A blessed and enjoyable Christmas to all of you who read this!  It is Christmas afternoon here, about 4:15 PM, 8 hours ahead of Michigan time.  It is about 75 degrees here, a little overcast.

  Lots going on around here. We have had one of our four cows die this morning of hoof and mouth disease.  She was pregnant and it is thought she didn't have the strength to overcome the disease.  Her mother and the baby I saw born some 2.5 months ago plus a brown and white milking cow are improving after being inoculated.  Thank God humans are not in danger from this disease.  At least the last time I checked in the mirror I saw no foam pouring out of my mouth!

  My retreat was quite blessed, sometimes a struggle to stay with, with some ups and downs in spirit.  There is a devil!!  The theme that caught my interest and was the overall focus of the 8 days was the depths of God.  There is a scripture that has always drawn me, I Corinthians 2:1-13, especially verses 10 & 11 that speak of no one knowing the depths of God except the Spirit of God. But then it goes on to say the Spirit of God shares something of a secret wisdom of God with those willing to be taught regarding the things of God and so they come to understand something of the "secrets" of God through the Spirit. As I said, this scriputre has intrigued me for years and as I began this retreat it jumped out at me again.

  My guide, an American nun who has spent the last 40 years here in Kenya and Tanzania, guided me.  She was excellent.  We would meet for about 30-40 minutes each morning to talk about what had happened the previous day in my prayer.  In light of my interest in this theme of the depths of God, she loaned for my use a booklet on the artwork and commentary of a German Catholic priest by the name of Sieger Koder (an umlaut goes over the 'o' in his name).  The title of this little book is The Folly of God.  The artwork is extraordinary.  I was guided particularly to a painting of Jesus severely beaten, lacerated, and bleeding some, stretching out fully while looking up to heaven.  The title of this picture is 'Holocaust.'  With this as background I prayed as the Spirit led me through this theme of the 'depths of God,' while I wondered, probed just what is God's deepest want, what does God most want to communicate and share with us, what does God 'feel' most and care about most, what is God's greatest joy and worst pain. What happened to Jesus suggests God's wanting to say something so profound, so ultimate, something almost desperate to us. These seemed to me to be fair questions to ask regarding my desire to know God much more and to grow in love of  God.

   At the same time I remembered reading a snippet of the writings of Blessed Henry Suso, a Dominican who lived in the late 14th century.  He depicted Christ, the Sacred Heart, inviting us to enter His pierced Heart and (this was completely new to me) find our place in Christ's Heart.  I thought:  how strange.  What would he mean by 'place" in Christ's Heart?  I did not have a clue.  But early in my retreat it came to me in the context of seeking to know something of the depths of God that the way to such depths is from the Heart of Christ, and so in His Heart there has to be a door and from that door there is a "stairs" that lead into the depths of God, to where God is most God, where one can "touch" what is deepest in God and gain some sense of what means the most to God in God's life.  To know something of this is to have opened up to a very rich relationship with God and with one's own self, one's own depths.  And I wanted this with everything I am.

   My guide said on the opening evening of the retreat, "Do not hesitate to ask God for the Impossible."  That saying grabbed my attention, and it gave me the courage to pursue this search and ask God to show me what is deepest in Him, what matters most to Him.  It did not give specific information like answers to questions but it does open the one searching to an intuitive sense of God's person and to what is closest to God's Heart. This is such gift, and very beautiful. It may seem to be the impossible, but why not ask for it!

    Yes, what matters most to God is His Son, the Christ, but right there with this awareness is the sense that what matters so much to God, what is deepest in God is me and you and everyone of us.  God has become the fool in the lengths to which He has gone in Christ to love us and to share His Heart with anyone of us who would care to know Him.  What is sad is that we take so long in our life, if ever we do, to wake up to this gift.  In the meantime, we look for such meaning and love in all the wrong places, as the famous Country song says.  We choose something much less, something that is "safer" and makes "more sense," something "more practical."

   Many of you who read these blog-postings prayed for me during my retreat, and I am most, most grateful. I remembered all of you during retreat to God.  So I thought I would say something about what happened for me, thanks in part to your prayers.  By the way, I would highly recommend to your reading and prayer the works of Sieger Koder.  Amazon.com has a lot of his works.  Another book of his I used during the retreat is entitled Christ Our Morning Star.  You should see Koder's painting of a young Mary embracing the body of the dead Christ just removed from the cross.  Wow, it will really affect you.  Then there is a painting of Koder showing the risen Christ hosting a breakfast of fish and bread for the apostles; they are just returning from a morning fishing trip.  The colors and spiritual energy in that painting are brilliant.

   I have to move on.  In 40 minutes we Jesuits have a social followed by a turkey dinner and ice creme.  I am opening for the community a large bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Scotch. It was given me by an American lawyer who made a 6-day retreat two weeks ago.  I was his guide and he discovered I enjoy good Scotch at times.  So I am breaking the seal on the bottle and sharing with the community the liquid 'nectar'. Some have complained about "the awful scotch" we have been drinking the last few months.  So this should quiet all the complaints.

   Happy New Year to you all.  Have a wonderful Christmas week in whatever you are doing.  I am still waiting to finish the visa process.  No, they won't throw me out of the country.  But it will be after Monday, the 6th, before I can resume the process because some office I have to get into doesn't open till then.  Some things here in Kenya are really slow.  God confronted me during retreat about some of my impatience with such things and my gripping about rarely getting away from here because I have no driver's license and we have one car for about a dozen people.  This is part of the economic reality here.

Bernie