Christine Valters Paintner

Christine Valters Paintner holds a doctorate in Christian spirituality and lives in Galway, on the west coast of Ireland, where she and her husband John run Abbey of the Arts, a virtual monastery for what she calls monks and artists. She names three identities she holds dear: poet, looking beneath the surface for beauty and offering it back; hermit, nourished by silence and by regular time alone in the woods or by the sea; and mystic, following the many who have felt a passionate desire for connection with the divine.

She grew up in New York City, where the Cloisters, the medieval monastery rebuilt on the northern tip of Manhattan, caught her imagination long before she understood anything of the religious life. Her roots are Catholic. While studying Christian spirituality she fell in love with the twelfth-century Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen, and that reading opened the Benedictine path to her; she is now an oblate, committed to living as a monk in the world, which she describes as bringing presence to paying the bills and washing the dishes. Alongside the desert, Celtic and Benedictine sources she draws on the expressive arts, dream work and Jungian psychology, and she trained as a yoga teacher and a Dancing Mindfulness facilitator.

In the spring of 2012 she and John sold almost everything they owned in Seattle, where they had lived for nine years, and left to live overseas. Six months in Vienna, where her father is buried, were followed by the move to Galway. From there she serves the Abbey through online prayer services, retreats and virtual pilgrimages, and writes books on contemplative living. She has published three collections of poetry, Dreaming of Stones, The Wisdom of Wild Grace and Love Holds You, with a fourth, What Enters Through the Open Heart, due in October 2026.