Thursday, October 2, 2008

Today’s text

Philippians 3:7-11

But what were once my assets I now through Christ Jesus count as losses. Yes, I will go further: because of the supreme advantage of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, I count everything else as loss. For him I have accepted the loss of all other things, and look on them all as filth if only I can gain Christ and be given a place in him, with the uprightness I have gained not from the Law, but through faith in Christ, an uprightness from God, based on faith, that I may come to know him and the power of his resurrection, and partake of his sufferings by being molded to the pattern of his death, striving towards the goal of resurrection from the dead.

Reflection

Your world is distraction, my Lord, and your church, your people. It is in the silence of this room that I most know you. In the silence I meet you, O Great and Holy Silence, abiding, waiting, here, always.

It is in this silence that my soul slows and my eyes open. Here I learn to walk slowly, and the pressure to react to a million bombarding stimuli falls away. My soul quiets, and the mind calms.

Then only am I fit for the day, able to be with others, abiding with them in peace, no longer driven by internal frustrations or the demands of others. Then only am I prepared to be human, for I have been with you in the silence where I know your abiding.

Failing this, I lose you--and me, and I am unfit for human contact.

So I come here, counting everything as loss, as garbage, next to what I know here. For I know you here, and that other anxious self dies as I hear you, Great Silence, in the quiet of an abiding love.

May the noise and fury of the days not distract me from you or cause me to lose what you give me here. For you give me your own self. The life of you who are Life grows, emerging from the soil of my soul that I may be the self you are in me.

Rising again and again, until all of me is raised from the dead, and death itself is gone.

Pr. David L. Miller