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Category: Abbess love notes

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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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September 11, 2024

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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September 8, 2024

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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September 1, 2024

Sabbath as Contemplative Practice ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dearest dancing monks, artists, and pilgrims, One of the things that makes contemplative life so counter-cultural is the active resistance against living a life of busyness and exhaustion, of not making that a badge of pride, of making time to ponder, to be more present, and to live life more slowly and attentively.  We are surrounded by messages of scarcity and so our anxiety gets fuelled. One of the most profound practices to resist this kind of anxiety, to fast from its hold on me, is the practice of Sabbath. Walter Brueggemann, in his wonderful book Sabbath as Resistance, writes that the

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August 25, 2024

Writing as a Spiritual Practice ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dearest dancing monks, artists, and pilgrims Tomorrow we begin a 4-week series on Writing as a Spiritual Practice. The online program begins with a live Zoom retreat and then offers 27 days to follow with a daily pre-recorded writing prompt designed to take you about 20 minutes as a way to cultivate a writing habit. There are two additional prompts each day as well for when you have more time to spend diving into your creative well.  I am deeply inspired by monastic tradition, one of the great contemplative and mystical strands of Christian heritage, and also present in other religions.

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August 18, 2024

2024-2025 Programs ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dearest dancing monks, artists, and pilgrims, We hope you have had a restful summer. We always cherish this time of quiet reflection and dreaming into the new academic year of programs. I have savored having some time to simply be and deepen into the sacred rhythms of life.  Some of my time this summer has been spent working on a book about seven medieval women mystics. It is a tremendous gift to have some expanses of time to savor their visions and listen for their wisdom to us.  Out of this wellspring of rest, flows forth our calendar for the coming months

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August 4, 2024

Feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola

Dearest monks and artists, Today is the feast day of St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order.  The spirituality of Ignatius has played a huge role in my own unfolding. When I started undergraduate studies at Fordham University in philosophy I was at best agnostic (and the daughter of two agnostics raised in a completely non-religious household). My required course in Liberation Theology amazed me that I had not heard of this deep commitment to justice in the Catholic Church before. My service work in the South Bronx with at-risk youth and also in environmental restoration led me

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July 31, 2024

Upcoming Programs

Contemplative Prayer Service: Kinship with Creation
Contemplative Prayer Service: Kinship with Creation
6 Jan 25
Centering Prayer
Centering Prayer
15 Jan 25
A Midwinter God: Encountering the Divine in Seasons of Darkness
A Midwinter God: Encountering the Divine in Seasons of Darkness
20 Jan 25

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