Dearest dancing monks, artists, and pilgrims,
Our featured self-study this month is Earth, Our Original Monastery. This retreat companions my book and we updated this retreat last spring, adding all new content from Cassidhe Hart on writing your own earth psalter and Polly Paton-Brown on the spirituality of trees. There are also wonderful songs that go with each week’s theme and a dance prayer led by Betsey Beckman.
Here is an adapted excerpt from the book:
Earth and her creatures teach us how to pray, how to worship and praise, but only if we listen and pay attention to their rhythms in this world.
Monks know this rhythm well, as the ancient practice of the Liturgy of the Hours immerses them in the rise and fall of each day. On this liturgical rhythm, Thomas Berry writes, “From an early period Christians adopted a liturgy that carefully observed the correspondences of human praise with the numinous moments of the dawn and sunset and with the transitions of the various seasons of the year. This liturgy was carried out most faithfully in the Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries of Europe up through the medieval period. The social order was itself governed by this basic rhythm of life.” The threshold times of day, especially dawn and dusk, have long been considered numinous—times of special awe as the world moves from light to dark or dark to light. This fundamental rhythm is the foundation of this prayer practice and reveals Earth as the original liturgy.
The Hebrew and Christian scriptures present us with a vision of nature whose primary function is to engage in a continual act of praising the Divine. Contemplatives who wish to learn how to follow St. Paul’s invitation to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thes 5:17) would do well to pay attention to the natural world.
Each time you go for a walk, see if you can begin with a sense that you are stepping into a landscape that is animate and alive, that is participating in the great unfolding of a liturgy of praise. Then let your body join in with this ongoing hymn, knowing your body is intimate with this already ongoing song. We have separated ourselves from creation by claiming consciousness only for ourselves. All elements of creation participate in this primordial cathedral, scriptures, saints, spiritual directors, icon, sacrament, and liturgy offering wisdom to us with each turn. These sacred places of encounter with the Divine are profoundly embodied.
The psalms see all of creation itself as offering continual praise to God. The sea, the sky, the trees, the animals, the stars—all these are seen to be singing God’s glory without human words but with another kind of language. All of creation is called to praise the sacredness of all things, never exhausting this possibility. The psalms exhort, “Let everything that breathes praise the Lord!” (Ps 150:6). This is a continual and ever-unfolding chorus of celebration happening all around us, and we are invited to join. Praise should arise from our hearts as spontaneously as it does from pines and panthers, from the sea and sloths.
In an old Irish poem about a mistle thrush, the bird is celebrated for its beauty and described as giving an “impromptu sermon” that teaches his listeners much about the goodness of God. The bird is not only sacrament but also preacher and liturgist, offering his own perspective on celebration of the Divine Source.
The psalms of praise often describe nature as alive and in perpetual celebration. Thomas Merton saw his call as a monk to listen for the song being sung through all of creation. He was invited to join in with this original liturgy already happening all around him. In the forest he could tend to “the sweet songs of living things,” whose celebratory choirs he joined. In these moments he touched the paradise that pulses all around us.
In Way of the Pilgrim, a nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox text, it is written, “And while I prayed in the depths of the heart, everything around me seemed transformed: the trees, grass, birds, earth, air, light—every created thing seemed to proclaim that bears witness to God’s love for humanity. Everything was praying. Everything sang glory be to God.” All of nature sings glory to God, even the seasons themselves. The liturgical calendar reflects the seasonal cycle of dying and rising. Nature has her own liturgy, which we discover when we begin to anticipate the return of the salmon each fall in the Pacific Northwest, the migration of swans and geese each winter flocking by the thousands, the first snowdrops growing in Ireland as a sign of spring, and the lush bounty of fruits and vegetables that arrives each summer around the world. These are feast days in the calendar of creation’s unfolding, times to celebrate as nature offers up her signs of what is to come. Even the sun’s return each morning elicits the birds to sing their praises.
The self-study version of the Earth Monastery companion retreat to the book is on sale during September for 20% off. Use code EARTH20.
I will be teaching for two other organizations this month:
I am delighted to be invited to join the Center for Action and Contemplation this Friday, September 11th for an online event on the question of “What Do Women Do with Christianity?” I am sure it will be a wonderful and engaging conversation. Carmen Acevedo Butcher and Cassidy Hall are also both involved.
Then on Friday, September 25th, I am leading an online mini-retreat on a spirituality of blessing for Mercy by the Sea (registration closes on September 21st at 12pm Eastern Time).
And finally, I will be back teaching with the Abbey starting Monday, September 28th when we begin a 7-week series on the fairy tale The Handless Maiden, a powerful story about wounding and healing that has guided me for the last twenty years. I will share more about that in the coming weeks.
With great and growing love,
Christine
Christine Valters Paintner, OblSB, PhD, REACE
Image: Paid license with Canva
