Abbey of the Arts

Transformative Living through Contemplative & Expressive Arts

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    • 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
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      • 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
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        Aligning Body and Spirit Through
        Yoga and the Benedictine Way
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      • 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
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      • 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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Family Systems, Grief, Photos

What Endures

Today is the fifth anniversary of my mother's death. My time away on retreat the last few days was a time of ritual and remembering.  I will post more about the retreat itself in the next couple of days. Thank you for all of your beautiful blessings in comments and emails.

Last night after I returned home we went to a friend's house for Sukkot.  It is a 7-day festival that comes after the Jewish high holy days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and during it, celebrants build sukkahs or tents and live in them as a remembrance of the Israelites time of wandering.  As my rabbi friend reflected, it is a time to remember that life is fragile and we are vulnerable, that everything is temporary.

Coming on the eve of such an anniversary for me, the meaning was amplified in my heart.  The invitation to be present to life's brief and precious nature feels especially profound.  The memories of being present to my mother in those final days of her life and in the transition to her death continue to be the most visceral and profound memories I have.

With my father's death twelve years ago and the loss of my beloved companion Duke just over two years ago, I am familiar with the landscape of loss.  I know life's fragility in an intimate way. I know the terrible ache of grief when I have wondered how I can even manage to keep my lungs filled with air.

None of us is spared this experience.  We may have to face it in a variety of ways — the loss of a job, a home, a dream, a beloved one or many.  Each can tear our hearts wide open if we let it.  And each of us can shut out the pain in the hopes that it will make life easier to bear. I have chosen to welcome in the sadness again and again.

Yet life is filled with paradox.  In a world filled with losses and ending, there is also unspeakable beauty.  For the many hours I have spent with my heart rended, I have spent as many hours in awe of a landscape, of a small kindness, of love. To the degree I welcome in grief is also the degree to which I am capable of welcoming in joy. Life is unbelievably fragile and fleeting and it is made of a substance solid like steel or stone, enduring in ways we had not imagined.

My mother was a radiant woman.  She discovered her power in the last few years of her life and it continues to fill me with sorrow that I did not have more time to witness this gift, to bask in her ability to speak truth without apology. I was blessed to know her radiance at the time and to be grateful each day for what she would teach me. If I become truly her daughter, then I will have lived well.

This morning I awoke to discover fog laying close to the earth and so on this anniversary, I headed to the cemetery.  It is not where my mother is buried, that is three thousand miles away, but that does not matter. I love fog because it speaks to me of the mystery of God, of how we have only a limited vision of that expansive love and goodness.  I adore graveyards because in being surrounded by those stones lovingly erected by families in grief, I feel connected to a community that has loved deeply and I am linked to that other world in tangible ways.  I experience the "thin place" of which the Celts speak and who say this time of year we are approaching is when the veil becomes especially thin between heaven and earth.

She is as close as my own breath, she beats in my blood. I see my ancestors dancing with abandon in circles around me, calling me to remember what does endure across the tapestry of time — stories of exile and stories of arriving home again.

-Christine Valters Paintner @ Abbey of the Arts

(top photo is of my mother at 2 years old, other photos taken at the Lakeview Cemetery in Seattle this morning)

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16 Comments October 19, 2008

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

  • 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
  • Lift Every Voice: Contemplative Writers of Color – April Video Discussion and Book Group Materials Now Available

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