Dear Friends,

  Saturday, April 5:   big overcast here and hinting  at rain!    Still, I am going swimming later this afternoon, outdoors that is.

  Bits of news from here:  last week I had the great pleasure of connecting by way of Skype with a good friend, Jim Moloney.  Jim is dying but is alert enough for us to have had a good conversation.  I have known him from my days at Manresa.  He and his family have been loyal participants at so many of the activities at Manresa.  Some years ago he made for me a copy of various pieces of music, many of them from popular films but most notably from some pieces that the famous Chinese cello player, Yo-yo Ma played.  One was the theme song from the movie "Mission."  I have enjoyed many times playing this CD.  So during our Skype-conversation, I had the pleasure of playing back to Jim that song from the "Mission."  What a beautiful moment to witness the pleasure, the joy on his face when listening to that song coming to him from Kenya.  What a gift Skype is.

  One of my pleasures is to walk by each morning on the way to the dining room a rose bush that grows about 6.5 feet tall.  It is loaded now with pink blossoms.  Perhaps 15 are now open and the buds of maybe a dozen more yet to open up.  There are other rose bushes in our yard, some with yellow blossoms, a number of them deep red, but at this time the most impressive one is the one with all the pink, and then to see it standing so tall, so high!

  You should see the sky here at nighttime.  The moon is moving toward a full moon, the paschal moon, and the stars and planets sparkle.  Wow!

  On the walk up to my office, a 3 minute walk, I pass under some trees and near bushes that the bees are working over intensely!  We have our own beehives, so the bees are close by and it is quite something to hear this rather intense humming or buzzing they are making.

  The word is out:  for Easter midday meal we will have a big turkey with cranberries and sweet potatoes.  I can't wait!!!

  I trust you have heard in the news about some serious violence in the two main cities of this nation: Nairobi and Mombasa, which is a beautiful resort city on the beaches of the Indian ocean.  The violence is coming from certain immigrants from neighboring Somalia.  Somalia is mostly Islamic in its religious affiliation.  It is very poor and ripe for radical ideologies.  There is a long history of bad blood between Kenya and Somalia.  A few years ago Kenya sent in military personnel to fight the Al Quaida connected group called Al Shabaab who were creating major problems for Kenya.  The Al Shabaab people in an effort to take over Somalia beat up and killed a number of its own people.  In the aftermath 100s of thousands of refugees came into Kenya just to be safe.  Kenya then had to pay the bill for providing emergency shelter and food for these desperate people.  The Kenyan military, supplied heavily by the US and I suspect Britain, killed many of those in the training camps of Al Shabba in Somalia.  So  Al Shabaab  wanted revenge and bombed one of the big  malls here in Nairobi last September.  Recently, they have caused much chaos by killing 6 people injured around two dozen in two restaurants last week with grenades and then whipped up hatred and violent ideas among young teenage boys and young men in the port city of Mombasa.  A few nights ago an iman, condemned for his seditious ideas by many other Islamic imans, was shot to death, the third assassination of an iman in that city in the last two years.  All three were publicly endorsing violence and stirring up teenagers and men to riot.  It is strongly suspected that the police take matters into their own hands and eliminate these trouble-makers.

  Do we here feel unsafe?  No, not at all.  We are known in this area of the westside of Nairobi as having little or nothing.  There is nothing here to get in a robbery.  We think one of guards last July and August was syphoning gasoline from our cars.  One of our cooks was fired last December 31 after being caught stealing meat from our kitchen.  Petty stuff.  We have a wall all the way around our 46 acres and guards at the gate 24/7, dogs too in a kennel that bark at different times of the night.  Still, we could be hit by inside people, but again, we have so little that can be stolen and turned into money.

  This nation is made up of 44 million.  The vast majority are simple farmers, living close to the earth and with their animals.  There is 40% unemployment, yes, 40%.  Therein lies the basis for so much social, economic discontent and anxiety.  Therein lies the reason for so much theft and many break-ins, domestic violence, alcoholism, temptations to hopelessness. Connected with it is so much corruption among governmental officials and police, who can be bought off.  So many are really poor.  To take bribes or to steal can become a way of surviving.

  (Two hours later)  I just got back from swimming.  I did laps for about 25 minutes.  Just wonderful!  Tomorrow afternoon I am joining a family with two little children whose father works on the grounds here for a trip into the mountains.  All five of us are going up into the mountains to where we look out at from the bluff on our retreat house grounds.  I have mentioned before that these mountains have the shape and appearance of a range of Appalachian mountains in Pennsylvania or in Virginia.  LOts of forest area, lots of trees, some villages. They go as high as 8,000 feet above sea level. (we are at 6,000 feet) and I am told on the other side of the mountain range is a huge drop-off into a enormously large, spacious valley.   I am really looking forward to seeing this!

  In the last 10 days or so I have had one detail of the gospel reading from two Sundays ago stay with me a lot:  Jesus says in chapter 4 of St. John's Gospel that He has come to finish the work the Father gave Him.  I was intrigued by the significance of the word 'work' as Jesus used it.  He says, "My Father is at work and I too am at work.  I do the only the things I see my Father doing."  So I studied a commentary and asked a resident scripture scholar what the word 'work' means in this context.  He said that it refers to God's bringing light to what is otherwise total spiritual darkness,  being lost and being without guidance, getting spiritually lost and risking eternal loss.  ("The Light came into the world and the darkness did not put it out.")  So this has been with me and has even made me aware of how many people walk in darkness, feel unloved and go looking for love and purpose in money, pleasure, and power...only to be left largely empty and in some cases cheated by all the promise of these possessions/goals.   I find this word 'work' interpreting my own coming to Kenya and giving meaning to what I have been doing here.  I too feel at times I have certain tasks to accomplish here, that I have been given by God a work to do, and I have been given time to realize it.

   Next Monday marks the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the genocide in Rwanda;  in a period of 100 days 800,000 people were hacked or burned to death in that nation, not all that far from here.  Wow!!!!

  This past week I have had four people to guide for their 8-day retreats:  two nuns (one a Kenyan in her late 40s, another an Irish woman in her 70s); then two men, one who is 44 and is to be ordained a priest in just 3 weeks from today, the other a French Canadian priest, 86 years old, getting ready to return to Canada after spending most of his adult life in Africa as a Missionary of Africa.  I see each of them once a day for up to 45 minutes, sometimes the conversations are shorter than that.  They pray on scripture passages I give them, usually new ones each day. What great conversations we have, what meaningful lives they have, how touching their search for a deeper life in God and a more generous outpouring of their lives for the God they love so.  I am privileged to sit and take this in, to be a guide for them, mediating between them and the Lord. Next week I get a new batch of retreatants.  For that period we will have a full house. Oh boy, and with all the special Holy Week liturgies!

  I continue to read in the book "The Depth of God."  It is getting quite good.  It is very different in that it was written by a Jesuit who spent most of his adult life in Taiwan.  So he interfaces Christianity with what Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism say on who is the human person and what makes one authentic, in touch with the source of life.  He thinks  that those who do not enjoy the gift of revelation, as Christians do, have much to teach Christians about the search for God by their engaging in a deep reflection on the depths of the human person.  In short, they have to try harder than Christians.  They use reason alone and take the thinker far, without the help of revelation.  Yet there are some insights, some knowledge they can never reach because human reason can go just so far without the help of God's revelation.  The gift of Christ revealed by the Father is absolutely necessary to appreciating certain elements of the depths of the human person and the depths of the Source of all Life and Meaning (God.).  Anyway, it is slow, deep reading but very worthwhile.  I am taking lots of notes.

  It is time for me to move on.  I will write again on April 16, when I mark three years to the day that the inspiration to come to Kenya came to me.  More about that then!

Bernie Owens