Christine Valters Paintner's Blog, page 78

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.

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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.)

The Jubilee Begins! ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dearest monks, artists, and pilgrims,

Today is my 49thbirthday and tomorrow is John's. We are entering our 50th year of life and eager for this sabbatical time of spaciousness to listen and discern the shape of our work going forward and to have more time for the writing we so love to do.

I returned a week ago from teaching in Chartres, France. (The photo above was received one of my first nights there). The program was hosted by Lauren Artress and the wonderful folks at Veriditas who help promote the labyrinth worldwide. It was a powerful week of diving deeply into poetry as sacred practice, encountering the Cathedral as threshold space and keeper of the sacred feminine through the face of Mary, a very potent private labyrinth walk for our group beginning with a candlelight walk in the crypt, along with our amazing participants made for a very special time.

There were many gifts from this week away, some of which I'll still be unpacking for some time to come. It is always a gift to be held in a ritual space where you walk between worlds for a period of time. While I provided the poetry content and process each morning, there was a team who helped facilitate the other aspects of the program so I got to dive in and have my own pilgrimage experience at Chartres myself.

One of the moments that most touched me was encountering Mary of the Pillar in the cathedral itself and to be told by the guide that she is made of pear wood and under the dress she is wearing she is actually holding a pear in her hand. Some of you might remember my encounter with Mary and the pears when we first moved to Vienna. The pear has become a significant symbol in my life, what John calls my "spirit fruit." It felt like a reminder that I have now been living in Europe seven years and this time ahead is a coming full circle in some ways, and a new beginning in others. The sacred feminine continues to beckon to me to slow down, to release striving, to yield to this moment, to surrender to the divine embrace. What a beautiful reminder as I begin a sabbatical.

At the end of our Chartres retreat one of the team members, the lovely and gifted Catherine Anderson, facilitated us in a SoulCollage session and Our Lady of Delight revealed herself to me through the card-making. The blessing she offered me is: "May you be lavished with the gifts of joy, ease, pleasure, and play. May you trust deeply in the fruitfulness of rest."

I wish this for you as well, my dear monks and pilgrims. I realize that not everyone is able to take time off from work to allow for more spaciousness, rest, and healing in their lives. It is a privilege I do not take lightly. It is a gift I plan to savor every day. And I am eager to see what new gifts emerge in the space that I can offer back to this community.

We are taking a break from the daily and weekly emails for the next month. Look for our return to these on July 28th. We will be exploring the principles of becoming a monk in the world for our weekly reflections this coming year.

If you'd like to help support the continuation of our website and email newsletters during this time please click here for details. You can make a one-time contribution to keeping the Abbey going, or a monthly commitment for the year ahead. We also welcome your prayers and blessings.

With great and growing love,

Christine

Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, REACE

Photo © Christine Valters Paintner

Monk in the World Guest Post: Christine Aroney-Sine

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Christine Aroney-Sine's reflection, "Enter the Re-Wonderment of the World."

This year has been an amazing awe and wonder springtime on America's west coast. In California the spectacular blooming of the desert brought thousands of people out to relish the brilliant oranges, yellows and purples of the flowers whose seeds lie dormant, sometimes for years waiting for rain. In Oregon brilliant purple lupines waved their heads across the mountainsides and here in Seattle, smiling daffodils gave way to tulips and azaleas and rhododendrons in blazing displays of red and pink, white and yellow.

Did you know that a daily dose of awe makes us more caring people? Nature walks boost our immune system and make us healthier and more emotionally stable people. They enrich our contemplative core and expand our horizons to explore new aspects of our world and of our God.

Unfortunately many of us don't have time for God's awe and wonder world. As Robert Macfarlane says in his wonderful book Landmarks: "we have stunned the world out of wonder". We are too busy and too distracted to notice. We have replaced the mystery and majesty of our world and our God with mastery and desire for control.

It's not just natural landscapes that open us to awe either. "Awe softens us for the thunder glance of God and then enables us to glance at others in just the same way." says Father Greg Boyle an important homeless advocate in Los Angeles. Awe begets awe. Recognizing it in the natural world expands our vision to see God's glory in the faces of friends and stranger alike.

So how do we open ourselves to a daily dose of awe and wonder? It doesn't begin with a hurried walk through the neighbourhood though. It is a little like taking lectio divina out into the world, opening our minds, hearts and souls to the mystery of God's presence in everything we see and experience.

First we must slow down and take notice. Most of us hurry through our neighborhoods, intent on where we are going rather than where we are. Slowing down and giving ourselves permission to savour everything we see, hear and touch is an important step towards appreciating its awe. Suddenly we notice not just the magnificent trees in our local parks but also the gardens in broken pavement and the beauty of dandelions in an abandoned lot. Then our eyes shift to the faces of strangers who pass us in the street. They too make us gasp in awe as we catch glimpses of the image of God in them.

Awe and wonder is rooted in silence. We don't just hurry, we also go noisily through life constantly making noise or listening to it. On my daily lakeside walks I am amazed at how many fellow walkers are listening to music or talking to friends. They walk not for enjoyment but for exercise and hardly notice the beauty around them. Taking time to enter the silence in which God can speak to us about where we live and reveal the intricate details we need to notice is hard, yet necessary if we really want to see our surroundings as God does.

Third we need to take notice of the small and beautiful things. Awe can be triggered by an unexpected smile, a helping hand on the bus, graffiti on the wall. Giving ourselves permission to stop, notice and appreciate the inspiration of these things is a rare and precious gift. 

Fourth awe and wonder are enhanced when we seek out what gives us goosebumps. I recently walked around Beacon New York where my husband's family live. I have always enjoyed walking the streets but this time looked with fresh awe and wonder eyes. I love the murals – from the famous "man with no face" to the mermaid/Hudson River image, their beauty and the story they tell never ceases to inspire me. This year there were new ones that caught my attention and filled me with awe.

Fifth awe and wonder helps us see the world differently. It changes our perspectives of what is beautiful and what is worthy of notice. Walk around your neighborhood with a houseless person, with someone from another culture or with a child. They will notice things you never see and have perspectives very different from your own. They will open your eyes to marvel at aspects of your community that you take for granted.

I encourage you to take time this week to enter into the wonder not just of God's created world but also of the communities in which you live. Take your camera and a companion. What do you notice? What inspires you? Journal about your responses. Enjoy the re-wonderment of God's world.

Contemplative activist, passionate gardener, author, and liturgist, Christine Aroney-Sine loves messing with spiritual traditions and inspiring followers of Jesus to develop creative approaches to spirituality that intertwine the sacred through all of life.  She is the founder and facilitator for the popular contemplative blog GodSpaceLight.com.   Her most recent book is The Gift of Wonder: Creative Practices for Delighting in God. (IVP 2019)

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Earth as the Original Monastery ~ A Love Note from your Online Abbess

Dearest monks, artists, and pilgrims,

This spring I have completed the manuscript for my next book due out in spring 2020 tentatively titled Earth as the Original Monastery. I have been working with this image for several years now and have taught retreats both live and online to explore a deepened intimacy with the earth. To remember that earth is the primal teacher of prayer and sacrament is to cherish it as truly holy, as the truth of the incarnation. It is work that really calls to my heart more and more, especially in this time of our human journey on the planet.

During our Jubilee Year, one of my desires is to pray more with this image and see where it leads me. There are many possibilities, including the retreats we offer, the small grant program we have sometimes offered, as well as bigger dreams of perhaps purchasing small pieces of land in Ireland to plant trees and allow them to re-wild and nurture bio-diversity. It is exciting to ponder how the spirit might be calling us forward.

I wrote this article a few years ago but thought I'd offer it again, so you know the material I have been immersed in these last few months and will continue to be as I edit this manuscript for publication:

When I long to go on retreat, it is most often the sea or the forest which call to me. Everything in nature can become a catalyst for my deepened self-understanding. The forest asks me to embrace my truth once again. The hummingbird invites me to sip holy nectar, the egret to stretch out my wings, the sparrows to remember my flock.

Each pine cone contains an epiphany; each smooth stone offers a revelation. I watch and witness as the sun slowly makes its long arc across the sky and discover my own rising and falling. The moon will sing of quiet miracles, like those which reveal and conceal the world every day right before our eyes.

In our spiritual and religious traditions we categorize our experience in a variety of ways but often forget that the earth is the primary source of these categories.

The creatures and trees are spiritual teachers

Believe me as one who has experience, you will find much more among the woods then ever you will among books. Woods and stones will teach you what you can never hear from any master. —St. Bernard of Clairvaux

In ancient tradition, there were many holy men and women who were described as having a special relationship to animals often connected to embodied life.  St. Benedict, for example, befriended a crow who was later said to have saved his life from being poisoned.  It was said of St. Kevin that an otter would sometimes bring him salmon from the lake so he could eat.  St. Brigid had a cow that accompanied her and provided endless supplies of milk. These special connections and relationships to animals were once a sign of holiness.

There is a story about St. Ciaran, one of the early Irish monks in which he encounters a wild boar who was made tame by God. "That boar was St. Ciaran's first disciple or monk, as one might say, in that place. For straightway that boar, as the man of God watched, began with great vigour tearing down twigs and grass with his teeth to build him a little cell." After building him his cell, other animals came from their dens to accompany St. Ciaran, "(a)nd they obeyed the saint's word in all things, as if they had been his monks." I love this image of the animals as St. Ciaran's first monks, I love that they formed his original monastic community.

The elements are spiritual directors

How necessary it is for monks to work in the fields, in the sun, in the mud, in the clay, in the wind: these are our spiritual directors and our novice-masters. —Thomas Merton

The elements of water, wind, earth, and fire, offer us wisdom and guidance.  They are the original soul friends.  Air is the gift of breath we receive in each moment, the rhythm of life sustaining us. Fire is the gift of life force and energy and we might call to mind St. John of the Cross' image of the divine as the living flame of love which burns in each of our hearts.

Water is the gift of renewal and replenishment and we might call to mind the ritual of baptism as a call to claim our full gifts or the blood that flows through our veins. Earth is the gift of groundedness and nourishment and a reminder that we one day return to the earth. Bread and wine emerge from the earth. The act of eating is sacred and holy, sustaining our life and work in the world.

The mountains and flowers are the Saints

The bass and trout hiding in the deep pools of the river are canonized by their beauty and their strength. The lakes hidden among the hills are saints, and the sea too is a saint who praises God without interruption in her majestic dance. —Thomas Merton

The poet David Whyte has this beautiful line in one of his poems where he asks, "why are we the one terrible part of creation privileged to refuse our own flowering?"  As Merton describes, the animals and the elements live their fullness without holding back and in them we can discover what it truly means to become a saint.

They teach us how to live out our own sainthood by no longer refusing our true nature. We work so hard at rejecting our own holiness. How much we can be reminded by looking to nature of ways to yield to who we are most intimately called to be?

The seasons are our scripture text

This earth we are riding keeps trying to tell us something with its continuous scripture of leaves. —William Stafford

In the Celtic tradition it is said that there were two great books of revelation, the first being Nature and the other the scriptures. When we pay attention to the rhythm of the seasons we learn a great deal about the rise and fall of life, about emptiness and fullness.

Spring invites us to blossom forth, summer calls us to our own ripening, autumn demands that we release and let go, and winter quietly whispers to us to rest, to sink into the dark fertile space of unknowing, releasing the demands of productivity and calendars and to do lists and to simply be.

What grace we could offer our bodies by living according to these rhythms and in the winter seasons of the body fully allow the fallowness needed to restore to fruitful ground.

Forests are the original cathedrals and mosques

Groves of redwoods…are often compared to the naves of great cathedrals: the silence; the green, filtered, numinous light. A single banyan, each with its multitude of trunks, is like a temple or mosque—a living colonnade. But the metaphor should be the other way around.  The cathedrals and mosques emulate the trees. The trees are innately holy. —Colin Tudge, Secret Life of Trees

The cathedrals we build reflect the sacred spaces that trees have already been creating for thousands of years.  Next time you are in the forest, imagine this space as one of the primordial or original churches that has helped inspire the creation of thousands of other sanctuary spaces. Notice what arises in your body when you imagine being in the cathedral of trees, joining them in praise of beauty.

Liturgy arises from the original hymn of creation

In the opening pages of Being Still: Reflections on an Ancient Mystical Tradition, Orthodox theologian Jean-Yves Leloup describes a young philosopher who comes to Fr. Seraphim to learn about prayer of the heart.  Fr. Seraphim says that before he teaches him this way of prayer, he must learn to meditate like a mountain. He goes to learn stability of posture and grounding from the mountain, the weight of presence, and the experience of calmness and stability.  He enters into the timeless time of mountains and experienced eternity within and around him while also learning the grace of the seasons.

Next Fr. Seraphim sent him to learn how to meditate like a poppy taking his mountain wisdom with him.  From the poppy he learns to turn himself toward the light and to orient his meditation practice from his inner depths toward radiance. The poppy also teaches him the ability to bend with the wind and the finitude of our days as the blossom began to wither.

He is then sent to the ocean to learn the wisdom of ebbing and flowing. He learns to synchronize his breath with the "great breathing rhythm of the waves."

Fr. Seraphim finally has him learn to pray like a bird saying that the Prophet Isaiah describes meditation as the cry of an animal like a roaring lion or the song of a dove.  The bird was to teach him how to sing continuously, repeating the name of God in his heart without ceasing.

Each time you go for a walk, see if you can begin with a sense that you are stepping into a landscape that is animate and alive, that is participating in the great unfolding of a liturgy of praise. Then let your body join in with this ongoing hymn, know it as intimate with this already ongoing song.

All elements of creation participate in this primordial scripture, liturgy, sainthood, spiritual direction, and sanctuary spaces offering wisdom to us with each turn.

With great and growing love,

Christine

Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, REACE

Photo © Christine Valters Paintner