Thursday, February 20, 2014

Today’s text

Matthew 5:46-48

For if you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Do not even the tax collectors do as much? And if you save your greetings for your brothers, are you doing anything exceptional? Do not even the gentiles do as much? You must therefore be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Reflection

What do you ask of us, Holy One, except that we become ourselves. And what are we, if not love?

Our true self is love, the wholehearted generosity of the One, the heavenly Father in whose image we are made.

Made in the image of Love, made by Love, made for Love, made to know and to become the Love we are.

You call us to perfection, to completion so that we may know who we are … and know you, whose image we are, whose Being we share.

This is not something beyond us, but something already within us that our fears and wounds keep us from seeing and knowing and feeling.

That is why I keep returning to this place again and again.

I come to light a candle and listen to depths of myself lost amid manifold thoughts, ideas, emotions and demands that clutter my mind each day.

I come to the quiet, to the simple light of a flame that burns not only on my desk but in me, the candle of divine presence that is my true self, the breath of being, the fire of love that appears from my depths in these moments.

And in these moments I know. I know who I am, and I know who you are, Holy One.

I know, too, the souls of everyone I meet, many of them lost in the rush of the day, the demands of life and wounds that hide their truth from them, the truth that is your truth.

They, too, are love, the breath of being; the inner flame of love is their essential nature, an awareness hidden from most of them until moments when your presence in others and in this wondrous world we share awakens their hearts to the truth.

Thank you for those moments of awareness that bring us back to ourselves. Thank you for those souls who awaken our hearts to the divine flame within. Through them, you make us more alive, more ourselves than we have ever been.

Pr. David L. Miller