I am a big fan of Paula Huston’s work.  Her book The Holy Way: Practices for a Simple Life is one of my favorites and I attended a writing workshop with her a few years ago through the Image Journal in Santa Fe.  She is a generous teacher and writer and when I received her newest book for the season of Lent for the Patheos book club, my heart felt like singing.  Paula is gifted at bringing together rich resources from the tradition, refreshingly honest stories from her own experience, and practical ways to apply these in everyday life.  She is also a fellow Benedictine oblate and monk in the world, so I count her as a kindred spirit.

Her newest book Simplifying the Soul: Lenten Practices to Renew Your Spirit (from the wonderful folks at Ave Maria Press) is a true gift for the season.  Her reflections are rooted in the stories of the desert mothers and fathers, those wise elders whose voices still ring across time in our hearts today.

Lent is that marvelous season that calls us to return to God with our whole hearts.  Each year we hear this invitation on Ash Wednesday, each year we are marked with a reminder of our mortality, and each year Lent ushers us on a pilgrimage of the heart toward releasing all that keeps us from a full embrace of the holy presence in our lives.

In Simplifying the Soul each week has a theme with suggestions for simplifying in different areas of our lives: in money, the body, the mind, the schedule, relationships, and prayer.

I have to admit as I opened her book and saw the table of contents I was immediately drawn to week four on simplifying the schedule.  As someone who is deeply committed to cultivating contemplative spaciousness in my life, I still find myself often overloaded with commitments.

Her first reflection in this section is about social and professional ambitions and St Benedict’s call to us to become content with anonymity.  While I am not one to flutter about at many social events, as someone who runs my own business, anonymity is a hard thing to reconcile with my need to put my message out in the world.  Rather than suggest we eliminate things from our schedule as I am anticipating, however, Paula suggests the opposite: welcome in interruptions as the face of love, pray the Hours, attend a worship service, go for a walk and say prayers, invite someone who is lonely to tea.  I find myself a little irritated at first, these are things to add to my schedule, not simplify.  But quickly the hubris falls away and I laugh gently at myself and my expectations.  I am left with Paula’s deep wisdom that emerges from her own heightened self-awareness and rootedness in the monastic life.  Of course these things she suggests we add are to help re-orient our perspective.  To remind us that our schedules aren’t all about work and meetings and outings.  We must create space for a new kind of orientation to take hold.  One that sees love and the open-hearted quest for God as the center of our lives.

This book would make a wonderful self-guided retreat or to gather with a group and reflect each week together the ways you have been nourished and challenged by her invitations.  I highly recommend you consider making this journey for Lent.

Stop by the Patheos Book Club from January 16-31 for more about this book>>

Christine Valters Paintner is a writer, artist, spiritual director, retreat facilitator, and teacher. This post first appeared at her website Abbey of the Arts.

The year I started doctoral studies in Christian spirituality I also took part in a nine-month retreat in everyday life.  It was the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius in their extended format and a powerful experience of entering into the scriptures with all of my senses open and attuned.

I was also taking a course in Judaism to help direct me toward the subject of my exam in a spirituality other than Christianity, part of the requirements of my studies.  I was talking with the professor one afternoon and shared something about my experience in the Spiritual Exercises.  I described them as an imaginative engagement in the scriptures where we are invited to enter into the text with all of our senses, open up the gaps in
the stories, and engage in dialogue with the characters.  “Oh, just like Midrash,” she said casually.  At that point I didn’t know a lot about Midrash, but was really taken by this new door opening for me between traditions.  I began studying Midrash more extensively for my exam and ended up focusing on the work of contemporary feminist writers. These women were
telling the missing stories of biblical women and offering a new experience of biblical texts to their communities. I was enthralled by the Jewish perspective of scripture as black fire on white fire.  The black fire is the actual words of the text while the white fire is the space between – the place where holy mystery dwells.  Our imaginations help us to embrace both
aspects and begin to see the whole.

As I continued on my personal journey into Ignatian prayer through the
retreat, I discovered a new relationship to stories I had heard many times
before.  I remember the moment in my contemplation when I encountered Jesus
in a wholly new way.  I was engaged in a colloquy (Ignatius’ word for
conversation) with Jesus.  Through my imagination I sat next to him while he
held my hand, and I asked him how he was able to have the kind of wisdom he
did.  What I heard in reply was that he must have experienced a significant
loss at an early age.  It was more than hearing it, I felt it in my gut, I
had an embodied response.  Those “missing years” began to shimmer for me
with possibility of what other suffering he had to wrestle with.

Michael Card, in his book Luke: The Gospel of Amazement, describes the
imagination as the bridge between mind and heart and a means of integration.
His reflections on Luke’s gospel remind me of a delicious cocktail of lectio
divina, Ignatian contemplation, and Midrash.  We are called to enter the
spaces of the text, wander around there with eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and
skin attuned to new possibility, letting what is revealed to our senses have
weight.  So often we approach the texts with expectations, we know how the
story affects us already, we know how it all turns out.

Reading Card’s writing reminds me of how vital the experience has become of
seeing my dear friend and teaching partner Betsey Beckman dance the
scripture stories.  They become alive and embodied; they take on flesh and
sweat and dust, all essential ingredients for the transformation of my own
heart. When she moves and proclaims with her entire body, she utters the
words of black fire and the white fire of mystery emerges in the space of
breath and bone.  The texts become a living encounter with sacred presence.
When we unleash the scriptures through holy imagination, we really unleash
our own hearts and bodies into the landscape of possibility.  We begin to
dance at the edges of what we know and may suddenly find ourselves in a new
landscape.