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Reflections

Category: Monk in the World Guest Post Series

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Monk in the World Guest Post: Berenice Chan

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to the Monk in the World guest post from the community. Read on for Berenice Chan’s refection and poem “Uncertainty.” I wrote this poem to use as a lectio passage with my follow-on group from the 2020 Abbey of the Arts course “Way of the monk, path of the artist”. The topic “uncertainty” came from a fascinating essay I heard on BBC Radio 3 by the entrepreneur, CEO, writer and keynote speaker Dr Margaret Heffernan. She defined “uncertainty” as: the “not-knowing” if something is going to happen or not. She explained how artists need

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Monk in the World Guest Post: Mark Raphael

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Mark Raphael’s reflection “Lessons from an Ischemic Stroke: Achieving a Newfound Asceticism and Conversatio.” Stroke. The dreaded word that no 40-year old or their family wants to hear. On February 15, 2022 (the day after Valentine’s Day), I was admitted to the Emergency Room at a local area hospital here in Southern California near the college town of Claremont. Fortunately, and unfortunately, I did not have a female valentine on February 14th. My speech was slurred for

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Monk in the World Guest Post: Janeen R. Adil

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to the Monk in the World guest post series. Read on for Janeen Adil’s reflection and poem about liminality. Thresholds and doorways make for evocative images; as a monk in the world, I am drawn to a spiritual contemplation of this between space. When we lean into mystery/Mystery, we can see liminal time as a place open to rich and fruitful potential. Rather than stopping in an uneasy pause, we can instead rest on the threshold, regarding the time here (however long or short) as holy, as one of blessing. For a Liminal

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Monk in the World Guest Post: Susan Blagden

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Susan Blagden’s contemplative photographs and poems inspired by the work of Thomas Merton. As a contemplative photographer, coach and priest, I seek to live my days in a contemplative way.  For me, this means paying attention to my external world in a way that often makes surprising connections with my inner world.  My daily contemplative walk, complete with camera, invites me to be responsive rather than grasping.  My reading on this particular morning had included a short extract of Merton’s

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Monk in the World Guest Post: Amy Oden

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Amy Oden’s reflection on the power of the contemplative stance during a time of disorientation. It hit me first in my stomach, a gut punch I was not braced for: news that I would no longer be needed to teach a load of courses that I had, in one way or another, taught for almost 35 years.  On one level, I knew this time would come. In fact, it needed to come. It was healthy and in

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Monk in the World Guest Post: Roger Butts

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Roger Butts’s reflection and poem I Will Look. And I Will Sing. After decades of playing tennis, my knees hurt. After being in the car driving down a Colorado interstate, my back aches. My eyes don’t see so well after being alive 58 years. Sometimes I wonder how my arthritis will play out over time. I’m a hospital chaplain. I know this old body decomposes. I know it gets creaky. Some of us are in wheelchairs and

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Monk in the World Guest Post: Katharine Weinmann

I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Katharine Weinmann’s reflection and poem “A Holy Balance.” Grieving the loss of my professional vocation due to Covid and needing to find my footing with the world’s unravelling, I enrolled in the Abbey of the Arts Fall 2020 intensive online retreat, “Way of the Monk, Path of the Artist.” During a session of Lectio Divina in which Christine read Ecclesiastes 3, A Time for Everything, I reflected in my journal: “… Humming to the Byrd’s musical interpretation,

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