Abbey of the Arts

Transformative Living through Contemplative & Expressive Arts

  • Welcome
    • Prayer Cycle
      • Introduction to the Earth Monastery Prayer Cycle
      • Day 1 Morning & Evening Prayer:
        Earth as the Original Cathedral
      • Day 2 Morning & Evening Prayer:
        Earth as the Original Scriptures
      • Day 3 Morning & Evening Prayer:
        Earth as the Original Saints
      • Day 4 Morning & Evening Prayer:
        Earth as the Original Spiritual Directors
      • Day 5 Morning & Evening Prayer:
        Earth as the Original Icon
      • Day 6 Morning & Evening Prayer:
        Earth as the Original Sacrament
      • Day 7 Morning & Evening Prayer:
        Earth as the Original Liturgy
      • Prayer Cycle Leader Resources
    • About the Abbey
    • About Christine Valters Paintner
    • About John Valters Paintner
    • About the Wisdom Council
    • Monk Manifesto
    • Join the Holy Disorder of Dancing Monks
    • Subscribe to Our Love Notes
    • Website privacy notice
  • Books
    • 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
    • Poetry by Christine Valters Paintner
    • Poetry Videos
    • Dancing Monk Icons
    • Other Art Collaborations
      • 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
      • God Alone is Enough: A Spirited Journey with Teresa of Avila (Book Club – February 2021)
    • Community Online Retreats
      • The Spiral Way:
        Celtic Spirituality and the Creative Imagination
      • Journey with the Desert Mothers and Fathers (Lent 2021)
      • Dancing with Fear in Troubled Times
      • Novena for Times of Unraveling
      • Sacred Time: Embracing an Intentional Way of Life (Spring 2021)
      • The Two HT’s-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
      • Poetry and the Sacred Garden of the World:
        An Online Writing Retreat
    • 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)
      • 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
      • 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)
  • Calendar
  • Reflections
  • Contact

Monk in the World Guest Post Series

Monk in the World Guest Post: Monette Chilson

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission for the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Monette Chilson's reflection "Monk in the Darkness."

It is hard to be a monk in the dark. Our old ways don’t work. We bump, flail and wail in our blindness. We can easily get stuck in the disorienting fog.

I want to usher in the light. Celebrate the joyful. Be grateful for the blessings. That’s the kind of monk I want to be in this world. The serene, meditating variety with a bemused half smile upon my face. But that’s not always the reality of my calling or yours. Sometimes, we are asked to be monkish when the world goes black. Our private world or one of the concentric circles that contain it—our family, our city, our nation or what feels like the entirety of Planet Earth.

I find that I can’t think or analyze my way through this blackness, these places that feel like voids that might consume me. These places so bleak that I want to be consumed. What I have come to know is that these places are portals. They are dark, yes, but their darkness is holy. They are the way through to whatever Spirit has for you next. If we can’t intellectualize this passage, then how are we to traverse it? Religious platitudes have not helped me find my way.

What has helped is embodying the darkness. Diving into it and exploring it. In practical terms, using a yogic approach—one that includes the physical practices and the more subtle spiritual ones—has been the way through for me. Monks all know there is more to the world than that which we can see with our eyes. In the darkness, though, we forget. We need ways of reminding ourselves. Movements to awaken our body. Mudras to help us wrap our hands around what we’d rather push away. Meditation to help us sink down deep into the darkness rather than running away.

All this to make the unseen reality visible to our spirits. When we see this way, the material happenings around us take on a spiritual significance we would otherwise miss. A bolt becomes a beacon. Let me explain by way of a story.

Angie—my healthy, happy 42-year-old sister—had been gone long enough that I was still marking time in hours—18, 24, 36 hours. Surviving each felt like a milestone. I was not yet engaged in the busy work of writing the obituary that would come with the morning light and would make it feel real in a way that words do for me. Standing in my son’s dark room, groping desperately around his bunk beds for a tiny pillow to which he’d entrusted his most recently lost tooth, I just wanted to fulfill my tooth fairy duties and retreat back inside myself.

Frustrated, I silently wailed at my inability to do this one simply thing, tears rolling down my face. I felt defeated and disproportionately bereft at my failure. That is when I felt it. Something brushed against my hair en route to the floor where it landed on the wood with a solid clunk. I reached down to where I’d heard its metallic landing. I felt something cold. And hard. And real. A bolt. And next to it, the elusive tooth pillow, with the tiny ivory kernel tucked safely inside.

And then, through my tears, I smiled. I mouthed a whispered thank you to Angie. Angie who we’d jokingly called MacGyver. Angie who could fix anything. Angie who was somehow both wildly artistic and exactingly analytical. Angie who’d just pulled a bolt out of thin air to put me back together one last time.

This is the kind of seeing we need in the darkness. I could have missed it entirely, dismissing the bolt as an oddity. We need to open our hearts to the miracles that fall from the sky even when we are feeling forlorn and forgotten. When any God we ever thought we knew seems to have evaporated. When things can’t get any worse, still there is holiness. We can feel desolation and receive divinely orchestrated messages at the same time. In fact, our despair may sharpen our ability to receive them. When we have reached the end of us, that is when God steps in. That is when we become monks in the darkness.


Monette Chilson—author of My Name is Lilith and Sophia Rising: Awakening Your Sacred Wisdom Through Yoga—writes and speaks about God in the feminine and the feminine in God. She’s written for publications including Yoga Journal, Integral Yoga Magazine, Elephant Journal and Progressive Christianity and has contributed to numerous anthologies including Jesus, Muhammad and the Goddess, Whatever Works: Feminists of Faith Speak and A Journey Toward Home: Soul Travel from Advent to Lent. She was awarded an Illumination Book Award gold medal, as well as the Hoffer Small Press and First Horizon Awards. She is currently editing an anthology titled Original Resistance: Reclaiming Lilith, Reclaiming Ourselves. Connect on Twitter and Instagram (@MonetteChilson) or explore her work at www.MonetteChilson.com.
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2 Comments August 9, 2017

Upcoming Programs

The Spiral Way:
Celtic Spirituality and the Creative Imagination

Hosted by the Rowe Center
February 1-21, 2021
with Christine Valters Paintner, PhD

Journey with the Desert Mothers and Fathers
Retreat for Lent 2021

February 17-April 1, 2021
with Christine & John Valters Paintner and Betsey Beckman

Recent Reflections

  • Celtic Spirituality and the Spiral Way ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess
  • Hildy Tales 3: Ní heolas go haontíos ~ by John Valters Paintner
  • Humility + Join us today for live prayer! ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess
  • Hildy Tales 2: Tús maith leath na hoibre – by John Valters Paintner
  • New Book Club for 2021: Lift Every Voice ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

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