Cloister of the Heart : Day Three of Art Novena for Our Lady of Lourdes

Sunday, February 5, 2012

Day Three of Art Novena for Our Lady of Lourdes

She was a poor shepherdess,

Bernadette,

growing up at the foothills of the Pyrenees

on the banks of the Gave du Pau

tending the very poor family's

small flock of sheep

When the most miraculous vision appeared to her

a vision of Light

with roses on Her feet

from this numinous event

flowed forth a stream of healing water,

a holy place was born

Bernadette's life was transformed

into one of passion,

commitment and a vocation to the highest Love

Bernadette's message : God is everywhere!

A place where the fire was lit long ago

and the fire of your Soul

and Its unconditional love

is kept alive

A light for your feet

And such is the miracle within our own hearts

as She brings forth the waters of regeneration,

healing and wholeness,

teaching you that Love is everywhere

A small naif shrine made from items I collected during my visit to Lourdes : an embroidered holy card, a small collector's doll which I dressed up as Bernadette, a tiny statue of Our Lady of Lourdes, and a watercolour sketch of the Cathedral of Lourdes. To strengthen the feel and theme of the innocent child and childhood feelings, I used birthday cake candles to represent the massive votives that are kept burning at the grotto.

I invite you to join in this

Art Novena to Our Lady of Lourdes

share your stories

of the sacred within your own journey

and let us remind one another

of the Love

that the fabric of life is made of!

Please put up the link on your post.

I also invite you to Soul Songs today.
Here on The Path of Divine Love.
A sharing of collages, singing the song of your soul.
No knowledge of SoulCollage required.

Click on this link below

3 comments:

Miss RobynFebruary 5, 2012 at 11:05 AM
i love your little shrines.. I so wish to create one for this journey! my post will be up a little later.. and will comment again once I have posted :)
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Miss RobynFebruary 5, 2012 at 12:45 PM
my post is done!!
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rebeccaFebruary 5, 2012 at 10:18 PM
lovely!
alas traveling mostly to mexico i have countless virgins of guadalupe, but not a single photograph of dear Bernadette do i have to share!
love yours here today,
and bernadette always.
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My life as a Pilgrim to sacred places

Pilgrimage and sacred ritual is my foremost spiritual practise. Raised Dutch Reformed Protestant, the rich lustre of sacred and holy places offered a well of inspiration for my parched soul. My travels have taken me to many different religions, cultures and traditions. You will see on the internet that I have written on many aspects of the spiritual journey. Until I came into contact with the mystical side of Christianity. My first ritual I attended was the festival of Archangel Michael in Mont Sant'Angelo in Italy, then visiting Padre Pio. Then followed walking the pilgrimage of Bridgid, the sacred well and labyrinth in Kildare, Ireland. And that is when my art appeared in the form of paintings. Ritual grounded in the knowing of the unconscious, awakens us from the dream of habitual seeing and thinking. The conscious mind lacks the ability or maybe the neural pathway to communicate the new-found wisdom intellectually, and thus the expression through art steps in. Well, that is only my experience and understanding, of course. But I had not been an artist till I participated in sacred ritual.

My stay at Lourdes and participating in the rituals daily, turned me into a full time artist.

When one participates in a ritual (probably any ritual, but when you regard it as sacred, you add a certain 'light' to it) you are transported into a different time and space : colors are different; the light is different; everything has meaning and the ordinary become extra-ordinary. My art novena for Lourdes in particular, highlights my statement that our lives are the altar to the Divine and I strive to capture that numinosity of the sacred ritual in my photographs and altars. I only started creating sacred altars on my return from Lourdes. These small shadowboxes are vignettes, a moment in time in the life of ordinary human beings, lifted out of the mundane into the numinous, merely by seeing life as sacred.

Wisdom of Oscar Wilde

“It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us.” ― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

"In an old song the Mother sings: 'My sleeping is my dreaming, my dreaming is my thinking, my thinking is my wisdom.' She is the bed we are born in, in which we sleep and dream, where we are healed, love and die. In her wisdom we remember day's broken images and carry them down into dreams where their motions roll into shadows and root, growing into stories." ~Meinrad Craighead

Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. ~Rumi

I am the mother of fair love and of respect and of knowledge and of holy hope. In me is all grace of the way and of the truth; in me is all hope of life and of virtue - Ecclesiasticus 24:24.

OPEN FLOWER

Near your breastbone there is an
Open Flower.
Drink the honey that is all around that flower.
Waves are coming in:
There is so much magnificence near the ocean!
Listen: Sound of big seashells!
Sound of bells!
Kabir says: Friend, listen this is what I have to say:
The guest I love is inside me!
~Kabir

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Sunday, February 5, 2012

Day Three of Art Novena for Our Lady of Lourdes

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Namaste

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