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Holy Week

In Christian tradition, we entered into Holy Week yesterday.  Holy Week leads up to the Triduum, which is the highlight of the Christian year.  As a part of my prayer and meditation this week I am reading The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan. The first chapter concludes by highlighting the themes of holy week and the Christian life as a whole: “genuine discipleship, following Jesus means following him to Jerusalem, the place of (1) confrontation with the domination system and (2) death and resurrection. . .

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April 2, 2007

Best of Blogs Finalist

My blog is a finalist under the Best of Blogs Inspirational category!  Best of Blogs is dedicated to giving exposure to smaller blogs.  I am very excited and honored.  You can vote for me here (scroll down to the third category), you get one vote per day until April 13, 2007. -Christine Valters Paintner @ Abbey of the Arts

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March 30, 2007

Crossing Borders

My beloved and I went up to Canada for a long weekend retreat together, a time to be still and reconnect.  On Thursday night we made the long trip to Vancouver Island, driving a little way past the village of Sooke.  We had been to Sooke a couple of years ago and I longed to return because of East Sooke Regional Park which for me is tied only with Ruckle Park on Saltspring Island as my two favorite places to hike in this region.  The reason I love these two parks so much is that they both have densely forested trails

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March 26, 2007

Flowers Appear on the Earth

For see, the winter is past, the rains are over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth, the time of pruning the vines has come, and the song of the dove is heard in our land. The fig tree puts forth its figs, and the vines, in bloom, give forth fragrance. Arise, my beloved, my beautiful one, and come!  (Song of Songs 2:11-13) Yesterday was a beautiful morning in Seattle.  I went on a walk with Tune to capture more images of those wondrous cherry trees. As the flowers appeared on the earth I heard the ancient call that keeps

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March 22, 2007

Boldness and Choice

One of the things that I grieved the most when my mother died was that I didn’t have more time to be in her presence.  In the last few years of her life, she had become a bold and vibrant woman, unapologetic for who she was and what she thought was worth fighting for.  I loved that she had finally reached the stage in her life where she didn’t care what others thought of her.  She stood so firmly in her own presence and unique giftedness to the world.  She burned very brightly right until the end of her life when

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March 18, 2007

Awakening Intensive: November 11-17, 2007!

Today and tomorrow is the last session for this year’s Awakening the Creative Spirit program.  It has been a wonderful journey with an amazing group of diverse participants and I am eager to see what these last days call forth from everyone.  For 2007-2008 Betsey and I decided to take a break from the monthly format of this program and instead will offer it as a weeklong intensive from November 11-17, 2007 at St. Andrew’s Retreat House on the Hood Canal a couple of hours from Seattle.  There have been many of you who have expressed the desire to participate

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March 16, 2007

Nakedness

Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled, made nothing? Are you willing to be made nothing? dipped into oblivion? If not, you will never really change. The phoenix renews her youth only when she is burnt, burnt alive, burnt down to hot and flocculent ash. Then the small stirring of a new small bub in the nest with strands of down like floating ash shows that she is renewing her youth like the eagle, immortal bird. -D. H. Lawrence (found at Anchors and Masts) I am both drawn to the quote above and turned away at the same

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March 14, 2007

The Non-Possessive Life

To be able to enjoy fully the many good things the world has to offer, we must be detached from them. To be detached does not mean to be indifferent or uninterested. It means to be nonpossessive. Life is a gift to be grateful for and not a property to cling to. A nonpossessive life is a free life. But such freedom is only possible when we have a deep sense of belonging. To whom then do we belong? We belong to God, and the God to whom we belong has sent us into the world to proclaim in (God’s)

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March 13, 2007

Living Lent

The reflection below is written by Barbara Cawthorne Crafton:   We didn’t even know what moderation was. What it felt like. We didn’t just work: we inhaled our jobs, sucked them in, became them. Stayed late, brought work home – it was never enough, though, no matter how much time we put in. We didn’t just smoke: we lit up a cigarette, only to realize that we already had one going in the ashtray. We ordered things we didn’t need from the shiny catalogs that came to our houses: we ordered three times as much as we could use, and then

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March 10, 2007

Guardians of Beauty

We are the guardians of His Beauty. We are the protectors Of the Sun. There is only one reason We have followed God into this world: To encourage laughter, freedom, dance And love. Let a noble cry inside of you speak to me Saying, “Hafiz, Don’t just sit there on the moon tonight Doing nothing  – Help unfurl my heart into the Friend’s Mind, Help, Old Man, to heal my wounded wings!” We are the companions of His Beauty We are the guardians Of Truth. Every man, plant and creature in Existence, Every woman, child, vein and note Is a

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March 8, 2007