Mennomystic

The saying goes, "The more you learn, the less you know." But from my Old Colony Mennonite heritage, the saying is a bit different, "The more you learn, the more you're wrong." This saying, in itself, has a few different meanings. One is that, the more you expose yourself to knowledge the more responsible you are for  that knowledge. From ultra orthodox Mennonite colonies in Latin America, I have heard stories of women running from the room if someone started to read the Bible. One woman told me that her mother would chastise her husband if he took out his Bible to read it, "Put that book away!" I never grew up part of the Old Colony, but it's funny how a generational way of thinking snuck in to my consciousness. Paradigm shifts are not easy. No Staples big red button here. Gaining knowledge that contradicted what I had been taught cause inner turmoil and struggle as the tectonic plates beneath me shifted. I remember at times thinking, "I wish...

 In your anger do not harm yourself or others. I'm doing a course through a meditation app on better understanding the anger within myself. One of the exercises is to think about the things that make you angry and locate where that anger lives in your body. The last time I listened to a lesson from the instructor, which was a couple of weeks ago (I am not, if anything, inconsistent), she was talking about our "inner child." I've always thought of her an my "inner toddler." Most of the time she doesn't want to transition. For example, she doesn't want to leave the house, get out of bed in the morning, take a shower, get to work. She's very vocal in my head, but that's a post for another day. Today, she told me that she was scared when I got angry. She was scared that I was angry at her. When I get angry at myself, it's to my current older self. I told her, with the utmost care, that I was never angry at her. When I'm angry, it's us...

Yesterday I read the Center for Action and Contemplation's daily meditation about the myth of the hero as a means of understanding the path of transformation. And I thought perhaps this was a good opportunity to reflect a bit about the journey I undertook last summer using Richard Rohr's threefold hero's journey template: leaving, encounters, and the return. Through a working group on Maya-Mennonite Relations, I went to Campeche as a guest of a Maya collective of farmers and as a Low German interpreter for two other delegates among the Mennonite colonists. I had been in the area twice in 2009 as a researcher getting stories on the history of the Mennonites in that area. This time, I would meet those I could not and learn the stories I was unable to obtain at that time due to language barriers (I don't speak Spanish), that is, the Maya's own story of their lives and how the Mennonite's intersect with theirs. The heroic myth first involves a leave taking from home...

I began writing this blog post in March. When the ducks and geese were returning from their sojourn in the south. It's now September and these fowl with their grown young begin their return journey. Funny that I left this topic...not funny ha ha, but funny, ironic. This is what I wrote back then: Arguments and slights will occur. Resist the desire to pile them on top of your life story. Shake the hurts off and go in peace. Observe the ducks. After a fight they turn and swim away, spread and shake their wings vigorously then float serenely on. Be...like the ducks. What is ironic is that I slighted someo ne shortly thereafter. It was completely unintentional. But there you have it. And I was not able to "be like the ducks." My personality type is such that I am extremely hard on myself. I take responsibility and blame for everyone involved in a situation and bear all the guilt and shame. I do this as an unconscious form of penance; thinking that I will make "things rig...

The starting point of the Christianity I grew up in was humanity's sinfulness . It is the foundation for all beliefs and interpretation and behaviour towards others and the entire cosmos that follow. It has been and continues to be a path of destructiveness that I have been unlearning for decades. It is not the path that I taught my children. Instead, in the Franciscan tradition, suffering  is the foundation for understanding the nature of reality. But also holds a position of all of creation being made good, a process that is continuous. From this beginning point, the presence of the Christ is a manifestation of the Divine suffering with  us not for  us. From the former position, the interaction between the Divine (through Jesus) and humanity, is transactional (the entirety of the cosmos does not figure into this framework only people which is one of the causes of the degradation of life on this earth).  Transactional interactions become the norm for all...

 When everything belongs - an alternate wondering about sin What does it mean for "everything to belong," that every-thing has a place with God, that every-thing is God's and that there is no-thing apart from God? What does it mean for everything in creation to be made "good?" And what is up with sin and "evil?" I need to read Richard Rohr's latest book on that and maybe then these musings would have more clarity. But until then... What if everything were about the resistance, the forces of push and pull? Can energy be created without the friction of opposing forces? What if none of all this existence is "bad" or "good" but it is in thinking, and action, that makes it so? It seems as though the "knowledge" of good and evil is the root of the problem. But maybe it's that this knowledge seems to be synonymous with "judgement" - the pronouncement between good and evil. Sin, correctly translated,...