Poetry Conveys Message of Faith

Father Michael Kennedy looks out at the rows of heads bowed in prayer, the tattooed necks and drab institutional garb of Central Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles. He peers into young hearts wounded by violence and bearing charges of murder, robbery and drug-dealing. Here in these dark, treacherous places, he feels the presence of God.

And using a Christian meditation technique that is rapidly gaining followers from gang members to Hollywood celebrities, Kennedy helps these troubled youths experience God too.

At a time when some Catholic priests are under fire for sexually abusing children, Kennedy, the pastor of Dolores Mission Church in Boyle Heights, represents to his followers the many more priests who devote their lives to healing youngsters. Several times a week, he offers his personally penned meditations, which use powerful spiritual poetry to fuse contemporary street life with ancient Gospel scenes.

On Wednesdays and Sundays, he is at Juvenile Hall, guiding teenagers such as Carlos, 17, who joined a gang at the age of 11 and has been in and out of trouble for offenses including robberies, curfew violations and his current charge--attempted murder.

On Tuesdays, Kennedy leads meditations with a women’s community group in Boyle Heights, helping them cope with lives scarred by wife-beatings, drive-by shootings and other horrors. He shares his spiritual poetry with the hungry who show up in the Dolores Mission food lines, with graduate students at Loyola Marymount University and even at the recent star-studded wedding of actor Charlie Sheen.

And now, with his third meditation book, “The Jesus Meditations” (Crossroad Publishing Co., N.Y.), newly published, Kennedy’s poetic prayers are gaining national notice. They are being explored by experts in drug-abuse treatment as a healing method. In Florida, Father Len Piotrowski has started prayer groups using Kennedy’s meditations to bridge cultural differences in his diverse Catholic parish.

“I find this prayer method works with all cultures and ethnicities, because it speaks to the human heart and human experience,” said Piotrowski, pastor of St. Paul’s Church in Tampa.

The techniques are based on the 450-year-old spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, to which Kennedy belongs. The lanky, bearded priest has called them a “school of the heart” that emphasizes personal experience of God rather than intellectual knowledge. Unlike Eastern meditations, which seek to empty the mind, Kennedy invites participants to activate their imaginations, place themselves in Gospel scenes and experience God as a concrete, healing presence.

The point, he said, is an inner transformation to embrace the values of compassion, justice and mercy embodied by Jesus. After that, he said, the transformation would ideally activate a person to spread those values as a “presence of hope and comfort to people” and a countervailing force to self-aggrandizement and material excess.

“I believe union with God should be so transformative that you’re willing to go to the most difficult places to minister--to prisons, to those who don’t have a voice and live on the margins of society,” said Kennedy, 53, a Bay Area native who has devoted most of his 25 years of ministry to immigrants, farm workers, convicts and the poor in Latin America and Los Angeles.

Kennedy’s home base of Boyle Heights is one of those often neglected places. In fact, the priest said, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles gave Dolores Mission Church to the Jesuits because no one else seemed available to minister to the mostly Latino immigrant neighborhood of high crime and poverty, a place he said has been “soaked in blood.”

People like Arturo Lopez, Rita Chairez and Claudia Martinon work there with Proyecto Pastoral, a nonprofit group run out of the church that seeks to organize neighbors on such issues as education, anti-violence, leadership training and self-esteem. All use their meditations in their street work.

After gang members recently began shooting at a nearby park filled with families, traumatized neighbors packed Dolores Mission the next day as Kennedy led them in a meditation to calm their fears. When Chairez’s brother was killed in a drive-by shooting, Kennedy wrote a meditation that, she says, helped her say goodbye.

For Lopez, Kennedy’s meditation titled “Lepers” helped him cleanse his heart of resentment and pain left from years of isolation and taunting because of a childhood skin disease. Carlos, the incarcerated juvenile, said the same meditation touched him as well, because “a lot of us have been shut out by our families, and when they put us away from everyone in here, we sometimes feel like lepers.”

That meditation draws on Matthew 8:1-4, relating Jesus’ act of touching the untouchables and cleansing a leper of his disease. In sensual, poignant prose, Kennedy writes of skin burning at night, the loneliness of isolation, the hopelessness of recovery and the agonized entreaties to God to explain such sufferings. Then, the healing:

*

the loneliness the rejection

i had felt

for so long

the meaningless of life

i could see

all those wounds disappear inside

felt a warmth

flowing from jesus’ hands

healing the oozing wounds

breathing in deep

feeling strong this healing

a sensation in my whole body

of being made whole

opening my eyes

looking into the eyes

of the one

who gave me hope

*

Kennedy, who was ordained in 1977, has written hundreds of pieces reflecting on issues such as sorrow over his parents’ deaths in the mid-1990s and his 1985 detention in El Salvador, where he was shot at and arrested by police for bringing food and medical supplies to villagers in the war zones. His latest book includes a CD narrated by actor Martin Sheen, whom the priest met in the 1980s during protests over U.S. policy toward El Salvador.

On this Sunday at Juvenile Hall, Kennedy is cloaked in brilliant green vestments as he greets the somber detainees who file in, arms tucked behind their backs. He is accompanied by the detention center’s Catholic chaplain, Janne Shirley, other priests and several volunteers. Today, the priest’s theme is easing the weight of worries--an appropriate one for juveniles facing court hearings. First, Kennedy calls up several people to feel the weight of rocks in a bag as a visual aid to make the lesson more concrete.

Then a related scripture is read: Matthew 11:25-30, in which Jesus offers to give rest to all those who are “weary and heavy-laden.”

After that, Kennedy reads his meditation, alternating between the imagined voice of the Apostle Peter, pouring out his confusions and fears, and the gentle reassurances of Jesus to surrender to God’s loving presence.

Finally, several youths troop forward to the lectern to read their reflections. One girl asks that the pain her incarceration has caused her mother be lifted. Another asks for a “second chance for my family.” Still another discloses that her “deepest desire is to have my father back in my life,” even though she knows he is serving two life sentences.

Later, Carlos says the meditations he has practiced with Kennedy and other volunteers during the last year and a half have helped him open up, grow closer to God and know himself. They have also helped him escape the loneliness of incarceration by teaching him to visualize himself in a better place. And, says Shirley, the youth’s faith journey has helped him grow into positions of responsibility at Juvenile Hall.

“There’s nothing magic about this method,” Kennedy says. “It’s just a way to bring prayer to people, have a religious experience and share it. When you’re in pain, what’s going to get you through is the felt presence of God.”