Blog de Mylène Otou

  A year ago, I inaugurated this blog with this article, which has been translated into English for this Lenten season. Enjoy! It's Lent! If you're like me, you are probably overwhelmed with prayer and meditation proposals for that special time of the liturgical year. And you probably have plenty of disorganized Lenten resolutions in your head. Perhaps, just like me, you never really sat down to think about your New Year resolutions, so Lent is the perfect time to do it. Well, my brothers and sisters, it's time to stay focused! Time to put all these ideas in order, choose a prayer mode and stay as faithful to it as much as we can. Time to fix some realistic Lenten resolutions and go right at it without thinking twice! Time to take out them spiritual books that have been sleeping on your shelves taking dust! Time to clean up our soul from all the dust we've been sweeping under the rug all year. Time for retreats and sacraments! Sure, it all looks a bit intim...

I wrote this article last summer and have been waiting for the perfect timing to release it. I decided I would do it on Valentine’s Day, since it refers to couples. In the meantime, I was blessed to attend to a Christopher West conference for the third time in my life, which fueled my desire to share this article, as it is inspired by his works on John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. So here we go! Have you ever heard the expression "Never go to bed mad" as an advice for couples? In other words, couples should talk out any problems they might have and make peace before they go to bed together, so that the next day becomes a new day, free of resentment and grief. Well, I was thinking about that, and then I had this epiphany. I had already read books in which Christopher West makes an analogy, comparing marriage to the sacred altar on which the spouses reproduce the Holy Communion of love making, becoming one flesh, as we become one flesh with Jesus in the Holy Communi...

We are entering Black History month. On February 16, the “Black Panther” movie is coming out. Everyone is talking about Blackness, Afro-descendants are going back to their roots... And so, I decided to write my first article on this blog that is not related to my faith. Rather than being about my one true first identity (being a daughter of God), this article will be about one of my many other identities, that of being a Black woman. Being a Black woman in a White-Male-dominated world, even though I consider myself very lucky, as a Black person, to know exactly where I come from, from what country in Africa, what village, what tribe, and to know exactly who my ancestors are. Not all of us have that chance. So let's start. As a Black woman, I was always told, out loud or not, by my Black community or not, that when it came to hair, the longer, the straighter, the better. I don't remember at what age I got my first perm, probably around 5 or 6. I just remember the be...