Dearest dancing monks, artists, and pilgrims,
 
In the northern hemisphere today is the celebration of the summer solstice, the longest day.

The seasons are connected to the different cardinal directions, as well as the four elements. Hildegard of Bingen, a 12^th century Benedictine Abbess, allied the direction of the south and the season of summer with the element of fire. We find a similar connection in the Native American Cherokee tradition and in the Irish Celtic tradition.

We might think of summer as the season of fire and stoking our passions. It is the season of coming to fullness connected to the Hour of noon and midday, when the sun reaches its peak in the sky. It is the time of fruitfulness, when blossom gives way to sweet abundance of berries and peaches, delicate lettuces and gorgeous tomatoes.

While Beltane on May 1^st invited us to tend to the very first fruits of summer’s arrival, the Summer Solstice announces the time for full fruits and an extravagance of color and sweetness in the world around us.

June 24^th is the Feast of John the Baptist and stands directly opposite the Christmas vigil and the Winter Solstice. We can always orient ourselves on the wheel of the year and see where we are in relation to all of the other turning points. 

To honor the fullness of summer in ritual, consider facing the direction of the south and taking some deep breaths. Spend some time in meditation on what your own passions are. What would you like to kindle?

Where have been the sparks of joy in your life? What is coming to full fruitfulness? How might you welcome in your own growing fullness?

I am delighted to share that my fairy tale Journey to Joy is now available as in paperback and we have created a small group journey guide through the story in a 4-week and 8-week version! These are available for free to download on our website. 

Our self-study sale extends until the end of June (including our Sacred Seasons retreat which has reflections on the turning of all the thresholds of the year). Use code SUMMER20 to receive 20% off. We have 29 online programs available! With self-study you move at your own pace and the materials stay available to you. 

With great and growing love,

Christine

Christine Valters Paintner, OblSB, PhD, REACE

*Blessing from A Book of Everyday Blessings by Christine Valters Paintner (Ave Maria Press) 

PS – If you are in the Southern Hemisphere and wish to read about the Winter Solstice please click here >>

Image paid license with Canva

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I recognize that I interact in the world on the dance floor while I interpret the world from the balcony. My contemplative practice uses the guiding values / spiritual principles that populate the part of me that observes and influences my behavior from the balcony with the part of me that is simulated by the what goes on around me and with me on the dance floor. One of my profound spiritual directors challenged me to be aware of the movement to and from head and heart. This became the foundation that nurtured the Benedictine presence in my spirituality that found companionship with virtues of Franciscan practice. 

Learning to listen deeply to God and one another is often joyful, sometimes awkward, downright painful at times, but always the strength of my contemplative practice that brings the presence that reminds me that I am not alone even when I feel least lovable. A word that could sum up the previous somewhat complicated sentence is humility. Indeed, when writing my autoethnographic self-study in 2013 that became my doctoral thesis entitled Intrapersonal Intelligence Mediated By Self-Reflective Adaptive Practice That Manages Anxiety: Learning To Lead By Giving Space, I collated into Appendix H the Spiritual Principles and Guiding Wisdom from the time I entered seminary in 1986. The graphic that accompanies this brief essay reminds me prayers, hymns, scripture, and other meaningful thoughts that find root in this appendix and still speak to my being.

The graphic helps me bring my contemplative presence to my work and to my family as it not only reminds me of who I believe I am but challenges me to be more of who God created me to be. The energy this challenge stimulates is to not gain God’s favor, which I already have by God’s grace, but guides me to recall the moment when I found and began to live in the peace of the breath prayer God placed in me when I least expected it and needed it most: I have nothing to prove, only your holy invitations to offer. Humility allows me to find joy in the reality that I am good enough even as I struggle with an honest appraisal of my imperfection. 

The core of the graphic is a sun that pushes against diminishment while offering illumination. I am sensitive to darkness and light as images that are easily full of cultural bias and the projection of power. I ring the sun with words by Cardinal John Henry Newman, “Stay with me: So as to shine as to be a light to others…The light, O Jesus, will be all from thee.” Not in my graphic but writ on my heart is his phrase, “the catching force, the sympathetic influence of what I do.” For me, the sun in the graphic pulsates with thirty years of the ingrained Collect for Mission by Bishop Charles Henry Brent and the recent discovery of The Prayer of Self-Dedication by Archbishop William Temple. Thus the writer David Brooks found fertile ground for me to claim that I am more who God has created me to be when I act as an illuminator and not a diminisher.

 The center of the sun graphic has the points of four arrows that hopefully evoke a compass. An early learning from Stephen Covey about the Compass and the Clock is foundational. I can easily be drawn into the demands of events and things as represented by the clock but when I recall the image of the true guidance a compass offers, I find relationships with people to be most in harmony and balance with spiritual principles and leadership practices. Deep Church is an example of how I found a throwaway term and gave it meaning as a way of expressing my understanding of what it means to be with a group of people who gather with a willing expectation to share intimately the love of God. In the heart of the compass cross in the sun graphic are words that evoke the promise of what it means to live in relationship with God and one another. I think I now use these words as an illuminator’s clarion call: We belong to one another. Together, with God’s help, we can make one another stronger. 

That slogan would be a fine way to end this brief reflection. However, God’s sense of humor found me once again while I was serving as priest in an eight-month interim position. Psalm 71, verse 18 as translated in the Book of Common Prayer, now lives on the opening graphic on my iPhone as well as in my heart: And now that I am old and gray-headed, O God, do not forsake me, till I make known your strength to this generation and your power to all who are to come. I would not have heard God speak if I had not been primed to listen by my contemplative practice. Stay with me, and then I shall begin to shine as thou shinest: so to shine as to be a light to others.

In the fall of 2018 The Rev. Dr. William Carl Thomas became a retired Episcopal Priest living in New Bern NC. Bill brings with 37 years ordained experience as a Coach and Sunday Supply Priest. Bill is a former member of the Interim Ministry Network Faculty. Meet Bill at WCTcoach.com.

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Each week we are delighted to feature a reflection from our community in the Monk in the World guest post series. There are so many talented writers and artists at the Abbey and we love giving our dancing monks a chance to share their work. Submissions to the 2026-2027 publication calendar are open through June 25^th. We’d love to consider your reflection, poetry, or artwork on the theme of contemplative practice and living as a monk in the world! Please click here to read through the details and submission guidelines.

Every year during June we offer a summer self-study sale. We have 29 self-study retreats in our virtual library which includes a variety of programs to support your contemplative and creative paths. 

Here is an adapted excerpt from my book on Breath Prayer, the self-study companion retreat to the book is included in the sale:

Many religious traditions have some version of breath prayer. In the Christian tradition, the roots of breath prayer are built from St. Paul’s invitation to people who hold faith to “pray without ceasing.”  In early Christianity many monks and nuns would endeavor to do exactly this in practice by bringing prayer to each breath. They would combine a phrase of prayer or blessing with the inhale and exhale so that every breath was a chance for them to be present to the sacred. In earliest tradition the prayer most often prayed was known as the Jesus Prayer or the Prayer of the Heart. This prayer and prayer form originated in the sixth century but the text is taken from words spoken to Jesus, as recorded in the gospels, in the first century.

This kind of “mantra” practice has also long been present in the Hindu tradition, where a sacred phrase is repeated as an anchor to keep one’s awareness focused on the divine at work in the world. In the Buddhist tradition these take the form of gathas, short verses recited with the breath as part of mindfulness practice and meditation and recited during ordinary activities, like walking, working, or cleaning and so on. 

In Sufism it is the dhikr prayer that is repeated to help in remembering the sacred presence. Jews pray the Shema, “Hear O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is One” a prayer recited as part of morning and evening prayers and also before sleeping. Some consider it to be the most important prayer they offer. Some Christians pray with the rosary, which is a proscribed set of prayers to repeat again and again while using beads to mark your way. While some who pray the Shema or the rosary don’t always equate the prayer form with breath, for those who observe the way the prayer is embodied, repeated, they witness the breath and cadence so close in form that for many it is considered a close form to breath prayer.  

In the Philokalia, the great collection of Eastern Christian wisdom books, which also teaches about the early practice of the Jesus Prayer, St. Hesychios the Priest writes: “let the name of Jesus adhere to your breath, and then you will know the blessings of stillness.”  I love this image of letting the prayer adhere to your breath. Rather than a forcing together of word and breath, imagine the words naturally being drawn to the breath like a magnet to metal or like bees to flowers. In this bringing together, the “blessings of stillness” wash over you. 

Our breath is such an intimate companion. One that sustains us moment by moment even as we are entirely unaware of that sustaining gift. Yet when we bring our intention to it, it also becomes an ally for slowing down, for touching stillness. 

These prayers are meant to be gateways — both to bring you more present to the sacredness of whatever activity you are involved in, and also perhaps to eventually write your own short phrases for prayer to learn by heart.

The self-study retreat offers recordings of live webinar sessions with me, some beautiful art meditations from Dr. Amanda Dillon, and movement invitations with Dr. Jamie Marich. 

Have a look at our entire library and see if there is a retreat that is calling to your heart right now. Use code SUMMER20 for a 20% discount! (And if the discounted amount is still too much for your budget, please contact us about a scholarship).

With great and growing love,

Christine

Christine Valters Paintner, OblSB, PhD, REACE

Image © Christine Valters Paintner | Brigit’s Garden, Co. Galway, Ireland

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My friend stopped his bike on the trail in front of me, sniffed the air, and asked, “Do you smell it?” 

“What?” 

“The animal smell.”

I breathed in. Nothing. 

“It’s that gamey scent,” he tried again. “You don’t smell it?” 

Was it a bad smell? An unwashed body smell? I had no idea. “What’s ‘gamey’ mean?”

“It smells … different.” 

I shook my head, not smelling anything unusual. We scanned the trees but saw nothing. Eventually, we rode on.

It didn’t really bother me that I couldn’t smell the “gamey” scent my friend did. Not having the most sensitive nose, I knew I didn’t smell everything my friends smelled. In fact, I didn’t experience quite a few things as my friends experienced them. 

With a chronic health condition, my body does things differently. It means me having different experiences compared to my friends. It also means me having different experiences compared to myself from one day to the next. I never quite know how I’ll feel. It’s a reason I’ve found the idea of “inner hospitality” so challenging to my practice of living as a monk in the world. Theoretically, I like the idea of having compassion for the different parts of myself and my experience, feeling different on different days and accepting each of those days as they come. In practice, though, I’ve dreaded my bad days as much as I’d dread becoming the source of a bad, “gamey” kind of smell, myself. 

Of all things, learning to mountain bike reminded me of this, showing me how little I’d accepted certain parts of my experience. It humbled me.

Many days I enjoyed those bike rides through the woods. I gained control of my bike, managed more obstacles, and kept up better with my friends. I noticed deer nibbling at underbrush, an eagle who’d sit on a birch branch over the river, and once even a baby racoon hanging from a tree. I enjoyed those bike rides immensely.

But other days felt different. My body’s response times slowed. My depth perception shifted, too. Rather than build up speed, as I consistently tried to do, I had to slow down. I had to focus even more intentionally on safety. Sometimes, if my coordination suffered too much, I stayed home from the bike trail altogether. 

Staying home felt hard to do. Part of how I’d managed my condition over the years was to pursue normal activities as much as possible regardless of how I felt. I’d often functioned well enough, ignoring (and hiding) how I felt whenever I could. 

Until the mountain bike trail. Until the activity that wouldn’t let me to push through “different” days as if they didn’t exist. Some days I had to admit I didn’t feel well and change my plans. To the practices of balancing my body with the bike and strategizing pedal strokes around obstacles, I added the practice of acknowledging my vulnerability to myself and to others. It’s a level of self-acceptance that I’m still developing. And yet, the idea of inner hospitality, of practicing gentleness and compassion will all aspects of my experience, has felt like a truly helpful frame.

As have the bike trails. 

My body is not, after all, the only source of “difference” cropping up along those trails. Sometimes fallen leaves obscure surfaces. Sometimes broken branches block paths. Black snakes may drape their long bodies across the dirt to lay in the sun. And I’ve noticed other mountain bikers tending not to treat these trail variations as anything like a bad smell wafting along the breeze. On the contrary. 

I’ve seen fellow mountain bikers relish navigating different trail conditions. Snapping pictures, they post on social media about how they’ve handled things. They tell one another stories in the trail parking lot. They compare how different bike suspension levels and tire designs handle variations on the trail. It’s as if tackling these differences brings them a fascinating challenge.

Obstacles, constraints, any number of “different” conditions—whether they arrive on bike trails, with unusual and “gamey” scents, or inside my own body—I don’t need to wrinkle my nose at them. I’ve been realizing this. The source of the differences is life, and I want to approach life, even the most humbling parts, with a little more fascination and compassion than frustration. 

I do think my perspective is getting there, however slowly.

I remember one of those “different” days when I paused from an especially slow-paced bike ride. I needed the pause. Fatigue had hit me hard. However, sipping from my water bottle, my attention shifted beyond myself. I became aware of smelling something … odd. 

Only when I glanced around did I see it: a buck. I’d never encountered one so close before. He had a huge body on an entirely different scale than the slender does I usually saw. This massive creature with its curving antlers stared at me. I stared back. It crossed my mind to grab my camera, but then the buck loped away through the trees while I only stood there, still too stunned to move. 

I’d just learned what a “gamey” smell meant, and it didn’t smell bad. Just musky, woodsy, distinctive. And different though the day had felt, I wouldn’t have traded it for a “normal” day. I’d have missed too much.

Callie J. Smith is an author based in the midwestern United States. She writes fiction and short-form essays about everyday things like hope, creativity, and grief. Her newest novel, Kohelette, blends domestic fiction with magical realism in a story of piecing together life after loss. She’s online at CallieJSmith.net. 

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This Friday, June 12^th, we are delighted to welcome Brother Richard Hendrick, OFM Cap. for a retreat on moving From Intention to Attention: Becoming Really Present in Prayer. We will encounter this flow through the lens of the Christian contemplative tradition, looking at the Desert Fathers and Mothers, the Franciscan masters, the teachers of the practice of the presence of God, and the sacrament of the present moment up to our own day to garner tools that will help us in our own personal meditative life and practice today.

This poem is from Brother Richard’s Facebook post on March 22^nd:

Desert Stillness:

Be still 
and know
that I Am...
Would you enter the desert
at the heart of yourself?
Would you allow the sandals of your senses
to fall away?
Would you, finally, recognise
the holy ground your heart
truly is?
Would you behold the burning bush
afire with presence at the centre of
your soul?
Then you must 
enter the desert of stillness.
Be still
and know...
Would you know the call to exodus
from the slavery of self?
Would you pass through the waters
of overwhelming worry?
Would you ascend the holy mountain of prayer?
Would you behold the glory so bright that it is darkness?
Would you enter the cloud of the presence?
Would you keep the covenant of grace?
Would you reach the promised land of peace?
Then you must enter the desert of stillness.
Be still 
and know...
For
This is how the Ultimate is revealed:
as presence through stillness,
as Being beyond being,
as emptiness without absence,
as right relationship,
in which 
we come to know
the self truly
only in the light
of Pure Being as
independent
(where all else depends on love),
as non-contingent:
(where all else arises from previous causes),
as creative:
(where all else sub-creates),
as transcending all,
imminent in all,
beyond all,
but 
holding all
in being
by
Love.
Would you enter the desert 
at the heart of yourself 
and see it bloom?
If you would,
then only
be still
and you will 
know.

Please join us Friday to explore the place of Intention and Attention as energetic directions of the soul in your meditative and prayer practice.

With great and growing love,

Christine

Christine Valters Paintner, OblSB, PhD, REACE

Image: Paid License with Canva

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