Dear Friends,

  Sunday evening here, 8:30 PM, eight hours ahead of Michigan time, EST.  We received a great, soaking type rain for over an hour this afternoon and it was truly needed.  I just finished these lst two days with the last parts of the rose garden:weeding, pruning, loosening of soil and loading up the root system with cow manure and bone meal .  Now the entire plot of flowers has been "jazzed up" to put out lots and lots of blossoms, a wonderful sight to behold.  Our visitors are noticing and commenting most favorably!  Sometimes I take a walk over to that area just to get my "beauty fix" for the day and to take note of anything out of place or needing close attention.  Pure fun!

  The big concern around here since a week ago yesterday has been the horrific massacre that took place a week ago yesterday in a far northeastern Kenyan town called Mandera; it is close to the Somali border where terrible tensions exist between Christians and jihadist, Al Shabaab Muslims.   Maybe you know already that on Saturday, the 22nd, early in the morning, a bus with over 40 people on it was leaving  Mandera and traveling westward to bring people, many of them teachers in their 20s, to their home towns.  School is out in mid-November through Christmas week.  These people were returning to visit relatives and for rest over this vacation time.  Once out of town and in the bush area they were pulled over by about 15 gun-totting men with scarfs wrapped round them to hide their faces.  These men went on the bus and demanded at gun-point that people recite a sentence from the Quran; if you could not do that, then you were to get out of the bus and you were ushered over to a place and made to lie face down on the ground.  28 people "flunked" that test, so here were 28 people lying face down, all next to one another.  With that two or more of these armed Somalis moved down the row and shot these people in the back of their head.  The wailing and screaming was something else, survivors later testified.  After these men finished murdering these people, they raised their rifles in the air and starting firing them a number of times while shouting in triumph.  They disappeared across the border into the bush and a few hours later were pursued by the Kenyan army and were killed.  A Kenyan jet flew in and bombed their training camp and make-shift hospital with wounded, hurting Al Shabaab militants, and killed, it is said, some 200 people in the process. Some of these 200 were women and children most likely.   The Kenyan military provided no photographic proof of this raid.

   There is so much anger in this nation toward the government  and its fumblings, its incompetence and failures to protect its citizenry.  The present governmental party is in power till 2017.  That is a long time into the future.  The president is someone who has been indicted by the World Court in the Hague for criminal actions during the 2008 national elections.  He is the son of the first president of Kenya, a very rich man but without much foresight.  This nation is so divided along tribal lines;  tribes put up their man regardless of his credentials or lack thereof.  And then you thought politics in the USA was awful!!

  Tomorrow evening I begin my annual 8-day retreat.  I finish on the morning of the 10th.  I think I am quite ready for a time to be alone and extra quiet with God.  Lately, prayer has been for many days very, very rich.  If I can get quiet in body and focused in mind and will, then I sense I am "looking right at" God, yet with no image as such.  But the sense of His presence and closeness is very, very real and profoundly rich in beauty and goodness.    I am straining for words adequate to the experience, but that is the nature of the encounter.

   Tomorrow is the feast day of some English Jesuits who underwent terrible torture in the 1580s for being Catholic but especially for being Jesuit.  Queen Elizabeth I had him hanged, drawn and quartered, after being stretched and stretched on a rack--really a vicious way to execute anyone!  One is a man called Robert Southwell (pronounced Suth-ull, with the accent on the first of the two syllables.)  He wrote an extraordinary poem I would like to quote to you and with this say 'goodnight."  The poem could be one meaningful way to prepare for the coming of Christmas--

                                                                     The Nativity

                                             Gift better than Himself God doth not know.
                                               Gift better than His God no man can see.
                                             This gift doth here the Giver given bestow.
                                               Gift to this Gift let each receiver be
                                            God is my gift, Himself He freely gave me,
                                               God's gift am I, and none but God shall have me.

   A blessed and happy Advent to all.

Bernie Owens