Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Dear Friends, Today is December 27, Tuesday after Christmas Day, the feast day of St. John the Apostle of whom it is said was the closest friend of Jesus among the 12 apostles. . . . . I am now ready to write what I began more than two weeks ago, when I spent two hours typing and then lost it all. You might imagine the frustration and my need to postpone trying to write anything more after that very frustrating experience. Yesterday I wrote responses to 21 emails. About four of them were detailed and long. Together they took about four, maybe five hours to do. Skyping for nearly one hour with a great friend in Troy, Michigan was included in all of this. Then the day before, Christmas Day was a day to enjoy some very good food and good company. There were 27 of us for dinner starting around 1:30 PM, half of them guests. It was a happy time had by all. Having a 45 minutes social with drinks and snacks before the dinner started all of the celebration. I must admit I ate too much and I paid for it yesterday. Thankfully I am back to simpler food, less of it too, and am feeling almost normal again. Ha! Will I ever learn??!! (Did I just hear a strong 'No!" coming from the backseat??) . . . . . Our weather here is a little cool for this time of the year--usually in the low 70s; sometimes it gets to the high 70s around 3 PM--and most nights we have a wonderful sky and stunning views of stars and Venus and Jupiter. The pollen from all the flowers makes me itch a lot sometimes. It seems we never really find the perfect setting. I am trusting heaven will lift us above all of these imperfections! One blessing for me is how I almost never get a cold and in more than three years I have not had the usual sinus infection I would get about twice a year when back in Michigan. No antibiotics for me in over three years! . . . . . In the meantime I find my work very satisfying, sometimes deeply satisfying. It is a privilege to have work that you truly enjoy and often feel buoyed up by the promise of a deep exchange of meaning with people in and through the conversations that my kind of work affords me. I often get a "front row view" of the inner workings of God in the lives, in the souls of people who come here for silence and close, intimate exchange with God. How real and close God is. Many times I remark to myself how the world of the invisible is so much more real and satisfying than the visible world with its frequent emphasis on glitter and noise, on having a 'good time' and its offer of meaning through pleasure, but not very much underneath its noise and efforts to entertain and its claims to meaning. It soon wearies us and reminds me of the title of a 1960s British film that studied the empty life of a very self-centered man, Alfie by name. The movie's title and its background song said it all: "Is That All There Is, Alfie?" . . . I want to try to give you some sense of what was given to me during my retreat last November 30-December 7, concluding on the morning of the 8th. This is what I was in the middle of describing when I lost everything last December 10. I will be briefer now than I was intending to describe then. Right from the start of the retreat I was attracted to the bible's description of the piercing of the side of Christ. This moment is found in John's gospel, chapter 19, verse 34. The Roman soldier, doing his job, finishes the execution of Jesus who is nailed and breathing his last. The gospel writer focuses in on the immediate aftermath of the piercing: he says blood and water flow out of the cut made in Jesus's right side when the soldier shoves the spear through Jesus's chest over to the left side into his heart, piercing it and releasing the fluids of blood and lymph/water. That image, that scene held me for eight days. With varying clarity I spent my entire retreat right there, attracted back to it again and again, and seeing more and more deeply into it as the days passed by. I was drawn much beyond just the physical details of that scene and soon into the implications of it all; sometimes I was very aware of Jesus's mother standing there, sometimes quite aware of the gospel writer John who as a young man was witnessing this awful moment, the seeming end of a wonderful friendship he had with Jesus, yet he was being marked for the rest of his long life to be THE eyewitness of a world changing event when God was at His best in the face of the human race being engaged in its most awful, shameful moment. John would tell of this event and leave for all generations to ponder this ultimate expression of the outpouring of God who is Love and Mercy Itself. But I was especially drawn to be present to or aware of God, Jesus's Abba, as if He were standing in the background and sharing silently in this devastating moment, with this best gift He gave to the world spurned, rejected and crucified by a people gone mad. . . That scene, that image which carried something of an awareness deeper than any image of the depths of God kept me still, alert, present without words, amazed, moved, "captured", held with a sense of wonder and love and sometimes deep emotion. I am taking time here to describe something of what I was given because I hope it helps you the reader to notice and find your own way into this same mystery of love and get close to what is ultimately the indescribable goodness and lovableness of the Source of all Reality, the source and fullness of all Beauty and Truth. It is this encounter that heals all brokenness, that gives lasting hope, and makes any sacrifice totally worth it. It truly is a taste of heaven, a glimpse of what the soul of us all is searching for. This is "what it's all about, Alfie!" . . . . . Sometimes prayer is simply getting quiet enough and being attentive, staying steadily aware in the face of what is beyond all words, and then by a gift of God getting "grabbed", getting "pulled in" with awe and being moved with great joy and longing into adoration. You get pulled in and held by what is overwhelmingly meaningful, beautiful, and so good like nothing else in the entire world, and your spirit in its depths knows this, is irresistably drawn to this. You have found the center of your soul and the Source of all goodness and hope waiting there for you. To spend quality time, very attentive, before this Reality this way, just to be quiet and aware with love and awe will change a lot in how you look at yourself, at the world and other people. It leads you to value what God values and to see as empty what much of the noisy world thinks is so important. (What's It All About, Alfie?") In time what happens is a growing sensitivity at deeper and deeper levels of ourselves to this very attractive Reality. Like what St. Augustine says, the "eye of our heart" begins to open and we see what we have passed over many times and were blind to. But now, God has blessed us to see. The "scales have fallen from our eyes," as it did for Saul. This reminds me of the scene in Luke's Gospel with the blind man on the side of the road pleading twice for Jesus of Nazareth to heal him: "Jesus, Son of David, have pity on me!" Jesus says, "what do you want me to do for you?" The man, Bartimeus says, "Master, help me to see. Let me see." And Jesus says, "Be healed. Your faith (in God) has made you whole." And the man then receives his sight and follows Jesus along the Way.) Really, everyone of us is that blind man on the side of the road. But many of us do not even know we are blind to this deeper Reality; no one ever tells us about it as something available to us; no one tells us that seeing much more deeply this One, the really Real, is a gift waiting for us to receive if only we become aware of this new possibility for ourselves and earnestly seek with the help of God to open to it, to ask for it. It is love for God and others that opens up the eye of our soul to the deeper levels of Reality . . . . We start noticing what our fears, worries and greed, our anxieties and lust, our resentment and jealousies make us blind to. . . . . . One theme related to this wound in Christ's side that came up in my retreat was the attraction to the other four wounds of Christ. I have been drawn for years to this theme. I was given a cross, Eastern church style, when I was ordained 44 years ago. It images the five wounds inflicted on Christ, to his hands and feet, his head too. Nearly ten years ago I found in a book we were discussing during the biweekly reading seminars at Manresa in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan a reference to the five wounds of Christ being something one could carry inside their spirit, in their soul, not just in one's body like the stigmatists but inside yourself. This drew me strongly. In this book, St. Gertrude, a 13th century German, wrote about her finding this prayer that expressed the desire to receive from God this "imprint" or mark of Christ's Passion, to carry in one's depths His five wounds, simply because Jesus means that much to you and His passion and death had deeply moved you to want to honor His love and live in His Spirit. Encouraged by what she writes, I began to pray that prayer, daily, but many times up to this recent retreat wondered whether God had answered this prayer for me or not. Then on the very first day of my retreat, it dawned on me during one of my meditations in a very meaningful way that I had been given this gift a long time ago, even before I started to pray that prayer, thanks to my carrying inside myself the wounds of Christ contained in the stories of good people who shared with me about their lives, especially about the wounds in their lives. This light or insight made even more meaningful what was given to me on the first day of my retreat last year when I was shown in a striking image a set of candles all close together and immediately understanding that each candle represented a man or woman friend in my life whom I cared about deeply, friends that I had known and cared about for years. So in this year's retreat I was shown a special feature about these friends: I carry within me with much reverence and sometimes significant emotion their stories with a particular emphasis on their being wounded, some of them terribly so. So I began to reminisce on how some of you have opened up to me about your lives and let me see and feel with you something of your share in the woundedness of Christ: your losing a father when so young and being so vulnerable and how it so affected you into your adult years; or losing tragically your only son, your only child in a soccer freak accident; or being gang-raped a number of times and suffering nightmares because of it and temptations to self-rejection, self-hatred; in being molested as a child and in turn struggling with sexual attractions that would land you in prison if you acted on them; discovering yourself to be addicted to one thing or another (alcohol, drugs, porn, etc), any substance that threatened to eat up your soul and make you seriously contemplate suicide; or being haunted with the memories of choosing to abort your child and then suffering to regain self-respect and trust in the mercy of God for you; or spending many years with a certain loneliness caring for a broken husband, a broken sister and a mother living so long and requiring but deserving so much close care. I cannot tell you how much meaning and consolation during my retreat I found in realizing this level of meaning gained from carrying many of you in my soul and then awakening to how this is really one way of understanding the fulfillment of my prayer over many years: to bear within my depths the wounds of Christ and to do whatever my priesthood calls me to do FROM THIS SACRED SPACE I HAD FRESHLY DISCOVERED INSIDE ME. . . . . Some may still wonder: why the wounds of Christ should be an object of so much attention and care, of so much love? Perhaps it will help to explain it--partially--this way. Really, one does not explain love but either understands it from experience or has not yet opened to real love in their lives. So here goes my attempt to shed some light on this mystery of loving Christ, especially by focusing with deep reverence on His five wounds. I recall my mother who for all her life suffered a lot from eczema to her fingers and into her hands. The skin of her fingers and hands dried out so easily, then cracked and bled thanks to the eczema because she cooked a lot, canned a lot of fruits and vegetables for our winter needs, sewed and crocheted a lot and so exposed herself to many chemicals, natural and synthetic, in her care for us four children. Even though she wore water-protecting rubber gloves, she still got affected by all of this and would often apply sauves of various kinds to gain some relief and hopefully healing of the eczema blisters and itching that went with it all. As I look back on that and remember growing up around her with this kind of dedication and loving care, I am quite moved and feel the desire, yes, to kiss her hands, to look deeply into her eyes and tell her how I will be eternally grateful for her love, a priceless gift. Her wounds were like that of Christ's wounds of love, an expression of everlasting commitment to the lives she and our father generated. I have experienced some of the same love, deeper of course, welling up in me as I pay attention to the wounds of Christ. I own them as the greatest of all gifts to me . . . and for everyone of us. How can I not be moved when I see something of what I have been allowed by God's Spirit to see in this Mystery of love?? How can I not kiss every morning the red stone on that cross given to me 44 years ago (the red stone representing the wound to Jesus's heart) and laying it on my bed to see during the day? Is there anything in the whole of the world's history like it? Absolutely not. I trust that each of us in thinking back to special friends in our life whose stories have touched us significantly we will see the same mystery inside ourselves and will suspect that much more of God's life and activity are going on in you than you ever suspected. A happy, healthy and blessed 2017 to all of you. Bernie Owens

Saturday, December 10, 2016

Friends, I just stumbled back into my blogsite after having typed for two hours this afternoon part of a letter I was going to post regarding my recent retreat experience. It seems I have lost it all! I don't find it anywhere. I thought it would be worth sharing some of the retreat with you. I hit the SAVE button before going to dinner and assumed when I returned I would be able to continue. Then, I got locked out of my email and went round and round with Google to get a new password they would recognize. A wasted evening! A fresh experience of being tried in patience! I will give this a try tomorrow while having now to hurry up to some other work I have to deal with. Booo! Bernie Owens