An inside story

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. (Philippians 4:4-5)

Very little makes me happier than mud on my boots as I walk a trail far from the sounds of any road or highway. I prefer out of the way places … or days when rough forest trails are still wet from rain or melted snow.

I know I will be alone for most of the miles, and my mind will freely wander among mysteries I don’t understand and prayers I barely know how to speak. But I speak, nonetheless, stumbling over my thoughts, talking into the Great Silence, who sometimes speaks back in the secret room of my soul to which God alone has access.

Today, the sun momentarily breaks through a moody December sky as I rise out of the woods into a tall grass prairie. My boots sucking into the mud of a sodden trail, barely a foot wide, I walk through a dense tunnel of dry, dead grasses, taller than my head, rustling in a breeze too warm for this time of year.

And I stop … and look at the sky, realizing … I’m happy, no, something more, a quiet joy, feeling held … inside an immense embrace … by a Love who loves for me to know I’m loved, whose arms are the grasses enveloping me on every side.

This is why I come out here, to feel myself inside this Love who unleashes a fountain of joy from that secret, inner room that is God’s own.

It doesn’t happen every time. But today a great ‘yes’ erupts from the depth of my being, ‘yes’ to life, ‘yes’ to the world, ‘yes’ to the Loving Mystery who bids me to don my boots and come out here to rediscover who I am and where I live.

For I live in the embrace of a great and unimaginable Love who enfolds all time and existence … and most certainly the sodden trails of Spiers Woods on a gloomy December day.

‘Rejoice in the Lord,’ Paul writes. He doesn’t need to tell me twice. Not here. Not now. But I repeat his words, wondering if the most important word in his exhortation is the smallest … ‘in.’

Out here, I know where I am. I’m not just in the woods but in the Lord, which is to say inside the Love the Lord is, inside the creation that flows from the infinitely abundant store of God’s heart, inside the story of God’s endless machinations to awaken the souls of human beings to the Love who loves them, inside the divine drama that enfolds from the unlikely birth of a peasant child in a Bethlehem stable.

I can’t think of any place I’d rather be, but then … we are all in this place, like it or not, whether we believe it or not. The story goes on, and every human soul (and everything else) is either a willing or unwilling participant in the story of God’s infinite love for this troubled world.

The willing know how privileged they are to be included, and joy spills from their souls with shouts and songs and prayers, like the shepherds who were the first privileged to kneel in the dust at the feet of the Christ child.

Looking back on my hike, I wish I’d kneeled out there … all alone … in the mud. It was a good place to say, ‘thank you … for including me.’

I think I’ll go back soon.

David L. Miller

Songs in the night

 The Lord, your God, is in your midst; … he will rejoice over you with gladness, he will renew you in his love; he will exult over you with loud singing as on a day of festival. (Zephaniah 3:17-18a)

I’ve been singing more lately. Maybe, it’s because the darkness gathers so early … or because Christmas is near … or because I long for something I cannot give myself.

Yes, this, a lifetime of longing takes me to a chair by the window where I page through my hymnal, seeking songs my heart knows, like tonight … as a cold rain drizzles through the downspouts in the cold December darkness.

I ache to sing myself home … where the heart that I am … and the Heart who made me for himself … are one heart, one love, breathing in time, if only for a moment or two, for this … is heaven.

The longing grows stronger this time of year, or perhaps it is stronger at this time of life … when the heart finally wakes to the one thing it most needs.

Singing in the night, songs come one after another. Advent songs, Christmas songs, whispered in the dark silence of the house, my voice once strong, now a tremorous prayer for God’s great love to fill me whole, banishing every doubt and sorrow and setting my sluggish heart to flight.

Some songs I sing over and over again, night in and night out, knowing how deeply they touch me and awaken my heart to the Love who loves me.

The Spirit breathed those songs in the hearts of those so divinely privileged to make music of the soul. Through these songs, the same Spirit fans love’s flame within me, opening a door in my heart for which I have no key.

Love is the only key, the Love who loves me, the Love who sings to my soul even as I sing in the night.

We sing together, my Lord and I. We are one in the music of the night. One in love, one in Spirit, singing Love’s eternal song, my heart’s holy longing still, at rest.

No, it won’t last. Joy will slip away. The weight of the world will crush it from my heart. I will lose the melody in the midst of my moods, anxieties and contrariness. But Love’s holy song does not end or fade.

The One who sings with me in the night makes melody in every love and beauty that touches our senses to beguile our hearts. The Loving Mystery, whose face is our Lord Jesus Christ, everlastingly sings Love’s everlasting song, hoping we will hear … and sing … all the way home.

David L. Miller

Nothing much

And this is my prayer that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you determine what is best (Philippians 1:9-10a)

Nothing much happened this week. But here I am, my heart hungry for something to share, so I will share my nothing much. Perhaps it is like yours.

I saw sand hill cranes again this week. Like always, I heard their soprano trill before my eyes found them against a freezing blue sky, wondering why they had not flown south a month ago, wondering, too, how they know how to mill around until they form a huge wedge and make their way, wondering, too, where I would be in the wedge if I were a crane, not in front to be sure, but in the middle somewhere, happy just to be among friends, which I was … just watching them, grateful, too.

It was nothing much, but I gave thanks for the Maker of cranes who enchant me and gladden my heart.

Then, there was yesterday at Starbucks. A Middle Eastern boy, seven, I’d say, thick waves of jet-black hair covering his head. Holding the door for his parents to leave, I also stepped through the doorway to purchase my daily fortification. Turning back, I held out my hand in a ‘give-me-five’ fashion. His brown hand quickly slapped down on mine. ‘Thank you, young man,’ I said. He smiled and turned to his parents, and we went our ways, his mom and dad obviously and properly proud of their boy.

It wasn’t much. But standing in line to place my order, the image of his little hand smacking mine lingered, and I gave thanks, praying for that boy, hoping his parents make a few more like him. The world needs them.

Then, there are the words that pull at my heart each day when I read my Bible and pray whatever the words move in me. ‘The Lord will come to his temple,’ I read in Malachi, the prophet. At this, I see Jesus walking in the temple in Jerusalem, beckoning me to be with him. And hope fills me, for I know: He will come, just as he always comes to this heart of mine, assuring me that I belong to him and am not alone.

It's nothing much, just a moment of time, a moment of prayer no one else sees or hears, but for the time of this knowing I am changed into an image of the love I see and feel.

Or, I read ‘the word of God came to John in the wilderness,’ and immediately feel my tears, knowing that the One John promised has come … and will come … and is already here … in this strange and undeniable hope brimming within me, his Spirit breathing life and love into my morning soul.

It's not much, but I remember despairing days when I felt so little, if any of this, and I give thanks for the love of this Holy Mystery who comes to people like me in the wilderness of living … and always will … because for reasons beyond our ken … you and I, God says, are dear to me, precious in my sight.

So precious, St. Paul says, that Christ will complete the work he has begun in us … that our ‘love may overflow more and more.’ Reading this, I look across the living room where sits my beloved Dixie in the morning light in the chair where she always sits, and I get it.

This miracle of love transpires the same way it has for centuries: little by little, as the Great Love, who is more patient than time, works his magic … when it seems nothing much is happening.

A place for our eyes

‘When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified ...' Then [Jesus] said to them, ‘Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven. (Luke 21:9-11)

I wonder what ‘the burn’ looks like now. Different, I’m sure; better, I hope, for it’s been more than 40 years since I saw it. But it keeps coming to mind because of the anxious Facebook posts and news stories that greet me any time I choose to pay attention.

I saw the burn while backpacking in Rocky Mountain National Park. Our guide said he brought all his groups to this place. Slowly … and sadly, he walked us through several hundred acres of blackened pine and aspen stumps, a needless fire, the result of human carelessness.

He had an eye for destruction and a heart for the violated wilderness, but there was another place for our eyes he did not seem to notice.

It was late spring and a profusion of wildflowers and grasses covered the landscape. New shoots from seeds released in the fire had sprouted tiny trees, new growth pressing through the soil.

The whole scene was alive with life … and hope, which is exactly what I don’t read in those Facebook posts or hear in the news since the presidential election.

Fears of a dystopian future are far more common, human rights ignored and violated, immigrant and undocumented workers swept up and sent away, decimating their hopes, their families and perhaps also sectors of the U.S. economy.

More than a few gaze across the broad landscape of our society no longer recognizing the country they thought they knew … nor their churches, which they have long loved.

In so many places, the future looks dark ... or at least murky, the country riven by poisoned politics and a wide variety of ‘isms,’ racism, sexism, nationalism, globalism, isolationism, etc. etc., not to mention old-fashioned vices like greed and narcissism that erodes trust and feeds cynicism about whether things can or ever will improve.

All of this is worthy of our concern and action, but what most worries me about the darkness of our present time is its capacity to convert us.

What we attend to is what we love, St. Augustine said, and what we love we will become. It’s a variation on a well-known contemplative adage: We become what we contemplate.

Fixation on the darkness or troubles of the moment—or the era—desolates the heart so that we see little else. Imprisoned in a world of our making, we no longer have eyes to see the wildflowers that can and will grow because ‘the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and … bright wings,’ as Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in the depths of his darkness.

In his soul, I hear the soul of Christ, who did not shy from the suffering and tribulations that stain human history with blood and tears. Wars, insurrections, famines, earthquakes, plagues, all that and more will come. It’s the stuff of every age and generation. Ours is little different.

But ‘do not be terrified,’ Jesus said, words that echo through history … and certainly through the hearts of martyrs and mystics, who never lost sight of the beauty of our hope, trusting that we and this world are loved with an everlasting love.

Just keep your heart open, one of those mystics, Julian of Norwich, tells us, ‘and you shall see it.’

David L. Miller

Hey, Jimmy. Meet Herb

Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18)

My prayer began in the car, at the intersection of Maple and highway 53. But maybe that’s just when I noticed what was happening.

Jimmy Buffett sang on the radio, Remittance Man, a song I didn’t know, but know all-too well, about a wayfarer wandering from one port of call to another because he cannot return home.

The Spirit blows where it wills, Jesus once said, and the sea breezes of Jimmy’s songs are as good a place as any. And so it was, his lyrics stirred a deep longing.

I kept listening, hoping the song would offer a verse of redemption, of healing, but it was not to be. The remittance man just keeps wandering the world, round and round, ever longing, never home.

The light turned green, and I kept driving, down the hill then back up to College Drive, a left turn then another into St. Procopius Abbey for a walk on a light-deprived November day … and to pray.

I don’t think prayer is a particularly religious thing, that is to say, everyone does it, religious or not. They may or may not ever notice it, and if they do, they are likely to call it something else. But it is prayer nonetheless, the remittance man’s longing for home where lies tender absolution for whatever failures of our humanity may haunt us.

Often as not, our prayers are not bidden by us, not chosen, but are awakened in odd moments, unguarded moments, when a song, a stray word, an old hurt, a familiar face on a faded photograph, or … whatever … unveils the deep hope of our soul for which we have no name other than … home … or love … or God. Maybe they are all the same, or at least so it seems to me.

We are never far from home. The Word, the Living Flame of Love, the Wonder who is God speaks, warms and awakens tears from the deep center of our being, awaiting their moment to remind us that we bear a beauty beyond all telling, welcoming us to know ourselves as temples of the Love from whom all things come and to whom all things go.

‘I am,’ the Voice says. ‘I am the hope of your longing. I am the Love who calls you home. I am the secret center of your soul. I am the home that is now and forever, if you would but come to me and rest.

‘I am the One you cannot conceive, but whose touch you know in all that is good and love and beauty and hope, in the sweetness of joy and the silent tears of your sadness. I am, and I am here.’

Yes, and in Jimmy Buffett songs and in the gnarly briars of the Abbey Woods that snare my hair and tear at my jacket, and definitely in the six, grazing deer who greeted me in the meadow—the gentility of their steps revealing the Grace of the One who longs for my heart, their stillness a call to be still and know the Heart who is the answer to every prayer.

Bidding the deer farewell, I walked to the half-light of the chapel and sat to pray, but there was little need. I sang hymns written by my old friend Herb and his friend Carl, asking God to let them know how grateful I am for the words and music they left us when they went home a few years ago.

I suspect I will continue to sing those songs until it is my time to join them. Then, we can sing together … and Jimmy can join in.

David L. Miller

What the cranes said

Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? (Matthew 6:26)

You hear sand hill cranes before you see them. Sometimes you hear them but never see them at all because they fly so high. I heard them three or four times before I came to an opening in the forest and saw them circling just east of me.

Putting the tip of my tongue on the roof of my mouth, I blew from my throat, imitating the alto trill of their call. They ignored me. They just kept circling, round and round, going nowhere in particular, a convention of cranes, rather like church committees and assemblies that once were my lot to suffer through.

With each turn in the crystal blue of a November sky, however, more appeared, enlarging the flock from dozens to hundreds, their cries louder now, excitement building, drawn together by an ancient magnetism neither they, nor I, understand, but which tells them that their autumnal journey should not be taken alone.

And I, on my autumnal journey, am … well … jealous. I’ve always been jealous of birds, they for whom flight is like breathing, and I whose soul was meant for soaring, so often earthbound, my heart drawn to heights of love and joy by an ancient magnetism of a mysterious Something or Someone for whom the human heart longs from the very moment of birth.

I’ve been trying to name this Someone or Something all my life, hoping, finally, to make it my own, wanting to belong … fully and forever ... to the Mystery for which I most long—one with the Love who sometimes whispers to me, ‘We are one. We are one. Do not fear. We are one.’

Maybe the cranes hear this voice, too, in their own way. Their gathering, a congregation of flight, climbing higher now, making ready to embark to winter’s home, safe from the cold soon to descend on these woods.

Just as they set out, a southbound jet out of O’Hare, 25 miles north, passes by, little higher than their altitude. Ten thousand feet is nothing to them, just a nice glide path. And with that, they go, and I turn west, down a slope deeper into the woods, mostly denuded of the canopy that obscures the sun through the summer months.

Unlike the cranes, I’m alone, but smiling for reasons I don’t fully understand. My autumnal journey continues and not just in these woods. I’m 72, now, and wish I had a few more companions for my journey home, which I hope continues for a long time. I want to keep coming here to see the cranes and listen to whatever they have to tell me. They’ll pass this way again in the spring, and I know they’ll make me smile.

Maybe they are the voice of the Great Mystery—or at least one voice—telling me the truth. Do not fear. We are one, all of us together … in one great Love.

If that’s all I ever know of this Mystery, it’s enough.

David L. Miller

A weary wandering toward home

[Jesus said], ‘How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!’  (Luke 13:34)

Just one word. That’s all it took to awaken tears of bone-deep longing, as the sun struggled to break through the stone-gray gloom of an unpromising morning.

Little light penetrates these November clouds, come one day early. Nor have I much light of my own to contribute. Another source must be found.

Weariness weighs the heart, worries, yes, for a family member carrying heavier loads that I can imagine … and can do nothing to lift.

But there’s also the weariness of our times, the fear and anger, accusations and recriminations that poison the public square and make a ‘newsie’ like me want to turn it all off—the politicization of … everything, the divisions, the doom-speaking of rival parties and candidates, the word ‘fight’ that appears on the lips of all sides, telling adherents they must fight for their rights, fight for the country, fight for democracy, fight or lose your freedom, your country, your way of life, fight … and we win.

Or do we? Any victory that makes losers only perpetuates love’s destruction.

I am tired of it all, weary of it all, sick to death of the conflict, the lies, half-truths, distortions and divisions, my head sinking into the pillow with a heavy sigh these nights, hoping for rest that refreshes the heart.

Rising, I make coffee and shuffle to my chair, hoping to sink into my soul where love’s flickering flame might revive awareness of who I am and whose I am … and just who it is that holds my times, these times and all time in the palm of an ever-loving hand.

Still, I wonder: Is this feeling desolation or a strange and difficult consolation because it brings me back … and closer … to Jesus who is this love?

If desolation is the darkness of feeling far from the warming rays of divine sunlight, perhaps … this weariness is not desolation at all. Perhaps it is a share in the longing of Jesus, who births tears in my eyes with a single word, ‘gather.’

That part of my heart that beats in time with his longs with him for the pain of our splintered humanity where trust dies beneath the power of invective, yielding a harvest of hate celebrated and magnified by party spirit of all types and paraded for profit across multiple networks.

How often, how long, how much … I have wanted to gather you into a protective love where knowing, breathing, abiding and sharing this love evaporates every us-and-them into we and us.

This is the voice of Jesus in these times, in every time. And the frustrated tears of our longing to be gathered beyond the weary sorrows of our divisions is the holy consolation of knowing his heart within our own, love’s living hope refusing to die, hungry to be gathered home.

And if you’ll pardon me, the sun (truly) just found its way through the gloom to warm my window. As it always will.

David L. Miller