Abbey of the Arts

Transformative Living through Contemplative & Expressive Arts

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  • Books
    • Breath Prayer:
      An Ancient Practice for the Everyday Sacred
    • Sacred Time:
      Embracing an Intentional Way of Life
    • The Wisdom of Wild Grace: Poems
    • Earth, Our Original Monastery:
      Cultivating Wonder and Gratitude through Intimacy with Nature
    • Dreaming of Stones: Poems
    • The Soul's Slow Ripening:
      12 Celtic Practices for Seeking the Sacred
    • The Wisdom of the Body:
      A Contemplative Journey to Wholeness for Women
    • Illuminating the Way:
      Embracing the Wisdom of Monks and Mystics
    • The Soul of a Pilgrim:
      Eight Practices for the Journey Within
    • Eyes of the Heart:
      Photography as a Christian Contemplative Practice
    • The Artist's Rule: Nurturing Your Creative Soul with Monastic Wisdom
    • Desert Mothers and Fathers: Early Christian Wisdom Sayings Annotated & Explained
    • Lectio Divina–The Sacred Art: Transforming Words and Images into Heart-Centered Prayer
    • Water, Wind, Earth & Fire: The Christian Practice of Praying with the Elements
    • Awakening the Creative Spirit:
      Bringing the Arts to Spiritual Direction
    • Lectio Divina: Contemplative Awakening & Awareness
  • Poetry | Art | Music
    • Music + DVD
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      • Monk in the World art series by Kristin Noelle
      • Saints & Animals art series by David Hollington
      • Sacred Time art series by Alexi Francis
      • Mary block print art series by Kreg Yingst
  • Programs
    • Lift Every Voice: Contemplative Writers of Color Book Club
    • Community Online Retreats
      • Harriet Tubman and Howard Thurman-on Being Free
      • Writing Into Bloom
        with Christine Valters Paintner
      • Revelations: The Mysticism of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe
      • The Wisdom of Wild Grace: A Weekend Retreat Online
      • The Spiral Way:
        Celtic Spirituality and the Creative Imagination
      • Sacred Balance:
        Aligning Body and Spirit Through
        Yoga and the Benedictine Way
    • Self-Study Online Spiritual Retreats
      • Creative Flourishing in the Heart of the Desert:
        An Online Retreat with St. Hildegard of Bingen
      • Dreaming of the Sea:
        A women’s discernment journey through the story of the Selkie
      • Earth, Our Original Monastery
        A Companion Retreat to the Book (SELF-STUDY)
      • Exile and Coming Home:
        An Archetypal Journey through the Scriptures
      • Eyes of the Heart:
        Photography as Contemplative Practice
        (Companion retreat to the book)
      • Journey with the Desert Mothers and Fathers
        (SELF-STUDY)
      • Honoring Saints and Ancestors:
        Online Retreat for the Season of Remembrance
      • Lectio Divina:
        The Sacred Art of Reading the World
      • A Midwinter God:
        Making a Conscious Underworld Journey (SELF-STUDY)
      • Sacred Rhythms of Sky, Sun, Sea & Stone:
        A Creative Retreat with the Elements (SELF-STUDY)
      • Sacred Seasons:
        A Yearlong Journey through the Celtic Wheel of the Year
      • The Soul of a Pilgrim:
        Eight Practices for the Journey Within
        (a companion retreat to the book)
      • The Soul's Slow Ripening: 12 Celtic Practices for Seekers of the Sacred (a companion retreat to the book)
      • Water, Wind, Earth & Fire
      • Watershed Moments
        in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures
      • Way of the Monk, Path of the Artist:
        A 12-Week Companion Retreat to The Artist's Rule
      • The Wisdom of the Body:
        A 10-Week Online Companion Retreat to the Book
      • The Wisdom of Mary and the Sacred Feminine
    • Live Programs: Pilgrimage & Retreats
      • Writing on the Wild Edges (Ireland)
      • Hildegard of Bingen (Germany)
      • Awakening the Creative Spirit: Experiential Education for Spiritual Directors in the Expressive Arts (Northwest)
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Grief

Infusion of Grace

infusion.gif

The woman who sat in the chair opposite me looked understandably frightened.  It was her first day there, what would become part of her routine over the next several weeks.  Her husband sat beside her holding her hand, stroking her skin gently, reassuringly, as if to say, I am here with you in this and through this.  The nurse sat fixed before them, taking her time to explain the whole process of receiving treatment for cancer, what she should expect, how she would feel. Of course, any words can never do justice to the experience of allowing chemicals to flow through your veins in the quest for healing.  Chemicals that bring on nausea and hair loss, among other undesirable side effects.  She was probably in her 40's, much too young to face the threat and specter of cancer. 

Every ten weeks I make a trip over to the hospital to receive an infusion of Remicade, a treatment for rheumatoid arthritis, an auto-immune illness.  It is what is called a disease-modifying drug, rather than an anti-inflammatory.  It acts to suppress the part of the immune system they believe is responsible for the attack on joint tissue.  Rather than taking a pill every day, the medication is administered by IV drip over a period of two hours every few weeks.  I have been making this journey for the last six years and have had RA for a total of fifteen years.  Side effects of this drug include decreased resistance to infection, although I have thankfully encountered no negative effects thus far.

The infusion takes place in the Oncology Infusion Center, and so most of the people coming to this place have one form or another of cancer.  Each visit I always share my room with two or three others receiving various kinds of chemotherapy treatments. Some of it is clear liquid like my own, sometimes I see people receiving a vibrant red liquid that apparently can burn the skin if it makes contact.

The times I spend there I am filled with gratitude, gratitude for the advances in medication that have taken place since I developed this illness, gratitude for access to comprehensive health insurance and care, gratitude for supportive friends and family.   I sit back in my recliner chair under the flourescent lights watching the clear liquid drip through the tube, receiving the gifts it offers my body, relishing the ways it allows me to continue to thrive with greatly diminished pain in my life.  This infusion is truly a sacrament for me, a gift of healing grace in my life.

This medication, I have been told, would cost about $36,000 a year if I paid out-of-pocket.  I pay only $20 with each visit.  Clearly no one receives this medication without prescription coverage. Currently over 45 million people in this country are denied health care coverage.  There was a very moving book published about three years ago titled Denied: The Crisis of America's Uninsured and contains 40 heartbreaking stories of families whose lives were shattered by illness and who were unable to receive care and treatment available because of lack of health care coverage.  They chose 40 to represent the 40 million at the time who were uninsured, now the number has risen to over 45 million at last count.  This is a complete failure of the imagination.

Before I started receiving this treatment I had such a bad flare I literally couldn't rise from bed by myself.  At the same time our rent was doubled (we were living in San Francisco) and my husband's job at the church was getting cut back to half-time.  I was in graduate school full-time so we had no safety net.  Thankfully with time we found another home and another job, and my doctor started me on this medication.  It was fairly new at the time.  Without it I would surely be living with excruciating pain and severe deformity of my joints.  Without her chemo, the woman sitting across from me would likely be risking death.  So it was with the stories in the book I mentioned above, so many unable to receive treatment for cancer or other diseases because insurance had been lost through unemployment, or a series of crises, and the tenuous safety net most of us live with had broken.

The landscape of illness, much like the landscape of grief, is a vastly different world than the one most of us inhabit.  It is a place where everything we have taken for granted gets turned upside down.  It is a place of great rawness and vulnerability. A place where we are forced to face the profound and delicate tenderness of our bodies, often forced to let go of dreams gone unfulfilled, reevaluating our futures, being more grateful for the gifts that health brings, praying that we are able to taste health again.  It is a place where we become initiated into a vast sisterhood and brotherhood of tenuousness.  To suddenly have the veil of illusion of the seeming permanence of good health lifted can bring tremendous sorrow and heartbreak. 

I have been through some very painful times with my illness, I was in my twenties when diagnosed, my mother the only other person I knew with the illness and she had not fared well.  I have had my share of great despair, of asking why, of wrestling with God.  And I likely will have more.  One day I found a photo of myself at the age of two or three in mid-giggle. I loved the innocence of that moment, my own moment of Eden, a time long before I had confronted the terrible suffering of the world, the pain of my own life.  It has been on my altar ever since.  Not because I long to return to that innocence, but as a witness to the joy that dwells deep inside of me despite all the forces that may conspire to quell it.

Somehow I have avoided bitterness over my losses.  Perhaps it is because I see so clearly that none of us can evade loss, none of us can escape mortality.  In that awareness comes responsibility to witness to it, to promise to make visible the suffering of others.  Why we suffer is of course one of the great questions of all time.  It is one I try to wrap myself in at times.  But more often than not, I wonder that there is such immense beauty in the world.  There are many who act purely out of self-interest, but far more who try their best to live from a place of great love and hunger for connection.  Those who won't deny the suffering of the ones they love, but who promise to dwell in those cracks with them.  I am aware that my own marriage vows of "in sickness and in health" have been called upon again and again.

In those moments of grace, when we love fully despite the suffering we have known or the loss we fear, when we laugh in face of the multitude of reasons for crying, when we cry fully and deeply despite those who would want us to keep our suffering silent, when we feel moved to create something of beauty in the midst of ugliness, in the midst of this great Mystery God pulses, in those moments of ordinary grace.

-Christine Valters Paintner

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18 Comments September 13, 2006

Upcoming Programs

  • Writing Into Bloom with Christine Valters Paintner
    • May 1, 2021
  • Revelations: The Mysticism of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe
    • May 13, 2021
  • The Wisdom of Wild Grace: A Weekend Retreat Online
    • May 15, 2021 - May 16, 2021
  • View All Upcoming Programs

Recent Reflections

  • Monk in the World Guest Post: Reverend Deb Goldman
  • A mini-poetry reading from Christine plus other publishing news
  • St. Kevin Holds Open His Hand and Radical Hospitality ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess
  • Monk in the World Guest Post: Greta Kopec
  • Monk in the World Podcast + Harriet Tubman Mysticism ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

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