Our Lady of the Lights

 He will not break a bruised reed or quench a smoldering wick. (Matthew 12:20a)

Sobering memories dampen the spirit today, September 11, memories and faces.

There was the mother I met on her deck in Brooklyn a few days after the collapse of the World Trade Center towers in New York. Looking at the ash on the deck rail, she refused to disturb the dust, wondering aloud if it was her daughter.

I remember a parochial school teacher, her voice breaking as she described standing for hours at the school door, holding her student, waiting for a father who never showed up.

But more than these is the indelible image of a young woman at Union Square in lower Manhattan. She kept watch over thousands of candles as hundreds sat around her in stunned silence, staying long into the wee hours.

The memorial grew larger every night, and every night she was there when I sat among the silent and watched, transfixed by the beauty of her soul and the grieving love of those who held each other in the darkness.  

Night breezes would extinguish a few candles from time to time, and she would crawl among them, gently stretching and twisting lest she topple one of the fragile flames as she relit a smoldering wick.

She never lifted her eyes, not once that I could see. She kept watch over the lights as though they were her children, tenderly caring for each one through the night.

I never learned her name. She spoke to no one, and I didn’t dare interrupt her vigil. It would have been sacrilege to distract her from a work so holy.

When I wrote my story I called her Our Lady of the Lights, the Madonna of Manhattan.

Sitting there, we were all her children, the light of her love holding us all together, warming us in the night.

I wonder where she is today. I wonder if she ever really knew the beauty of what she did ... or how grateful at least one of us is 20 years later.

But I doubt I’m the only one.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 

 

Love has us all

 

But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. (Luke 6:35)

Nothing is less realistic than imagining you can work up pleasant thoughts about those who hurt or belittled you. We carry a thousand wounds from childhood and whenever we have been injured along the way, typically trying to push them aside as we age as if that were possible.

Ignore them as we may, they remain in wounded corners of the psyche, appearing at unpredictable times to remind us that there is work left undone.

Take a long walk away from the noise of traffic, construction down the street, a plane overhead, the music of a familiar voice calling you to necessities of the day. Soon enough, the mind becomes a quiet pool from whose depths  memories appear, words you wish you’d never heard, a disparaging glance, slights large and small that still cut from decades past.

No act of will can make them disappear, and the self-righteous ego rails against the hurt, conjuring reprisals to hurl against the ghosts that haunt your wounded heart. Or maybe that’s just me.

But I doubt it.

The necessary work is that of forgiveness, which is a really an invitation to ride the wave of a very great love, letting it pick you up and carry you along until it breaks on the rocks, splashing over the wounded places in your heart and the wounding faces you have long carried.

Maybe then you can see them as they are, every one of them as imperfect as yourself and as needy. And as loved, by the Love who is that wave longing to lift us from old hurts into the freedom to let it go, knowing ... Love has us all, every last one of us.

It the only healing.

David L. Miller

 

One of the crowd

And [Jesus] came down with them and stood on a stretch of level ground. A great crowd of his disciples and a large number of the people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon came to hear him and to be healed of their diseases (Luke 6:17-18a)

You don’t really understand this scene until you imagine yourself amid the crowd, craving Jesus’ touch, knowing you have needs you cannot meet.

It is better to speak of need instead of needs, however. What niggles deeply within is the hunger to feel truly and wonderfully alive, to be lifted beyond the sadness of our mortality and be touched by something, by someone who fills our being with a life that transcends the life we are living.

This is why they clamored after Jesus. They craved the mysterious something that was in him, aching to feel and know it within themselves. Surely, they suffered diseases and maladies of all sorts, but beneath these was the gift and burden of their humanity crying out for food that satisfies the hunger they could not name.

Our humanity begins to die within us when this desire is lost to the despair of believing there is nothing more to life than getting the best we can out of the years we have.

They are my brothers and my sisters, these souls who crowded near Jesus, who hungered to touch him, who wanted him to hear their voices and turn and see them and reach out his hand.

When you feel this, when you see that hand reaching out and pulling you into an embrace, it is then you understand what words cannot convey. You know the heart of the One who is the heart of God for whom your heart hungers.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

The final freedom

 

September 6, 2021

On another sabbath  [Jesus]entered the synagogue and taught, and there was a man there whose right hand was withered. The scribes and the Pharisees watched him to see whether he would cure on the sabbath, so that they might find an accusation against him. (Luke 6:6-7)

It is Jesus’ freedom that most impresses me and which I most want. Opponents watch his every move, seeking opportunities to pounce, but Jesus is marvelously free from all this.

Neither the judgments of opponents nor the approval of friends define or determine his actions. He acts according to inner impulse, living out the identity he is within, undeterred by those who denounce him.

What defines him, of course, is the oneness he shares with the Loving Mystery with whom his heart communes. He is like all the rest of us in this regard. Only in communion with a great love do we know and find freedom to be the soul we are.

I find myself in a unique position, different from any I have known in my 69 years. Many things that defined me are gone ... and gone for good—professional standing, role, place and position, along with whatever privileges and respect they afforded.

What is left, however, is greater than what was before, an opportunity to enter the final freedom found only as one releases the external supports the insecure heart uses to give itself significance, an opportunity to allow my heart to rest in God alone.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 

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