Have you checked out Patheos yet? (the great new site exploring different religious traditions) I will be contributing to them regularly on the topic of art and spirituality and my latest article is here — Beauty and Spirituality — so pour yourself a cup of tea and contemplate the role of beauty in your own spiritual practice and then head on over to this week’s Poetry Party for more creative inspiration!
So have you missed the Abbey this week? I have been on an amazing journey for five days with even more amazing women. We close our time together this morning and then I will head back home to rest and renew and will return to blogging Monday. In the meantime, visit my article on Art and Spiritual Practice at Patheos, a new site offering resources to explore the gifts of different religious traditions.
A week and a half ago I participated in a Blog Meme Interview and I asked if readers had any other questions for me. kigen asked me: “Is it, and if so, what makes the doing of photography a sacred or religious practice for you?” The answer is, of course, an unqualified YES! :-) Mythologist and storyteller Michael Meade says the word “moment” comes from the Latin root momentus, which means to move. We are moved when we touch the eternal and timeless. There is a sense of spaciousness in moments. Art and spiritual practice are how we find this moment
Sunset Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colours which it passes to a row of ancient trees. You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you, one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth, leaving you, not really belonging to either, not so helplessly dark as that house that is silent, not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing that turns to a star each night and climbs – leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads) your own life, timid and standing high and growing, so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching
“Music arouses the sluggish soul to watchfulness. It has power to soften even hard hearts, and by rendering hearts moist it ushers in the Holy Spirit. Through the power of hearing, God opens to human beings all the glorious sounds of the hidden mysteries and of the choirs of angels by whom God is praised over and over again.” -Hildegard of Bingen 1098-1179 “I am not satisfied with him who despises music, as all fanatics do; for music is an endowment and a gift of God, not a gift of men . . . I place music next to theology
“a shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse, and from his roots a bud shall blossom.” -Isaiah 11:1 (from the second Sunday of Advent) Yesterday I gathered together all of the images I had found of my aunt and uncle (my mother’s siblings) as children and worked on creating something for each of them as a gift this Christmas. I am not very close to my uncle so I am not sure how this will be received, but I felt the need and desire to create it. This journey of reaching back across time and telling these stories through image
Tim You’ve only just arrived Now you’ve begun to go My God, how much I love you How my whole body aches with The glory that is you. Constantly changing, sometimes slowly, Sometimes in one heartbeat Or the blink of an eye. Becoming, always becoming, your self. Already my hands rest open You sitting there in the palm of my hand Stretching your wings Testing the wind Learning to fly. -Rebecca Johnson ***** Rebecca was a participant in our most recent Awakening the Creative Spirit program. She came with perhaps the least background in
