Dear Friends, Here we are on Friday during Thanksgiving weekend. I know most of you who read this are living in the USA and so I wish you lots of relaxation and enjoyment of being with family and friends. Here in Kenya it is a regular week for work and the usual routine. But as an American I cannot help but be with all of you in spirit and wish you the best and the peace that only our good God in Jesus can give. Oh, how we and the USA needs this now at a time of such strife and disrespect from many voices around us. I am so struck by the disrespect and insulting manner reflected in and even fostered in the newspapers, the TV and internet news sources. I am saddened by all of this. We so need to make a choice for listening respectfully to each other, even when disagreeing. We need to calm down and reclaim our center in Him whose love makes all the difference. I am well overall, even though I have had three bouts of dysentery in the previous two weeks. The most recent week I have been normal and hope I have gotten through whatever it was that bothered me so much. Our neighborhood monkey is frequenting us again and makes loud noises when running across our roof tops during our breakfast time. Just imagine a medium sized dog with a long tail running around on top of your own house and looking for any open window to sneak in and steal food. That is what this character is like! He can even open our big sliding door from the veranda into our dining room if the door is slightly left open. About five days ago our monkey succeeded in getting into our dining room and stealing a cluster of bananas off our center table. I had had a banana from that cluster at breakfast the same day and found them too ripe for me. I ate about half of it and cut away the rest. So really, these bananas were ready to be put into banana bread. So this pest did not get the best in what he stole. I did spot him, however, soon after his theft nestled in the crotch of a nearby tree gorging himself on one banana after another. It is after all rather humorous! In the end one has to admit he is cute even though obnoxious at times! Our worry now is how he, and we think a second monkey, are beginning to steal our mangoes. We will have in January a bumper crop of mangoes. Our trees are loaded with them but need to have more time to have them fill out and be ready for picking. And when they are ripe, the eating is out of this world! I assure you, mangoes are on the menu for the eternal heavenly banquet!! In the meantime the damn monkey aims at beating us to them, even before they become ripe! We are planning to throw nets over these trees, which is not an easy task! I begin my own yearly 8-day retreat next Tuesday evening, the 29th, and finish on the morning of December 8, the feast day of Mary's Immaculate Conception. I would greatly appreciate your remembering me during that special time in your prayers. Thank you so much. By the way, do you who are US citizens know that the USA some years ago was put "under the protection of" and dedicated to Mary, under the title of her Immaculate Conception? The basilica or national shrine in Washington, DC, is dedicated to her under this title. The meaning of this title given her and its implications for us who aspire to follow Jesus closely are pretty awesome, something quite worth learning about and applying in one's own spiritual walk with God. It implies extraordinary blessings available to any follower of Jesus who is childlike enough to learn and be led by God's Spirit to new spiritual depths in Christ. It has struck me, and I included this in my book (More Than You Could Ever Imagine), that all the attention and honors given by Christians to the Mother of God are not attention for just her but also constitute wonderful good news for any of us who aspire to follow closely her Son. That is because she and all the blessings God gave her are a mirror and anticipation of the many blessings God has in store for each of us as we make our journey home to God. All that is honored in her is a hint of all the goodness and beauty of God being realized in us. Her story anticipates so much of our own story that is still in its early stages and is unfolding toward a fullness we get glimpses of when looking at her, if we will look! I will close with relating to you a very painful story I heard just last Tuesday. Some of you will most likely find this disturbing; it certainly was and still is disturbing to me, but it does give you the reader a hint of some of the monstrous evil I am learning about here in Kenya, evil going on in this young nation, among a fragile people who are for the most part terribly poor and susceptible to the forces of evil. It is a story of a family with the scourge of alcoholism in a number of members of the family, and I think mental illness too, accentuated by some members calling upon witch doctors and curses to get revenge on other members of the family. the family is said to have become Catholic Christian, baptized, but mixing with such polygamy, philandry, and the consulting of leaders of the occult. The story I tell climaxes in the death of a 39 year old daughter, dying I think from a heart attack, after she was found to be pregnant and got an abortion. Her father, who is mentally unstable and a micro-manager of the grown children he fathered from one or other of his wives, demanded that this daughter get an abortion, a late term abortion at that. So she did because the economic means for her was with her father. She was jobless and dirt poor and vulnerable to being left out on the streets if she refused. So I am told by the one who related this awful story ( half-sister of this woman!) that the baby during the abortion, bleeding and all, was crying when it was thrown into a nearby bucket and there it died. I have heard in my spirit this cry and it so upsets me. My faith in Christ tells me this is a moment in which He, who said that when you give a drink of water to one of the least of my brothers or sisters you do it to Me, is crucified again. The ultimate mystery and meaning of every human life is found in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. This is where we find the meaning and purpose of every human life, Christian and non-Christian. The only resolution to monstrous choices like this is found in His mercy spoken while He hung on the cross, "Father, forgive them, for they really don't realize what they are doing." May you and your families have a blessed Advent. Come, Lord Jesus, Prince of Peace. In You alone is our hope and lasting joy! Bernie Owens

Dear Friends, It is now Sunday evening here, November 6. I just finished leading a weekend retreat, a very different kind of retreat than what I usually lead. This is more like the retreat format at Manresa near Detroit in that I give talks, five of them over the weekend, but also I am the only one available to see retreatants for one-on-one conversations, and then I lead half hour group meditations, in this case, contemplative meditations which are much deeper than any other kind of prayer. One of these on Friday evening, five on Saturday, and two on Sunday morning. We finished with a 1 PM midday meal. I am tired but it is a good sense of tired. I will sleep well tonite! I had a stout beer with dinner this evening; it was a time to celebrate a little. Given the work I do, I hear some hair-raising stories at times. I will say from my hearing women admit to having had an abortion and how that memory lingers with them and haunts them in many cases, I don't see how having an abortion can truthfully be called an instance of "health care", unless it is a procedure done to save the mother's life. Even then, there is deep grief that the mother experiences, sadness over having to do what she is doing to save her life. I hear too many women being damaged psychologically and spiritually by having consented to this procedure for reasons other than to save their lives. Women who shrug off having had one and deny any spiritual damage from it were never close to God or spiritually sensitive to begin with. The other cause for concern I hear about here in Kenya is the widespread involvement with witchcraft and the dabbling in other forms of the occult. This very scary danger is widespread among high school and college age students. The high schools have been infected by people trying to make a lot of money and appeal to naive, vulnerable students to get involved in these rituals. Why you may ask would they do such? It seems that this involvement promises power over others you are angry with or want to hurt or control; also it is a way for becoming financially very successful. In Kenya there is a strong desire to get rich, to enjoy much prestige through wealth and status. Tribalism affects this kind of thinking, makes for greed and envy, also the desire to be powerful through wealth and then to have power over one's enemies through witchcraft. It may seem bizarre and far-fetched to you, my reader, but I will tell you without a doubt, I have witnessed this phenomenon myself, yes in the USA, and I know there are cases of powerful manifestations of evil powers and spirits that are very controlling and dangerous when a person opens the door of their heart to them and gives over power to them. This is very sinful in that it insults God by saying, "You, God, are not enough to guide me or provide for me. I am going to something else that will deliver to me the results I want (money, status, control, revenge, knowledge of someone in the hereafter, etc)." But when a person does such, all hell breaks loose in their lives or in the lives of their children or family. In some cases certain dabblers curse someone else and the impact on the one cursed is very, very dangerous and the one who issues the curse is in deep spiritual trouble, usually for the rest of their lives. I know of curses that affect more than one generation but two or three, and many members of the family tree. Too often certain people will brush away such stories as run-away fear easily explainable by psychological categories. Religious hysteria can indeed by explained sometimes by psychology. I am saying, however, that I know from experience that sometimes what is going on is NOT explainable by psychology but is truly a scary disturbance from the world of evil spirits, that these powers do exist and that they can do grave damage on those who play around with such stuff and put their faith in this power rather than in God. I know such goes on in Michigan thanks to certain cults and the worship of Satan. Pornography and the kidnapping and sexual abuse of children are so often connected with such evil. Here in Kenya I am aware of extreme cases of possessions that require an exorcism; persistent and aggressive spirits that ruin the lives of others and beat them up physically, psychologically, spiritually; who prompt in the possessed person impudent, hateful words, insults, accusations that are just off the wall, wild and crazy. but very threatening, wanting to do violence, even murder. I have had to listen to some religious leaders describe challenges like these, working with persons they have to care for or try to form in the early stages of religious life and who are this disturbed. What I am describing is real, I have had to listen to such cases and this truly happens at times. I am sure that what I am listening to is not just hysteria of one kind or another, but is the result of some people fooling around with the occult or being the victim of someone in their family fooling around with witchcraft and rituals of cursing. Even if later they try to get out of its power, it is often too late and they are miserably oppressed for much of the rest of their lives. What is sad and shocking is that there are some ordained leaders who deny the reality of what I am describing, seeing it entirely in terms of ancient superstitions, and subscribe entirely to explanations that psychologists can offer. Another topic: have you ever had the feeling and desire to respond to something or Someone so good and true and beautiful that you want to give yourself entirely to it or to that Someone, yet you feel very small and utterly inadequate to give what this Other deserves; that your depths are only a fraction of what you want to give, only a fraction of what you sense this something or Someone is worthy of? If you can identify, I am sure you would agree that it is an experience both painful and sweet. Right? If you can relate, I trust you know what I am talking about. It is a holy and such a life-giving experience to want to give our entire self to Someone and at the same time be overwhelmed with their goodness and lovableness while at the same time experiencing the frustration of not being able to even come close to giving what the other deserves, is made for, and is capable of receiving. Is this not the longing for eternity? the longing for the deepest communion with God? To enter into God's depths and to know and to love that which there is no reality more worthy, more lovable, more full of goodness than this One? I am quite tired after a demanding weekend. I am off to bed and pray for the USA, my homeland, and its future. May God lead us well through these tumultuous, sometimes embarrassing times. Bernie Owens