April 2, 2013

Today’s text

John 20:18-20

In the evening of that same day, the first day of the week, the doors were closed in the room where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews. Jesus came and stood among them. He said to them, 'Peace be with you,' and, after saying this, he showed them his hands and his side. 

 Reflection

You are our peace: You, not ideas, facts or theories about you, but you.

So come behind the closed doors of our hearts where secret fears, pains and longings fester. Come and speak the word I long to hear: Peace.

You need not say a thing. Just come behind the wall of our faces into the secret domain of ourselves where we so desperately need to feel a love that fills every space and casts out the emptiness of ourselves.

All you need to do is stand there and let me see and feel you.

I will know it is you because everything else will go away, every fear of the thoughts of others, every unfulfilled longing, every feeling of being lost or alone, every need for anything other than just to be … with you.

Peace abides when I know your presence holding me from within. This goes beyond love.

For you do not love me as an object, from the outside looking at me, taking mercy on me in my fallen and confused state. You love me from within my very self, your love filling the infinite emptiness of soul that craves and yearns and hungers.

Nothing else can satisfy me. So come.

I do not know how you come into me, where the secret passage way is. If I did, I would run there now and throw open the door. Or is being here … in the silence … opening enough?

But it seems you need no door or secret pathways. You make your own way. You do not need my help. You move through walls as if they were not there, including mine.

It just happens, and I trust that it will again. Sunday, a small girl ran to me, lifted her arms and insisted on being held. She buried herself in my chest. It wasn’t quick. She clung, holding fast, not in fear or in pain craving comfort. She folded herself into me so that we were one, not two.

For a moment everything went away. Everything. Nothing existed except the moment, the loving, the freedom from every troubling thought.

There was peace. I needed and wanted nothing. My thoughts did not wander. I was aware of only this moment.

It seems silly to ask, but was that you, or just a little girl?

I have often said that you are in everything, working to fill creation with the love you are. When that filling comes to us, so does peace, and it was peace I knew in that moment with her head buried in my chest.

So, please, today, can you do that again?

Give me the peace of the love that folds itself into my soul and chases away everything else. You are my peace.

Pr. David L. Miller