Dearest dancing monks, artists, and pilgrims,
We are delighted to begin our 2025-2026 program year and our 20th year of ministry this Friday, August 15th with a retreat on Loving into Justice led by the wonderful Coke Tani. Coke offers this reflection and introduction to what we will explore in our time together.
With a heart of creativity and solidarity, I look forward to sharing time with you this Friday at our online mini-retreat, Loving into Justice: Pilgrimage through the Body.
I imagine that love, justice, pilgrimage, and the body are not new for you of the Abbey, and for this I bow to you with great appreciation! And, in these times of immense and intense social injustice, how might we experience our bodies not solely as sites of expression, but of ever-emerging wisdom in the ways of the Sacred Feminine?
We are not alone. We can find rooting in the Magnificat of the young mystic-activist-virgin/sovereign-Mother-priestess some of us call Mary, in and through whom the Creator’s love for all was deeply incarnate. She is still with us, for Empire is not new. How might the just and loving light of Christ emerge at the speed of the contemplative body?
We can find further ground for our experiences in contemporary creators like modern dance pioneer Erick Hawkins, who said “the body is a clear place,” and counselor Augusta Kantra who says, “If you can soften your body, your heart can settle, and if your heart can settle, your mind can listen.”
When we consider the current oppressions of severe Othering—in the forms of criminalization, removal, detention, occupation, and unimaginable destruction—let us realize that at the root of these persecutions is great fear, distrust, and/or disparaging of the body. Unlike these qualities of patriarchy and colonizing cultures, the intersectional Sacred Feminine reminds us that we were “intricately woven in the depths of the earth” by our Creator (Psalm 139:15b, NRSVUE). Our embodiment is both intentional and sacred.
More, it’s vital that our means for “loving into justice” be as decolonized as the content of our visions. Poet and intersectional activist pioneer Audre Lorde said that if we wish to disassemble social structures for the sake of true liberation, we need frameworks and practices beyond those very structures. Lorde said, “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”
As people of Spirit, Creativity and Prophetics, I affirm with you that it is genuine change we seek in these times.
This Friday, we will practice strengthening and centering the wisdom of our bodies in this endeavor. We will first welcome our bodies as “bodyspirits*” through a simple warm-up to help our senses remember pathways we were blessed with at birth. We will be guided into movement meditation to better understand particular forms of social injustice without retraumatizing ourselves. We will uphold creative social movement saints. Our bodies will be invited to once again become sites of Her Sacred Imagination, where we can begin to co-create truly beloved community.
*I give thanks to Phil Porter and Cynthia Winton-Henry, co-founders of InterPlay©, who coined the term “bodyspirit,” reuniting body and spirit, in and for our times.
Please join us this Friday as we pray our bodies into the Love that is liberating and just!
With great and growing love,
Christine
Christine Valters Paintner, OblSB, PhD, REACE
