Dear Friends, Happy New Year to each and all of you. I notice how all the paragraphs that I had separated in my last two letters were eliminated and all of the text of my letters was jammed together. That is not pleasant to read!! I am very sorry for that. I wonder whether separating each paragraph by two spaces rather than just one might solve the problem. I am going to experiment with that. So . . . my retreat concluded last Friday afternoon and now on this Monday we are back into the routine of daily work, no more partying, with all the Christmas decorations put away. So be it. First, thanks to any and all of you who prayed for me during retreat. It was challenging and in a number of ways very up and down for the first five days, then better for the next three and finally truly wonderful in the last two days. Part of the challenge was in trying to follow to the letter the directions of the author of a book for a 10-day Contemplative Retreat. While his (Fr. Franz Jalics) teachings are wonderful, I found it trying to use his detailed directions about how to hold your hands, what to focus on, and what mantra to use. It became just too complicated for me. I needed something more simple and once I went back to the way I pray contemplatively, everything smoothed out. But his teachings are superb, very clarifying, very helpful. I wish he had been here with me so that I could have talked with him during the retreat. Maybe he would have thrown me out of his group. But I did experience a lot of discouragement during most of the retreat, ups and downs in my moods, temptations, and generally having to trust, trust, trust, finally to trust my own experience and go with that. And that is when the great calm settled in and with it a wonderful sense of the presence of the risen Jesus during my meditations. One very important dimension that accompanied all of this was my realizing the gift of some very special friendships in my life, men and women who are so important to me, and then one new one who has recently come into my life. So much of the measure of what makes for such friends is the level of conversation we have had together, the sharings around prime values and relationship issues. Who is God, what do you still hope to do and experience before you die, what has made you suffer (e.g., divorce, death of a child, letting go in a relationship, childhood traumas, etc.) and what has made you laugh and feel loved and cared about: when I find people who are able and willing to talk about such topics like this, they become rare treasures and I truly experience God in them and with them. Such people are priceless for me. As I said in my book, friendship is often called the eight sacrament in the church's life, that is, in the life of God's people. All of this came up strongly on the first day of my retreat and again on the last day. So yes, I had some challenges, but it was all quite graced. I am blessed. Again, thanks for your prayers. On the first day I had an awareness of each of these friends represented by a flame of fire, a small, gentle flame, all of them together forming something like a circle. I could not help but associate this with Pentecost and also to recall the opening lines of John of the Cross' famous poem, "The Living Flame of Love". It goes like this: "Oh living flame of love (which refers to God's Holy Spirit) that so tenderly wounds my soul" and I added to his words ". . . with Your love . . ." I kept repeating this with much inner satisfaction. And then for the newest friend there was this one lone flame waiting to be brought in or invited into the circle. All of this began with my recognizing this flame of love flickering in my own depths and moving me to a new richness in my life. I am reminded of what has been stirring in me when in the last month I read closely a biography of the 18th century Carmelite nun, St. Teresa Margaret of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and how overwhelming was the longing in her to love God totally and each of her fellow sisters in her cloistered community. Reading that biography really, really grabbed my spirit, so powerful are the descriptions of the spiritual energy stirring in that young woman in her longings to give everything of herself to God, and that her deepest pain was that she could not find in herself a love adequate to the response of love God deserves. For her she keenly felt that God deserves the whole world, the whole cosmos, and then infinitely more, and this pain of not being able to give such to Him consumed her. Her spiritual director is quoted to have said that he believed her spiritual intensity was more responsible for her death at such a young age than the peritonitis that was the physical cause of her death. God has so strongly claimed her from her early childhood, so entered into the depths of her being and let her intuit something of the overwhelming goodness and beauty of God that she was "burned up" by it all. the intensity of it all in a sense killed her. The retreat also prompted me to take 15-20 minutes toward the end of each day and join the retreatants in their time of silence (8:00-8:30 PM) before the Blessed Sacrament exposed when all in the chapel sit in silence before Him and are quiet there--no songs, no common prayers, just BE. It is really something to have a chapel of 50-60 people and no one is talking or singing but each and all are completely focused on Him, in that sacrament mounted in a monstrance on the altar. On Wednesday I start my new course with the seminarians. Each Wednesday morning I will be traveling into the seminary to lead this course(9 miles from here; it takes usually 1 hour and 5 minutes to make that trip, so bad is the morning commute traffic! But this is when I had seen a big family of baboons along side the road coming back from raiding someone's garden!!). The course's title is: "The Humility and Foolishness of God." The students will be reading sayings of Francis of Assisi, the writings of St. Bonaventure, some material from Teilhard de Chardin, and then they will read a small book entitled "The Tears of God." The overall thesis of the course is that God has humbly extended himself to us so much, has bent down in tender care as a parent would to a struggling child but has been so abused in Jesus and ignored by so many of the people He loves that God has been called a fool for still choosing to be with us and to love us to the end. I will have nine Africans and one Ukrainian for my students. We should have some really good conversations. I am hoping this course will greatly expand their appreciation of who God is and what God's love is like that it will greatly impact their personal prayer and their preaching. On the next to last day of my retreat I relaxed by bringing rabbit compost and bone meal to my roses to jazz them up again. Right now the roses are looking glorious, with many blossoms of various colors, and some rising up 7 feet. But it has been about five months since I last "fed" them and the time is about now to reinforce that organic power that produces such color and shape and makes everyone walking by to marvel. I love it! I tell my retreatants at times: "this is reality, mixing it up with rabbit poop." They wince and I laugh!! I keep getting strong inspirations for a second book. I keep collecting notes for it. More and more I feel pretty sure about the title of the book: in the upper part would be these words: "If Only You Knew the Gift of God" and then in the lower part of the book these words: "From Habits of Control To Letting God Lead" Anybody want to buy it??? So it is time to wrap up this letter. God bless and thanks to those of you who express your appreciation for this blogsite. It motivates me to keep writing. Goodnite! Bernie Owens