Welcome to Abbey of the Arts!
A virtual monastery and global community
The Abbey is a virtual global online monastery offering online programs & retreats, reflections, and resources which integrate contemplative practice and creative expression.
We support you in becoming a monk in the world and an artist in everyday life. We believe in nourishing an earth-cherishing consciousness.
Poetry is our nourishment. Art inspires our souls. We dance for the joy of it.
We delight in being joined by people like you, who are monks at heart and seeking kindred spirits, a community committed to contemplative rhythms and creative expression.
We are not affiliated with any particular institution and open our doors to people from any denomination or none at all. We strive to create a place of welcome and hospitality where we might dialogue with one another and grow. Our own spirituality is shaped very much by the rich Christian mystical tradition and transpersonal psychology.
We celebrate diversity and strive to be radically inclusive. We are a queer-embracing, anti-racist, and anti-ableist community. Abbey of the Arts cultivates a wide circle where each member can show up as their truest selves.
To get started on your journey we invite you to:
- Watch the welcome video from Christine Valters Paintner, the online Abbess.
- Subscribe to our newsletter and receive regular soul nourishment with your choice of daily, weekly, or monthly emails. When you sign up for the newsletter we will send you a link to a welcome gift: Our Monk in the World 8-day online retreat (inspired by the principles of our Monk Manifesto).
- Learn more about our Holy Disorder of Dancing Monks and visit the Facebook group to join the community and meet other dancing monks.
- Enjoy our free resources listed below.
- Explore the Reflections section of our website to read soul nourishing reflections from Christine and John Valters Paintner, Hildy the Monk-ey (our Abbey mascot), and members of the community in the Monk in the World Guest Post series. (Calls for submissions are announced in the newsletter.)
- Check out our Calendar for a schedule of upcoming programs. We offer monthly contemplative prayer services, single session retreats focused on contemplative wisdom and creative expression, and seasonal, multiweek retreats that invite you to a deeper integration of contemplative spiritual practice and creative expression with monastic spirituality.
Join the Holy Disorder of Dancing Monks!
The Path of Contemplation
Are you a monk in the world?
Contemplative spiritual practice and rhythms invite us into a deeper way of life, one in which less becomes more, and the goals are slowness rather than speed, savoring rather than productivity. Contemplative ways of being call us to resist the busyness of the world and to invest our identity in being rather than doing.
At the Abbey we are nourished by three streams of the Christian wisdom and mystical tradition:
- The desert mothers and fathers, who starting in the 3rd century traveled out to the harsh landscapes of the Egyptian and Syrian deserts to live a life dedicated to God and to strip away all that stood in the way of full-hearted commitment. Their stories offer us wisdom across the centuries for how to deal with the relentless demands of our thoughts and find true inner stillness (hesychia).
- Celtic Christian monasticism, which flourished from the 5th to 12th century in Ireland, and took great inspiration from the desert elders. They were characterized by the local nature of their practices (before Rome stepped in and demanded conformity), the reverence for creation, and their dedication to peregrinatio, which is a form of pilgrimage characterized by wandering and exile for the love of Christ.
- The Benedictine Rule, written by St. Benedict in Italy in the 6th century. It has been in continuous use since that time in thousands of communities around the world, known for its balanced way of life. Benedict wanted monks to find the sacred in all things, all people, and in the unfolding of time.
We also engage in conversation and dialogue with yogic and other contemplative traditions, including contemporary secular traditions like the Slow Movement.
Contemplation is . . . awakening, enlightenment, and the amazing intuitive grasp by which love gains certitude of God’s creative and dynamic intervention in our daily life. . . contemplation is a sudden gift of awareness, an awakening to the Real within all that is real. A vivid awareness of infinite Being at the roots of our own limited being. An awareness of our contingent reality as received, as a present from God, as free gift of love.
Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny. We are free beings and sons of God. This means to say that we should not passively exist, but actively participate in (God's) creative freedom, in our own lives, and in the lives of others, by choosing the truth. To put it better, we are even called to share with God the work of creating the truth of our identity.
The Path of Creativity
Are you a writer or artist?
Our approach to working with the arts is through the lens of the expressive arts where process is honored over product and a multiplicity of art modalities are explored as ways of accessing different insights into a particular experience. The languages of poetry, visual art, music, movement, and imagination are all brought to bear on the act of soul-making. In ancient traditions, all of the arts came together through rituals honoring life’s transitions.
The arts can become a vehicle for discovery where what is new within us is given safe space to emerge, where the soul is able to give expression and find form for its deepest longings. Creativity at heart is about cooperating with the divine work within us. Our work in the arts creates a safe space for participants to dive into the gifts of the creative process and listen for the invitations and discoveries shimmering there and what wants to emerge.
We welcome the profound insights of Jungian and transpersonal psychology, dream work, archetypes, and expressive arts, where the inner symbolic life is honored as a significant source of wisdom about the divine movement in the soul.
Body wisdom is also at the heart of our work. We honor the body as “the last unexplored wilderness” and reclaim this powerful wisdom and insight for our lives. Contemplative embodiment is at the heart of our practice.
Earth Our Original Monastery
How necessary it is for monks to work in the fields, in the rain, in the sun, in the mud, in the clay, in the wind: these are our spiritual directors and our novice-masters. They form our contemplation. They instill us with virtue. They make us as stable as the land we live in.
Do you long to nourish an earth-cherishing consciousness?
Nature is a sacred text and the first scripture. The cycles of the seasons offer deep wisdom and we honor the earth as our original monastery.
We live in what we might call an Age of Forgetting. We have forgotten who we are in relation to everything else: the creatures, the plants, the mountains, the forests, the oceans, one another, and even to ourselves.
One of the fruits of contemplative spiritual practice is the remembrance of our wholeness, to see past the divisions we create with our egos and minds, and rediscover the way we are all of one creation.
We are resurrecting the memory of an ancient kinship. We are called to a holy remembrance of a wise knowing within us. We are not separate from nature and creation. We have animal bodies and within us is a wild and intuitive capacity that goes beyond the carefully constructed plans we have for ourselves.
The tradition of monastic spirituality was birthed in the forests and deserts, the places of wilderness and wild edges which reflect an inner reality as well. This call to the edges, which is the monk’s call, is a call to wildness, to that which lies beyond our domesticated, neat, safe, and secure lives. Nature reminds us of the messiness and beauty of things. Nature says that when we let ourselves get messy and play in the dirt, profound things can happen.
Free Resources
Explore our Lift Every Voice Book Club and podcast for a bi-monthly conversation on how increasing our diversity of perspectives on contemplative practice can enrich our understanding of the Christian mystical tradition. Bi-monthly we will post our newest video recording and invite you to watch, ponder, and share your insights with us during the month that follows. Lift Every Voice is now available as a podcast in your favorite apps like Apple, Google, Spotify, Amazon, and Pandora. We then invite conversation and reflection in our dedicated Facebook group (click the link to request to join us).
