Abbey of the Arts

Transformative Living through Contemplative & Expressive Arts

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    • 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
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    • About Christine Valters Paintner
    • About John Valters Paintner
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  • 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
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Featured Poet Series

Featured Poet: Susan Miller

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 Susan Miller, whose work is inspired by the sacred in relationship. Read her poetry and discover more about the connections she makes between poetry and the sacred.

Et In Arcadia Ego

For Anya Krugovoy Silver

Yesterday a new Tom Waits song
was released, and I thought

of you. In a different world
we would have met up this October,

our heads together over a cafe table,
and we could have sung it

like schoolgirls singing the anthem
of their country--not Russia,

not America, but the country of those
who joke about death and carry

a St. Agatha prayer-card wherever
they go. In April your hair

was growing back, and you wore
red and black earrings that swung

like pendulums over our lunch.
You ordered a giant cup of coffee.

I ordered a giant sugar bomb.
The sun warmed our walk

through Central Park, and we linked arms
talking about how much making out

is okay for a 14-year-old, being moms.
It was and was not an ordinary day.

Now I am the only one
who remembers how slowly we walked,

how I returned you to the apartment
because you feared

getting dizzy alone.
I’ve been trying to pray more,

reading your poems.
I painted my nails red

because of you, letting the chips show.
I walk through the house, wishing

you would haunt me the way you said
your dead friends would sit with you

during chemo. One more time
I would sing to you bella ciao, bella ciao,

bella ciao.

Originally published in Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, 2019

Themes of Her Work

My main theme currently--in just about every aspect of my life--is grief. In the past six years I’ve lost a number of deeply beloved friends, including my official sponsor for conversion to Catholicism, my unofficial sponsor for conversion, one of my early mentors in poetry, one of my most recent mentors in poetry, and my grandmother. I’ve spent the entire last year in rumination. I haven’t been writing so much as preparing to write--I’ll be traveling to Mexico this summer to start a book of essays about death in Mexican art and culture. I expect poetry will follow as well.

Poetry and the Sacred

Poetry, like all acts of witness, allows the reader to enter into another’s perspective. Reading poetry can help develop empathy and a deeper communion with others. If there is anything that brings me closer to the sacred, it’s the effort to grow closer to other human beings. I often write poetry because my reading inspires that impulse. I’m not always in touch with my faith; my mind is likely to be distracted or cloudy. But reading (and I’m a reader first) can center me again, because I’m asking questions and trying to enter into some kind of wisdom. In my twenties, I spent a year reading Ecclesiastes everywhere--on the subway, in my room, at lunch, between classes. I read it because I needed it. It wasn’t just because it was the Bible--it seemed to hold both sensuous music and sere truths, a poetry that was totally dire but would inevitably seduce you anyway. Artists I admire often tell difficult truths in beautiful ways--Colette, Gwendolyn Brooks, Eliot Weinberger, Elizabeth Bishop, Anthony Hecht, Denis Johnson, Anya Krugovoy Silver, George Saunders, Sturgill Simpson, Mark Doty, Werner Herzog, Tom Waits, Marie Ponsot, Jerry Harp, Yehoshua November… plus the usual suspects (Hopkins, O’Connor.)

A Vision

Last night I dreamed the church in winter.
Crowds of people filled the pews, laden
with armloads of roses and larkspur,
each with a tray of lit candles. St. Claire
loosened all her blonde hair in a pew
in the front of the sanctuary, and I knew
St. Francis nestled between friends somewhere.
The priest told us In this dark hour of the year
we light candles to dispel the vision of evil,
which shadows us whenever we forget to turn
towards the light.
Directly I could feel
beside me the grey one on his ashen horse,
his face obscured under his tattered hood,
and felt the wind of his galloping, but
my candle’s flame did not flicker.
You must make your own light, the Father said,
and as I raised my head I saw every man
and woman, every child, clean and naked,
brighter than the glow of a thousand candles.

Originally published in Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality, Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2016, and in Communion of Saints.

About Susan Miller

Susan L. Miller is the author of Communion of Saints: Poems (Paraclete Press.) She has twice received Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes for poetry, and has poems in Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion, and Spirituality (Sibling Rivalry Press) and St. Peter’s B-List: Contemporary Poems Inspired by the Saints (Ave Maria Press.) Her poems have been published in Commonweal, Black Warrior Review, Meridian, Iowa Review, Los Angeles Review, Image, Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, and other literary journals. Essays have been published on the Sick Pilgrim blog. Because she is a student of Marie Ponsot, she has also had poems published in several volumes of Still Against War. She teaches at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Recent Articles:
The Catholic Imagination: What’s Actually on Display in the Met’s Heavenly Bodies Exhibit, Part I

Dress Like a Saint: What’s Actually on Display in the Met’s Heavenly Bodies Exhibit, Part II

Vatican Treasures: What’s Actually on Display in the Met’s Heavenly Bodies Exhibit, Part III

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 25, 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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