Abbey of the Arts

Transformative Living through Contemplative & Expressive Arts

  • Welcome
    • Prayer Cycle
      • Introduction to the Earth Monastery Prayer Cycle
      • Day 1 Morning & Evening Prayer:
        Earth as the Original Cathedral
      • Day 2 Morning & Evening Prayer:
        Earth as the Original Scriptures
      • Day 3 Morning & Evening Prayer:
        Earth as the Original Saints
      • Day 4 Morning & Evening Prayer:
        Earth as the Original Spiritual Directors
      • Day 5 Morning & Evening Prayer:
        Earth as the Original Icon
      • Day 6 Morning & Evening Prayer:
        Earth as the Original Sacrament
      • Day 7 Morning & Evening Prayer:
        Earth as the Original Liturgy
      • Prayer Cycle Leader Resources
    • About the Abbey
    • About Christine Valters Paintner
    • About John Valters Paintner
    • About the Wisdom Council
    • Monk Manifesto
    • Join the Holy Disorder of Dancing Monks
    • Subscribe to Our Love Notes
    • Website privacy notice
  • Books
    • Sacred Time:
      Embracing an Intentional Way of Life
    • The Wisdom of Wild Grace: Poems
    • Earth, Our Original Monastery:
      Cultivating Wonder and Gratitude through Intimacy with Nature
    • Dreaming of Stones: Poems
    • The Soul's Slow Ripening:
      12 Celtic Practices for Seeking the Sacred
    • The Wisdom of the Body:
      A Contemplative Journey to Wholeness for Women
    • Illuminating the Way:
      Embracing the Wisdom of Monks and Mystics
    • The Soul of a Pilgrim:
      Eight Practices for the Journey Within
    • Eyes of the Heart:
      Photography as a Christian Contemplative Practice
    • The Artist's Rule: Nurturing Your Creative Soul with Monastic Wisdom
    • Desert Mothers and Fathers: Early Christian Wisdom Sayings Annotated & Explained
    • Lectio Divina–The Sacred Art: Transforming Words and Images into Heart-Centered Prayer
    • Water, Wind, Earth & Fire: The Christian Practice of Praying with the Elements
    • Awakening the Creative Spirit:
      Bringing the Arts to Spiritual Direction
    • Lectio Divina: Contemplative Awakening & Awareness
  • Poetry | Art | Music
    • Music + DVD
    • Poetry by Christine Valters Paintner
    • Poetry Videos
    • Dancing Monk Icons
    • Other Art Collaborations
      • Monk in the World art series by Kristin Noelle
      • Saints & Animals art series by David Hollington
      • Sacred Time art series by Alexi Francis
      • Mary block print art series by Kreg Yingst
  • Programs
    • Live Programs: Pilgrimage & Retreats
      • Monk in the World (Ireland)
      • Writing on the Wild Edges (Ireland)
      • Vienna Monk in the World (Austria)
      • Hildegard of Bingen (Germany)
      • Awakening the Creative Spirit: Experiential Education for Spiritual Directors in the Expressive Arts (Northwest)
    • Lift Every Voice: Contemplative Writers of Color Book Club
    • Community Online Retreats
      • The Spiral Way:
        Celtic Spirituality and the Creative Imagination
      • Journey with the Desert Mothers and Fathers (Lent 2021)
      • Dancing with Fear in Troubled Times
      • Novena for Times of Unraveling
      • The Two HT’s-Harriet Tubman and Howard Thurman-on Being Free
      • Writing Into Bloom
        with Christine Valters Paintner
      • Sacred Time: Embracing an Intentional Way of Life (Spring 2021)
      • Poetry and the Sacred Garden of the World:
        An Online Writing Retreat
    • Self-Study Online Spiritual Retreats
      • Creative Flourishing in the Heart of the Desert:
        An Online Retreat with St. Hildegard of Bingen
      • Dreaming of the Sea:
        A women’s discernment journey through the story of the Selkie
      • Earth, Our Original Monastery
        A Companion Retreat to the Book (SELF-STUDY)
      • Exile and Coming Home:
        An Archetypal Journey through the Scriptures
      • Eyes of the Heart:
        Photography as Contemplative Practice
        (Companion retreat to the book)
      • Honoring Saints and Ancestors:
        Online Retreat for the Season of Remembrance
      • Lectio Divina:
        The Sacred Art of Reading the World
      • A Midwinter God:
        Making a Conscious Underworld Journey
      • Sacred Rhythms of Sky, Sun, Sea & Stone:
        A Creative Retreat with the Elements (SELF-STUDY)
      • Sacred Seasons:
        A Yearlong Journey through the Celtic Wheel of the Year
      • The Soul of a Pilgrim:
        Eight Practices for the Journey Within
        (a companion retreat to the book)
      • The Soul's Slow Ripening: 12 Celtic Practices for Seekers of the Sacred (a companion retreat to the book)
      • Water, Wind, Earth & Fire
      • Watershed Moments
        in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures
      • Way of the Monk, Path of the Artist:
        A 12-Week Companion Retreat to The Artist's Rule
      • The Wisdom of the Body:
        A 10-Week Online Companion Retreat to the Book
      • The Wisdom of Mary and the Sacred Feminine
  • Calendar
  • Reflections
  • Contact

The Artist's Rule:
Nurturing Your Creative Soul with Monastic Wisdom

by Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, REACE, OblSB

Ave Maria Press 2011

Register for the online companion retreat here

Description

Summarized in the phrase "pray and work," The Rule of St. Benedict provides the inspiration for Christine Valters Paintner's newest exploration of the mutually nourishing relationship between contemplative practices and creative expression. Artists of all stripes and stations in life--poets or painters, potters or photographers--will discover how traditions of Benedictine, Celtic, and desert spirituality can offer new sources of inspiration for their work.

Through this twelve-week course, themes like "Sacred Tools and Sacred Space," "Creative Solitude and Community," and "Nature as a Source of Revelation and Inspiration" are enriched by Paintner's perceptive discussion and enhanced by insightful quotations from well-known artists and writers. Each week offers suggestions for grounding both the creative and the spiritual life through three basic practices: walking, lectio divina, and journaling.

Chosen as one of the 50 Best Spiritual Books of 2011 by Spirituality & Practice (under the category of Creativity)

Order Details

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When you purchase books through the links to Bookshop.org or Amazon.com, Abbey of the Arts is provided with a very small percentage of your purchase price at no extra cost to you. We apply these funds toward scholarships for our online programs. Thank you for your support!

Supplemental Materials

How Monastic Wisdom can Nurture Creativity with Janet Conner on Unity FM
The Soul of the Artist on Ave Explores Podcast
Nourish your inner monk through contemplative creativity (article at U.S. Catholic)

Praise for the Book

The Artist’s Rule, by Christine Valters Paintner, is a work of deft matchmaking between two human archetypes: the monk and the artist. As a Benedictine oblate and spiritual director, Paintner has the gifts needed to distill the wisdom of an ancient monastic tradition into a twelve-week journey designed to invigorate the artistic soul. The Artist’s Rule is suffused with a contemplative spirit that challenges our culture’s ceaseless call for productivity and what Paintner calls an “array of inner voices that denounces our inherent goodness, demands an unattainable perfectionism, and lures us to fill our emptiness with compulsive behavior.” Instead of this madness, The Artist’s Rule invites us to conspire with the sacred rhythms of fruitfulness and fallowness in art-making, and in so doing, to embrace both the kataphatic (expressive) and apophatic (ineffable) traditions of knowing God. In accordance with the Rule of St. Benedict that “all guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ,” artists must likewise show hospitality to all that is foreign, poor, meek, and potentially Christ-bearing within themselves. Together with her own personal reflections, Paintner harvests swaths of wisdom from a diverse cloud of witnesses—including the early desert fathers, Rumi, Henri Nouwen, Joan Chittister, Thomas Merton, Wendell Berry, Kathleen Norris, and Pablo Neruda. Each chapter offers a set of exercises in lectio divina, meditation, writing, movement, and visual art designed to tap the creative spark and cultivate new habits of self-awareness. Gracefully written and ever-consoling, The Artist’s Rule demands engagement from its reader. It challenges artists of every variety to journey actively with their Rule, and to thereby plumb the riches of both a contemplative and generative discipline." -Image Journal

At every turn, the beauty and depth of Paintner's writing and the references she includes makes reading a rich experience." -Cistercian Studies Quarterly

In a world that lives in the shallows, hungering for depth, meaning, and beauty, The Artist’s Rule entices us to plunge into the riches of a contemplative, creative life. With hospitality, wisdom, and grace, Christine returns us to ancient monastic practices that have preserved the soul of spirituality across the ages and can restore us in our own time. Silence, solitude, sacred reading, stillness: such treasures of the monastic path have the power to transform us and draw us far into the mysteries that lie at the heart of our lives. As she illuminates and navigates the connections between contemplation and the act of creation, Christine beckons us into a sacred threshold space. What we find in this space—this sanctuary—will sustain and deepen our creative call, for the life of the world." -Jan L. Richardson, Author, In the Sanctuary of Women: A Companion for Reflection & Prayer

Graciously offered, wisely conceived, carefully crafted, The Artist's Rule leads the reader ever more deeply into practices that recover the awareness that contemplation and creativity spring from the same Source.  This work, grounded in Benedictine spirituality, offers us ways to rediscover the sacred art of living and serving, following the Spirit's lead and awakening to the artist's palette of our daily lives." -Mary C. Earle, author of The Desert Mothers: Spiritual Practices from the Women of the Wilderness

In The Artist's Rule, Christine Valters Paintner offers a helpful recipe for living a contemplative life. In a series of chapters intended for use over a twelve-week period, she presents gentle yet challenging invitations to deepen one's commitment to creativity and prayerful presence to the world, through a careful and wise selection of thoughts for reflection paired with practical activities to engage body as well as spirit." –Norvene Vest, author of Desiring Life: Benedict on Wisdom and the Good Life

This book is for all artists and budding artists who long for an infusion of creative spirit. By melding monastic practices of embodied spirituality with fresh invitations for creating art, Paintner shows how to make creative life out of your whole life. -Margaret D. McGee, author of Haiku - The Sacred Art: A Spiritual Practice in Three Lines

It is a time of shift, of awakening, new challenges, greater complexity in every dimension of daily life. The Artist’s Rule is a treasure for those of us who long to live a rich inner life, to be fully human and creative members of a creative Universe, to give expression to what is moving within us--to write, paint, make music, and dance.  Christine frames her exploration in monastic wisdom, but in our present context where the whole world is our monastery.
The inner guide of each of us is thoroughly welcomed and nourished throughout the chapters—in explorations, guided imagery, mystical insight, poetry, music, reflections, inspiration, practices of creativity, ritual – as we travel today’s call to creativity and contemplation. -Mary Southard, CSJ, artist for The Cosmic Dance: An Invitation to Experience Our Oneness

Benedict established a School for God's Service, intending his monastery to be a place where seekers learn how to incarnate God's Awesome Presence in our midst and to embody the Good News to others. The Artist's Rule does just this, guiding readers into very human practices that help us cultivate deeper awareness of our relationship to the Divine. These spiritual practices will support our growth into our humanity. And they're just fun! I highly recommend Christine's work. -Laura Swan, OSB, author of The Forgotten Desert Mothers: Sayings, Lives, and Stories of Early Christian Women

Going through the explorations and exercises in The Artist's Rule is the closest thing you can do to attending Christine's workshops and retreats in person. Christine's soothing vocal rhythm in person is amazingly translated in this book. Not only the vocal, but the back and forth movements from the heart to the mind and back again is like being on a hammock on an exotic beach.
This feast of a book will satisfy any person longing to truly participate in creation in creative ways. Each weekly session is inviting, safe, and surprisingly doable due to Christine's compassionate arrangement of elements. Instructions, directions, and guidance gently flow and make one feels Christine's own creative journey.
Like condiments laid out on a dining table, quotes from poets and writers, mystics and saints and ordinary people are sprinkled throughout its pages. Then Christine uses those excerpts as pointers, or even supports, for the topic she is discussing. The power of this type of presentation lies in the way that she rocks you on both sides of the brain. She brings you down to earth one moment with a Wendell Berry or Celtic prayer, then swings you high to the heavens with a Rilke or the Desert Fathers.
I guarantee you that this is not your standard contemplative practice. Be ready to be rocked, to be pulled and to be pushed, and to fly. Her words and her exercises will take you to a place you've never been before, because you will be asked to do things you haven't done before.
This book is like an angel who sweetly whispers to the ear of my heart create (draw, sketch, paint, move, cook, hum, write, be silent) to praise. This book helps me to embody the Benedictine motto 'That in everything, we glorify God.'" -Roy DeLeon, OblSB, author of Praying with the Body: Bringing the Psalms to Life

I highly recommend The Artist's Rule as a way to explore and embrace our inner monk and inner artist so we can unleash greater creative living. Using the wisdom of Benedictine values, Christine Paintner seeks to nurture contemplative and expressive practices which flow from seeing all of life as a sacred creative gift we give each other.  Inner contemplative practices yield and sustain a creative expressive life and enable us to see our world as holy." -Lucy Wynkoop, OSB, St. Placid Priory, co-author of Lectio Divina: Contemplative Awakening and Awareness

In The Artist's Rule, the familiar subjects of creativity and spirituality explode into a kaleidoscope of connections that invite the reader into the borderland where these topics converge. Grounded in scholarly knowledge, the book quotes Scriptures, theologians, mystics, psychologists, artists, poets, and others, yet it reads like a stimulating conversation with a soul friend."To read the whole review, here is the PDF>>  -Catherine Grytting, Listen, Spiritual Directors International

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Upcoming Programs

The Spiral Way:
Celtic Spirituality and the Creative Imagination

Hosted by the Rowe Center
February 1-21, 2021
with Christine Valters Paintner, PhD

Journey with the Desert Mothers and Fathers
Retreat for Lent 2021

February 17-April 1, 2021
with Christine & John Valters Paintner and Betsey Beckman

Recent Reflections

  • Celtic Spirituality and the Spiral Way ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess
  • Hildy Tales 3: Ní heolas go haontíos ~ by John Valters Paintner
  • Humility + Join us today for live prayer! ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess
  • Hildy Tales 2: Tús maith leath na hoibre – by John Valters Paintner
  • New Book Club for 2021: Lift Every Voice ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

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