Mennomystic

  One of podcasts I’ve begun listening to as of late is Empire with Anita Anand and William Dalrymple. They explore stories of the history of various empires, historical contexts, impacts on the lives of everyday people, their rise and fall. Most recently I listened to their series on Palestine. Fascinating and horrible.   I am back to the beginning learning about the East India Company, not unlike the Hudson’s Bay Company in Canada, where a corporation takes control of a territory/country to bleed its people and land dry for the benefit of a few shareholders. As the podcasters pointed out, the East India Company (EIC) had no compunction to care about the welfare of the people it controlled. It was this relentless pursuit that caused tremendous amounts of pain and suffering and began the British empire’s government to enter India in droves to establish a semblance of order. India was at the time, in the 1700s, divided by numerous factions that fought against each other. A...

  "The heart is a bloom, shoots up through stony ground," - U2 Beautiful Day   "The most unfortunate thing about the concept of mysticism is that the word itself has become  mystified —relegated to a “misty” and distant realm that implies it is only available to a very few. For me, the word “mysticism” simply means  experiential knowledge of spiritual things , in contrast to book knowledge, secondhand knowledge, or even church knowledge."                                                                                                 - Richard Rohr   Rohr goes on to say that those of us who have been "churche...

  This is the way things always have been. It’s always been David and Goliath. The least likely, dirty, smelly, sheep herding child against the sure-to-win, powerful giant. This has always been the way. And it’s not about the victory; it’s about the struggle. Victory is fleeting. Struggle endures. I’ve been reading the murder mystery book series by Kate Wilhelm written between the 1990s into the 2010s. The protagonist, Barbara Holloway , is a criminal lawyer disillusioned with the justice system that is so easily manipulated by greedy, self-interested, powerful, wealthy, elites. She literally takes the law into her hands to advocate for the innocent, the outcast, and the vulnerable. Just like history is often written by the victors, laws were written by those in power to favour them and maintain the status quo that maintained their hegemony . It’s a conspiracy that hides in plain sight through authority, legitimizing atrocities with impunity. Barbara agonizes over her own man...

  I sit here in exhausted resistance. Not having been able to write for the past month, I wonder if I can at all. The ideas, thoughts, and perceptions are all there, but feel cloaked by a heavy wool blanket of torpor, doubt and fear. Writing is soooo much work. It's hard and time consuming. And for what? Hasn’t it all been said before? There’s nothing new under the sun. Does my voice really matter? Am I just adding to the clamor? I keep thinking that people will know the things that I know but I also know they don’t. But I feel like, they should. Just go look! Seek and you will find. Be curious about the world around you. Ponder deeply. Find credible, thoughtful, humble, optimistic, creative, and out of the box thinkers and read or listen to them. That’s what I do. My friends tell me that a lot of people don’t do that. Can’t I just show them where to look? Sure, but no one else experiences life, and reads, and listens, and processes, and writes in exactly the same way that I can. A...

 I'm reading an "old" book this summer. It was published in 1986. One short section most mornings. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg . I bought it ages  ago and I believe I didn't get very far because one of the first things she says is that writing is a journey of exploring the truth of what is. And like Jack Nicholson said in A Few Good Men, "You can't handle the truth!" I couldn't. I couldn't handle the truth of my inner life in turmoil, the weight of lies that I believed about myself. So, unconsciously I slipped the volume into my library and kept the pain inside. But it never stays inside. It pours out and wounds those in my orbit. I can see this now. Now, as I read her passages, I can see that I wasn't ready for Natalie's words at that time. Or maybe, had I persisted, I would have begun the healing process earlier. No matter. Here I am. Today's reading was about writing first lines. Write a b...

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,...

 I am BOTH - Mary and Martha   Luke 10:40-42 "Martha, who was busy with all the details of hospitality, came to Jesus and said, 'Rabbi, don't you care that my sister has left me all alone to do the household tasks? Tell her to help me!' Jesus replied, ' Martha, Martha! You're anxious and upset by so many things, but only a few things are necessary - really only one. Mary has chosen the better part, and she won't be deprived of it.'" A few months ago, I had the privilege of performing Laura Funk's Midrashic monologue, "Mary's Martha" - based on Mary Schertz's commentary on the passage above. I got to share the stage with Steve Bell and his sister, Dorothy Fontaine for the launch of Laura's book People and Places of Sacred Interior Spaces - Midrashic Monologues and Guided Meditations.  In preparation, I opened my own heart to the monologue to experience what Spirit was speaking to me, and in the process I found a...

Trimming for travel, Shaking off others shackles. Advancing...dancing. 

By becoming aware of the images I project onto others, I see how I am plagued by the things I detest within myself.

Dying to self does not mean self denial. It doesn't mean putting your needs on hold for others. It doesn't mean punishing yourself. Dying to self means, giving up the ego's demands, the demands of the self that says your worth is based on externals, and based on circumstances. It means accepting that you are loved. You are worthy of love. It means listening to that voice in your head that tells you "you are stupid" and then telling it "that is a lie." It means listening to that voice in your head that tells you "you are better than them," and telling it "that is a lie." Dying to self is listening to the truth about yourself: I am loved.

There's a burning in my heart, a yearning for something different. I'm always after the new and shiny thing. And because I know this is my tendency, I have learned to be still and search my heart and my motivations and check the level of my inner resources. This burning and yearning, this unsettled feeling has been within me for the last 25 years. Richard Rohr says the best critique of the bad is the living out of the better. I have balked at the call to ministry for decades. I have always said that my life's vocation IS ministry. I dedicated my life to this when I was 12. But thinking about starting a church...that's something different.  I still don't want to do it. It will be work and I don't have time for it. But I am tired of what is. And if it doesn't exist then I have to make it myself. I need to stop being pensive over other Christians who aren't in the same place. I just need to move on and be with those who are at least at the same...

The life of a contemplative is to approach all of living with a singularity of purpose. It is to have the mind of Christ, to actively look for and expect to see Christ, and to be Christ in all things. It is the unity of mind, spirit and body. The three in one. The intellectual/creative/planning centre - Theos - in material form - Christ - given life force energy - Spirit - to live and move and have our being.

Yile (Carrie) Chen My heart has a natural tendency towards loving kindness.   When this natural flow of love towards someone is stopped, I feel guilt. Guilt, for being unable to love another, is my heart's sadness over the broken connection within myself to express love. Based on a meditation by Dom Sebastian Moore OSB

  Hope, an Advent Lament   “Hope,” they say, in this, the first week of Advent, when despair takes the shape of a shawl. Heaviness hangs hard round my shoulders rounding my spine bending low my spirit.   “Hope, huh?” Glad it doesn’t depend on me and my moods, which now is a weighted blanket of my community’s divisions stuffed with fear and pride and powerlessness and stubbornness, stitched together with hand picked verses.   Hope...as I sit in the dark, wrapped in this melancholy mantel of longing for a season of rebirth.   Hope is faith in the future, good thing it doesn’t depend on how I feel today.

Photo: Coming Home by Samantha Reuter https://www.srueterart.com/ If God is everywhere then there are no profane places; all places and spaces are sacred and holy. Our work as Christ followers, Holy Spirit inhabitors, is to unveil the divine mystery hidden in all things, to uncover the sacredness of all of creation. Which includes our very bodies. As I write this, I realize that the discovering of ourselves as sacred spaces is not a one-off , it too is part of the human journey.   A process requiring the re-ordering of our very own hearts to the true reality that always is, that we are sacred. And it is a process, a process of re-membering “who and whose we are.” Too often though, this development is arrested and stalled often by the Church that claims it is the bearer of our salvation. For many years… many, many years, I truly believed I was evil. Inherently bad, cursed, flawed and irredeemable. This inner knowing persisted as a result of my fundamentalist evangelical...