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Reflections

Category: Abbess love notes

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The Holy Call of Doubt: See – Pilgrimage of Resurrection through Creative Practice (a love note)

This is the second in a series of eight reflections over the season of Easter on making a pilgrimage of resurrection. Word for today: See “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nail marks and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”  — John 20:24-25 “Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. We joyfully announce it. [And yet] I realize that my faith and unbelief are never far from each other. Maybe it is exactly at the place where they touch each other that the growing edge

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Easter Sunday: Rise – Pilgrimage of Resurrection through Creative Practice (a love note)

Word for today: Rise Dearest monks and artists, Lent is such a powerful season of pilgrimage through the desert, calling us to return to God with our whole hearts. We arrive at Easter eager to celebrate the reality of new life out of death, but sometimes forget this is another, even longer season, rather than a single day of celebration. What does 50 days of practicing resurrection look like? What would it mean to embark upon another pilgrimage to the heart of our own creativity in collaboration with the Great Artist at work, the one who brings newness from the

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Holy Saturday: The Space Between

Holy Week invites us into a world full of betrayal, abandonment, mockery, violence, and ultimately death. The Triduum, those three sacred days which constitute one unfolding liturgy, call us to experience communion, loss, and the border spaces of unknowing. Holy Saturday is an invitation to make a conscious passage through the liminal realm of in-between. I love the wide space of Holy Saturday that lingers between the suffering and death of Jesus on Friday and the vigil Saturday night proclaiming the return of the Easter fire. For me, Holy Saturday evokes much about the human condition—the ways we are called to

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The Holy Pause: Spiritual Practices for a Time-Obsessed Culture

To receive this love note straight to your in-box, subscribe here (and also receive a free gift!) For the next few weeks I will be offering you some gems from the Abbey archives as I create the space I need to finish several writing projects and prepare for spring’s teaching: Time is the measure of things that come to an end, but where time itself ends, eternity begins . . . . In the end, there is no end. The ends of time are near the roots of eternity, and the ends of the Earth touch on the other world or

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The Grace of Flowering

This is not a poem but a rain-soaked day keeping me inside with you and you loving me like a storm. This is not a poem but a record of a hundred mornings when the sun lifted above the stone hills outside my window. This is time for boiling water poured into the chipped cup holding elderflower, hawthorn, mugwort. This is not a poem but me standing perfectly still on the edge of the lake in autumn, watching a hundred starlings like prayer flags fluttering. This is my face buried in May’s first pink peony, petals just now parting, eyes

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Mid-Way through Lent: Beginning Again

For the next few weeks I will be offering you some gems from the Abbey archives as I create the space I need to finish several writing projects and prepare for spring’s teaching. In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself astray in a dark wood where the straight road had been lost sight of. —Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy Dearest monks, artists, and pilgrims, We are approaching the midpoint of our Lenten journey through the desert. This is a ripe moment to pause and reflect on the commitments we made in earnest almost a month ago as

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Making Space for the Divine: The Gift of Silence

To receive this love note straight to your in-box, subscribe here (and also receive a free gift!) For the next few weeks I will be offering you some gems from the Abbey archives as I create the space I need to finish several writing projects and prepare for spring’s teaching: It was said of Abba Agathon that for three years he lived with a stone in his mouth, until he had learnt to keep silence. (Agathon 15) The silence of the desert elders is called hesychia, which means stillness, silence, inner quiet. However, it is much deeper than just an external quiet.

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