Mennomystic

  "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...

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...