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
    • Walk the Ancient Paths: Pilgrimage
      • Monk in the World (Ireland)
      • Writing on the Wild Edges (Ireland)
      • Poetry and the Sacred Garden of the World (Ireland)
      • Vienna Monk in the World (Austria)
      • Hildegard of Bingen (Germany)
    • Live Programs and Spiritual Retreats
      • Awakening the Creative Spirit: Experiential Education for Spiritual Directors in the Expressive Arts (Northwest)
    • Community Online Retreats
      • Lift Every Voice: Contemplative Writers of Color
      • The Way of the Hermit:
        A Spiritual Survival Guide for Dark Times
        with Kayleen Asbo, PhD
      • The Spiral Way:
        Celtic Spirituality and the Creative Imagination
      • Journey with the Desert Mothers and Fathers (Lent 2021)
      • Sacred Time: Embracing an Intentional Way of Life (Spring 2021)
    • 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
  • Calendar
  • Reflections
  • Contact

Featured Poet Series

Featured Poet: Bonnie Thurston

Last spring we launched a series with poets whose work we love and want to feature and will continue it moving forward.

Our next poet is Bonnie Thurston, whose work facilitates “seeing through” the particular to universals  Read her poetry and discover more about the connections she makes between poetry and the sacred.

Compassion in a Cold Climate

After mild December, sudden cold
scalpeled in sharply, dropped snow,
a bandage covering wounds.
We are all wounded, rent asunder
by our intransigent opinions,
by our palavering politicians
interested in positions of power
but not good, ordinary folk
who keep the engine of state
chugging relentlessly on
with no discernible direction.
The whine of arctic wind,
the sting of sleet on skin
are bracing, enlivening, a tonic
against the tempting enervation
of bad news from every direction
which causes an instinctive
drawing protectively within.
Frigid air makes breathing ragged,
the lungs ache, the eyes water,
makes the body remind the heart
that its hidden hurts are holy
only when they knit private pain
to the world’s awful wounds,
when they fan the flame of caring,
when they keep compassion alive.

Themes of Her Work

I try to articulate the timeless in the temporal, the aliveness in everything. My primary “subject” is landscape, rootedness in place conferring identity and stability that facilitates “seeing through” the particular to universals. An admitted Eyore, darkness is a perennial theme, but darkness as unknowing more than evil or threat. Recent poems respond allusively to “current events.” I create spare poems (whittle out anything un-necessary) that are consciously alliterative, and recently experiment with a “not sonnet” form: fourteen lines unrhymed lines, maintaining the divisions of their Petrarchan and Shakespearian progenitors.

ad-din‘

Beneath the forms,
the eternal essence,
multitudinous variations
reflecting Divine kindness:
the gift of many ways
for many peoples,
all beloved, all desired.

When the wind blows,
grasses of the fields
bow down in ranks.
Flowers are multiform,
but all yearn toward
a singular source of light:
the Face behind the faces.

‘Quintessential religion

Poetry and the Sacred

Beyond Word’s Horizon

I came to love of God
through literature and languages.
I came by words to the Word,
loved both, though variously,
was brought to shores of silence,
set sail on uncertain tides,
set sail on becalmed seas,
set sail to surrender,
go west into unknowing.

In “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.” Wordsworth describes nature’s “… presence that disturbs me with … joy,” just the presence I experienced in home’s mountains: “… something far more deeply interfused,” the “motion and…spirit, that impels/All thinking things, all objects of all thought,/ And rolls through all things.” I was hooked.

Islam suggests God spoke one word: Be. John’s Gospel asserts creation sprang from language. “In the beginning was the Word” Who by language invites us to something else, more, other than appearances. Poetry clothes the otherwise invisible. Through it we see what IS (reality) and what might be (possibility). That clothing is my practice. My lectio is Scripture (the ultimate allusive, metaphorical language). Writing is my authentic prayer, an attempt to articulate the glimpsed “beyond” or “other,” to honor God’s gratuitous, humanizing gift of language and return the gift to its Giver.

Outside Time

Being outside time,
God is not experienced
by increments,
but suddenly
as a match struck
in a dark room
which proves to be
a treasure house,
as lightening bolts
explode the night sky
eclipse lesser, stellar light.
God is not temporal,
not process but Presence,
creation, infinite epiphany.

“Beware the Ides of March”

In lovely foretaste of future,
temperatures soared skyward.
Peachy dawn promised bright days.
Returned birds sang avian duets.
Two robins intently engaged
in awkward, complex sex dance.

But today is shrouded in frost
and winter’s watery light.
Three does in winter coats
limp across the icy hill
nibbling at what there is to eat,
bark on the young pear trees
that will not blossom
when spring finally arrives.

About Bonnie Thurston

Bonnie Thurston resigned a Chair and Professorship in New Testament to live quietly in her home state of West Virginia.  Author or editor of 22 theological books, she contributes to scholarly and popular periodicals. [An internationally known Merton Scholar, her doctoral dissertation was one of the first on Merton.] She began writing poetry as a child, published her first poems in college, and is now widely published in the U.S.A. and U.K. Of her six collections of poetry the following are available [from Amazon or directly] from the publishers.

Belonging to Borders (2011) LitPress.org

A Place to Pay Attention (2014) CinnamonPress.com

Practicing Silence: New and Selected Verses (2014) ParacletePress.com

From Darkness to Eastering (2017) IonaBooks.com

A lover of the West Virginia hills, Bonnie is an avid reader, gardener, cook, and classical music lover.

Dreaming of Stones

Christine Valters Paintner's new collection of poems Dreaming of Stones has just been published by Paraclete Press.

The poems in Dreaming of Stones are about what endures: hope and desire, changing seasons, wild places, love, and the wisdom of mystics. Inspired by the poet’s time living in Ireland these readings invite you into deeper ways of seeing the world. They have an incantational quality. Drawing on her commitment as a Benedictine oblate, the poems arise out of a practice of sitting in silence and lectio divina, in which life becomes the holy text.

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Leave a Comment September 11, 2019

Upcoming Programs

The Way of the Hermit:
A Spiritual Survival Guide for Dark Times

January 22-24, 2021
with Kayleen Asbo, PhD

The Spiral Way:
Celtic Spirituality and the Creative Imagination

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

Recent Reflections

  • 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
  • Hildy Tales One: Dia dhuit, is mise Hildy! by John Valters Paintner, Your Online Prior
  • Celebrate the Earth Monastery Prayer Cycle podcast with us!

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