commitment as a Benedictine oblate, the poems arise out of a practice of sitting in silence and lectio divina, in which life becomes the holy text.

[image error]

Silence and Solitude 1: A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dear pilgrims, monks, and artists,

During this Jubilee year of sabbatical we are revisiting our Monk Manifesto by moving slowly through the Monk in the World retreat materials together every Sunday. Each week will offer new reflections on the theme and every six weeks will introduce a new principle.

"Silence is never merely the cessation of words . . . Rather it is the pause that holds together-indeed, it makes sense of-all the words, both spoken and unspoken. Silence is the glue that connects our attitudes and our actions. Silence is the fullness, not emptiness; it is not absence, but the awareness of a presence."

-John Chryssavgis, In the Heart of the Desert: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers

Each of us contains the seed of the monk within us. How does one live as a monk in the world? Don't monks live cloistered away in monasteries?

We live in a time when there has been tremendous growth in the number of people becoming Oblates – lay members of monastic communities who live out the Benedictine way in the everyday world. There are communities of folks experimenting with "new monasticism" – ways of living out monastic spirituality inspired by St Benedict or Celtic traditions in the heart of urban spaces. Then there are others who are just longing for a more meaningful and heart-centered way of being in the world and who are looking to monasticism as a model of balance and depth.

One of the central hallmarks of the monk is a commitment to contemplative ways of being in a frenetic world. Instead of being carried away by the daily demands of modern living, the monk makes space for holy pauses and the silence which holds everything together. Contemplative moments are an act of resistance to a world that judges our value by our productivity and achievements rather than who we are.

With great and growing love,

Christine

Tea and Take Podcast Interview with Christine Valters Paintner

Christine is interviewed by Jamie Marich (Abbey Wisdom Council member) about poetry and the expressive arts:

Listen to the podcast version here>>

Dreaming of Stones review from the Chicago Tribune

Dreaming of Stones: Poetry collection offers spiritual solace


by Barbara Mahany, Chicago Tribune





To enter the pages of Christine Valters Paintner's " Dreaming of Stones " feels akin to wandering the undulations of Celtic wilds, the barren landscape that cloisters timeless secrets and truths. It's not hard to imagine ancient ruins off in the mist-drenched distance. Nor to hear the cry of North Atlantic winds, sweeping across moor and mountain. It's haunting and it's beautiful.


Most of all, it's to find yourself at home in a place you've never been — the very definition of soulful retreat.


 


And so it is in this first full poetry collection by Paintner, a writer and Benedictine oblate who moved to the west coast of Ireland in 2012. She now calls herself the abbess — or "urban monk and part-time hermit" — of Abbey of the Arts, a virtual monastery and global ecumenical community that combines contemplative practice and the arts.


 


No less than Richard Rohr, the best-selling spiritualist and Franciscan friar, writes that Paintner's poems "have both a mystical and earthly sensibility, drawing us to the transcendent as well as the immanent presence of the divine." Paintner herself writes that "poetry is language carved down to its essence," and she calls these 80 poems "little love notes to the world." Love notes of the soul, perhaps.


 


Paintner is fluent in the lush language of earth and sky as well as the otherworldly, the mysterious beyond. Born and raised in New York City, she is old-soul Celtic, through and through. Her poems rise out of the monastic practice of dwelling in silence, and hers, often, is a churchless god. A god who can't — and won't — be confined. A god who belongs to any and all.


 


The poems here are distillations of the most enduring wisdoms — love, hope, heartache, the unfolding of time — penned with a painstaking eye on the earthly. Carved out of the raw stuff of existence, especially in these troubled times, these dispatches offer safe harbor for taking stock, seeing the sacred, absorbing the solace.


 


And as with all the finest poetry, it's the unwritten volumes beyond the words that hold our lingering attention. To enter these poems is to slow time, to pause long enough to grasp what might otherwise have escaped us.


 


The poems here might as well be prayers — many of them anyway. Others put words to lasting truths.


 


In one of the collection's six sections, in a poem titled "St. Gobnait and the Place of Her Resurrection," Paintner writes: "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?"


 


Or, pages later, in "St. Brigid and the Fruit Tree," this: "Your tears splashed onto / cold stony earth, ringing out / like bells calling monks to prayer, / like the river breaking open to / the wide expanse of sea. … There will always be more grief / than we can bear … Life is tidal, rising and receding, / its long loneliness, its lush loveliness, / no need to wish for low tide when / the banks are breaking."


 


In her afterword, Paintner writes of her devotion to the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke and "the way he wrote about the God of darkness and mystery, the God who loves the questions rather than the answers." She shares that inquiry. And it's her hope, she writes, that those who find their way through "Dreaming of Stones" find "a moment of sanctuary" in its pages.


 


The poet's prayers, then, are answered. This collection — probing the mystery and the darkness, embracing the god of question not answer — indeed carves out sanctuary in a most turbulent landscape, amid these wild, wild times.


 


(Barbara Mahany's latest book,"The Blessings of Motherprayer: Sacred Whispers of Mothering," was published last spring.)