Dear Friends, It is Friday morning here, July 21, and a little chilly which is normal for here at this time of the year. We are in the Southern Hemisphere, just barely (50 miles south of the equator), but also up in the mountains, 6000 feet up. It won';t warm up for us until the middle or late part of August. All things in time I guess!............................................................................................... I am prompted to write by two recent events. One is a conversation I had yesterday with a retreatant I am presently guiding. The other is what happened to me this morning during and right after the Eucharist while pondering the first of the two scripture readings..................................................... The conversation was with a woman missionary to South Sudan. She is a member of the Comboni missionaries, men and women who trace their origins to the 19th century founder, Daniel Comboni, already a canonized saint (If you knew his life story you would see why he has been singled out as such an outstanding follower of Jesus). The retreatant is in her early to mid 50s, a woman from Costa Rica. She has been serving the very poor of that war torn nation for quite some years, and after a 6 month leave to care for her 90 year old mother and 91 year old father back in Costa Rica, she is returning to South Sudan because she sensed in her prayer God calling her to continue serving these wretched people of South Sudan. What impresses me so from our conversation yesterday is her describing the chaos these people live in while the two main tribes of that nation war against each other; almost everyone, private citizens too, have guns. There are so many murders and no arrests. The poverty is grinding, homes are often robbed, sometimes even burned down along with crops. Life stinks in so many ways for these people who are powerless to stop the fighting and build a nation. I asked her whether the people ever ask why you choose to live with them and not some other safer, nicer place on earth. She said, "yes, they do but usually indirectly. They watch us closely, she says, to see over time whether we are who we appear to be. In time they will ask why we sisters stay with them in such hellish conditions. We stand out so glaringly with our white or olive skin among people whose skin is very, very black, thanks to the especially hot sun in that part of Africa." Then this nun said what really touched me. She said she has been told by these Sudanese people that the sisters staying with them in their terribly difficult living circumstances make God's love for them believable; they can see that God cares about them and is with them in their plight. In time these people give names to these missionaries. The name she has been given is "daughter of God." ........................................................................................................ The story of this retreatant reminds me of the four American women (three nuns and one laywoman) who went in the 1970s as apostles from the Cleveland diocese to be with the rural poor of El Salvador during the deadly civil war that was going on in that nation. Their letters to family and friends back in Ohio told of how there was no hope for these simple people to better their living circumstances but saw the meaning of their mission to be one of being companions with them while in a very difficult situation, encouraging them while these poor tried to raise their families and assure their safety while in the midst of so much war and bloodshed. It was, as these four missionaries described it, a ministry of accompaniment. Perhaps you know who are these four women I am talking about. On December 2 of 1980 they were raped by government soldiers and then murdered. .............................................................................................................At mass this morning, which I led for the community, we heard for the first reading the instructions to the Israelites, trapped in Egypt as slaves of Pharoah, of how to celebrate a meal with a roasted lamb. This would forecast what God would soon do for them; It would be called their Passover meal that celebrates their liberation from their enslaved state in a foreign land. Blood from the lamb would be smeared on the doorways of their homes as a protection from God's angel while it would strike down the oppressors but spare (pass over) them. Of course, this passage is loaded with symbols that find their fulfillment in the death of Jesus and especially in the shedding of His blood and how the Eucharist is our Passover meal. The more we wake up to our need for God, how caught we all are to some degree by our enslaving tendencies or attachments, we also wake up to the DESIRE for a freedom we don't have, to live a life with greater integrity and meaning, to give ourselves to something really worthwhile. And so, with faith in the love God has for us, when we wake up to that awesome fact, we then especially appreciate the blood of Him that was shed so that we could pass over from self-centered living to living a life that is really worthwhile and a DESIRING to give of ourselves back to the God who in Jesus shed His blood for us......................................................................................................................................................... I really got hit this morning with this awareness. I am at times overwhelmed with the depth of God's love, not just for myself but for you too and everyone for that matter, even for the most harden, uncaring, and self-entered of us--Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, aboriginies, etc. Everyone from the beginning of time. Nothing is more powerful, nothing more meaningful. NOTHING! This is the only power than can overcome death and in the end it blesses us with the gift of being able to pass over from this troubled world into the Infinity of God's new world and the family He is creating and wants us to be part of forever. In the meantime there are walking among us people who are pouring out their own blood for their spouses, their children, their suffering parents and relatives and neighbors, fellow parishioners, even their enemies, the wretches of South Sudan too--saints among us even though they are not aware of being so. ..................................................................................................... The next time we drink from the chalice hopefully we will catch in that action the allusion to how a marriage proposal was done in Jesus's culture. A man and woman would give their 'yes' and seal their life-long commitment to each other when they both drank from a cup of wine that had been poured out by the father of the future groom. Jesus on the last night of His life gave us Himself as blood, inviting us to drink from the cup and say our personal 'yes' to a relationship that is more profound than any other relationship on this earth could be. He poured out His blood literally, the following day. He is inviting you and me to grow into a similar sense of generosity, to say a 'yes' with the same depth: pouring out our selves completely as He did for us. Yes, it will take a lifetime to do such but what matters is the DESIRE to do so and each day to live with the hope that in God's timing we will each be given the generosity to make this same kind of gesture back to Him, with boundless gratitude and infinite love. Bernie Owens