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.
