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Category: Lenten Online Retreat

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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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Join us on a Desert Journey for Lent ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dearest monks and artists, We begin a desert journey on Wednesday through the sacred days of Lent this week on Ash Wednesday. We will be drawing wisdom from the desert mothers and fathers and creating a sacred space for contemplation and reflection. As we collectively move through a desert time in this pandemic, the desert elders have much to offer us. This is an excerpt from the introduction to my book about them: The wisdom the ammas and abbas offer is so pertinent to our times because it is about the fundamental struggle to live a meaningful and authentic life. 

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Join us for an online retreat this Lent ~ A love note from your online abbess

Dearest monks and artists, I am delighted that John Valters Paintner will be taking the lead on our Lenten retreat online. He has a great love for the scriptures, and taught them at the high school level for many years. The upcoming retreat is the fruit of years of his reflection on exploring some overarching themes in the Bible. What follows is an overview of what the retreat will cover and the rich questions you will be invited to explore: Week 1: Introduction The Bible is not a single, declarative statement of fact. It is a series of competing voices

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Grow in intimacy with the Earth Monastery this Lent ~ A love note from your online abbess

Dearest monks, artists, and pilgrims, The season of Lent begins this Wednesday and we are offering an online retreat experience for this holy time which extends through the first week of Easter. We invite you into a contemplation of the Earth as Original Monastery and to nourish an earth-cherishing consciousness. Jesus begins his own ministry with a time out in the wilderness, seeking the ways that creation can challenge us and nourish us and reveal new directions. Imagine spending 40 days yourself listening for the wisdom of wilderness. The monk here and now is supposed to be living the life

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Creativity and Social Transformation

Dearest monks, artists, and pilgrims, Last week I shared that 2016 marks the 10th anniversary of Abbey of the Arts’ existence as a virtual monastery. I will be reflecting back on some of my reflections from the Archives and tracing the development of the Abbey this year.  From the beginning, my heart has been sparked by the conversation between contemplative practice and creative expression and how it might be a force for transformation in the world. Here is a reflection I wrote in the first month of creating the blog on Creativity and Social Transformation: If in the Judeo-Christian tradition

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Stirring in the Belly: Listening for New Life

My latest Seasons of the Soul column for Patheos is now available here: The most important events make no stir on their first taking place, nor indeed in their effects directly. They seem hedged about by secrecy. It is concussion, or the rushing together of air to fill a vacuum, which makes a noise. The great events to which all things consent, and for which they have prepared the way, produce no explosion, for they are gradual, and create no vacuum which requires to be suddenly filled; as a birth takes place in silence, and is whispered about the neighborhood.

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i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart) i am never without it (anywhere i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling) i fear no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true) and you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky

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