Mennomystic

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.