Dear Friends, It is with heavy heart that I tell you I have lost what I spent two hours typing for you this evening! Google is doing something to blogsites, something I do not understand. I cannot account for what I did or did not do to lose everything! How terribly frustrating. It makes a great difference to tell friends what is going on in my life here and to let you share in some of its blessings. Google says these changes are to make everything safer and easier. I really wonder!! Anyway, I will try again in one or two weeks to post ano. I was telling you in this letter I lost about the monkeys returning and the great outdoor swim I had this afternoon and the beauty and fun of the ordination liturgy a week ago at a cathedral for 1500 people! I don't have the time to type it out again! Sorry.

Dear Friends, Sunday dinner time, Valentine's Day, here in Nairobi. We have had a day of beautiful weather, 80 degrees, low humidity, wonderfully sunny, and I took advantage of it all and went for an outdoor swim at a pool surrounded by palm trees, 50 feet high yucca plants in bloom, cactus plants probably 40 feet high, and then the ever present bougen-via (spelling?) bushes in bloom, these with fucia colored petals gracing the area. I swam my laps for about 20-25 minutes and then sat at the edge of the pool so I could soak in the sun on my back. It is like July here, the middle of summer, and a great time to relax. I needed this after some really busy days this past week, fruitful in ministry, including this morning. I came home and could not stay awake, so after lunch I napped for 90 minutes and then went for the swim. What a way to relax on the Sabbath! And yes, the monkeys are back, two of them roaming our grounds, trying to get into our mango grove and anticipate the ripening of our bananas in the big grove of trees we have. They are good size monkeys, with a white fur ring around their faces along with an otherwise black or dark grey coat and long tails. They are cute, even beautiful to see . . . until they succeed in stealing some of our fruit!! They are so coy, keeping their distance, climbing trees to get away and waiting there for you to tire of chasing them and walk away. It is very important that we lock our windows and doors if we have food in our rooms. They will try to break into our dining areas, here at our Jesuit community and then too in that of the retreat center, if they smell bananas and/or bread from inside. They are fun until they succeed in getting inside and making a mess of the dining area, with banana peels here and bread wrappings there. Last Wednesday night and then during most of the day of Thursday we had rain storms and lightning here that were of major size and force. One lightning bolt struck a transformer on a pole on our property and set it on fire. We lost power twice during this 36 hours. I was walking our cloister corridor, a canopied walk of more than 100 yards long--just wonderful where I can walk even during the worst of weather. I do that when praying a rosary or the chaplet. Around 3 PM on Thursday, during a downpour of almost monsoon proportions the lightning bolt hit. There was no gap between the flash and the sound. I really jumped, got scared, and got back to my room as soon as possible. I thought it much too risky to keep walking at that time in the cloistered corridor. Last weekend I went to the ordination to the priesthood of a young man I had led through his 30-day retreat a year and a half ago. Lawrence Otieno is his name. Three other diocesan seminarians were ordained priests with him and one other diocesan seminarian was ordained a deacon. What a joyous moment it was: at this recently built cathedral that holds about 1,500 people in a pentagon-shaped building. The singing and the dancing were just superb. Even though 15 Jesuits, four of them former students of mine, were being ordained deacons at just about the same time at the seminary on Nairobi, I felt I really owed it to this man who I greatly admire to come and celebrate him. I am very glad I did. There was not one cloud in the sky most of the day. The cathedral was jammed, from wall to wall, with about 1,500 people and then some people even standing outside the church building. The girls and boys who led the dancing and singing were like young folk (10 years old or so) at a jazzer-size class for the really physically fit. I got "winded" just watching them dance in the aisles, and then all so coordinated. It was obvious that they had practiced for this special occasion. At the start of the three readings an adult male with a turban on his head and dressed in very colorful costume, came running up the center aisle while beating a small drum to call our attention to the coming of God's Word soon to be proclaimed. Then behind him came two men carrying, one in the front and one in the back, a canopied ark of the covenant, except instead of stone tablets it was the lectionary, the book of bible readings for the liturgy of the Word. What an elegant and creative way to honor the Word of God and to get the attention of the congregation toward that special moment or time during the whole ceremony. In the meantime I was one of about 80 priests gathered up in the sanctuary of the cathedral. Once the bishop lays his hands on the heads of these men being ordained and says the words of ordination, then every priest is invited to come in a line and lay his hands on the head of each of the newly ordained. It is all done in silence. Quite impressive but rather long for 80 priests to do this! The poor heads of these four men just ordained!!! During the liturgy there was a choir, probably 100 members, a majority of them women, leading us in our singing. The energy that they showed was something else. And the organ, an electric one, sounded fairly close to a pipe organ--pretty good! Much better than the usual keyboard one hears in most parishes here. What is so characteristic of the liturgies, especially of the music at masses, is how the participants, choir members and those in the pews, move their bodies with the rhythm of the music. They love a 1,2, 1,2 beat, and then to clap their hands to that beat, to sway their bodies and to have drums accompanying all the singing. You cannot sit nor stand still. You really stick out if you do stand motionless and not clap. How different from white cultures and their style of worship. While the music and dancing were remarkable, what was not pleasant was the introductions at the end of the mass of about half of the 80 priests in teh sanctuary. Why this has to be done, I do not know. but it went on and on for over a half hour. It made the entire ceremony, from beginning to end, last four (yes, 4!!) hours and fifteen minutes. That is unforgivable. I have learned not to drink much before these mara

Dear Friends, In three hours I have lost two letters I spent so much time typing for you. It is late here, I need to go to bed, and I will try in another week or two to write you another letter, hoping to God it does not suddenly disappear from the screen, which is what might happen to this before I finish!!!!! Bernie owens

Friends,' It is almost a month since I last wrote. As you probably surmise, I have been super busy. This evening ended a heavy teaching schedule in five different programs, three here at the retreat center and two at the seminary. Teaching in the areas of spirituality and theology gives me a lot of life, but at the same time it takes a "lot of gas in my tank," lots of preparation and xeroxing of handouts to provide a quality learning experience. So here I am wanting to visit with you on this Friday evening when all of this is finally behind me. I now have a ten-day open space on my calendar till the next set of retreatants comes here for their 8-day retreats (the evening of 2/16). I plan to use this very rare opening on our calendar to work on my fund-raising efforts, to set up events back in the Detroit area for May and June (I return to the USA on April 22) and to seek out foundations for possible grants to the project I have chosen to lead. (I have accomplished 27% of our goal to this date. Please God, help me/us to wrap up this effort in the next year or two. I want to start writing my next book and cannot get momentum in doing that until this more immediate need is met! Writing a book takes a terrible amount of time for isolation and extended hours day after day to make any progress and to be inspired as you go along in the writing! I am certainly not lacking the desire to accomplish this.) I intend to use some of this time to promote my book that is almost a y er old among Faith Formation leaders in certain parishes in the diocese of Detroit. If a diocese can adopt it as a main source for ongoing faith formation, then I think the sales of the book will really take off in the USA. The word will get out that it is a fine source to help people go deeper in their lives with God. Some of you have expressed concern for me about whether jihadist violence is nearby or on my/our mind that much. I would say definitely not. If bombings were to occur anywhere near here, it would be in the city where lots of people congregate, like in a mall. Our retreat center is at the far western end of the metro area of 4-5 million people, and we are at the end of a dirt, rocky road that would not appeal to saboteurs/jihadists. If anything, we are more prone to robberies, and that I sense is rather remote. Yes, I lock my door every night, the windows too. And I sleep quite well. There is a certain point when you simply surrender to God your situation and trust in His protection through His angels. Yes, I do believe in angels and pray every morning to Michael and all of God's angels to protect me and this place, to also guide me in my fund-raising efforts. Three weeks ago the Kenyan army camp, stationed inside neighboring Somalia, was attacked at 4 o'clock in the morning by Al Shabaab jihadists with enormous car bombs, three of them. The cars or jeeps rammed through the main gate of the compound, literally blew it up and open and were followed by suicide foot-soldiers firing at any soldier of the Kenyans. It was a disaster for the Kenyans. So many soldiers were killed. The Kenyan government has yet to admit in public how many of our soldiers were killed. It is suspected that it was about 200. The camp has since been abandoned and the Kenyans are setting up a new camp in a nearby area. There is talk that the jihadist rebels are gaining strength. American drones do take out some of their leaders, but drones by themselves are not enough to make the difference in a military campaign. The Kenyans need to be much better coordinated and equipped. This nation is only 53 years old; it is still so young and not yet developed that much. There is so much poverty here, unemployment, behavior that is criminal(family abuse, incest, prostitution, alcoholism that sometimes leads to blindness, robberies, illegal land purchasing, etc) reflecting hopelessness and economic lifelessness, (few markets outside Africa!) And yet some wonderful, courageous things are going on through great institutions of schools, orphanages, hospitals, medical dispensaries in villages and in "the bush". It is the leaders of these signs of hope that want to come here for their annual 8 days of retreat, of quiet, so that they can regain spiritual and bodily energy to go back to their commitments. Yes, we are their oasis, their place for getting re-energized. I continue to feel the power and depth of my three weeks in Italy last November, especially from the two weeks of it on pilgrimage. God strongly touched me while there, as I said in my previous letter, especially at the Carmelite monastery in Florence and then through the biography of the 22 year old nun whose body is preserved miraculously at that monastery. She (St. Teresa Margaret of the Sacred Heart of Jesus) died in 1770, six years before the American Declaration of Independence. I spent the month after coming home from Italy reading closely the passages in her biography that had so moved me in the previous reading from months ago. I have a strong sense at various times that God many times "touches through" the veil that covers our mode of existence and impresses on us closely His choicest gifts, especially His own personal love for us, a love that is so sweet to the soul. From "the other side of that veil" He guides us, leads us, blesses us, gives us hints--sometimes really strong--of the life that is awaiting us all once we pass over. If we pay attention His presence will significantly impact us, stirring those deeper desires and thirsts of the soul, and sometimes these thirsts become so active, so strong that you are in His grip, so to speak, and marked deeply in your soul with an unforgettable knowledge and understanding of this inner life of the Holy Spirit stirring inside us all. "Taste and see the goodness of the Lord," as the psalmist says. This life wells up from our depths and comes out in joy and in our tears at certain times. We sense we have been touched by Divinity, and our spirit cannot forget such encounters. We long for the fullness of it all. For this we have been made, and our life is a journey to this communion that will never end nor be taken away from us. Tomorrow morning I will go to the ordination to the priesthood of a young man I led through a 30 day retreat a year and a half ago. Lawrence Otieno is his name (Otieno means you were born in the morning hours.) He will make a fantastic priest. What a good soul he is! His first assignment will be to serve in Cameroon, in western Africa, about 2000 miles west of here, in some very poor, even primitive villages. He spent some time there before he did his theology studies in Nairobi and spoke glowingly of feeling so close to God through these people who live at the edge and throw all their hope on and put their trust in God. Lawrence's father died about two weeks ago. His father was so ill and weak, bed-ridden I think, that there was no hope of his coming to tomorrow's celebration. I said to Lawrence, "God has now made it possible for your father to come to your ordination and to rejoice with you at the beginning of your life as a priest. Your father is free now and will be there to pray with you and thank God for your calling and for sustaining you." Anytime I go to an ordination, I spend some time just looking at the parents of the ones being ordained. I can never get over what an honor it is, what a blessing it must be on the marriage of the parents to see one of their children be called to such a life and make it through the long training. I will never forget my own parents and their joy shared with me on the day, nearly 44 years ago, when I was ordained (6/10/72). My God, 44 years ago! I am an old man! But I don't feel old at all. I have never been as busy or engaged as I am now, at least as much as I was when I lived in the States. (You know, it does not matter where one lives once you have discovered this greatest of friendships, the closeness and richness of Christ and His Abba, who is our Abba. This is the pearl of great price worth selling everything in order to own. Once this happens to a person, so much of what one thought important before becomes as nothing, even a liability and distraction. I need to go to bed. It is 9:45 PM here now. Tomorrow I will wear my black clerical suit for this wonderful occasion, probably the fourth time in my nearly 2.5 years here in Kenya when I will have done so. Clerics among Jesuits here in Kenya are even more rare than they are among Jesuits in the USA. Some traditional Catholics don't know what to do with us! I will say that in some cases certain Jesuits don't know what to do with other Jesuits! We are a "different breed" in a number of ways! I love being one of them! Bernie Owens

Dear Friends, Happy New Year to each and all of you. I notice how all the paragraphs that I had separated in my last two letters were eliminated and all of the text of my letters was jammed together. That is not pleasant to read!! I am very sorry for that. I wonder whether separating each paragraph by two spaces rather than just one might solve the problem. I am going to experiment with that. So . . . my retreat concluded last Friday afternoon and now on this Monday we are back into the routine of daily work, no more partying, with all the Christmas decorations put away. So be it. First, thanks to any and all of you who prayed for me during retreat. It was challenging and in a number of ways very up and down for the first five days, then better for the next three and finally truly wonderful in the last two days. Part of the challenge was in trying to follow to the letter the directions of the author of a book for a 10-day Contemplative Retreat. While his (Fr. Franz Jalics) teachings are wonderful, I found it trying to use his detailed directions about how to hold your hands, what to focus on, and what mantra to use. It became just too complicated for me. I needed something more simple and once I went back to the way I pray contemplatively, everything smoothed out. But his teachings are superb, very clarifying, very helpful. I wish he had been here with me so that I could have talked with him during the retreat. Maybe he would have thrown me out of his group. But I did experience a lot of discouragement during most of the retreat, ups and downs in my moods, temptations, and generally having to trust, trust, trust, finally to trust my own experience and go with that. And that is when the great calm settled in and with it a wonderful sense of the presence of the risen Jesus during my meditations. One very important dimension that accompanied all of this was my realizing the gift of some very special friendships in my life, men and women who are so important to me, and then one new one who has recently come into my life. So much of the measure of what makes for such friends is the level of conversation we have had together, the sharings around prime values and relationship issues. Who is God, what do you still hope to do and experience before you die, what has made you suffer (e.g., divorce, death of a child, letting go in a relationship, childhood traumas, etc.) and what has made you laugh and feel loved and cared about: when I find people who are able and willing to talk about such topics like this, they become rare treasures and I truly experience God in them and with them. Such people are priceless for me. As I said in my book, friendship is often called the eight sacrament in the church's life, that is, in the life of God's people. All of this came up strongly on the first day of my retreat and again on the last day. So yes, I had some challenges, but it was all quite graced. I am blessed. Again, thanks for your prayers. On the first day I had an awareness of each of these friends represented by a flame of fire, a small, gentle flame, all of them together forming something like a circle. I could not help but associate this with Pentecost and also to recall the opening lines of John of the Cross' famous poem, "The Living Flame of Love". It goes like this: "Oh living flame of love (which refers to God's Holy Spirit) that so tenderly wounds my soul" and I added to his words ". . . with Your love . . ." I kept repeating this with much inner satisfaction. And then for the newest friend there was this one lone flame waiting to be brought in or invited into the circle. All of this began with my recognizing this flame of love flickering in my own depths and moving me to a new richness in my life. I am reminded of what has been stirring in me when in the last month I read closely a biography of the 18th century Carmelite nun, St. Teresa Margaret of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and how overwhelming was the longing in her to love God totally and each of her fellow sisters in her cloistered community. Reading that biography really, really grabbed my spirit, so powerful are the descriptions of the spiritual energy stirring in that young woman in her longings to give everything of herself to God, and that her deepest pain was that she could not find in herself a love adequate to the response of love God deserves. For her she keenly felt that God deserves the whole world, the whole cosmos, and then infinitely more, and this pain of not being able to give such to Him consumed her. Her spiritual director is quoted to have said that he believed her spiritual intensity was more responsible for her death at such a young age than the peritonitis that was the physical cause of her death. God has so strongly claimed her from her early childhood, so entered into the depths of her being and let her intuit something of the overwhelming goodness and beauty of God that she was "burned up" by it all. the intensity of it all in a sense killed her. The retreat also prompted me to take 15-20 minutes toward the end of each day and join the retreatants in their time of silence (8:00-8:30 PM) before the Blessed Sacrament exposed when all in the chapel sit in silence before Him and are quiet there--no songs, no common prayers, just BE. It is really something to have a chapel of 50-60 people and no one is talking or singing but each and all are completely focused on Him, in that sacrament mounted in a monstrance on the altar. On Wednesday I start my new course with the seminarians. Each Wednesday morning I will be traveling into the seminary to lead this course(9 miles from here; it takes usually 1 hour and 5 minutes to make that trip, so bad is the morning commute traffic! But this is when I had seen a big family of baboons along side the road coming back from raiding someone's garden!!). The course's title is: "The Humility and Foolishness of God." The students will be reading sayings of Francis of Assisi, the writings of St. Bonaventure, some material from Teilhard de Chardin, and then they will read a small book entitled "The Tears of God." The overall thesis of the course is that God has humbly extended himself to us so much, has bent down in tender care as a parent would to a struggling child but has been so abused in Jesus and ignored by so many of the people He loves that God has been called a fool for still choosing to be with us and to love us to the end. I will have nine Africans and one Ukrainian for my students. We should have some really good conversations. I am hoping this course will greatly expand their appreciation of who God is and what God's love is like that it will greatly impact their personal prayer and their preaching. On the next to last day of my retreat I relaxed by bringing rabbit compost and bone meal to my roses to jazz them up again. Right now the roses are looking glorious, with many blossoms of various colors, and some rising up 7 feet. But it has been about five months since I last "fed" them and the time is about now to reinforce that organic power that produces such color and shape and makes everyone walking by to marvel. I love it! I tell my retreatants at times: "this is reality, mixing it up with rabbit poop." They wince and I laugh!! I keep getting strong inspirations for a second book. I keep collecting notes for it. More and more I feel pretty sure about the title of the book: in the upper part would be these words: "If Only You Knew the Gift of God" and then in the lower part of the book these words: "From Habits of Control To Letting God Lead" Anybody want to buy it??? So it is time to wrap up this letter. God bless and thanks to those of you who express your appreciation for this blogsite. It motivates me to keep writing. Goodnite! Bernie Owens

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