My dear friends,

  As I write this to you, I look at my watch and notice it is 8:20 PM on Saturday, August 23, almost one year to the minute when I arrived here from the airport in Nairobi and began my new life at this special place.  I am just amazed.  I still pinch myself at times to impress upon myself that I am not in the USA anymore but am far away, on the other side of the world and south of the equator.  The birds and flowers, the view are rather different, but I must say when I listen to the souls of people who come here for retreats, I see the same issues, the same challenges and hungers.  It reminds me that we are all the same when it comes to this journey called life and that we are all, every one of us, on the same essential journey to God.  The color of our skin, the way we pronounce words, the customs we inherited may be different, yet the needs of our souls and the longings for God are all the same.  I am profoundly moved at times by all of this. And I am more and more impressed by houw our life with God, with ourself and with others is so influenced by our bodies, by their functions and trials, by our sexuality and health needs.  We are not just souls!!

    I feel I am at such a special time in my life.  I am now 75 years old--God, that sounds old!!  But it is a terrific time to see life from this many years and have a perspective I didn't have when I was 40 or 50 years old.  I love this time of my life, I love what I am being permitted to be involved in.  I am feeling so creative and alive with the varied opportunities I am being asked to lead, to guide, to teach, to mentor in one-on-one situations, and then, yes,  to tend to large numbers of roses, which before I had always thought were too complicated and delicate for me to give my time, too difficult to raise successfully.

  Next week is one of the biggest weeks yet to come along for me.  On Tuesday afternoon I meet with all of the teachersof the theology school, the Jesuit seminary (these are my new colleagues where I will be teaching) and I have been asked by the presidentof the school to lead a two and a half hour gathering to reflect on a holistic teaching method applied to their teaching situations, and then what are the values of St. Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises that inform theirteaching style and choice of content.  I am honored, just amazed that I have been asked to lead such a thing, with such highly educated Jesuit teachers.  I guess I have arrived!!

  Then the next day I teach for the first time in 15 months, this time a weekly course for two hours on Wednesday mornings for seminarians, future Jesuitpriests,and possibly Carmelite seminarians and a few lay students.  What I will be teaching is the spiritual classic by the Carmelite saint, Teresa of Avila who lived in thelate 1500s.  She wrote a book that is considered one of the greatest on prayer and stages of spiritual growth.  It is called The Interior Castle.  The castle is her image of the human soul; in it are many rooms, seven sets of rooms that represent various stages of spiritual development and growthfor the human person.  With it we will read and discuss a commentaryon Teresa's great book:  It is entitled, Distractions In Prayer,Blessing or Curse??  It is such a greatbook, so insightful.  Its fundamentalthesis is:  when you have recurrent distractions, receive them as a gift of God if you are serious about wanting to give everythingto God and cooperate with God's healing you of the various attachments and blind spots in your life, the ways in which you resist God.  Letting these come up is God's way of saying to you, "So you want to give everything to me??, Then look at this, give it to me, let go of your attachment and undue worry, your anxiety, your shame, etc and let me be your Friend and Lord even of  this situation of your worry, of your attachment.  Let me Lord of even this part of your soul."  These conversations should be exciting.  I look forward to them.

   I need to go now.  Our internet connection was off for three days, so I have a number of emails I still need to respond to.  I wish you well and God's peace.  I must say, in being here God is becoming so real to me, I guessbecause I am seeing God more and more in the people and nation round me.  I am more and more convincedwe usually walk around with our eyes veiled, even blinded to the divine reality that is just the other side of this veil thatseparates us from it for now.  If only more could see!  It is all a gift.

Bernie Owens

(there is something aboutmy omputer that is acting up; I cannot makes spaces between some words I haveto correct, so tha is why you are seeing some words being run together!)