In recent years, after deaths and losses, changes and griefs, I’ve moved farther and farther away from the traditional dogma I was raised under, and have grown increasingly impatient with what seems to me to be the empty use of religious jargon; the way words like ‘God’ are thrown around void of any true meaning, as if the terms themselves are idolized instead of being understood as signposts to truth. In this struggle, I’ve attempted to define and understand who ‘God’ really is in a way that is meaningful to me, beyond the religious baggage layered on the term. Pondering this question in meditation, I turned to God’s claim to Moses, “I am who I am.” As a writer and grammar nerd, this statement is fascinating to me. “I am,” of course, is the present tense of the verb ‘to be.’ To be – I am, you are, he is, I was, you were, you will be, I am being, you are being, God is being. It occurs to me that God is the ‘is’ in all that is. God is the part of me that ‘is,’ the part of you that ‘is,’ the part of nature that ‘is.’ God is what makes us ‘be.’ God is the ‘be’ part, the verb of being alive, the you and the me and the is-ness between us. As I pondered this beingness and wondered what it had to do with my own life, this story and resulting poem came to me. It’s written in haibun form, a Japanese prose-poem form that traditionally combines prose and haiku. My haibun is a sonnet-haibun, as I’ve combined prose with a sonnet. I hope you find it meaningful.

When I was young, I mucked horse stalls in exchange for riding time with a Quarter Horse named Calypso. I loved her chestnut back, white face and forearms, chocolate brown eyes.  One hot July day with the sun high and the wind still, my horse and I cantered across a field. Flying.  

          Halfway, Calypso stopped. My body did not.  
          I landed flat on my back, like a flipped pancake.  
         The landing sounded thunk.

I lost my breath and lay on the ground with my eyes closed for the longest moment as I wondered if I was dead. My fingers felt the prick of the grass blade tips and I smelled the sticky sweet scent of that same grass. When I finally peeked, I saw the sky and her white puffy clouds, soaring birds, ravens, wingspan coasting,  

            heard their distant croak calls, watched shining sun,  
            north-drifting clouds, sky never-ending  
            across the horizon, blue on and on.  
                      Prisons of my mind, like ghosts,  
                      floated far far away. I thought how John Donne  
                      foretold death’s ending pride riposte.  
                      In darkened shadows, life’s on the run.  
         The ground beneath lay firm, flowers budded pink,  
         purple feathers floated skyward.  
         I wish I could say I’d sparked a holy jubilee, 

                     but maybe I saw a cosmic wink,  
                     mythic goddesses inspired.  
                     This morning, our Yoshino cherry  

blossoms exploded like popcorn kernels encased in velvety pink softness, and butterflies gorged themselves on the first nectar of spring. I looked at the sky and clouds, sun shining on blades of grass, and ran my fingers over the tree, her scratchy smoothness, warmth, linked to an energetic buzzing sensation in my fingertips, connecting life to life.

Christine Davis is a writer, poet and artist from North Carolina, USA. Her poetry has been published in Moonstone Arts Center’s Neruda Anthology (2023, “My Dream”), Kakalak (2023, “Elegy for America”), The Autoethnographer (2023, “After the School Shooting, in a Death Denying World”), and Stardust Review (2023, “La Luna es Vida”), among other publications. Her poetry collection, Life and Death and Holy in Every Breath (Wild Rising Press) was published in 2024. Christine has studied poetry with poets Judyth Hill, Rusty Morrison, David Koehn, Jessica Jacobs, and Morri Creech. Her writing explores her experiences with death and dying, spirituality, and social justice and compassionate living. She is a participant in the Charlotte Center for Literary Arts’ Author’s Lab, where she is writing her memoir about her experience living in Ireland to research the Magdelene Laundries, search for her ancestors, and find herself. She has participated in, and been inspired by, several of Abbey of the Arts’s pilgrimages in InisMor, Galway, and Perth, Scotland. 

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On Pentecost*

Spirit of courage,
we stand huddled too,
like the disciples in the upper room,
wondering what is real and true anymore.

Reveal to us the pulse of your fire
in each of our hearts
and send us with bread and roses
out into a world
hungry for nourishment.

Bless us with visions of peace;
carry it across every sky
on wings of a dove.
Help us understand one another
so that we might know
our common purpose in love.

Let the winds of change
rush in and upend all our fears.
Empower us for a more
just and loving future
where we dance with your wild grace.

Dearest dancing monks, artists, and pilgrims,

Blessings on this Feast of Pentecost my friends. 

We live in the midst of chaotic times. As crises continue to build, we may find ourselves confused or fearful. We may want to gather in the upper room of our lives with our closest friends and close the door on a troubled world just like the disciples. Yet chaos always calls for creative response, it always beckons us to open to holy surprise.

Today is the feast of Pentecost, that glorious final day of the season of resurrection. The Apostles were together experiencing bewilderment over how to move forward when the Holy Spirit flows among them and breathes courage into their hearts. If we have stayed committed to our pilgrimage this far then we may still wonder why we have journeyed so long and still are full of fear and unknowing.

It says that those who witnessed this event were “amazed and perplexed.” Some were confused, others cynical. The story of Pentecost asks us a question: How do I let my expectations and cynicism close my heart to the new voice rising like a fierce wind?

Pentecost demands that we listen with a willing heart, and that we open ourselves to ongoing radical transformation. We discover that the Easter pilgrimage does not end here, instead we are called to a new one of sharing our gifts with the world. Soul work is always challenging and calls us beyond our comfort zone. Prayer isn’t about baptizing the status quo, but entering into dynamic relationship with the God who always makes things new. Scripture challenges our ingrained patterns of belief, our habitual attitudes and behavior. 

To be fully human and alive is to know the tension of our dustiness, our mortality, to be called to a profoundly healthy humility where we acknowledge that we can know very little of the magnificence of the divine Source of all. The Spirit descends on those gathered together in a small room and breaks the doors wide open. We are reminded that practicing resurrection is not for ourselves alone, but on behalf of a wider community. Not only for those with whom we attend church services, but beyond to the ones who sit at the furthest margins of our awareness. Pentecost is a story of the courage that comes from breaking established boundaries.

Starting on June 1^st I am leading a 4-week writing retreat called The Wisdom of Wild Grace: An Online Writing Retreat for the Wild Soul inspired by my poetry collection of the same title. In this collection I include 30 poems about the saint and animal stories which appear throughout Christian tradition, especially in the desert and Celtic lineages. 

There is a story about St. Ciaran, one of the early Irish monks, found in the marvelous book Beasts and Saintsby Helen Waddell (a compendium of stories of desert and Celtic monks and their encounters with animals) in which he encounters a wild boar who was made tame by God.

“That boar was St. Ciaran’s first disciple or monk, as one might say, in that place. For straightway that boar, as the man of God watched, began with great vigor tearing down twigs and grass with his teeth to build him a little cell.” 

After building him his cell, other animals came from their dens to accompany St. Ciaran, “(a)nd they obeyed the saint’s word in all things, as if they had been his monks.”  I love this image of the animals as St. Ciaran’s first monks, I love that they formed his original community. One of the great delights of the desert and Celtic monastic tradition are the abundance of stories of saints’ special connection to animals as a sign of their holiness. 

This is one sign of Pentecost living – expanding our awareness even wider and discovering that the animals might be the original monks and we have so much to learn from them. 

Join me for the writing retreat which begins with a live session and then includes daily practices for the following four weeks. These prompts will come from the stories of the saints and animals and will invite you to enter into these stories with the heart to cultivate intimacy with the holy wild. 

With great and growing love,

Christine

Christine Valters Paintner, OblSB, PhD, REACE

Image © Christine Valters Paintner

*Blessing is from Christine’s book A Book of Everyday Blessings: 100 Prayers for Dancing Monks, Artists, and Pilgrims (Ave Maria Press)

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“Suddenly from heaven, there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind…and divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them and they were filled with the Holy Spirit.”        

I have been thinking about the day of Pentecost and how it carries important messages for us in all seasons. When the smoke and winds of Pentecost have died down what’s left? A conversation. 

Above the murmur of the different languages, individuals heard God speaking to them in their own native languages. The Spirit of God rushed in to empower many different kinds of people to do something astounding—to communicate effectively with one another! 

Pentecost was about mutual conversation. A mutual conversation between God and humanity. And a mutual conversation between human beings. And yet, despite the modern miracles of international translation devices and the many skilled individuals who speak multiple languages, we actually seem farther apart in our ability to communicate with one another.  

Even so, I wonder if the Pentecost moment of old is becoming more expansive? I wonder if, because we as human beings have failed to listen and understand one another, that God may be reaching out to the world in a new way, using an older language? I wonder if God is speaking to us through the Earth? I wonder if this expanding Pentecost is calling us to listen and engage in a sacred conversation with the creatures of God’s creation? 

Thomas Berry has said, “We are talking only to ourselves. We are not talking to the rivers; we are not listening to the wind and the stars. We have broken the great conversation.”  

Berry’s comment encouraged me to begin practicing listening and holding conversations as I sit in a Cedar Forest next to the farm where my children and grandchildren live. The cedars, firs, alders, ferns, mushrooms, wildflowers and the furred and feathered ones have welcomed me there.  The Great Mother tree embraces both me and my four-year old grandson, Leo.  

As our conversation unfolds, I sense that other two-legged friends would be welcome there too. I consider inviting friends with the desire to practice kinship. What would it be like to practice a respectful presence by listening to the many voices in the forest? Could we enter into a conversation with them by simply being present and participating in their worship?   

Sitting on the stumps we would begin by grounding ourselves in silence, acknowledging the many creatures by name whom we have joined. Next, engaging in a practice of holy wandering for twenty to thirty minutes, we   would explore an area of the land to listen to what creation and God may be saying there. After the wandering, we would come together again and share our experiences and offer prayers of thanksgiving. Sometimes we might sing or read poetry. There might be scripture readings or readings from other faith traditions, stories or poems or a mix. 

However, the main point is to listen to creation and restore the sacred conversation between the Earth and humanity, which many believe has been broken. So yes, I see this as God’s invitation to be part of an expanding Pentecost movement. God is speaking to us through the Earth and I believe we are called to listen. 

For me, the Sabbath Day of Sunday will usually involve gathering in an Episcopal Church to share the elements of the Earth, the bread and the wine, and let’s not forget the flowers and the water of baptism. But I also love and welcome Earth’s invitation to be nurtured by creation in a forest sanctuary, by the seaside, or in my own backyard.     

I am grateful for the first miracle of Pentecost as revealed in our sacred scripture. And for the Spirit revealed to us in the images of wind, water, and fire. I hope you will join me in being part of the expanding Pentecost. Wander into creation and see what you hear. It will surely be words of love.      

Today, let us pray for the Spirit to again blow the breath of love into the hearts of all people. May we invite the Spirit to gift us with the fire of love; to come upon us and enlighten our world with compassion. May our compassion embrace both humanity and other-than-human elements that surround us above, below, around and beside us. 

Let us pray and hope for a continual expansion of Pentecost, noticing wherever and however a fresh outpouring of the Spirit will draw all people into an awareness that we are One, with humanity, with our Earth and all her creatures. May the Spirit guide us through our stewardship of the Earth’s beauty and resources. Let us pray and hope for an expanding Pentecost in our own lives. Let us be bold to pray, “Come Holy Spirit, come.” Amen.    

Elaine Breckenridge is a dancing monk, Episcopal priest and Wild Church Leader. She happily resides on Camano Island, Washington where she volunteers at the Camano Farm Ashram and Circlewood. She has two grandsons, ages 7,4 who live at the Farm Ashram with their parents. When she is not writing a sermon, she enjoys practicing yoga and exploring the island’s many forests, beaches and nature preserves.  

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This Friday, May 22nd we welcome Wisdom Council member, spiritual director, and musician Dr. Richard Bruxvoort Colligan for a retreat on The Psalms and a Gloriously Disrupted Life. During the retreat Richard will guide us in an immersion of his favorite part of the Hebrew scriptures. 

Here is an excerpt from Richard’s new book on the psalms:

The psalms of the Hebrew Bible sing of a rich, complicated life. The psalmists– the people who wrote the psalms—were creative, open-hearted musicians who composed and sang with their community. From their lyrics, we can see that they clearly struggled with God and wrestled with their place in the world. Their praises soar, their blues ache.

Welcome to 150 affirmations for your life, set to ancient music for which we have only a handful of clues than can help us imagine what it sounded like.

To be clear: The Psalter is not a make you-feel-better-with-a-Bible-verse project, and it was never intended to be. The psalms will absolutely not tell us to get over our struggles and move on. The Psalms will ask us to, as the psalmists sing in Hebrew, yachal—to wait, hope, and stay—until our experience has ripened and our humanity has been honored. After all, our ancestors of faith were called Israel, a word that means to have contended, or wrestled, with God, the Heart of Life.

In our desire for happiness, the psalmists connect us to generations of joy. When we’re angry, they affirm that rage is often absolutely appropriate; they will not talk us down from it. And if, like me, you live with depression or anxiety; know that the psalmists understand us too.

The contours of the examined life can be mapped by the stars of individual psalms. When we view them together as the five-book Psalter, a sky full of constellations emerges. Not right away. Your eyes need to adjust to notice the particulars given the enormity of the sense and scope of the sky. Then—look! The Milky Way. The Big Dipper. Orion’s belt, and then your own future in the sky—much like the number of Abraham’s descendants (Genesis 15:5)—become clear as your imagination gets its bearings.

“Music makes an altar out of our ears,” writes composer W. A. Mathieu. And all the psalms are music.

(Reprinted with permission from Dangerous Songs: The Psalms and a Gloriously Disrupted Life by Richard Bruxvoort Colligan. Copyright © 2026 Broadleaf Books.)

Join us this Friday to expand your life with the psalms through teaching, singing, and meditation. You will be invited to sketch, doodle, journal, and create psalm-inspired poetry. No prior study of the psalms is required and all are welcome.

With great and growing love,

Christine

Christine Valters Paintner, OblSB, PhD, REACE

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I noticed it first when I needed respite from the demands of caregiving for my husband as he declined with dementia. When I became depleted or tempted to push myself beyond my own well-being, it was the trail along a nearby lake that saved me. I could walk the trail and weep or stare or daydream, the lapping waves and soft breezes offering balm to soothe and comfort me. I didn’t have to get tasks done or make anything better. I didn’t have to figure anything out or try to hold it altogether. I could just be, without effort. I found my deep breaths again, my pulse settling into its rhythm. What a discovery: I could let creation minister to me! 

Through those hard years of Perry’s dementia, I learned to trust this, to allow creation to minister to me again and again. When Perry moved into memory care facility during the pandemic, I couldn’t visit him, couldn’t sit with him, hold his hand or touch him. My own body rebelled at this physical separation. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, distress overwhelming my thoughts. I remembered then the way creation had ministered to me and I sought the Oklahoma prairie. As I stood on the edge of this wide-open expanse of short-grass, fierce wind in my face, I felt my body release at a cellular level. When words and the gestures of friends could not seem to touch the depth of my pain, the only solace was the sky, the only comfort the vast ocean of prairie, grass bowed by the caress of wind. I surrendered to creation’s ministry, allowing myself to receive creation’s balm.

The ministry of creation was my lifeline through those particularly painful months. When I couldn’t pray or speak or think clearly, I could walk the trail along the nearby lake. It was like oxygen. I didn’t have to figure anything out or make anything happen. I just had to show up and let creation take it from there. It did require me to get out of bed, mechanically go through motions of dressing, drive 3 miles to the parking lot, get out of my car and move my legs. This was creation’s ministry, too, pulling me back into my body, back into my life. 

I couldn’t tell you what happened really. I don’t remember thoughts, breakthroughs or epiphanies.  I only know I was held in the sky and water, dirt and trees. They held me, let me walk, let me be. They didn’t push with probing questions, offer suggestions or try to make it all OK. Creation companioned me, gently being itself and thereby receiving me as I was. Something in that accompaniment restored me slowly, over time, cell by cell, my shattered sense of my life began to re-form. 

Recently I’ve moved to a new city, Seattle, a major life transition that brings both losses and new possibilities. Again, I can feel my body drawn to the nearby Green Lake to walk, to let my awareness settle on the gentle movement of the water, let my skin feel the soft breeze through the trees, to let creation minister to me. I’m learning it is medicine, a healing, a sense of regeneration at a cellular level. I don’t know the actual chemistry, but I can sense that I am receiving a salve. I trust it. 

Other times, I walk along Shilshole Bay where the wider view of water receives me. As I behold this brilliant view, I sense creation embracing me, holding me. And when I want to soar, to become “a feather on the breath of God,” as Hildegard of Bingen says, I stand on the ridge at Discovery Park, 200 feet above the Puget Sound. I join the spacious vista of creation’s glory, the Olympic Mountains across the water and the San Juan Islands spreading out as far as I can see. This expanse pulls me into creation’s embrace, lifting me up so that I feel lightened, carried, in the arms of sea and sky.

Allowing creation to minister to me was not a spiritual program I set out to learn. It was not a spiritual self-improvement path I was determined to master. Instead, it was an unexpected showing, a revelation as creation showed me how to surrender, how to enter its arms and rest. It was a slow, gradually increasing awareness that I was being pulled into creation’s embrace, a solace beyond words, a place to rest. The ministry of creation returned me to myself, not to my previous self but to the new self I was becoming. This is holy ground, holy work, holy rest.

Raised on the prairies of Oklahoma, Amy Oden finds her spiritual home under the wide-open sky. Her passion is to introduce spiritual practices that nourish lives to follow Jesus into the world. She has been a seminary professor for most of her life, focusing now on spiritual formation and spiritual direction.

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