Your Online Monastery for Your Spiritual Practice

Come and Play!

Greetings dear friends, In a week and a half I will be heading to the Emerald Island from the Emerald City and will be out of email and blogging touch for a bit. More blogging to come this week though. In the meantime I wanted to post another invitation for you to consider joining Betsey and myself for what promises to be a wonderful time. I have had lots of folks express interest, and it would be helpful for us to have you register before August for us to be able to confirm with the retreat center. Registration requires a

June 3, 2007

Maybe the World is the Real Poem

-Christine Valters Paintner @ Abbey of the Arts

June 3, 2007

A Great Pilgrimage

A Great Pilgrimage I felt in need of a great pilgrimage so I sat still for three days and God came to me. -Kabir Pamela McCauley shared the wonderful poem above in a comment she left on my post about Africa. She also shared this great quote from a Ugandan Sister who said, “You have watches, but no time. We have no watches, but plenty of time.” Wishing you a weekend of spaciousness. May the Holy One come to you in the stillness and fill the wide open spaces of your heart. -Christine Valters Paintner @ Abbey of the Arts (photo from sheep farm on

June 1, 2007

Monastic Commitment

Tomorrow I head down to the Priory for our annual Oblate retreat, the topic is “The Heart of an Oblate” and I am looking forward to spending time with some of my Oblate friends. Sister Lucy asked if I would consider being a mentor this coming year to someone who is becoming an Oblate candidate, which means she is exploring the possibility of making this commitment to our community. I was delighted to be asked, even more delighted when I was matched with a woman I already know and for whom I have great fondness and engage in stimulating conversation. I

May 31, 2007

Practicing Resurrection S-l-o-w-l-y

For the season of Easter I made a commitment to practice resurrection of the body, both my own body and the Earth’s body. It has been a good process as I continue to discover places of my own healing and how they are woven together with the healing of the greater body. As a part of this journey I started seeing a nutritionist whose approach to food I love. When we first sat down and she asked about my previous experiences with seeing a nutritionist, I told her that the couple of times I had gone before they had me try

May 30, 2007

Surrender

As I get older, I am slowly learning to take myself and my work less seriously. It is the fruit of embracing humility–that monastic virtue whose root is humus, meaning “of the earth.” At the same time, the more I let go of plans that don’t feed me, and the more I allow myself to go out to bloom, the more I experience a deep sense of peace within myself. I am becoming the peace I want to see bloom in the world. In a world of busyness and productivity, we need a lot more uselessness, more being, more poets, artists, and monks

May 28, 2007

The Fire of Courage

In the Christian church, today is the feast of Pentecost. It is considered to be the birthday of the church because it celebrates when the Spirit descended upon the disciples and filled them with the fire of courage to go and spread the message of liberation witnessed to them. Vestments and banners usually are red, filling the church with a sense of the energy that must have rushed into the room that day. It is a joyful feast, bringing the fifty days of the season of Easter to a dynamic close. I like to imagine that ragtag group, gathered together “in

May 27, 2007

Allium Fireworks

Allium is one of my new favorite flowers (after peonies, of course). For some reason I had never seen or noticed them before. They look to me like purple dandelion seed pods or a tiny fireworks display. Blessings upon your weekend. May you discover new beauty you never noticed before! -Christine Valters Paintner @ Abbey of the Arts

May 25, 2007

Dreams of Africa

In the last couple of weeks we have watched Blood Diamond which takes place in Sierra Leone and The Last King of Scotland which is about Uganda. They were both heart-rending films. I also have been reading A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmeal Beah which addresses the Sierra Leone story from the perspective of a boy soldier who was rehabilitated and now lives in the US. It raised again for me the question of how we live in meaningful engagement with the sorrows and struggles of the whole world? A couple months back we went to see a powerful performance of the Soweto Gospel Choir.

May 24, 2007

Peonies

Yesterday I splurged on a bouquet of peonies and proceeded to fall completely in love with them when I got home. I have never before spent so much time gazing at and inhaling the scent of these splendid flowers. I cultivated my new love through the lens of my camera. Some days the abundance I find in words and images is enough to break my heart wide open. What has broken your heart open this day? -Christine Valters Paintner @ Abbey of the Arts

May 22, 2007

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Come and Play!

Maybe the World is the Real Poem

A Great Pilgrimage

Monastic Commitment

Practicing Resurrection S-l-o-w-l-y

Surrender

The Fire of Courage

Allium Fireworks

Dreams of Africa

Peonies

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