Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Today’s text

1 John 3:1

You must see what great love the Father has lavished on us by letting us be called God's children -- which is what we are! The reason why the world does not acknowledge us is that it did not acknowledge him.

Reflection

Do I want to be known, or is it too frightening? For too long I have hidden that which I am. For decades I have been afraid to reveal this inner heart where I am filled and overwhelmed by your great divine heart.

I hide the hunger and the struggle to know the fullness of Love you are, to live beyond every anxiety, loving with the love you are.

I hide my heart, waiting for moments when I know the person in the other chair, the people to whom I am speaking might accept me or have a glimmer of understanding of what moves me.

I do not fear misunderstanding so much as dismissal and rejection. I want to be taken seriously, but what is taken most seriously in this world is that which can be counted: money, the score of recent games, concrete things that seem real because they can be seen and handled and make a practical difference in the nuts and bolts of daily existence.

But what of this inner awareness of grace and love; what of the hunger to know oneself resting in Love Unlimited; what of the experience of abiding … of feeling one’s heart enveloped in that Eternal Mystery, the Uncreated Love you intuitively know is your Source, your Home, your sweetest and truest desire?

What of the fulfillment and joy you find in that inner space where nothing separates your heart and that great Mysterious Heart? How does one speak of this reality, which is the most important truth of your and all life? It cannot be described except in vague, vaporous terms that appear to have no concrete reference the rest of the world understands?

Is it possible to describe such truth without sounding, well, like a flake?

For it sounds flaky even in the ears of the conventionally religious for whom God is something ‘out there’ to believe in, not this wind of Love that blows everywhere, even through the cobwebs of your own soul.

The world cannot acknowledge the wonder of Love Unlimited because it did not see and touch, feel and know Love Incarnate, the wonder of the mind of God in human form, in you, my brother, Jesus.

Did you fear their rejection and failure to see? It is hard to imagine that, yet there were moments at the end of your life when you prayed to be delivered from the suffering wrought by those who neither understood nor cared to do so.

Still, you went forward, knowing what you knew, being the soul you are, living from the depths of the Loving Mystery who filled you, and they destroyed you … or tried.

I have not been this brave, or should I say this filled with the One who is Love so that others’ opinions and actions no longer mattered?

But there are moments when this is true. There are moments when nothing else matters but knowing the One who is Love Unbounded--knowing that, like you, I am beloved of God from all eternity.

May I know such moments today and be the soul you call me to be, beyond every fear that hems in my heart.

Pr. David L. Miller