Good morning, friends,

   Sunday, May 25, beautifully sunny here but a little nippy as we inch closer to the start of winter (summer for you!).

   Today is the last day where I have the entire day to work on long-range projects.  Tonight begins the introductions for many people coming here for retreats.  Some will do only 8-day retreats while most will be starting a 30-day retreat (also called the complete Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola).  Yes, 30 days. I will be leading four people through 30-day retreats:  three African seminarians (each about 30 years old) and one nun of the Missionaries of Charity order, the one Mother Teresa of Calcutta (Kolkata) began.  This nun is marking 50 years in their order. I see each retreatant daily for 45 minutes as they pray through the meditations and contemplations on Jesus' life.  Awesome, life-changing things happen when people are that focused for this length of time on God, on the fact of sin and God's mercy, their sense of being called to walk closely with Jesus in their own life, and then to look deeply at the story of Jesus' ministry, His being rejected, His death and resurrection!   This process engages the person at the level of their thinking, their feeling and values.  It leads them to re-evaluate their life, their priorities, and what they will do with what is left of their life.  It is a privilege to listen each day to what God's Spirit stirs up and inspires in them.

   My usual experience of this remarkable process has been to lead people through this retreat but stretched out over nine months.  In that form they would pray one hour a day on this same biblical material and come once a week for a debriefing of their prayer during the previous week and then get guidance from me for the coming week.  It has been 25 years since I have led anyone through the 30-day version of these Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius period.  For the first week of the 30 day period I will also being seeing a fifth person who will make an 8-day retreat.  I would greatly appreciate your praying for these five people and also for me in the role of their guide.  Thank you very much.   Come, Holy Spirit!

   As I came back  from breakfast to my room on this beautiful morning, I was strongly "hit" by a sense of God's goodness.  It just came to me and grabbed my attention!  I felt so present to God and the quality of God's person, so utterly good and so deeply lovable.  How do I help you relate to this??  Let me try this.

   If you have ever been touched by the goodness of someone, of a person you have known and come to care about over the years and then get REALLY STRUCK in a certain moment by their deep beauty, goodness, integrity and trustworthiness such that it makes you sit down, drop what you are doing at that moment, and become quiet while in that awareness, and you allow yourself to be totally captured by what you are aware of--getting in a sense STUNNED by it all--then you can relate to what I am trying to say.  Sometimes this awareness has happened to me through another human being.  This time it was direct, straight from God.  Wow!

   At mass this morning the presider homilized about the friendship with God that the gift of the Holy Spirit makes possible for us, if we will allow such to happen, if we will take the time, as in any friendship, to get to know and eventually love this very special Person.  We get taken by the goodness, the beauty of this Inner Friend, and we are more and more drawn in while we give our 'yes' to this gift.  We are enriched beyond anything we previously expected.  We can't imagine living any other way and wonder why we didn't say 'yes' to earlier invitations to such a relationship and life.   (Nice background for having to listen to four people each day over the coming month!)

   One of the 'carry-overs' of the workshop I led for the 30 teachers at St. Aloysius H.S last week is the desire of some of the teachers to make the Spiritual Exercises.  So the president and I are discussing this afternoon plans for how to make that happen.  When at Manresa I designed an 8-10 week program called "Learning How To Pray With the Bible."  I could use the same program in this instance.  People begin by praying each day for about 30 minutes from Bible passages I give them and they come once a week and in small groups share the fruit of their prayer during the past week and get guidance from me for the next week.  After 8-10 weeks of that, I can readily tell who has taken to the daily discipline and who hasn't.  Those who got into the process and whose prayer was noticeably blessed are obvious candidates to make the full Spiritual Exercises over a nine month period.

  On Friday I marked nine months since I arrived here.  It has been a full nine months.  I have not felt idle or bored.  I sense I am more active and have had to create new things since coming here that I would not have done if I had stayed in Michigan.  I loved what happened to me and was able to do when there ( 19 years at Manresa!), but now in this new chapter in my life I am getting challenged anew and fortunately have the time and the resources to create new things in this very different part of the world. Give me meaningful work and I can live just about anywhere!

   Last Thursday I learned that Immigration has approved my application for a visa.  It will be another week or two before I actually have the document in hand, but now it is official:  I have been given legal status in this nation.  (What a wait!  Five and a half months since I began the application!) And with that document I will be able to get a driver's license and also to say 'yes' to some retreat and workshop requests in Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia and South Sudan. I look forward to the opportunities to contribute to the church in some of these nearby nations.

   While in a car last Thursday I was reading a recently purchased paperback, a collection of homilies on the Eucharist by Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa.  Some passages were/are just wonderful.  Let me mention two.  He is commenting on the words of the hymn "Adoro Te Devote. ("Devoutly I adore You.") and comes to the line of "Everything fails in contemplating You."  He elaborates to say that everything, people and things but also all thoughts, images and worries fail to express adequately this wondrous Mystery of His Presence in the Eucharist. It is too rich, it is beyond all possible expression of creatures, so beautiful, so good, so overwhelming is this One.  He goes on to quote a philosopher of the late 13th century, Roger Bacon from England, to say, "If the divine majesty were to manifest itself to our senses, we would not be able to stand it and we would fail altogether in reverence, devotion and wonder.  Experience demonstrates this truth.  Those who exercise themselves in the faith and love of this sacrament do not succeed in enduring the devotion that is born from pure faith, without dissolving in tears and without their soul, coming out of itself, liquefying by the sweetness of the devotion, to the point of no longer knowing where they are or why."  Yes, everything creaturely fails when trying to give a response worthy of God and so great a gift.  I guess this paragraph brings me back to what I was sharing up above about what happened to me this morning in coming back from breakfast to my room.

   Yesterday afternoon I took about 30-40 photos of the grounds here and of my room, of my office, of the chapels and of the main buildings and dormitories.  I am hoping to be able to send them to as many of you as possible in the next day or two.  Hopefully they will give you a sense of what an amazing place this is here.  These pictures will be the next best thing to my buying you tickets and bringing you here to see for yourselves!

   I need to move on.  God bless.  Enjoy your improving weather!  This afternoon I will be getting in some outdoor swimming.  The cool nights have made the water colder but once I get moving I am fine for a good invigorating 25 minute swim.

  Bernie Owens