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Category: Lent Easter

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The Saints in Walgreens ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dearest monks, artists, and pilgrims, Ash Wednesday is this week and we will embark on our Lenten journey The Love of Thousands: Honoring Angels, Saints, and Ancestors.  Many of you feel a deep kinship with Abbey of the Arts because of our love of mystics and the saints and the ways we cultivate connections to those wise guides beyond the veil. This happens in many ways including pilgrimage, presence, and . . . relics. Relics may seem just like that – relics of another era, but these bits of clothing, hair, nails, and bones of the saint that have been revered

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The Love of Thousands Lent Retreat ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dearest monks, artists, and pilgrims, Ash Wednesday is March 2nd and when will embark on our Lenten journey The Love of Thousands: Honoring Angels, Saints, and Ancestors. Two significant things about this retreat – first it is content I am working on for a book that will be published in fall 2023 around some of my favorite topics.   The second is that I will be having a major surgery in March and will be recovering through April, so we are only hosting one live session for the community to begin the journey. The rest of the content will be delivered through written

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Easter Blessings + An Elemental Journey ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

A Glimpse of the Underglimmer by Christine Valters Paintner from Abbey of the Arts on Vimeo. “A Glimpse of the Underglimmer” (after Basho) You can see it sometimes in October when the sun’s low angle slides gold over the field, effervescence of light, or you stand in a forest of cedars and March rain pads hundreds of tiny feet across the emerald canopy, or the fireflies of July form new constellations, then vanish into summer’s night leaving only trails of light in your memory, or you stand in a May meadow, a fox crosses quietly, you hold still as possible,

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Practicing Resurrection with All of Creation ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dear monks, artists and pilgrims, Christine has written an article for Godspace Blog. An excerpt is below with a link to read the full article. 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. And yet this year, we were challenged to a much more severe Lenten experience, where many of our daily securities have been stripped away. How do we then approach the glorious season of resurrection, and celebrate not just

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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

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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.

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A Different Kind of Fast: Part Six – Embrace Organic Unfolding

Dear monks, artists and pilgrims, * This is the sixth part of a seven-part series we will publish weekly during this Lenten season. 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. A person can live alone and still experience much noise within and a person can live in the midst of a crowd and have a true sense

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