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Abbess love notes

Writing Your Spiritual Memoir ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dearest dancing monks, artists, and pilgrims, This Friday, September 13th, we are pleased to welcome Wisdom Council member, clinical trauma specialist and expressive arts therapist Dr. Jamie Marich to lead us in a mini-retreat on Writing Your Spiritual Memoir. In this mini-retreat experience, Jamie will use several expressive arts facilitation strategies to help us start or continue the process of writing our own spiritual memoir.  Fresh off the experience of writing her own memoir You Lied to Me About God about her experience of growing up in a mixed Catholic-Protestant home and experiencing spiritual abuse in other settings, Jamie has a great deal

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A Midwinter God Reflection Guide

We are pleased to offer a reflection guide for my latest book A Midwinter God: Encountering the Divine in Seasons of Darkness which releases on Friday, September 13th. Download the reflection guide here. About A Midwinter God: “I believe we all carry grief that has gone unnamed and unmourned,” writes best-selling author Christine Valters Paintner. “Nothing in our culture prepares us to deal with darkness and grief. We are told to cheer up and move on, to shop or drink our way to forgetting the pain we carry. Yet I believe that being faithful to our own dark moments is

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Monk in the World Guest Post: Jamie Marich

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to the Monk in the World guest post series. Today’s poem is by Wisdom Council member Jamie Marich who will lead a mini-retreat on September 13th on Writing Your Spiritual Memoir. Read on for her poem The Great Lie. Jamie is fresh off of writing her memoir, You Lied to Me About God: A Memoir, and has a great deal to share with the world about her spiritual formation process. This poem is one small reflection that flowed from her own expressive arts processes in preparing the book for publication. The Great LieThere are many lies about God going

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A Blessing for Trust in Abundance ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

A Blessing for Trust in Abundance*Spirit of generous abundance,remind us there is always more than enough,enough food, enough love, enough time, enough resources. Help us to see how our patterns of livingseparate and disconnected amplifies our scarcity. Bring us into the joy and challenge of communitywhere bread divided multiplies, where laughter shared overflows. Empower us to share freely from our own abundance with others in need. Slow us down to see how time expandswhen we breathe and pay attention. Bless us in our efforts to trust in the goodness and love that pulses through the worldsustaining it moment by moment.

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Monk in the World Guest Post: Jean Wise

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Jean Wise’s reflection The Spiritual Practice of Writing a Poem Each Day. At the end of my third-grade year, my teacher gave me a book of poetry. “When I saw this book, I thought of you,” she said. “Keep writing, Jeanie.” This is the first memory I have of someone else recognizing me as a writer. Even though I was young yet and as life unfolded, took different routes, her encouragement and gift of poetry seeded deep

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Abbess love notes

Sabbath as Contemplative Practice ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dearest dancing monks, artists, and pilgrims, One of the things that makes contemplative life so counter-cultural is the active resistance against living a life of busyness and exhaustion, of not making that a badge of pride, of making time to ponder, to be more present, and to live life more slowly and attentively.  We are surrounded by messages of scarcity and so our anxiety gets fuelled. One of the most profound practices to resist this kind of anxiety, to fast from its hold on me, is the practice of Sabbath. Walter Brueggemann, in his wonderful book Sabbath as Resistance, writes that the

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Monk in the World Guest Post: Carmen Acevedo Butcher

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to our Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Today’s post is an offering from Wisdom Council member Carmen Acevedo Butcher. Read on for Carmen’s reflection on exploring the history of words as a contemplative practice. Thank you, soul sister Christine, for your friendship, Hildegardian abbess wisdom, invitation into the Wisdom Council, its conversations and belonging among diverse insights, and the joyful dancing. I’m grateful for all the Abbey of the Arts community! Living in community and awareness of interconnectedness is essential to being human, as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel reminds us. We remember.

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Abbess love notes

Writing as a Spiritual Practice ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dearest dancing monks, artists, and pilgrims Tomorrow we begin a 4-week series on Writing as a Spiritual Practice. The online program begins with a live Zoom retreat and then offers 27 days to follow with a daily pre-recorded writing prompt designed to take you about 20 minutes as a way to cultivate a writing habit. There are two additional prompts each day as well for when you have more time to spend diving into your creative well.  I am deeply inspired by monastic tradition, one of the great contemplative and mystical strands of Christian heritage, and also present in other religions.

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Tea with the Abbess August 2024

We had a lovely time as a community gathering for tea, poetry, lectio divina, writing exploration, program updates, and questions. View our calendar for full listings of our 2024-2025 academic year. You are most welcome to join us!

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Monk in the World Guest Post: Jodi Blazek Gehr

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Jodi Blazek Gehr’s reflection on her word for the year. Choosing a word to focus on each year has become a nourishing, soulful ritual. I love participating in an ancient practice of contemplation recommended by Christine Valters Painter: “This tradition (for desert mothers and fathers) of asking for a word was a way of seeking something on which to ponder for many days, weeks, months, sometimes a whole lifetime…A word was meant to be wrestled with and slowly grown

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