Dear Friends,

  It is Friday evening here and I am in the mood to write a new letter.

  First, a bit of news on our Jesuit community.  Today one of our members died.  He was 76 years old, 11 months older than me.  That makes me think twice!  Yes, some of my contemporaries are done with their time on this earth!  I feel I have so much more to do, things I need to finish before my time to leave comes!  God might see things differently!!!!!  May His will be done, always may His will be done.  It is always wiser, and the best.  He knows better than any plans we might make!  I truly believe that, even though it is proper and natural for each of us to make our plans for the future. What is important is not to hold on to them too tightly, to allow God to alter them and not be unduly upset by such a surprising reversal.

  Anyway, the one who died was an Indian Jesuit, someone who had served in Eastern Africa for over 30 years.  He was terribly overweight, had to get around with an electric cart and sometimes with metal arm crutches.  A little over a week ago He had gone to the food counter for something toward the end of our  dinner time and failed to negotiate the use of one of his crutches.  He fell backward and hit the back of his head hard on the tile floor in our dining room.  He was taken to the Nairobi hospital where a brain scan showed he had incurred a severe concussion and that a blood mass had collected over his right eye, in the front of his brain.  After two or three days of weighing options, doctors concluded surgery was unavoidable.  He underwent surgery about three days ago, became conscious for a while, spoke some jumbled words, but had a high fever.  This morning he died.  We will bury him in our small cemetery Sunday afternoon.

  This evening I was visiting with an 89 year old Indian member of our Jesuit community (sharing some brandy and potato chips also!!  Yum-yum) and he was showing me the letter of a woman friend of his who died very recently of cancer in Chicago.  In the letter she spoke of the very good care she was receiving and then thanked him for the times back in the 1970s and 80s when he visited her and her family while he was fund-raising in the USA.  She said so simply and so beautifully 'thank you' for the gift of his friendship and prayers over the years.  It meant everything to her.  I was quite moved by that simple saying and thought to myself how blessed we are when we can give such a gift to each other and also receive this gift of friendship in our own lives.  There are very few things that are better or more meaningful!   It made me think of so many of you who read this and have blessed me with your friendship and shared over the years faith in God's love for us.  It was the main reason I wanted to write a blog posting this evening, to thank you for being a very important and meaningful part of my life!

   When someone dies, it makes me think about my own life and how extraordinary is this journey, how gifted we are to be, just to be (the miracle of our existence!), and then to have the opportunity to share in the lives of so many wonderful human beings.  This journey we are making together is beyond wonder, it is so, so awesome.  What we are being readied for is beyond description.  (Of course, that is what my book coming in March is about!)

   I wish to pass on to you some reflections from something I read recently, something that is just remarkable and worth pondering.  It goes like this.  A person is enlighten and lifted up when someone really looks at them.  This originally happened when chaos was enlightened by God looking at it (See the book of Genesis, chapter 1, verse 1.)  The 'Bridegroom' casts His gaze across the face of the abyss and sprays life across it.  This is what happened when God created:  the universe, each element in it, each event in it and web of those events held together--all thought, all friendship, all history--are given being by the eyes of the divine Other, eyes 'communicating' being to the world. Such a creation is flamboyant in its beauty, as the Word of God, glancing kindly but wildly, 'scattering a thousand graces' and flooding the cosmos with traces of who He is.

   There is a marvelous sense here of God's creative act being not just a primeval beginning, but a present event.  The event is as gentle, in a sense as precarious, but also as loving as the gaze of one who cares.

   There is a marvelous sense too that the universe has a character to it.  When God the Father gazes, He gazes through His Son.  The Son is His face, smiling upon the world.  "God saw that they were good," which was to make them good by 'seeing them' in His Son.  Creation has a Son-like color, a Son-like shape which the Son alone could fill.

   So the Son does undertake to fill us.  His eyes not only hold us in being; they hold us in friendship, a friendship made possible when He meets us with human eyes.  Humanity is enlightened when the Son becomes flesh, looks at us, draws us out of ourselves, and raises us up to Himself.  In this the whole cosmos is renewed.

  This He did when He became human, lifting us up into the beauty of God, and so lifting up all creatures in Him . . .  In this raising up in the Son's incarnation and in the glory of His resurrection according to the flesh, the Father gave us creatures not just as partial beauty; we can say that He entirely clothed all creation in beauty and dignity.

   God's gaze, then, clothes the world in beauty and joy; that is what happened in the event of Christ, born and risen, confirming the universe in what it is meant to be.  From this perspective we wake up to who we really are!   When we get in touch with how deep and personal that love is for us, then we know who we are and we have a sense of purpose in our life like never before.  We want to live, we are delighted to be alive, and we want to be part of all that is.  We want to do something lasting with our life.  In other words, love has to give itself away.  If we realize we are loved, we want to love back.  And if we note that we have been and are being loved by a love that is cosmic or infinite, then we have to--in fact, we want to-- love back with an infinite, limitless love.  We gaze upon the Beloved like we were first gazed upon and we look at our loved ones like we were first seen with love.  This is what the best of friendships open us up to.  This is what death cannot destroy.  This is what is forever.  It is a taste of eternal life.  I hope you are able to relate to what I am talking about. Friendships in God are forever.  Death ends our life here on earth but real friendship lasts forever.
I find this so meaningful and uplifting, giving hope.

   I need to go to bed.  Goodnite!

Bernie Owens