Dear Friends, Wow, it has been 5 weeks since I last posted anything here. And so, so much has happened for me in that time. It is mostly due to my being back in the USA (since April 22) and being busy with arranging fund-raising events in the Detroit area. While I am finding time to reconnect with friends and planning reunions with family members, most of my time so far has been spent in strategizing and organizing events at which as a voice for very poor people in East Africa I will make an appeal for donations. All of these events are in the future, June and especially in July. None has happened yet. I return to Nairobi on August 11. The results of these efforts will be best known com October and November. The weather here has finally turned wonderful--low 80s and no clouds. The first 3-4 weeks were cold or cool. A week ago Sunday, May 15, we had snowflakes falling in the afternoon. That is so unusual for this time of the year! Two evenings ago a friend and I went to the baseball game between the Tigers and Philadelphia Phillies. The home team won what turned out to be a thrilling game, 5-4, and the weather was ideal. During my time back I came across a quote from a 19th century Canadian woman, Marie-Rose Durocher, that has so struck me. It has stayed with me and deepened over the last three weeks since I first discovered it. This is what I would like to reflect on in this letter. The quote is as follows: "I invite you to come to the Heart of Jesus with me, for it is there that I wish to dwell and where, if you wish it, we will never be separated." As I said, this has so drawn my attention and wonder; it is so special, so beautiful and for me very powerful. It draws me into a speechless wonder at what God offers to each of us, the closeness and communion each of us is meant to experience someday with Him and with each other. What does it mean "to enter the heart" of anyone? I can say such has happened for me with some of the people I have met in East Africa. I hear their stories, I pay close attention to what they are saying and feel something of what they are relating: e.g., a major economic struggle for themselves or their families, or their effort to help oppressed people (e.g., young teenage girls pressured to be 'cut' to satisfy tribal customs of genital mutilation) and so I get a glimpse of something of the beauty and goodness in these people. I sense their soul and recognize such nobility and courage in them. So, yes, I "enter their heart," their world with its secrets and hopes, their wounds and victories. I have experienced much the same with Jesus. I do know Him, without a doubt. I have experienced Him. "I know the One in whom I have believed, as St. Paul himself exclaimed." I have been privileged, like everyone is welcomed to do, to "enter His Heart," His world and its joys and pains, its present challenges and find there an overwhelming strength in Him to be consistently a steady, caring, loving, understanding and encouraging Presence. Spending 45 minutes each day in silence with Him, sometimes through the use of a Scripture passage very meaningful to me, or in just being steadily present and aware of Him present to me here and now, has opened me over the years to this Mystery, deeper and deeper. Yes, I have "entered His Heart", His world, His life in doing this. Most amazing of all has been my "enter(ing) into" His way of thinking and choosing in which He gives everything He has and is. To experience such a choice being made for me, and for you, and even for each person that ever existed or will exist is something I struggle to take in. I can hardly take it in; in some respects I know I cannot take in much of this Mystery. It is so beyond me yet draws me irresistably. Never before have I met anyone who has made such a choice as Jesus did in the last hours of His life. It is often too much to stay present to such a choice in the face of the sufferings and death He experienced. It puts me back on myself to consider what it would be for me to make the same choice, to do for someone else what He has done for me. It would take a rare gift from God to give one's entire self that deeply, that completely. So to be "inside Him, in His world, in His Heart", to feel what He feels and to know what He knows, draws me powerfully, but this also leaves me feeling terribly inadequate, so limited in being able to receive such a gift. Yet, it is what God's Spirit attracts me to move "into." And, as the quote of Marie-Rose Durocher speaks to, I want to bring the very special people of my life (really, anyone I can find and is willing to respond with a 'yes') to this most beautiful and sacred of all Places and for them to know for themselves as much as possible something of this most awesome Presence and Loving Assurance. To have this kind of friendship with anyone who has such a focus and attraction is, I am sure, the closest glimpse of heaven any human being can have while here on earth. So while I have been working at setting up fund-raising evenings here in the Detroit area during this summer, this quote I share with you has "moved around" inside me at different times, in ways that capture my attention at times and draws me to an inner attentiveness and a felt need to spend time being still before this great Mystery and letting myself be taken down inside, down into wordless wonder and humbled gratitude. This must be something like what Moses experienced when He encountered God and had to take off his sandals because he knew he was on sacred ground, in a Presence so captivating, so indescribably beautiful and beyond all words. Today, May 25, is the first of nine days many people including myself prepare through some brief prayers for the great feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, (June 3 this year). It is a simple way for asking to be taken "into His Heart," into His world and care for this world to be more and more like He is; it is to be given His Heart and more of His Spirit so that we may become another Christ, another presence of Him in a world that so needs understanding, healing, mercy, truth, conversion, justice and peace. I know that eventually He will have His way with each of us and that we will, by His gifting us, have the quality of mind and Heart He does. But until that day it is "More Than You Could Ever Imagine." "Eye has not seen, ear has not heard what God has prepared for anyone who loves Him." Bernie Owens