Hi, Friends,

  Here I am posting another letter so soon after I posted one last evening.  It came to me this morning during my meditation that something connected with what I talked about in yesterday's letter did not get said.  It will not be easy to do this, but I feel I need to try because only in that way will what I wanted to say in yesterday's posting get said.

   I will start with a question.  Have you had the experience of being so affected by the goodness and truth and beauty of another person that you take the time to be completely, totally focused on them and you look at them deeply but respectfully, allowing the gift of that person to fill you?  We can be so taken up with our busy life or taken up with the gifts this other person brings us but never really connect with them at the level of their person, at that level where they are uniquely themselves, with who they are in their depths.  All of us carry this mystery within us.  Everyone of us is this deep and yes, holy.  But we can easily miss being alert to this mystery and gift of the mystery of ourselves.  We carry the divine in our depths. We are never alone.  From our depths come glimpses of beauty and goodness that make our life have an entirely different meaning and hope.

  So if you have had something of the experience I am referring to, if you have noticed this depth in just one person in your life, then I think you can follow me in what I will try to say below.

  I have learned over the years that when I engage in my 45 minute meditation/contemplation each morning, I am moved to be very quiet, to just focus on God, not to start thinking of anything about God nor saying anything to God, nor imagining anything about God but to just be quiet and attentive.  What comes up at times are distractions.  My mind does want to get involved.  My imagination does jump around.  Sometime I feel the urge to say something and then I realize what I am doing comes from a nervous, childlike level of my wanting action.  So I have to gently cease doing that.  My deeper instinct is to come back to that quiet space where He is present--where there is no image, no concept or thought, just an amazing, beautiful presence and to be attentively quiet there.  To settle down and just BE.  Sometimes it is much easier than at other times.  Sometimes my spirit is jumpy because of what happened the day before or all the things I know I have to deal with in the coming day. So a fair mount of the "work" of contemplating/meditating is to keep coming back to this Center, this quiet place and to let go, to just BE.  And then there are by the grace of God some easier times when something really powerful wells up from my depths and I get overwhelmed with the awareness that I really do KNOW Him and the love that comes out of me is so overpowering.  It is a love for Him first and then a love for the entire human race . . . with the desire that everyone know this peace and joy, this Presence and Love, this most amazing Person.  This is what filled me in various ways last Tuesday, on the anniversary of Romero's assassination, and then on the next morning when I went to surgery.   What I felt I needed to share with what I posted yesterday is this movement of the human spirit to be drawn like a magnet to this One who is the essence of goodness, truth and beauty.  It is so overwhelming and so real, so powerful that it overcomes all fear, moving one beyond even the instinct of self-preservation to offer yourself for a Love that is greater than what you ever experienced before but is worth everything, EVERYTHING!!  You lose your fear of death, so powerfully can this grip one. Your deepest interest is not just to serve this Love but to give yourself entirely and be totally One with it.  You lose all fear, all self-concern and worry.  You are completely taken up into this sacred Reality and when you come back down you look at the world with boundless hope and the assurance that this Presence, this Love is too powerful for any and all evil.  It will in its time overcome all obstacles, all that threatens the deepest hopes of the human race.  It is the most persistent power around.  It never pushes people, never forces.  It is usually quite gentle, although for some personalities this Presence can intervene and "seize" you and really "capture" you. But it is always respectful and open to the possibility of our saying 'no'.  True love cannot be any other way!

  So again, this experience came to me strongly on Tuesday as I pondered what this sacred Presence did to Romero and even more so the next morning as I lay on a stretcher in the pre-op room, so very alert and feeling amazingly ready and alive while waiting for the anesthesiologist and surgeon.  Sometimes I am speechless with the reality of God, how close and really powerful God is.  Above everything is the goodness and loveableness of this God.  Finding such a Friend is surely the greatest discovery of a human being's life and once that happens there is the unfolding from your depths of wanting to serve this Reality, to give everything you are and have to this One.  This is surely the Pearl of Great Price which prompts you to go and sell everything you have in order to buy it (See Matthew 13:44-46)  You become a "fool" out of love, so captivating is this Reality, so alive to this Sacred One do you become.  Romero experienced such, I am sure, and so did the human Jesus when on a daily basis.  He got up before sunrise to go off to a quiet place to be alone with God, His Father.  We need to follow His example!

  So, that is it.  I am done.  I have written what I felt compelled to say but needed a good night's sleep and this morning's contemplation to realize that I had more to say than what I was able to say last evening.  Again, a blessed Holy Week and Easter season to you all.

Bernie Owens