Greetings, Friends,

  I have planned twice in the last five days to write something here, only to have our connection to the Internet go off and no electricity at all during much of the daytime.  What frustration around here with Kenya Electric.  They have no competition, but enjoy a monopoly in supplying electricity in this nation.  And you know what that leads to:  laziness, no real push to improve the quality of their service.  BAHHHH!  It makes me appreciate the trustworthiness of the power service provided in the US.

  Last Tuesday evening we had a new group of retreatants come here for eight days, 54 or 55 of them.  They will finish this coming Thursday morning.  I am guiding five of them.  We have 10 directors, some taking up to 6 or even 7 retreatants.  That is a lot of listening, up to 45 minutes for each person!!  I realized as I began that I have not directed anyone in a retreat here at Mwangaza since early March before I returned to the States.  That is more than 5 months.  Wow, a long dry spell!  I will say that I have been deeply touched by the stories and what has been happening in the retreats of these people I am guiding!  What a privilege to witness God's workings in these people.  I so wish many Americans with such busy lifestyles and sometimes frenetic activity characterizing their days would make themselves available for such.  It could be life-changing, but of course, I am reminded that many people really do not want to change their life-style, that getting close to God and having a vital relationship with God is not a priority for them.  And so their spiritual life is rather feeble, and their awareness of and response to God are hardly a part of their life.  As one tastes the gifts of God and the indescribable goodness and lovableness of God, it leave you shaking your head at how many have no idea what they are missing out on.  In various formats this is available to everyone, yet many say "I'd rather be sailing, " or "I just don't have the time nor money for that," oftentimes meaning they are not that interested or just plainly fear God and where God might take them if they got close.

  I wish to describe briefly one such retreatant and tell a little of what has happened to her during this retreat.  There is no way any of you would ever know who I am talking about, so I feel the freedom to share something of what God has done in her these past five days, with three yet to go.  It is a story of extraordinary reconciliation.

  Sister Anna, I will call her, is one of eleven children, the first daughter to be born after four brothers.  When Sister was about 10 years old, her father, having been elected to a government post and thereby having come into significant money, decided to take a second wife.  There were now two mothers in this clan; two children came from the second wife.  The second wife lived in a home nearby but separate from the family from the first mother.  The tensions, the anger, the hurt were something else.  The father/daughter relationship was full of pain, and the daughter, the future Sister Anna, strongly blamed her father for the chaos in their family.  The second wife fought back, using even witchcraft to control and get even with her "step-children" who resented her presence.

  Sometime after Sr. Anna entered the religious order she is a member of, her father took to being seriously ill.  He expressed the desire to return to the sacraments of the church but died just before the pastor could do this for him.  Still, he was given a church funeral and burial.  When  Sr Anna got word about her father's illness and eventual death, she did not leave her teaching responsibilities and travel back to her village.  She was so torn, so conflicted.  She did manage to get herself to join  her family during the wake but could not bring herself to stay for the funeral.  While her father's funeral mass was going on, she was back here in Nairobi engaged in her work.

  On the first day I met with Sr. Anna, I introduced myself and asked her what she wanted to happen for herself during the coming 8-days.  Immediately she began talking about her father, and talked a lot!  I could hear in her story an affection for her father, a grieving for something big that she had lost in her life, a sadness about how she had handled her broken heart, about not going to her father's funeral, and missing what she once had with her father during her first 10 years.  There is a certain toughness, a strong persona in her personality, and this made her hold back many emotions when in my presence.  Later, when alone with God, she let much of these feelings go, thank God!  She opened up greatly.

  Intuitively, I saw an opening in her, a readiness to deal seriously with her state of soul.  I loaned to her two pictures, one of a woman curled up, almost in a fetal position, in a dark dungeon, with her back to an opening in one of the walls of the dungeon.  She had great apprehension on her face. Coming in the opening of the dungeon was the hand of the risen Jesus extended to this woman, inviting her to come out.  The picture showed only the hand of Jesus, nothing more of his body.  The other picture is a painting or copy of a mural of the risen Jesus with a nun (St. Margaret Mary Alacoque) knelling with great awe before Him, with total attention.  Shining through His wounds (his two hands, two feet and side) were shafts of intense light, obviously a hint of His divinity flooding through His wounds of love.  His whole body was shrouded in circular patterns of red, orange and yellow, expressive of the overwhelming power of God's love shown in Jesus risen.  I gave these pictures for her to pray with, to look at closely, and to "find" herself in and through them.

  She spent a half day with the first picture, owned herself to be in that dungeon of anger and hurt and self-pity, frozen in spirit, unable to reconcile.  With the second picture she spent a half day and grew to feel a great desire to break out, to finally get free from the slavery of her past and to come into the light of Jesus risen.  She will be marking 25 years as a woman religious come August 15.  It is meant to be a great, festive celebration for her and numerous other members of her community marking their Jubilee year.  She did not want to stay in the dungeon as that day approaches.  She begged for the power to break out her tomb and come home to God, to come into His glorious light and joy.  And her prayer was answered.  but let me not get ahead of myself in this account.

  So the next day she spent in her room talking with both her father and Jesus present to her.  It was an amazing trilogue.  She heard and owned that she had blamed her father for the disunity and pain in the family, that she had to take responsibility for her own actions of contributing to family pain and disunity before setting herself over against him.  This turned out to be a great "freeing" moment, a moment of father and daughter coming to peace and mutual forgiveness,  She could now truly believe her father is in the resurrection, saved and freed by Jesus to be with Him forever, forgiven as only He can do.  She had such gratitude for this moment, this gift.

  Then in her prayer she turned her attention back to Jesus in His dying moments saying, "Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing."  She kept repeating this saying.  And she gave her father the benefit of the doubt that in many ways he did not know what he was doing in taking the second wife (it is such a common action in this African culture that when men get money they take one or more additional wives.  It is a sign of power and prestige for the man, and security for the woman.  There is so much cultural pressure for men to do this.  There is much polygamy in this culture, even among men who have been baptized and still want their children to be in the sacramental life of the Catholic church.  They will come to church but sit in the back during Sunday mass or funerals.  Many families resist any of their children becoming priests or nuns because family and having children are so highly regarded.  To not have children is to be considered really odd and anti-family, anti-African.  Family is everything here for most Africans.)  I have found it very moving to witness this woman go through this process.  There are few spiritual events as powerful or beautiful.

  I then showed her two additional items, one a copy of a painting of St Francis of Assisi kissing the bleeding feet of Jesus crucified, with the nail marks clearly visible.  All one can see in this picture are the lower legs and pierced feet of Jesus, with Francis in such tenderness and overwhelmed love showing gratitude and infinite care for Jesus.  This picture was painted about 70 years after Francis' death.  The other picture was a copy of Caravaggio's painting of  the apostle Thomas being invited by the risen Jesus to place his finger into the open side of Jesus, pierced by the Roman soldier; to no longer be partially believing but truly believe and proclaim this Good News of the resurrection and reconciliation (which Thomas did with the rest of his life, going all the way to India to proclaim this amazing Jesus and the difference He makes in the lives of those who believe.)  The details of this picture,  the various shadings of light and dark, the emotion of the scene, the tension of that moment are so strong and riveting.  Sr. Anna herself could not but be taken up into the power and tenderness of both pictures.  She recognized the parallel between her own wounds and those of her father as well, over against the wounds of Jesus.  It was truly powerful, so healing, so spiritually engaging for her.  For her it made sense to bring her whole family, even the second women her father married, INTO the Heart of Jesus and allow Jesus, as only He can, to reconcile her family and care for each member.  She said often, "I now know I am being sent by Him to go back to my family and be a caring presence for each and everyone of them, to love them and myself too as best I can, to accept them and myself as genuinely as I can, to not absent myself anymore from any of them."  The power of God's mercy and how it cuts across so many seemingly impassible barriers, is very moving to witness.  For the last three days of the retreat time, Sr. Anna is reading and pondering Henri Nouwen's classic, "The Return of the Prodigal Son."  It is one of the greatest works ever written in English on reconciliation.  She had said she wants to understand better her "mission" back to her family.  I said to read this book of Nouwen and especially the role the father of that family of those two sons, namely, to be a constant presence of love, vulnerable, yes, to risk being taken advantage of, but steady with a love that can transcend personal hurts and can let the love of God flow through him in his forgiveness, trust, and unconditional love.

  I need to stop there.  I need to get some physical exercise this afternoon before our mass at 5:15 PM.  I am so glad the internet came back around noon so that I could write this.  God bless all who read this.

  I am happy to close by saying the feedback I am receiving on my recently published book is most, most encouraging.  One of these days I think the sales will really take off, probably after New Years when it gets advertised at two national bookmarts, one in Los Angeles and the other in Atlantic City.

  Peace!

Bernie Owens