Summer Retreat and Fall Online Course Explore Benedictine Spiritual Practices

This summer I will be in Berkeley leading a weekend retreat on Praying the Hours at the Episcopal seminary CDSP.  I will follow it up with a fall online course on Benedictine spirituality.  Consider joining me for one or both! 

Here are a short interview and article about them:

Summer Retreat and Fall Online Course Explore Benedictine Spiritual Practices

In the midst of busy lives, time is often seen as an ever-diminishing resource, a constraint on our ability to do all that we might like to get done. But, “time can become a gift,” says Christian spirituality scholar Christine Valters Paintner, Ph.D., who will be leading a weekend retreat at Easton Hall Conference Center this summer and extending the experience through an online CALL course in the fall. “Praying the Hours: Exploring the Seasons of the Day and Our Lives” will be held in Berkeley from July 17 to 19—perhaps offering respite and time for reflection to those returning from General Convention.

Dr. Paintner, who teaches Christian spirituality courses at Seattle University and is co-author of Lectio Divina: Contemplative Awakening and Awareness (with Lucy Wynkoop; Paulist Press, 2008), sees the weekend retreat as “an opportunity for people to be moved through the experience of the Hours as a way of tending to the movement of the day, of the seasons, of life itself.” The Benedictine approach to praying the Hours, explains Dr. Paintner, gives space to still the day-to-day race though time so that we experience something of “the rise and fall of everything as the promise of morning gives way to the fire of noonday, as the afternoon confronts us with our limits and then moves us into the deepening darkness of night.”

Dr. Paintner, herself a Benedictine Oblate, will offer an extended exploration of Benedictine spirituality in a fall online course, “Benedictine Spiritual Practices: Contemplative Ways of Being in the World.” This seven-week course (begins late October) will introduce participants to three essential Benedictine contemplative practices: lectio divina (sacred listening), centering prayer, and praying the Hours. The course, says Dr. Paintner, “Offers the gift of extended reflection on classic Benedictine practices, giving students the opportunity to engage modes of prayer and contemplation week by week, to discuss their experiences with other students, and to consider the ways in which sustained spiritual practice allows us to develop ways of being in a world of doing.”

More detailed descriptions of the weekend retreat in Berkeley and the seven-week online CALL course, as well as registration information, are available online at http://cdsp.edu/center_summer.php#spirit.

A special discount is available for those who register for both the weekend retreat and the online course.