“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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Tomorrow is our monthly contemplative prayer service and because Simon is in the middle of a big transatlantic move, I will be joined instead by Nóirín Ní Riain, a wonderful friend here in Ireland many of you know well. 

Because it is the month of May and Nóirín and I both have such a devotion to Mary and the sacred feminine, Mary will be the focus of our prayer service, as well as the Celtic festival of Bealtaine.  

In my book Birthing the Holy: Wisdom from Mary to Nurture Creativity and Renewal, I explore 31 names for Mary. Here I share an adapted excerpt from the chapter on Mary as the Morning Star. 

Morning Star: She Who Awakens the World

Dawn is the time of new awakening, new light, new life, all qualities connected to the resurrection. The first Christians faced east when praying. By the eighth century most Christian churches were built to be aligned in an east-west orientation with the altar facing east in the direction of the rising sun. I love this directional orientation as a physical reminder of how we are called to orient ourselves. 

In the story of Epiphany, the magi follow a star to discover the Christ child. Stars have a magical quality in the scriptures offering just enough light to illuminate the pathway ahead. We can imagine in times before electric lighting, how much more mysterious, magical, and important the night sky was and being able to trace its movements for navigation and sense of time. 

The morning can be full of promise and new beginnings and Mary as the morning star is symbolic of all that we hope will come in a new day. Many of the early Church fathers wrote about the “morning star,” the stella matutina, that shines brightly before the sun rises symbolizing Mary who is the light preceding the brilliant illumination of the sun (Son). This morning star was actually the planet Venus, which depending on the season appears in the sky as a bright, steady light a couple of hours before sunrise. 

St. Aelred of Riveaux, a monk in the 12^th century, wrote: “Mary is this eastern gate. For a gate which looks to the east is the first to receive the rays of the Sun. So the most Blessed Virgin Mary who always looked toward the east, that is, to the brightness of God, received the first rays of sun or rather its whole blaze of light.” The east is the direction of the new dawning, the first rays of illumination, and the journey of awakening. Mary is facing in the direction of light and reflecting that back to us to offer us hope of what is to come. 

Swedish mystic St. Bridget describes Mary as “the star that precedes the sun.” The celestial bodies are symbolic of our inner life, calling us to luminosity and transcendence. Much like the Star of the Sea, the Morning Star beckons to us, guides us, and shows us the way to a life illuminated by wisdom and Mary’s guidance for us. The Morning Star shines the way to our true calling. 

St. Bonaventure writes: “despair not; raise up your eyes and cast them on this beautiful star; breathe again with confidence.” Cardinal John Henry Newman had a devotion to Mary and held her two titles of mystical rose and morning star in high esteem. He considered Morning Star to be her ultimate name and title as it connects her to the heavens while the rose is earth-bound and will eventually wilt and decay. She appears in the darkness before the dawn to herald the light that is coming. She invites us to awaken from our sleep to prepare for illumination. 

Mary as the Morning Star calls us to the inner work of embracing darkness and shadow while also finding the glimmers and gleams of inner gold. She invites us to rest into those places of darkness, lifting them up to our loving gaze, and then offering them to her, bringing us closer to wholeness. Mary also reminds us that we are made from stardust, she holds a place to remind us of our dignity and humanity. 

Just in the way that the North Star connects to an inner dimension of ourselves, so too does the Morning Star. When we are able to locate our inner guidance system and lean into the wisdom we find there, we find ourselves directed toward our calling in life. Mary helps us to discover this aspect of ourselves by being an outer symbol of an inner reality. I think of the North Star as more of our inner direction and the Morning Star as more of our inner promise that light follows dark and a new day is beginning. We live embedded in a family and cultural setting which can determine a lot of what we believe our calling to be. Mary helps us to distinguish between the various pulls in our lives and helps us to set down the masks and personas. 

Please join us for our contemplative prayer service tomorrow!

With great and growing love,

Christine

Christine Valters Paintner, OblSB, PhD, REACE

Blessing and excerpt come from Birthing the Holy: Wisdom from Mary to Nurture Creativity and Renewal by Christine Valters Paintner (Ave Maria Press)

Mary Block print by Kreg Yingst

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We welcome you to submit your reflection for possible publication in our Monk in the World guest post series. It is a gift to read how ordinary people are living lives of depth and meaning in the midst of the challenges of real life.

There are so many talented writers and artists in this Abbey community, so this is a chance to share your perspective. The link to the reflection will be included in our weekly newsletter which goes out to over 15,000 subscribers.

Submit your own post from one of the following categories on the general theme of “How do I live as a monk in the world? How do I bring contemplative presence to my work and/or family?” It works best if you focus your reflection on one aspect of your life or a practice you have, or you might reflect on how someone from the monastic tradition has inspired you. The Monk Manifesto is another source of inspiration. We invite reflections on the practice of living contemplatively.

Post categories:

• Photo or visual art essay – Please include a one paragraph introduction about what inspired you and how the images relate to contemplative practice. You may submit 3-5 photographs with an optional 100-150 word description of each image. All work must be your own. Please make sure the image size is smaller than 1 MB.

• Poetry – Please include a one paragraph introduction to your poem or poems about what inspired you and how they relate to contemplative practice. You may submit up to 3 Haikus, 2 short poems (20 lines or less) or one long poem (up to 40 lines). You may also include 1 photograph or illustration. All work and images must be your own.

• Written reflection – Submit your post of 700-900 words. Please write from your own perspective and experience rather than offering instructions for others to follow. You may include 1-2 images if they help illustrate your reflection in meaningful ways. All images should be your own. Please make sure the image size is smaller than 1 MB.

Please follow these instructions carefully:

• Please click this link to read a selection of the posts and get a feel for the tone and quality.
• Please include a head shot and brief bio written in the third person (50 words max).
• If your reflection is specific to a season, feast day, or liturgical point in the year, please note that in the subject line of your submission.
• We will be accepting submissions between now and June 16th for publication between June 2026-June 2027 (depending on the number of submissions). We reserve the right to make edits to the content as needed (or to request you to make edits) and submitting your reflection does not guarantee publication on the Abbey blog, but we will do our best to include as many of you as possible.
• Email your submission to Melinda by June 16th and include the reflection pasted into the body of your email and attach your photo(s). Please do not embed your photos in a Word document.

We will be back in touch with you by late August to let you know if your post is accepted, if edits are needed, and/or when we have scheduled your post to appear.

We look forward to reading and sharing your wisdom with the community!

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