Mennomystic

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...

  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.