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...

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...