Hello, Friends,

  Today is Tuesday here, another overcast day.  Surprisingly we have been getting a fair amount of rain after having gone through such a long dry spell.  The mornings have felt like a damp May morning that require sweaters.  I think summer is slowly moving toward its end; five more weeks before autumn settles in here.

   Then I mark six months since I came here in Kenya come a week from Sunday 2/23.  The time is going by fast.  I am not lacking things to do!

   What little excitement there is around here centers on the pond of fish and its one turtle.  The pond is situated at the front door of our dining room.  Yearly it is drained and the big fish are scooped out to be eaten by us; the pond is cleaned, and all the minnows, smaller fish and turtle are put back in for another year of confined life!   The pond is quite big, about 35' long and maybe 15' wide with a rock island in its center); It is a beautiful part of the ambiance of this place, lily pads with blue blossoms and white calla lilies growing at the edge of the pond to give it some further beauty.   (I enjoy throwing little bits of sliced bread to these creatures.  They count on this "manna from the heavens" and compete with each other for the little morsels come their way. The turtle is slow, so I have to throw the bread bits close to its mouth so that the large fish don't grab it before he/she does.

   The other excitement, a sad event, happened here on Sunday morning.  The holstein cow born last October, died on us.  It  succumbed to some tick, despite the vetenarian giving it some shots.  It was so happy and bouncy at one time.  Now it is gone.  (Its mother is pregnant, so we will have another little one in the near future.) The meat was given to our pack of six German shepherds and its entrails given to science for analysis.

   Today, February 11, is a day full of memories for me.  It is a feast day in the church when millions commemorate what happened at Lourdes, France in 1858.  There a 14 year old illiterate girl, Bernadette Soubouris witness 18 times over a seven month period the mother of God coming to her.  Many charged her with making it all up.  Even her local pastor gave her a lot of grief about her story.  The atheistic mayor mocked her.  But in the end her story was vindicated, and once people began to witness dozens of cripples being completely healed in the springs of water flowing so abundantly there from the mountainous rocks, the skeptics became firm believers, even the atheistic mayor.   In the present day 5-6 million people come there every year in hopes of some kind of healing of their sickness, often a terminal sickness.  Train loads of people pile into the village of about 20,000 people every day from about May through October.  They come in wheelchairs, on crutches, and pallets on casters.  I have been to this place four times since 2003 and have been impressed beyond description,.  On my last time there in 2009, on the last day, I was hearing confessions/reconciliation for English speaking people.  A young Irish mother came to the sacramental ritual and as she came into the small room, I saw at the bottom of the frosted glass that covered the door's surface someone trying to see under the small sliver of clear glass that was at the bottom of the door.  I turned and the mother did too while wondering whether I should do anything about such a disturbance.  The mother said, "Oh, its my little 3 year old, my daughter.  She wants to come in."  So I said, "Is that alright with you?"  She said, "no problem."  So I opened the door to let the little one in.  She was perfectly a beautiful three old, blond hair, and very quiet while her mother put herself in the ritual before God, asking God's forgiveness and strengthening in her life as wife and mother.  She had three other children and had lost two pregnancies she told me.  So she was the mother of six and she and her husband and family were living like gypsies going from one place to another in France to find work and settle wherever her husband was employed.  At the end of her confession I asked her, "Why did you come to Lourdes, so far south for you??"  She pointed to the little three year old.  I said, "Tell me about it."  She said, "A year ago my husband and I brought her here; she had braces on both legs well up her legs.  We took her to the grotto (where Mary came to Bernadette 18 times), my husband and I and children prayed, and then we took the braces off her.  She has not needed braces since that moment. . . . So we had to come back this year to say 'thank you'."

   So...I tell you, I will never forget that moment nor that story.  I said to the mother, so stunned was I by the story, "I wonder what will become of your daughter?  What does God have in store for her as she grows into adulthood?"

  There are 67 medically verified miracles registered at that special site since 1858 and thousands of others who have been healed and whose stories are recorded there.  The head of the Jesuits from 1965-81, a Spaniard named Pedro Arrupe, credits his own calling to the Jesuits with his witnessing a man in a wheelchair, crippled for who knows how many years, standing up completely healed just as he was blessed by the priest holding the Blessed Sacrament in a monstrance.  This happened during the late afternoon procession and blessing of the sick.  It is the daily prayer service for the sick.  It is done from 5-6 PM  in an underground basilica that holds up to 25,000 people. I have been there a number of times and sense the whole world shows up for that service. The prayer sung in so many languages of the world (lyrics on a teleprompter overhead for all to read) and the silence during other periods of prayer are really something else.

    Arrupe witnessed this man at the moment of his healing standing up, then he tells that he said to himself at that moment, "I must give my life to the God who just did this."  So he left medical school in northern Spain after two years of schooling and joined the Jesuits.  Amazingly, Arrupe  was the director of Jesuit novices in Japan near Hiroshima during World War II, and when the big bomb was dropped there he used his medical knowledge to bring first aid to the survivors and the dying in Hiroshima.  God uses everything, I guess.

   I recall 33 years ago today my father dying of cancer (1981) and sitting in the den of his home in Tawas, MI.  He was two months from dying.  At 4 in the afternoon, he called to my mother who was in the kitchen preparing their dinner.  He said, "Chum, chum, come here!"  She said, "What is it, Chris?"  He said again, "Come here!"  Once she entered the den where he was sitting, he said, "She was right here."  Mom said, "What do you mean?"  He repeated,  "She came to me, and I sense everything is going to be alright."
In the days that followed and my mother had time to process what happened, she came to trust that he was not delusional, that something beautiful and genuine had been given to him, that in someway he had experienced the loving, peaceful presence of the mother of Christ, and then on the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes.  The sign that he was not making up all of this was that before this experience he had been terrible restless and fighting in his body so much of his dying process.  After this experience and for the remaining weeks up to the time of his death he was such a changed person . . . at peace and full of gratitude .  And that was the manner in which he died.  Up to that time he had expressed a misgiving with how much attention is given to the Mother of God; he would complain that more attention should be given to Christ.  But after this experience he would say, almost apologetically, that not enough credit and praise are given to Mary, that she is gift beyond gift.
   I had the mass here at Mwangaza this morning.  I will pass on to you  what I said at the homily for this wonderful feast.
   The message of Lourdes is the gift of poverty--reflecting the manner in which God came to us in Jesus and keeps coming to us in the poor of our day, to our own self as well, not in spite of but precisely in and through our own poverty (human weaknesses).  So yes, as it was for the illiterate, very poor Bernadette, poverty keeps us close to God and aware of our great need for God.  When we live otherwise, we get arrogant and forget who we are.
   Lourdes also models what genuine prayer looks like.  Bernadette's experience shows us a God of love, a God searching to embrace and converse with us in a heart-to-heart encounter.  In it we discover the smile of God who loves us  and in whose presence we discover ourselves in loving company with a God of great tenderness and respect for us.
  Third, Lourdes means the call to conversion, to realize the true nature of sin, the ugliness of evil, and urges us to seek true conversion of heart, as well as be sensitive to our neighbor who experiences the same struggle; we are all loved sinners.  We are all in the same boat needing a Savior.
  Last, Lourdes means that we are all together a very human Church, and each of us has a role to play in it, simply, bravely sometimes, lovingly.  Never are we just spectators. (Today is especially dedicated to those who live with sickness; this is their day, and we pray for them and thank them for what they bear for the sake of what God is building for us all as the mystical Body of Christ.) We are needed in the process of what God is doing with the entire human race.  It was Mary as the Immaculate Conception, which she called herself when Bernadette asked her what her name was,  who came to Lourdes to remind us all of the Gospel and of a new humanity, a new creation that is in the making, beginning with her, blessed among all others.
   (Three hours later)
   So, friends, I am going to sign off.  I just showered after working on the soil of the new flower bed I am creating in the front of the retreat center.  I am learning how to deal with very tough African clay!  I hope you are enjoying some of the winter Olympics as we are here.  I so enjoyed the figure skating.  The Russian lass of 15 years old seemed to me to be the best individual skater, the most natural and free of them all.  The American couple who skated to the tune of Schherezade by Rimsky-Korsakov was in my judgment the best in a crowd of very, very good skating couples.
   Peace, and a happy Valentine's Day to you all.

Bernie Owens