Dear Friends, It is late in the afternoon here on Tuesday, the 29th, in Christmas week. We have had gorgeous weather today, about the best that summer can offer: low humidity and in the high 70s. I was able to swim outdoors today for about 20-25 minutes. I am now so relaxed and feeling wonderfully limp. I never lie in the sun in the afternoon, however, nor walk for long with skin exposed since the sunrays here are so, so direct. Being almost on the equator means the sun comes in straight at us and not on an angle, as is the case in the Detroit latitude at more than a 40 degree angle. One humorous event for us is a donkey that brays so mournfully every 15-20 minutes in the village that is across the river and its valley near us. Someone in the village there purchased a donkey about a month ago. It gives out this desperate sound even in the nighttime, so someone has said. I don't hear it but during the day I do and I think it is saying loud and clear throughout the valley: "I am lonely, and I want a mate!!" This reminds me of a very funny scene in one of Fellini's famous films from Italy done maybe 30 years ago. The film shows the delightful craziness of an Italian family, at table sharing a meal, at the beach, in it interaction with the clergy (usually awkward!), going on a Sunday drive, etc. There is one scene from the movie that our local donkey reminds me of. It is a scene of the oldest member of the family, a man who is a widower and perhaps 85 or so in years, senile and dependent on nursing care. One Sunday afternoon he gets loose and climbs a tree, rather far up. The family who had been out on a picnic returns to hear him in the tree calling out loudly and repeating in mournful, drawn-out cries, "I want a woman. I waaant a wooomannn!!!!" Another event that took place some 300 miles to the east of here has greatly blessed this nation. Some two weeks ago a band of Al Shabaab jihadists crossed the Somali border into Kenya and stopped at gunpoint (AK 47s) a bus filled mostly with women. The intent of these young men, covered on their heads with headwraps and wearing masks, was to separate the Christians from the Muslims and shoot the Christians right then and there. This happened twice or three times last year in roughly the same area. But the Muslim women this time refused to cooperate and even offered their burkha covering to the Christian women and then told the jihadists that they would have to kill all of the passengers together, Christians and Muslims, or they were to leave. This response apparently so stunned the terrorists that they left. The newspapers made great coverage of this story and wrote at length about what Muslims and Christians together in this nation can do when they unite and respect each other. These women did much more than what the army could have done or did. War stinks! Tomorrow morning I "go into the desert," so to speak, as I begin my own annual retreat. Some months ago I found a book that attracts me a lot. Written by Fr. Franz Jalics, a Jesuit from Hungary, and with the title: "Called to Share in HIS Life, the book maps out as ten-day retreat. It begins with simple acts of awareness in nature (so that will be my entire first day of retreat--just to look intently at what I am seeing while wandering about or sitting on a bench on our retreat house grounds). Then on day 2 I shift to a number of 30 minute meditations where with my eyes closed I focus my attention simply on the palms of my hands that are folded together in my lap and absolutely still. From there in the later days the focus shifts to more explicit spiritual, religious subjects: the mother of Jesus and then entirely on Jesus. I am to read nothing, not listen to music, eat alone and in the quiet, and of course I am not to turn on my computer. In this way I give myself to deeper and deeper quiet and deeper and deeper intimacy with God, who is beyond every image and feeling but is the ground or basis of everything and is ever present as the background or foundation of all particular objects of attention. You can imagine how important it is to be as still as possible with your body when meditating. Of course, distractions come up in the mind and imagination and feelings; that is bound to happen, but one is urged "to look beyond" such items in your attention and be aware of the divine Presence in its infinite presence, its infinite depth. With a steady faith one can reasonably hope to be blessed with an increasingly sensitive awareness of this boundless Presence who is mercy infinite, love infinite, penetrating everything and holding us all in its embrace as the most loving mother would hold her children, whether in the womb or in her arms. Does this seem too far out, too extreme? It does not seem so to me, and so I feel I am ready for such a retreat and do look forward to it, while knowing there will be times when things will seem "dead" or rather "dry" and even boring. But that is part of the entire experience: to avoid seeking certain kinds of experiences and be at peace with whatever is, aware of and present to the One who is "behind" all of this as the foundation of everything, the Source from which everyone has come and to whom we are returning. This Source is beyond all shapes, all particularity but is All, All. Anyway, I am off to dinner and wish all of you who read this a very blessed New Year, with health and joy of soul. Please remember me in your prayers. Thank you. Bernie Owens

Dear Friends, Greetings on this 3rd Sunday of Advent! I had spent an hour some five days ago typing a letter to post of this blogsite and then suddenly everything disappeared and I was unable to retrieve what I had typed. What a waste!! I was much too busy during the rest of the week to try again since I was in the midst of leading a retreat for 15 people. It was not an individually guided retreat, the usual kind of retreat given here, but had a form of two or three talks per day to the group over eight days. Staying with the schedule kept me quite busy. I am happy to say that the retreat was received very well and struck deep chords in the lives of the 15. Praise God! Its theme was, "Who is the Holy Spirit and what does the Holy Spirit do in each of us and in the world." Thank you to any and all of you who prayed for them and for me during the past week. One interesting thing I learned a few days ago is that we have a group of lions in a forest only some 5 miles away. They are not penned up but in the wild. I heard that one of the nearby farmers lost one of his dogs to a lion two weeks ago. The lion came out during the heavy rains we received and got the dog. I am told the lions emerge more likely during the rains because humans, the most dangerous animal of them all, tend to stay indoors when the rains fall. Lions, afraid of meeting humans, feel safer coming out to hunt during that time. (Guess what! It is raining now!) I have never thought of us being the most dangerous of animals, but with our guns and bombs and capacity to make war, I guess we are! The temperatures here have gotten hot in the afternoons. We are into the beginnings of summer. The days have gotten somewhat longer. Next week, on the 21st, we will enjoy the longest day of the year, while those of you in the Michigan area will experience the shortest day of your year. In the meantime we are enjoying so many beautiful flowers. Our dahlias especially are luxuriating; the blossoms are so abundant and gorgeous to view. And yes, my roses are prospering. I think they are soon due for a reinforcement of the rabbit poop and bone meal I put around their roots. In the meantime I am painfully aware of the hundreds of thousands of people starving in the nation just north of us, Ethiopia. Their lack of rain has led to this disaster for them. It is very sad. In my last posting I indicated that I had more to say about the pilgrimage I was co-leader for in Italy last month. I emphasize that it was a pilgrimage and not a tour. A pilgrimage is a time away from what one calls his home, his familiar surroundings. It is a journey that involves searching, a quest for a deeper life with God. At least that is what it is supposed to be. If any of you know the story of the medieval English writer, Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales", then you know all kinds of things can happen on such a journey, and everyone partaking in it can have different experiences, some happy and some not so happy. The expectations of people for what they want the pilgrimage to be can vary greatly, as did happen on this journey for the 35 of us. Most seemed very happy and fulfilled by their two weeks, but a very small number seemed not so. Those of you who read this most likely know that one moment of my two weeks on this pilgrimage was to meet personally Pope Francis and pray mass with him at his residence and with 15 other priests. It was a great, great moment for me. I have a wonderful album of some outstanding photos of the mass, of all 16 of us priests with him, and then some amazing photos of him and myself meeting, talking for about one minute, his blessing some rosaries I held in my hands, our sharing a hug, and then saying our goodbyes. (It became quite evident to me that the pope is not comfortable at all speaking in English. He never really learned it. This makes his address to the US Congress last September all the more remarkable. He must have practiced a lot with his pronouncing the words of that speech; I found it easy to understand him that day. As great as that moment with the pope was, it was not the most important and meaningful event of the pilgrimage for me. What was number one was what happened for me when visiting a Carmelite monastery in Florence followed by what has been happening for me in the weeks that have followed. In this sense the pilgrimage has continued and has gotten deeper and richer. I went to this monastery, with the great majority of the pilgrims, one afternoon to see the incorrupt body of a saint whose biography I had read nearly ten years ago. The name of this remarkable person is Teresa Margaret of the Sacred Heart. While she is a canonized saint, she is not very well known, certainly not like the Carmelite saint, the little Flower, St. Therese of Lisieux. This young woman, born in 1747, died after only 22 years, in 1770, six years before the American Declaration of Independence. She died from a hernia that quickly developed into peritonitis and this killed her in less than 24 hours. Yes, it is remarkable that her body never decomposed, but that detail is only an external sign by God of the profound spirituality of this young woman and the very deep union she and God enjoyed together. She was the oldest of six children from a fairly well-to-do family in Arezzo. From the time of her early childhood, probably as early as when she was about 4, she would frequently ask adults in her family "who is God?" This question and her continuing search (pilgrimage) was the driving interest of her whole life. In hindsight this stands out as a strong sign of God's marking and choosing her very early in her life for the closest of relationships with Him, and through this to become a great sign for the decades and centuries later of how real and close God is to us, of how deep relationship with God is the greatest and most fulfilling joy a person can ever experience in this life. The answers she got from adults to her question were never really satisfying. This quest drove her to apply during her final year of high school to enter Carmel in Florence. She was accepted by Carmel and started her life there in 1765. She was close to her parents, especially to her father. It was extremely hard for the both of them to see their first-born enter the monastery and know she would never come home. In her short five years at Carmel it would take God Himself, during her times of prayer and daily responsibilities to the other sisters of the convent, to give her the answer she was looking for to her question. Three years before she died, in June of 1767, she was flooded with an awareness, overwhelming for her, that God is love. After this major event she walked around the convent as in a daze for three days. I am sure she had heard before the answer to her question that God is love, but it was during that divinely chosen moment in her life, when she had come to know God quite personally and felt so deeply the desire to give herself completely to Him, that this great discovery of her life, this answer "crashed" in upon her. She felt the truth that God is love as the sweetest of all truths resonating throughout her soul and body. This really changed her life with God and her fellow sisters from then on. God was claiming her quickly in her life for that final union, face to face, forever. I suspect we humans for the most part have little appreciation of how overwhelmingly true is this statement that God IS LOVE. It is hardly very personal when it is first posed to us. It is only when something "major" happens in our life that we get some out-of-the ordinary sense of this central truth. Most of us know that God is Love as the answer to a catechism question. And some have learned how to pray with Scripture passages and hear God speak His love for them in their prayer. But only when we come to know ourselves deeper than what the busyness and noise of our daily lives permit, or when we feel terribly vulnerable or have had a brush with death do we begin to feel the power of this question and experience the depths of this kind of love as the only kind of love that can satisfy us and bring us to the joy we have been made for, the joy we have been looking for. With this as background I can now say something about why going to visit the preserved corpse of this young woman during our pilgrimage and my subsequent reflecting on aspects of her life-story have made this part of my time in Italy the most meaningful and spiritually richest part of the pilgrimage for me. Since returning on November 23 I have spent 45 minutes each morning working through Teresa Margaret's biography and the passages I had noted when I was in Italy. I have been so attracted and challenged too by numerous sections of her biography. I will try to give you a sense of what drew me and is inspiring me so much. It is the frequent mentioning in the biography of this young woman OF HER LONGING TO LOVE GOD WITH EVERYTHING SHE HAS AND IS that has spoken to me and catches my spirit so powerfully. There is an urgency and longing about this I have not felt before to the degree I am feeling it now. God has recently done something to me, and I am noticing it. In the Carmelite tradition there is a demanding challenge to look honestly and intently at the countless expressions of self-centeredness in ourselves, e.g., in our ways of thinking, valuing, speaking and acting. The challenge is to acknowledge this self-focus and self-indulging instincts inside ourselves and commit to saying 'no' to them and then choosing OUT OF LOVE FOR GOD, to choose otherwise or simply let go and wait on God. This becomes a lifestyle of continually dying to self-centeredness, to facing its expressions in ourselves coming up many times a day, and to grow in the habit of choosing instead to do whatever good one can do in that situation OUT OF LOVE FOR GOD. As one gets to know their depths better, we discover how terribly self-focused we are, how instinctual we are, and how for the sake of our own security and protection from what we fear, we think 'self' first and too often choose accordingly. The hope is to live from love and for love, to be before God and live for God. Practically this can be realized in our keeping back an impatient answer or rendering a small service or favor and doing it in a quiet way. We can live a life that is too busy and so lose a healthy self-awareness, a vigilance over our motives. It is then easy to get distracted by our own interests, to do what we do for a purpose that has its roots in our self. The motive of seeking our pleasure or seeking praise can spoil what we should be doing solely for God. God can be far in the background, not all that important to us, and we then live that moment with no thought or room for God. We can pour out our self on a project but rely too much on our own self. The call, instead, is to reliance on God so that whatever I do, it is done with God. I think "we" rather than just "I" when I do what I do. In fact, it becomes a habit that whatever is done, it is WE who do it, together. I am more and more living a spirituality of trust. What is very challenging in the story of Teresa Margaret is the way she handled criticisms and rebukes, especially when she was not guilty or responsible for what she was charged with. She would not protest nor defend herself in such cases but ask for pardon for whatever she was accused of, even when she was not guilty. She cited the example of Jesus standing silent before Pilate and saying nothing in His self-defense as her model. It takes immense humility to experience one's self being condemned yet being innocent and then to remain silent. When feeling hurt and resentment welling up, and a need to protest the injustice of being so accused, I am especially challenged. Yet, it is in such situations I am trying to learn from this young woman. I feel she has such a powerful way of choosing and imitating Christ and letting go of the need to protect or justify one's self. I cannot think of a more demanding way of focusing off one's instinctual self-centeredness and choosing to love Christ and the one accusing you in such a painful moment. I want to live with such a freedom and focus. It is this kind of desire that has come on so strongly when in Italy and has stayed with me since coming back here. And it not teh desire for self-growth but the deep, deep disire to live for God, so meaningful, so strongly is the attraction. Saints are made, not born. It is at the cost of much struggle that they learn to conform themselves to God's way and will. Gradually they offer less and less resistance, until by surrendering themselves completely to God's purifying actions, they emerge as free and quite beautiful in spirit and good works. They have largely overcome their self-centered impulses and ways of thinking. They have grown into a gentleness and kindness of heart, a genuine humility and generous love for others through a steady vigilance over their self-focused impulses: a hot temper, a lustful look or thoughts, a tendency to let fear of failure or criticism make them pull back; a long-standing fear that they really are not that lovable, leading them to resentment or envying others. The courage to make such a journey comes much more from being strongly attracted to the Heart of Christ and His unique, totally fulfilling love than by their own will-power. He has come to mean everything to you; he is recognized as the pearl of great price so that you go and sell everything in order to possess, such an unparalleled discovery is He. (I allude to Matthew 13:44-46.) This experience changes one at their core. One is moved to do anything, to surrender all in order to belong solely to Him, no matter the cost. Meeting Him changes everything. I found in this biography a statement that draws me: to accept without complaint the unsought crosses of daily life is the surest and safest way of disciplining our body and our will, to come to this kind of deep relationship in God, with Christ. To curb our tongue, to refrain from the critical word for the right reason--that is, out of the desire to live in Christ's Heart and to live for Him alone--these are special opportunities for growing to a deep union with Him. Acceptance of the common lot of food and sleep, of noise and weather and other small inconveniences give one plenty of opportunities to practice this inner discipline of heart and will and, in turn, they prompt one to growth in love for Christ by doing this out of loving gratitude. The trials and annoyances of daily life that come from nature and people one lives with are the practice field for this growth in love for God, for Jesus. Heat and cold, lack of sleep, the fidgeting or irritating habit of someone, the unsympathetic companion, the food that disagrees; the very slow or complete lack of response from public services (government, post office, etc.) are the typical situations when we can choose a deeper life with Jesus or fail by choosing the way of focusing on self and indulging our impatience, anger, our impulses to criticize and gossip. The challenge is to look upon these people with the love of Christ, to sympathize with their troubles, excuse their faults, always speak well of them and never fail willingly in charity toward them ... in thought, word or deed. This is not easy! Between God and such a person, then, there emerges a single love, one shared life. The person has been so very blessed to now live with the freedom and habit of choosing in big and small moments from an other-centered love. There is seen in their lives a profound integration of all their inner life. Christ Jesus has become their all, their deepest hope and joy, their first and last choice no matter what. So . . that is it. This is the gist of what I wanted to share with you about how my pilgrimage really is continuing, only this time in my interior! God bless. I will try to write something before Christmas, certainly before December 30 when I begin my own annual retreat. Take care. Bernie Owens