A visual meditation with images from my travels during the World Congress of Benedictine Oblates in October 2009. The photos were taken in the Vatican City, Rome, Subiaco (Benedict’s Cave), Monte Cassino (Benedictine monastery), and Sant’Anselmo (Primatial Abbey). The music is by Hildegard of Bingen.
My inner monk adores this Lenten season, this invitation to walk straight out into the desert and be present to all of the ways my inner demons (those forces that keep me from being free) wrestle inside of me. One of my favorite Biblical passages is the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel and after battling all night long, Jacob is wounded deeply in his hip and he demands a blessing which he receives. I remember the first time I heard this story again after a year or more of grieving over my mother’s death. In that moment the story broke open inside of my heart. I could feel the way I had wrestled and been wounded, but also blessed.
I have the privilege of guiding 125 participants through a Lenten journey with the Benedictine Spiritual Practices of lectio divina, centering prayer, and praying the Hours through daily emails, weekly lessons, and guided meditations. Since there is not a discussion component (although several small groups formed to journey together) I rely on emails from participants and links to blog posts to get a sense of how the journey is unfolding. Here are some initial jewels of offering out in the desert. Perhaps something here will speak to your own soul’s longing:
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Beth Patterson at Virtual Tea House offers a moving poem about placing ashes over her third eye.
A deep bow of gratitude to everyone who offered their words of beauty and grace here in this virtual Abbey space.
I hope you will stop by this week’sPoetry Party in the next few days, pour yourself a cup of tea (what’s your favorite? these days mine is Yogi Tea’s India Spice with a touch of sweet and cream), and savor the poetic beauty found there. If you are already feeling your Lenten energy sag these poems will enliven you again, if you are experiencing your very own transformative Lent, these poems will celebrate the depth and power of that journey with you.
There are also some beautiful offerings at my post this week about the Theoblogger Challenge to write aboutGod in 100 Words or Less. Stop by there to bask in the sacred beauty and to pen your own words and leave them (or a link) in the comments.
Blessings on the weekend ahead. Come back Monday for more reflections.
I was invited to be a part of Patheos‘ new Theoblogger Challenge – God in 100 Words or Less. (Patheos is a multifaith website where I occasionally write for the Catholic and Mainline Protestant Portals.)
One of their regular features is the Public Square, and this week the subject is God. They decided to reach out to a handful of theobloggers (those blogging about God online) and launched their first-ever Theoblogger Challenge inviting a dozen bloggers to answer the question: *Who/What is God? … in 100 words or less.*
Here is my response:
*****
God Is…
The One who pulses through the ancient blood of our ancestors,
and births newness in holy ecstasy.
The ticking of time through each mundane minute,
and the spilling open into eternity’s wide expanse.
The long naked branch, black against the winter sky,
and the petaled profusion of spring’s blossoming.
The beggar’s bowl
and the fountain overflowing.
The aching arms reaching out in lonely longing,
and the tingle of skin against skin in a lovers’ tangle.
The One who draws us to the sacred center of the world,
and lures us far beyond the fertile edges of our imagining.
-Christine Valters Paintner
*****
Click overto read the other responses and I invite you to play along – feel free to write your own reflection on who or what God is in 100 words or less. Post them here in the comments, at the Patheos site, or at your own blog and let me know!
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** For another opportunity to offer words of reflection, stop by this week’s Abbey Poetry Party on Entering the Desert’s Fire (and submit it by Friday for a chance to win a prize)**
The reflection below is a slightly edited reprint of something I wrote a few years ago for Ash Wednesday which still calls me to respond to its invitation:
Today we leave ordinary time to enter into the journey of Lent through the desert. The desert is that uncharted terrain beyond the edges of our seemingly secure and structured world, where things begin to crack.
We begin this desert journey marked with ashes, the sign of our mortality. There is wisdom in these ashes. If you have ever been near death or had a loved one die, you know the clarity that an awareness of our bodily limits can bring. How suddenly what is most important in life rises to the surface. This is the invitation of Lent, to realign our priorities. In remembering that we will die, we are called to remember God who is the source of our life.
When we are marked with ash on our foreheads we hear the invitation to “repent and believe the good news.” One of the Hebrew words for repent is nacham. The root of this word means “to draw a deep breath” as well as to be deeply moved to a feeling of sorrow. The Greek word for repent is metanoia which means ‘to reconsider’. But it is also a compound word made up of the words, “meta” and “nous.” “Meta” means “transformation” and “nous” means “soul.” So, as we begin this journey we are invited to nothing less than a “transformation of the soul.”
But how are we to be transformed and believe the good news? How are we to have hope when our lives are faced with the struggle of trying to make our way in the world, when loved ones face illness, when we are still at war with other countries and with ourselves. Certainly our journey through Lent is toward the season of Easter, a season of resurrection, but how do we get from here to there?
The prophet Joel offers some insight in our first reading. “Even now, says the Lord, return to me with your whole heart, with fasting and weeping and mourning.” Even now, in the midst of death and destruction, loss and pain, God calls to us. Not for a half-hearted acknowledgement, but to return to God with our whole heart, with the fullness of who we are. Return with fasting and weeping and mourning. This is a call to the practice of lament.
Each one of us carries grief, sorrow that has perhaps gone unexpressed or been stifled or numbed. Each of us has been touched by pain and suffering at some time. Yet we live in a culture that tells us to move on, to get over it, or to shop or drink our way through sorrow. Or to fill our moments with the chatter of TV and radio and ipods so that we never have to face the silent desert of our hearts. It is the same kind of attitude that forces us to answer “fine” when others ask how we are and we really aren’t. Even our churches often try to move us too quickly to a place of hope without fully experiencing the sorrow that pierces us.
Why do we work so hard to resist our tears? Jesus wept. We see him in John’s gospel shedding tears over the death of his friend Lazarus, in Luke we see him weeping over the whole city of Jerusalem because of their indifference.
What is the sorrow you carry with you today? Is it because of personal loss? A death, a job lost, a broken relationship, or an illness? Is it sorrow over the war that rages on thousands of miles from us? Is it because of the 18,000 children who will die today because of preventable hunger? Is it the ongoing racism that devastates communities or the religious hostilities that divide nations? Is it the thousands of people who have died as a result of the earthquake in Haiti?
I invite you to take just a moment to be in touch with the grief that you carry with you.
We resist feeling our pain because our society discourages it. Even without the absence of permission to feel sorrow, how many of us have the time and space it requires to adequately mourn our losses? Beyond the brief sound bytes we receive in the news each night, where is the space and the resources we need to process our sorrow?
This is where the profound wisdom in our tradition of lament enters. The Hebrew Scriptures are filled with this prayer of crying out to God. Lament gives form and voice to our grief, a space to wail and name what is not right in the world in the context of prayer.
The Protestant theologian Walter Brueggemann writes about the need for lament in his book The Prophetic Imagination. He says that people can only dare to envision a new reality when they’ve been able to grieve, to scream out, to let loose the cry that has been stuck in their throats for so long. That cry, the expression of that grief, says Brueggemann, “is the most visceral announcement that things are not right.” Only then can we begin to “to nurture, nourish, and evoke a new consciousness,” a new vision. We so desperately need a new way of seeing the world.
The prayer of lament is first and foremost truth-telling, it begins by challenging the way things are. Lament names that something is not right in the world. This pain, this suffering should not be. It helps us to name the lies we have been living and participating in.
Lament opens us up to a new vision of how God is present to our suffering. We call on the God who weeps with us, whose groans are our own, and we express our hope in God’s tender care.
Lament is a form of resistance: We allow ourselves to be present to God in our brokenness and resist the cultural imperative to be strong and hold it all together. We resist cultural practices of denying death through our worship of eternal youth. We stop pretending everything is okay and put an end to worshipping the status quo.
Lament puts us in solidarity with those who are suffering and schools us in compassion. Only when we have become familiar with the landscape of our own pain can we then enter into the suffering of another. Lament moves us beyond our own narrow perspectives.
In the prayer of lament we help give voice to the oppressed, to hidden suffering, the suffering in silence that happens because pain takes our language away. The prophet Joel says to blow the trumpet and call the assembly, because lament is the work of the community. Gathered together we say that the pain is being heard, that it is valid. Our community votes with its tears that there is suffering worth weeping over.
Finally, lament is the release of power, God’s power. The power that is the soul-transforming call of repentance. The paradox of our faith is that we must first surrender fully to these ashes, into the desert places of brokenness, before Easter and its promise of resurrection can fully enter and fill us. In the second reading for today, Paul invites us to be ambassadors of reconciliation. Lament invites in God’s reconciling and healing power.
During Lent my practice will be truth-telling. I will inhabit my places of grief, the sorrows I have resisted up until now, and allow my unspoken lament to rise up in me like fire. I will turn off the endless noise and chatter that distract me from those places where my heart has hardened. I will be in solidarity with those who have no voice and listen for their silent groans. I will trust along with our spiritual ancestors who wrote and sang the Psalms in the assembly, that when I go to the rawest, most vulnerable places, my soul is then transformed and I can answer the call to repentance with my whole heart.
This Lenten journey is for the sake of life and transforming power. It is not a second chance at New Year’s resolutions. It begins with the acknowledgment of that which deadens and kills. Justice, healing, repentance all begin in tears. They will not end there, but there is no detour on the desert journey to Holy Week.
In today’s Gospel Jesus warns us against practices that are done for their visibility. He calls us to examine the integrity and intention of our actions. So I encourage you this Lent, to consider continuing to eat chocolate, but make intentional space for your grief. Give permission for others in your life to express their sorrows. Help to create an atmosphere in your communities that encourages prayer of lament. Think of a friend or acquaintance who has experienced a loss in the last few months and make time to ask them about their stories, and let them know they will be heard. Examine the subtle ways that your own actions participate in and perpetuate the pain of the world. Cry out in public ways, express your lament perhaps in letters to the newspaper and those in power. Refuse to say that everything is fine. Practice truth-telling.
Is our image of God big enough to imagine that God can embrace all of our pain? Can we trust that the God who cries out alongside us, whose cry is our own, will also transform us in that space of darkness? Do we not believe that Jesus entered fully into the experience of death before being resurrected?
The readings for this Friday begin with Isaiah chapter 58, calling us to “cry out full-throated and unsparingly.” It then goes on to name the kind of fasting that God desires of us which is to set free the oppressed, to share your bread with the hungry, to not turn your back on others in their need. And only then, Isaiah tells us, will your light break forth like the dawn.
I select an image and suggest a theme/title and invite you to respond with your poems or other reflections. Add your responses in the comments section. Feel free to take your poem in any direction and then post the image and invitation on your blog (if you have one) and encourage others to come join the party! (permission is granted to reprint the image if a link is provided back to this post)
On Friday, February 19th, I will draw a name at random from those who participate and send the winner a copy of Sacred Poetry: An Invitation to Write.
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Poetry Party Theme:
Entering the Desert’s Fire
This week the Christian liturgical season of Lent begins on Ash Wednesday. For 40 days we are invited on an inner pilgrimage which parallels the desert journey Jesus made before he began his public ministry. In the Hebrew and Christian scriptures the desert is a place of preparing our hearts, of stripping away of false securities, of radical surrender, and of invitation to transformation. The Israelites wandered in the Sinai desert for 40 years and the early Christian monks went out into the desert to find a place of profound solitude and silence. The desert is an archetypal place where we confront our inner demons and are purified and transformed by the its heat.
I invite you this week to write a poem about your own invitation to enter the refiner’s fire – in alchemy lead is transformed into gold through heat and this becomes a metaphor for the human soul. What is the lead within you ready to be transformed into something treasured?
The poem could be a blessing for the journey ahead or an invocation of your deepest longings for this sacred time. Allow yourself to feel the desert heat as you write and invite in its power to spark, ignite, and illuminate the world.
Are you longing for a meaningful way to commit to contemplative practice for Lent?
Would you like to integrate a retreat experience into your everyday life with guided daily email support from an experienced teacher of prayer?
Are you wondering if there’s still time to sign up?
I have had several inquiries in the last day about whether you can still sign up for the Lenten E-Course on Benedictine Spiritual Practices. I will leave the registration buttons up until next Tuesday night. The first email of the course will actually go out on Monday morning, so if you register late I will send you the material you missed and I will also email you a PDF of the first two chapters of the book so you don’t fall behind in the reading before you even begin. If you register by Tuesday and live in the US your books should arrive in time for the second week’s readings. For International participants, your books really need to be shipped by tomorrow to arrive in time (depending on where you live). Please feel free to email me with any questions at Christine@AbbeyoftheArts.com.
i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)
-e. e. cummings
Whose heart do you carry in your own?
Who is the one who supports your own doing in the world whole-heartedly?
Where is the invitation to gratitude and wonder this day?
Lent begins in a week and the Lenten E-Course emails start this coming Monday!
If you’d like to register for this Lenten retreat in everyday life, please sign up in the next day or two so I can get your books mailed off to you in time!
Over at Patheos is a reprint of an interview I did a couple of years ago with the wonderful and amazing Jan Richardson. It is definitely worth a re-reading (or first reading for my newer friends) for Jan’s insights into art as a sacred practice.
Jan’s work has been inspiring me for many years, she is one of the first people I discovered as a kindred spirit in the contemporary connection between monk and artist paths (and her out-of-print Night Visions for the season of Advent is one of my favorite books ever). I am delighted to consider her a companion on the way and that since this interview was posted we have met and shared a lovely meal together at my favorite Greek cafe in Seattle once when she and her sweetheart were in the Northwest.
You can’t order a poem like you order a taco.
Walk up to the counter, say, “I’ll take two”
and expect it to be handed back to you
on a shiny plate.
Still, I like your spirit.
Anyone who says, “Here’s my address,
write me a poem,” deserves something in reply.
So I’ll tell a secret instead:
poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,
they are sleeping. They are the shadows
drifting across our ceilings the moment
before we wake up. What we have to do
is live in a way that lets us find them.
Once I knew a man who gave his wife
two skunks for a valentine.
He couldn’t understand why she was crying.
“I thought they had such beautiful eyes.”
And he was serious. He was a serious man
who lived in a serious way. Nothing was ugly
just because the world said so. He really
liked those skunks. So, he re-invented them
as valentines and they became beautiful.
At least, to him. And the poems that had been hiding
in the eyes of skunks for centuries
crawled out and curled up at his feet.
Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us
we find poems. Check your garage, the odd sock
in your drawer, the person you almost like, but not quite.
And let me know.
-Naomi Shihab Nye in The Red Suitcase
Where do you discover the hidden poems of your life? What ordinary, everyday objects could be reinvented into a Valentine, expressing the beauty of the world hidden beneath our expectations?
Lent begins in a week and the Lenten E-Course emails start this coming Monday!
If you’d like to register for this Lenten retreat in everyday life, please sign up in the next day or two so I can get your books mailed off to you in time!
Poetry Party Theme: 
