What Enters through the Open Heart

Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, REACE is the online Abbess of Abbey of the Arts, a virtual monastery where she leads online retreats and prayer services integrating contemplative practice and creative expression. She is the author of more than 25 books on spirituality and the arts. This is her fourth collection of poetry and her poems have appeared in journals in the U.S., Canada, UK, and Ireland. She lives in the west of Ireland with her husband John and dog Sourney.

“What is it about the mysterious alchemy of pain mixed with faith that, if embraced—however reluctantly—often produces profound beauty? It's a question worth asking Paintner because, in What Enters Through the Open Heart, she has achieved it. Excavating a topic which might easily pull us down, she instead gives us wings. Through these poems, readers are shown how one might use an intimacy with pain as portal to deeper intimacy with God. Chronic illness is unasked for, but it does not come empty-handed. The forced stillness that comes with it has knit this poet into nature, making her sister to birds, bees, dragonflies, and the stones ‘who sing of endurance.’ She learns a new way to see and surrender, teaching us that we can, too. Chronically ill or not, our strength will inevitably diminish as the years gnaw away our youth. For these reasons and more, this book, my friends, is what is called a gift.” —Nikki Grimes, New York Times bestselling author of Ordinary Hazards, a memoir in verse, and Glory, Too

“What Enters Through the Open Heart is an astonishing new poetry collection by Christine Valters Paintner. Its exquisite, intimate, and courageous poems make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, creating a portal into the communal, liminal vulnerability we routinely call ‘life.’ Deeply tender, these poems embody loss, name grief, feel pain, and embrace joy’s mystery in everyday blessings. This amma’s awe-drawn word gifts resurrection—as real, healing, and unbelievable as the sun’s first rays at dawn.” —Carmen Acevedo Butcher, poet and translator of Brother Lawrence’s Practice of the Presence and  The Cloud of Unknowing

“Christine Paintner’s newest collection, What Enters Through the Open Heart, is a book of deep listening—to the aching body, the sorrowing heart, the breathing earth, and the luminous hum of the sacred threaded through the daily ordinary. These poems turn illness into altar, grief into teacher, and attention itself into prayer, offering a fierce, tender theology of presence. With a voice both intimate and spacious, the collection moves effortlessly between hospital rooms and forests, saints and seaweed, ancestral memory and vanishing species, reminding us that ‘grief is the harsh light at midday,' and by learning to stand inside this light, these poems, we are illumined. This is poetry that does not look away: this is poetry that kneels, blesses, and keeps vigil. What Enters Through the Open Heart leaves the reader altered—exquisitely—more porous, more awake, and ever more deeply in love with this fragile, astonishing world.” —Judyth Hill, author of nine poetry collections including Writing Down the Moon