Learning to Trust What Shimmers -- A Guest Post by Christine Valters Paintner

 Learning to Trust What Shimmers

 

Our habitual ways of perceiving the world, which help us navigate things like stopping at a red light or stop sign, also stand in the way of seeing the world in fresh and new ways.

 

In my book Eyes of the Heart: Photography as a Christian Contemplative Practice, I find inspiration in the ancient practice of lectio divina, or sacred reading.  In lectio, we read scripture and listen for what word or phrase is shimmering. This practice is always in service of contemplative vision in daily life.  Lectio invites us to slowly see more and more of the world as a sacred text, ripe with possibility for meaning.  We can expand our contemplative practice to include a kind of visio divina, or sacred seeing, where we gaze on a painting or photograph we love and look for something that shimmers – perhaps a symbol, a color, a brushstroke, the play of light and shadow.  And in that shimmering we know there is a gift for us, even if we don’t fully understand its meaning in the moment.

 

We can then expand our practice of sacred seeing even further to include what we see all around us in our daily lives.  What would it be like to move through our day, watching for what shimmers, waiting to receive these moments of revelation, and then savor them? 

 

A question I often receive from people cultivating the contemplative path is: How do I cultivate trust in what shimmers?  How do I know what I am drawn to is sacred? 

 

We are so used to moving through the world analyzing and judging, bringing our expectations to each encounter, planning for the next several steps ahead.  It can feel awkward to bring ourselves fully present and draw on intuition, wisdom, and experience, rather than logic and analysis, to see what is most true.  This heart-centered knowing comes through practice. 

 

The most essential way I learn to trust what shimmers, is to ask myself if this encounter increases my compassion.  Do I feel a sense of expansiveness toward myself and others?  When the holy shimmers before us, it is always in the service of greater love.

 

As I cultivate this practice of attending to the gifts the world has to offer me, to what shimmers, I am at the same time nurturing the opening of my own heart.  Our minds harden our defenses, but the heart softens and blooms forth slowly, so that we find ourselves looking with more compassion on those who annoy us, and perhaps later, those we actively dislike, and finally those we have previously ignored and not even allowed into our line of sight. When we discover ourselves surprised by love and grace, we come to trust what shimmers forth as gift.  We receive without needing to figure things out.  We begin to follow the thread of moment by moment revelation, not knowing where it leads, only embracing the call to see with eyes of the heart.

 

Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, is the online Abbess at Abbey of the Arts, a virtual monastery and community for contemplative practice and creative expression.  She is the author of 7 books on art and monasticism, including her latest, Eyes of the Heart: Photography as a Christian Contemplative Practice (Ave Maria Press). Christine currently lives out her commitment as a monk in the world with her husband in Galway, Ireland.

Notice the Glory

Notice the Glory

Abraham Joshua Heschel

To pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain a sense of the mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in all attainments. Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living. It is all we can offer in return for the mystery by which we live....

Amidst the meditation of mountains, the humility of flowers wiser than all alphabets--clouds that die constantly for the sake of God's glory--we are hating, hunting, hurting. Suddenly we feel ashamed of our clashes and complaints in the face of the tacit glory in nature. 

Source: Quest for God

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"Eyes of the Heart" -- A Review

Eyes of the Heart: Photography as a ChristianContemplative Practice, Christine Valters Paintner’s latest book, is moving, helpful, challenging and inspiring.  Which is not surprising, given Christine’s record of turning out such books (two of my favorites are The Artist's Rule: Nurturing Your Creative Soul with Monastic Wisdom and Awakening the Creative Spirit: Bringing the Arts to Spiritual Direction).

Christine, besides being an author, is a Benedictine Oblate, writer, artist, spiritual director, retreat facilitator, and teacher. She’s also the on-line abbess for Abbey of the Arts, an amazing site that you should know about, if you don’t already.  I’m a regular visitor to the site and participant in her “Invitation to Photography” spirituality exercises.  She’s going to guest blog here soon!

As a photographer, as soon as I heard about Eyes of the Heart, I knew I wanted to read it.  I was not disappointed.  Christine is a wise writer and grand guide into the idea of combining contemplation and photography.  I appreciate this as I’ve been doing what I call “praying with my camera” for years.  In some ways, Christine’s concept is similar to Sybil MacBeth’s concept of “Praying in Color” -- an active, visual, and meditative form of intercessory prayer.

We find that the title comes from Ephesians 1:18 when Christine writes, “Photography as a spiritual practice combines the active art of image-receiving with the contemplative nature and open-heartedness of prayer.  It cultivates what I call sacred seeing or seeing with ‘the eyes of the heart.’”  Of course, this resonates with me – having written myself about learning to see deeply as a spiritual practice (Mind the Light) and the integration of body, mind, and soul to experience the Divine as we move through this world (Awaken Your Senses). 

Eyes of the Heart is filled with thoughts helpful and inspiring.  “For me, both art and spirituality are truly about tending to the moments of life: listening deeply, holding space, encountering the sacred, and touching eternity.  For a few seconds I touch time beyond time and in that spacious presence my heart grows wider, my imagination frees, my breath catches, and I am held in awe and wonder.  These are the moments that help to make life full of meaning.”  Indeed.  Words such as that are an invitation to experience God breaking through – via the means of a simple tool that many of us have in phones even, a camera.  It’s a gadget that is often thought of just as that – a gadget – rather than a entry into eternity and spiritual experience.  Christine’s book helps us broaden our spiritual horizons whether through phone camera or professional DLSRs. 

Make no mistake.  This is no book solely for photographers.  It is for anyone who desires a fresh way of connecting the visible daily life with the often unnoticed Divine presence in it all.  It opens a new way of seeing God at work in and around us.  We behold beauty, life, truth and love as we learn to notice – as we accept Christine’s invitation to “see with the eyes of the heart.”

Eyes of the Heart: Photography as a ChristianContemplative Practice by Christine Valters Paintner

Sorin Books (2013)

152 pages, paper, $15.95

Hard Music

by Tom Chandler

The hammers of the builders
of the house across the street

sometimes fall by accident inside
the same beat, as if the rhythm

of our separate work can
melt without our knowing

into something far sleeker
than our laboring lives

and I wonder if the carpenters
are happy in themselves when

they realize how they improvise,
how the nails bite the wood

to such natural jazz, the house
rising tall in grace because of hard

music, lifting up its chimneyed head
and shoulders to the sky.

"Hard Music" by Tom Chandler, from Toy Firing Squad. © Wind Publications, 2008. Reprinted with permission. (buy now) 

From "The Writer's Almanac"

Photo by Brent

On Certain Days...

Certain Days

by Grace Paley

On certain days I am not in love
and my heart turns over

                       crowding the lungs for
                       air

                       driving blood in and out of
                       the skull improving my mind

                       working muscles to the bone

                       dashing resonance out of a roaring sea
                       at my nerve endings

Not much is needed

                       air

                       good sense

                       power

                       a noisy taking in and a
                       loud giving back

Then my heart like any properly turned
motor takes off in sparks dragging all that machinery
through the blazing day
                       like grass
                                           which our lord knows
                                             I am

"Certain Days" by Grace Paley, from Begin Again: Collected Poems. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. Reprinted with permission. (buy now) 

From "The Writer's Almanac"

"The iris was the first to die,..."

Thanks for Remembering Us

by Dana Gioia

The flowers sent here by mistake,
signed with a name that no one knew,
are turning bad. What shall we do?
Our neighbor says they're not for her,
and no one has a birthday near.
We should thank someone for the blunder.
Is one of us having an affair?
At first we laugh, and then we wonder.

The iris was the first to die,
enshrouded in its sickly-sweet
and lingering perfume. The roses
fell one petal at a time,
and now the ferns are turning dry.
The room smells like a funeral,
but there they sit, too much at home,
accusing us of some small crime,
like love forgotten, and we can't
throw out a gift we've never owned.

"Thanks for Remembering Us" by Dana Gioia, from Daily Horoscope. © Graywolf Press, 1986. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Christ Came Juggling: An Easter Sunday Poem

Christ came juggling from the tomb,
flipping and bouncing death's stone pages,
tossing those narrow letters high
against the roots of dawn spread in cloud.
This Jesus, clown, came dancing
in the dust of Judea, each slapping step
a new blossom spiked with joy.

Hey! Listen -- that chuckle in the dark,
that clean blast of laughter behind --
Christ comes juggling our tombs,
tossing them high and higher yet,
until they hit the sun and break open
and we fall out, dancing and juggling
our griefs like sizzling balls of light.


-- Eugene Warren, from The Risk of Birth, poems selected by Luci Shaw

Sky Crosses: A Good Friday Poem

Sky Crosses

The heavens keep telling
    the wonders of God,
    and the skies declare
    what he has done. -- Psalm 19:1

Silver crosses cross
cerulean southeastern skies, horizontal
at first, then lifting toward heaven's vault with
a roar that rends the air, trailing 
fire and fumes.  Higher the 
crosses soar, almost vertical, sound receding, fading, and 
unholy smoke transforming, as our sins, from
blackness and fury, to white contrails
trailing the cross. My eyes, cast
heavenward, behold umpteen tiny twinkling
crosses crisscrossing  my 
Good Friday sight.

-- Brent Bill, 2013

"The Parable of the Lost Lens": Fifty-acres and a Fool Series

The Parable of the Lost Lens

And, lo, Brent was walking up the driveway when a number of the scribes and Pharisees came unto him, saying, “Tell us, O Brent, the way to see as thou seest, for thou art wise in these ways.”  Brent squinted at them and then said, “One day a farmer went out to mow.  And as he walked out unto the John Deere, he cleaned his glasses and noticed that one lens seemed loosed.  Now these were the same glasses he had laid behind the tractor the year before whilst working on it and upon which his good wife had trod while walking up behind him to see what he was doing and which his daughter who worketh at a place of eye care had repaired, so had hence be healed earlier.  The farmer looked upon the lens, sideways, straightaway, and upside down; and lo he determineth nothing, so he placed the glasses upon his head, climbed uponeth his tractor and mowed the prairie.”

The scribes and Pharisees were enthralled, for Brent spoke as one with authority.  “After mowing the prairie whilst listening to tunes uponeth his iPod, the farmer climbed down to clean the field trash off his tractor and bush-hog and, lo, whilst brushing the trash off the bush-hog’s deck a piece of long weed hit the lens and sent it sailing into the field.  Being a man of exceedingly calm demeanor, the farmer removed his glasses and stared upon them.  He place them back on his head and took them off again.  Lo, his sight was impaired, so he folded the glasses, put them in his coverall’s pocket, and searched up on his hands and knees through the field for the lost lens.  He sifted field trash through his fingers, he laid uponeth the ground and looked for a glint of the sun off the lens, and, behold, that which he sought for was revealed unto him and he picked up the lens with great rejoicing because that which was lost was now found.  Riasing the lens toward heaven, he gave thanks, brushed the dust from the lens, and put it in his coveralls’ pants pocket.”

After putting the tractor in the barn, he went into the farmhouse for his ritual cleansing and, lo, he pulled the lost lens from his coverall’s pants pocket and placed it, rejoicing, upon the Maytag.  Then he reached unto the top pocket for the glasses and they were not there.  Nor were they in any of the other of the coveralls pockets.  Nor were they upon the tractor, the bushhog, the toobox wherein he keeps his pipe (which was in the same pocket as the glasses) and other things.  He wandered out into the field and with wailing and gnashing of teeth, utterances of foul curses, he searched the field to no avail.” The farmer returned to the farmhouse, crying, “Woe is me, for that which is lost is found but that which was not lost is now not to be found.” 

Then Brent grew quiet.  The scribes and the Pharisees pondered his words.  “What manner of man is this that teaches this way?” said one.  Another said, “These are hard things.  What might they mean.”

“Beats me,” muttered Brent walking away.

-       --   from Johnbrent 4:1-27 of the Lost Gospel of the Farmer

This Desert Land ...

This Desert

Joseph Bayly

I said
this desert land is barren
void of life and beauty.
I drive for miles
see nothing
only sand and sage
feel nothing
only wind and heat
taste nothing but spit
dried spit.
He said
have you ever driven
in spring
through this same desert
seen blossoms flower
gorgeous wild?
It's all a thing of timing.
Seeds of beauty
are there now hidden
waiting fall of rain
to bring them life.
Lord send rain
upon my world
my life
I'm tired of dried spit.

Source: "A Psalm in Mojave Desert" from Psalms of My Life

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Photo by Brent

"... I am not an old man. Not..."

Twilight Comes

by Hayden Carruth

            After Wang Wei

Twilight comes to the little farm
At winter's end. The snowbanks
High as the eaves, which melted
And became pitted during the day,
Are freezing again, and crunch
Under the dog's foot. The mountains
From their place behind our shoulders
Lean close a moment, as if for a
Final inspection, but with kindness,
A benediction as the darkness
Falls. It is my fiftieth year. Stars
Come out, one by one with a softer
Brightness, like the first flowers
Of spring. I hear the brook stirring,
Trying its music beneath the ice.
I hear - almost, I am not certain -
Remote tinklings; perhaps sheepbells
On the green side of a juniper hill
Or wineglasses on a summer night.
But no. My wife is at her work,
There behind yellow windows. Supper
Will be soon. I crunch the icy snow
And tilt my head to study the last

Silvery light of the western sky
In the pine boughs. I smile. Then
I smile again, just because I can.
I am not an old man. Not yet.

"Twilight Comes" by Hayden Carruth, from Collected Shorter Poems 1946-1991. © Copper Canyon Press, 1992. Reprinted with permission. (buy now) 

From "The Writer's Almanac"

Photo by Brent

Boy at the Window

Boy at the Window

by Richard Wilbur

Seeing the snowman standing all alone
In dusk and cold is more than he can bear.
The small boy weeps to hear the wind prepare
A night of gnashings and enormous moan.
His tearful sight can hardly reach to where
The pale-faced figure with bitumen eyes
Returns him such a god-forsaken stare
As outcast Adam gave to Paradise.

The man of snow is, nonetheless, content,
Having no wish to go inside and die.
Still, he is moved to see the youngster cry.
Though frozen water is his element,
He melts enough to drop from one soft eye
A trickle of the purest rain, a tear
For the child at the bright pane surrounded by
Such warmth, such light, such love, and so much fear.

"Boy at the Window" by Richard Wilbur, from Collected Poems. © Harcourt, 2004. Reprinted with permission. (buy now) 

From "The Writers Almanac"

On The Bible, History Channel, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Angels

The B-I-B-L-E

O what have they done to thee?

You used to be the Word of God

And now thee’s bad TV

That’s what I thought last night when I started watching “The Bible” on History Channel last night.  It’s Hollywoodishly dramatic enough that when my good wife fell asleep watching it and awoke during “The Vikings” which followed, she assumed the latter was a continuation of the former and wondered which book of the Bible the producers were mangling now.  Only when a Viking ship appeared did it become clear it was a whole ‘nother show.

Now let me say I am not a Biblical scholar or a literal, inerrantist type of the first order.  But I do have high regard for this sacred text, so much that I have read, studied, taught and preached from it for years.  While the stories in the television show bore some resemblance to the stories in beloved Good Book, the enactment of them was … well, to be nice … a bit of a departure.

I mean mutant teenage Ninja turtle warriors rescuing Lot and his family???  That was my thought, at least, when I saw the scenes of the family fleeing Sodom – a huge Black angel and a shorter Asian angel dressed in armor that looked like the Ninja turtles and hacking all the unbelievers to death with swords and judo style moves.  Gimme a break.  Fire and brimstone from above isn’t enough?  Besides, I don’t recall even an authoritative version such as the Living Bible saying anything about the angels having to fight their way out of Sodom.  That version declares “the angels …rushed them to safety outside the city.” (Genesis 19:14)

And the accents??  “You don't want people talking King James English,” said one of the people associated with the program, but they certainly speak the King’s English.”  British accents dominate (not surprisingly, I guess since many of the actors are British), but to say it’s off-putting is an understatement. 

Then there is the actor’s appearance – English with bad Roman-esque hairdos (for those characters into sartorial grooming) and dirty faces.  Perhaps they didn’t have soap and water in Old Testament times.

The Bible is a powerful text.  Why, oh, why do entertainment types feel the need to soap-opera, action film it up?  I guess that’s what one should expect when this “version” is produced by husband-and-wife team of Roma Downey of “Touched by an Angel,” and Mark Burnett, of CBS’s “Survivor.”  Sigh.

I could only take about an hour of this nonsense.  I gave up and retired with a good book.  I’d suggest you skip watching “The Bible” and read it instead.  In the case of this mini-series (emphasis on “mini” in many ways), the book really is better than the movie.

-- Brent