Cloister of the Heart : Monday mornings with Mary

Monday, September 2, 2013

Monday mornings with Mary - offering of beauty

Flowers on the altar,

an offering of gratitude and joy,

in our modern day Temple of Mary,

sanctuary for seekers of the Holy Grail

on the Path of Divine Love

I have missed a few Monday mornings with Mary

as I was preparing for the regular retreat weekend

of The Temple of Mary of which I am the Founder

and Guardian. These photographs were taken of the main

altar to the Blessed Mother and Son.

And here are some photographs of the beautiful

surroundings in which the Temple community gathers and meet

at Tulbagh, a rural village in the Western Cape.

As you can see it is cold here.

Have a blessed week

blessings

5 comments:

rebeccaSeptember 2, 2013 at 6:58 PM
thank you for slipping me into your beloved heart and taking me with you.
you have been missed, for a most blessed gathering.
xoxo
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NonnieSeptember 2, 2013 at 9:00 PM
such heavenly surroundings for the blessed retreat!
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Priti LisaSeptember 2, 2013 at 11:18 PM
What a glorious altar! The backdrop picture of Mary
and baby Jesus is a beautiful one. Naturally I had to click
on the pictures to inspect everything...just beautiful.
♥ ♥
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AnonymousSeptember 3, 2013 at 9:48 AM
Extraordinarily beautiful. How many people attended your retreat? I can magine that the left feeling uplifted xx
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AnonymousSeptember 4, 2013 at 2:18 AM
Hettienne, I've been trying to post but I keep getting kicked off. I'll try again. Would love to hear more about your retreat. It is so lovely there. I'm Redondowriter in case this comes across as anonymous.
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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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Monday, September 2, 2013

Monday mornings with Mary - offering of beauty

5 comments:

Namaste

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