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Category: Abbess love notes

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A Blessing for Silence & Solitude ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Blessing for Silence and Solitude*Holy Source of Silence,beneath the clatter and din of the everydayyou offer your mysteries to our hearts.You call us to pause,to slow down and listen to the true longingplanted in each of us by you, a seed of holy desire.Support us in letting go of the inner and outer noise.Open wide in us a sacred cave for stillnesswhere we can attune to your presence.Enliven us with the gift of your sweet musicand allow us to encounter your holy presenceflaming in each of our hearts.Help us to catch a note of your songin the wind or in

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Journey to Joy ~ A New Project from Christine

Hello dear ones, I continue to feel better on this new medication thankfully. I am far from pain-free, but better than I have felt in perhaps two years or more. I continue to take things slowly as I am keenly aware my health is often fragile and tenuous, so gently I go with gratitude and cherishing. I wanted to share a project that emerged out of this long season of my body flaring and sometimes feeling like my joy was being stolen from me. I turned to one of the things that has always served me well—writing. Specifically the writing

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Creating New Beginnings in Times of Unravelling ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

A Blessing for Hope*Dreamkeeper,bless me with vision to see the possibilities for this hurting and broken world. Help me to remember that hope is not a thingbut an action, I cannot know that what I do is of any consequence, but I must do something. I must walk in trustthat I plant seeds for others,that my kindness ripples out into the world, that justice is necessary, that my joy mattersthat love is at the foundation of everything. On those days when hope feels so far away, surround me with kindred soulswho can help sustain hope when I must let go.

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A Midwinter God is Published! ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

God is not simply in the light, in the intelligible world, in the rational order. God is in the darkness, in the womb, in the Mother, in the chaos from which order comes . . . darkness is the womb of life. —Dom Bede Griffiths Dearest dancing monks, artists, and pilgrims, I am thrilled to share that my newest book A Midwinter God: Encountering the Divine in Seasons of Darkness has been published by Ave Maria Press and is available to order from your favorite booksellers! To celebrate we have two gifts for you: First, is a reflection guide with questions to companion

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New Abbey Team Member ~ Welcome Delaney Hart!

We are delighted to introduce the newest member to our Abbey of the Arts team. Delaney Hart (she/her), sister to Wisdom Council member Cassidhe Hart, is joining us from Illinois. To begin, her work will focus on increasing the accessibility of our self-study retreats through transcripts and closed captions for select videos, and creating reflection guides for some of Christine’s books. The guide for A Midwinter God: Encountering the Divine in Seasons of Darkness is available now. Meet Delaney Squirrels and trees, music and dance, curiosity and tears — these are Delaney’s teachers and guides. While listening for the inherent

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Writing Your Spiritual Memoir ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dearest dancing monks, artists, and pilgrims, This Friday, September 13th, we are pleased to welcome Wisdom Council member, clinical trauma specialist and expressive arts therapist Dr. Jamie Marich to lead us in a mini-retreat on Writing Your Spiritual Memoir. In this mini-retreat experience, Jamie will use several expressive arts facilitation strategies to help us start or continue the process of writing our own spiritual memoir.  Fresh off the experience of writing her own memoir You Lied to Me About God about her experience of growing up in a mixed Catholic-Protestant home and experiencing spiritual abuse in other settings, Jamie has a great deal

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A Blessing for Trust in Abundance ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

A Blessing for Trust in Abundance*Spirit of generous abundance,remind us there is always more than enough,enough food, enough love, enough time, enough resources. Help us to see how our patterns of livingseparate and disconnected amplifies our scarcity. Bring us into the joy and challenge of communitywhere bread divided multiplies, where laughter shared overflows. Empower us to share freely from our own abundance with others in need. Slow us down to see how time expandswhen we breathe and pay attention. Bless us in our efforts to trust in the goodness and love that pulses through the worldsustaining it moment by moment.

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