Dear Friends,

  Here it is Sunday evening again.  The week has gone quickly and I have used it to get a lot of rest.  I have been sleeping on an average of 10 hours a day and feel largely recovered from all the heavy, relentless work of the previous two and three weeks.  But I still have low, low energy in the mornings.  Too much sleep?  I don't know.  I am a little confused about my body needs right now.  What is clear is that I am much better off than I was even a week ago, much more rested in my nerves.  When I have to get up and lead a class, like yesterday, for three hours, I do well.  I am my old self and love the interaction with the students.  So, as I said, I don't know how to read my body right now.

  For three weeks I have had a bone in my lumbar area out of place and it makes me limp some.  I went to a local chiropracter and had two terrific, deep muscle massages to loosen up the back and then one attempt at an adjustment of the bones in my lumbar area but it did not take.  I need to go back during this week.  This pinch or dislocation leaves me with some mild sciatica down the right leg.  It is a bummer.

  My work with the flowers continues to give me delight.  Wow, I look at the roses I am caring for and see more and more beauty in them.  It is very satisfying to spend time on this, just to cultivate something so beautiful as these plants and see them  come alive with healthy leaves and abundant blossoms and pour out beauty upon beauty upon beauty.  This is in both the front of the main building of the retreat center and also in the back.  In the front I planted two dozen marigold plants to complete a long border in the front of the retreat house.  The border is now full of great color from low growing flowers of much variety and then very pleasant on the eyes as you enter the main building.

  Our afternoons are getting hot.  Clear skies and the African sun with its very direct rays beating down can really warm you up.  Thank God for low humidity!.  I cover up a lot (wide-brim hat and long sleeve shirt) when I work out in the area of the flowers in the front and the back of the retreat house main building; I use sun screen also on my ears, face, and on the back of my neck.

  Some of you have emailed me about the ebola scare and expressed worry for me.  I must say I almost never think of it.  It is so far away from here, like San Francisco would be from Detroit.  I do pray each morning that the angels of God protects us all here from both disease and any violence.

  I am finishing up this week with my course on Teresa of Avila's "The Interior Castle."  Two Wednesdays from this coming Wednesday is the final exam.  Leading the 11 seminarians through that classic and a very good commentary on it has left me with a renewed sense of awe at what God is leading us all to, in this life and finishing up in the next life.  It is not easy to get people to learn to be quiet with God in sustained, regular ways and to allow God to initiate new possibilities, new way of living and praying in their lives.  Most people don't seem to "get it", are not disciplined enough to let God in to themselves that much.  Many have no teacher to show them the way and to cheer them on.  But even with these limits, to read a book of this greatness gives you the reader a hint of the greatness, the awesome depths that are there in us waiting to be uncovered and claimed by us. We are much, much more than we seem! The busyness of daily life and its mundane, often very superficial happenings hide all of this from us, almost all of the time but not in every moment.  Sometimes we do get hints, little flashes of this glory we are made for and, like the woman at the well, thirst for.

   This morning at prayer something of this hit me strongly.  The wounds of the risen Christ are beyond description in terms of the love and beauty and goodness of God contained therein.  Is this what the doubting Thomas encountered when he put his finger into the open side of the risen Christ?? I have heard it said that we will all be saved by beauty.  (this is said in a novel by Dostoevsky and Pope Benedict liked to cite it a number of times.)  I mus say that there is an indescribable beauty in the wounds of Christ for any of us to see and be held by if we look there with love and gratitude.  There is no greater beauty than the gift of someone totally, totally given to another.  In this encounter one has the opportunity to see and be taken into a love that is more complete and more poured out in selfless care in this place of His Heart, with its open side, than in any other gesture of love ever.  I have never before encountered anything so beautiful, so moving as this gift.  Nothing comes close to its beauty and goodness. Nothing is so totally given, so noble, so worthy of response and love.  Just to be there with no sense of time going by, just looking and being held by it all--no words can describe this!!  How do you respond, especially when you open to the fact that this is all given for you, for me?  It is so personal and so very powerful.

   I need to get off to bed.  I am up early tomorrow to go to St. Aloysius High School to process the prayer of this last week of six members of the school's faculty. They are preparing to begin the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius next January.

  May your week be blessed.  Enjoy the autumn color.  I miss it, although there is so much beauty in nature here.  Again, the jacaranda trees are in their purple glory right now, full of blossoms all over their branches.  Next to the crimson bougenvilla (spelling??) blossoms, they light up the surroundings here!

Bernie Owens