Visit the Abbey of the Arts online retreat platform to access your programs:

Reflections

Category: Abbess love notes

Filter

Monk in the World: Conversion 3 – Reflections by Christine Valters Paintner (with AUDIO MP3)

Dear monks, artists, and pilgrims, During this Jubilee year of sabbatical we are revisiting our Monk Manifesto by moving slowly through the Monk in the World retreat materials together every Sunday. Each week will offer new reflections on the theme and every six weeks will introduce a new principle. Principle 7. I commit to a lifetime of ongoing conversion and transformation, recognizing that I am always on a journey with both gifts and limitations.   Conversion in monastic tradition is never a once-and-for-all event.  Instead it is always a process of unfolding, ripening, emerging, arising.  I like to think about this commitment to conversion as always

Read More

Renewing a Love for Earth in Challenging Times ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dear monks, artists, and pilgrims, This week’s love note is an excerpt from a written interview that Bearings, the journal of the Collegeville Institute, posted with me this week about my newest book Earth, Our Original Monastery. _____ In the book’s introduction you identify your vocation as contemplative. How do you engage with the existential dread and anxiety of climate change? Being a contemplative is the only thing that saves me from complete despair. Yet, even so, I still experience those feelings of dread and anxiety. There are beliefs which are the core of my contemplative practice: one, a deep

Read More

Easter Blessings from Abbey of the Arts ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

How to Be a Pilgrim – Poem Video from Christine Valters Paintner on Vimeo. Dear monks, artists and pilgrims, Lent is a powerful season of transformation. Forty days in the desert, stripped of our comforts, and buoyed by our commitment to daily practice so that we might arrive at the celebration of Easter deepened and renewed. In many ways this Lent was far more austere than any of us anticipated. Often, we arrive at the glorious season of resurrection and celebrate for that one day, forgetting it is a span of 50 days, even longer than the Lenten season through

Read More

Monk in the World: Conversion 1 – A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dear monks, artists and pilgrims, During this Jubilee year of sabbatical we are revisiting our Monk Manifesto by moving slowly through the Monk in the World retreat materials together every Sunday. Each week will offer new reflections on the theme and every six weeks will introduce a new principle. 7. I commit to a lifetime of ongoing conversion and transformation, recognizing that I am always on a journey with both gifts and limitations. “Translations vary, but in our modern day, conversatio morum suorum generally means conversion of manners, a continuing and unsparing assessment and reassessment of one’s self and what is most important

Read More

Let art, poetry, and music hold you in the paradox of these times ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

In a Dark Time Do not rush to make meaning. When you smile and say what purpose this all serves, you deny grief a room inside you, you turn from thousands who cross into the Great Night alone, from mourners aching to press one last time against the warm flesh of their beloved, from the wailing that echoes in the empty room. When you proclaim who caused this, I say pause, rest in the dark silence first before you contort your words to fill the hollowed out cave, remember the soil will one day receive you back too. Sit where

Read More

Monk in the World: Sabbath 6 – Questions for Reflection and Closing Blessing

Dearest monks, artists, and pilgrims, During this Jubilee year of sabbatical we are revisiting our Monk Manifesto by moving slowly through the Monk in the World retreat materials together every Sunday. Each week will offer new reflections on the theme and every six weeks will introduce a new principle. Principle 6: I commit to rhythms of rest and renewal through the regular practice of Sabbath and resist a culture of busyness that measures my worth by what I do. This week I invite you to ponder the following questions as guides for your Sabbath practice. What happens when you allow yourself to receive the full grace of Sabbath rest?

Read More

A Different Kind of Fast: Part Seven – Embrace Mystery

Dear monks, artists and pilgrims, Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole soil with the plowshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring, and reserve a nook of shadow for the passing bird; keep a place in your heart for the unexpected guests, an altar for an unknown God. — from Amiel’s Journal, translated by Mrs. Humphrey Ward John Cassian, one of the ancient desert fathers, describes three renunciations he says are required of all of us on the spiritual journey.

Read More