Finding peace

 Whatever house you enter, first say, “Peace to this house!” And if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person; but if not, it will return to you. (Luke 10:5-6)

Emud shouted in my direction as he stumbled up the steps to his front door, juggling a package in one arm and his two-year old daughter in the other. I didn’t understand him but thought I heard the Arabic word for peace, salaam, through his accent.

“Peace to you,” I shouted back, and he smiled. I’d misunderstood him.

He was trying to tell me his wife had given birth to their third child. A son had joined his two gorgeous little girls who grace the world just by walking across the lawn ... and picking my flowers.

Emud beamed, juggled the black-haired angel in his arms and went into the house. I returned to the dirt in my flowerbed, feeling something I wish I could switch on anytime I needed it.

Peace.

Today is one of those days I wish I had that switch. But maybe I do. Maybe we all do.

Maybe it is as simple as savoring the beauty of children. Maybe it is misunderstanding your neighbor and giving him and yourself exactly what we all most need, a taste of what the entire world needs.

Maybe it is writing these simple, utterly inadequate words and realizing for the umpteenth time that the world is filled with glory and that glory is the Love who arises within us whenever we share a joy or a sorrow and exchange a single word, peace.

I remember when “sharing the peace” was introduced ... or reintroduced ... into Christian liturgies after centuries of its absence. Some found it intrusive, an interruption of their prayer and contemplation.

Loving time for silence, I understand this, but for me it is a sacrament of Love’s living presence, a joyous celebration of giving each other what we cannot give ourselves.

The blessed irony of peace is that the moment you give it away you find it in yourself—and learn how to live with your neighbor in this crazy world.

I hope I see Emud again today. I know exactly what I’ll say. “Peace to you, Emud. I look forward to seeing your son.”

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trust Love alone

When the days drew near for [Jesus] to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. (Luke 9:51)

The spiritual journey inevitably takes one from what is known to a new country, to ways and places where the joys and comforts of what was must be abandoned.

One can try to hold on, crossing back into old ways in a vain attempt to revive past graces, but they lose their savor. The place you knew and which knew you moves on. The tired cliché is correct: You can’t go home again ... because the home that was is no longer there. Everything changes and so do you.

The road is our home, the road ahead. The Spirit of Life always leads beyond what we have known and cherished to deeper truth and more difficult ways that the heart might surrender its rickety justifications and defenses and learn to trust Love alone.

Biblical stories echo this journey.

The ancient patriarch, Abraham, leaves home with Sarah, his wife, looking for a new land and a new life, somehow trusting the Lord will show him the place when the time is right.

The captive Israelites escape Egyptian bondage and wander homeless, seeking the land God promised yet constantly looking over their shoulders, wondering if they should have stayed in Egypt.

Now, Jesus leaves the lake and villages of Galilee to climb steeper hills in Samaria on his way to Jerusalem. Determination lines his face as he is resolute to complete his mission, likely aware he will die painfully in the process.

He could have stayed safely home in Galilee. Abraham could have remained in the old country. The Israelites could have stayed in Egypt and avoided the blistering heat and deprivation of the desert.

But they didn’t. They trusted the Mystery who spoke in their hearts was a great and unconquerable Love leading them and everyone with them home to a country more alive and beautiful than any they had ever known.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wilhelm’s eyes

For your steadfast love is before my eyes, and I walk in faithfulness to you. (Psalm 26:3)

Rest well, old man. Rest in the Love I saw in your eyes.

Wilhelm Linss passed into the eternal love I knew in him on a sunny Saturday morning. That’s when I heard the news that I knew would soon come, regretting only that I was not there to bless him one more time as he had blessed me.

He always sat at the aisle-end of the second row of pews at the front of the sanctuary to shorten the distance between him and the Holy Eucharist at the time of distribution. His balance was failing. The last time I was to place the host in his hand he slipped and began to fall as I and one other soul privileged to love him interrupted his descent.

He righted himself and held out his wrinkled old hands to receive, one more time, as I fought back the tears of loving him and loving the Lord who held us both, the Lord and Love who holds him even now.

He was old in the truest sense, having lived fully the years he was granted, dwelling not in the shallows but in the depth of the beauty and ugliness, pain, absurdity and joyous glory of being human on this planet, his life caught up in the juggernaut of history that might have crushed him, but mercifully it did not. And many are better for it.

I came to know him best as he sat at my left elbow during the adult class and discussion that followed worship before the pandemic shuttered that joy. He couldn’t hear well so I often leaned left, speaking in his direction, knowing he wanted to hear, often asking for his thoughts, calling forth his years as a New Testament professor.

He spoke slowly and soft, as was his temperament, his accent thick, at times impenetrable, his words always welcome as we leaned-in to receive whatever came out of his one precious life.

Most precious of all was the day he shared what it was to be a POW in the waning days of WWII. He was drafted into the German army, a teenager, in the final months when the Nazis forced virtually all able-bodied males to serve, trying to stave off the inevitable destruction of the Third Reich.

Wilhelm, quickly captured, became a POW in a French camp where German professors, POWs like himself, began their own university to teach the next generation and stave off the aimless boredom of camp existence.

It was there he studied theology and continued to learn biblical languages, and it was there that he produced one of the most precious things I have ever held in my hands. Wilhelm brought it to our Sunday discussion to show us.

He had learned piano as a boy, and in the camp composed a little music. That is what he showed us, a short piano piece, written on strips of toilet paper. He fashioned the cover from thicker paper that had been cut from a sack that had contained flour or some other commodity. Wilhelm stitched the little booklet together with thread on the left margin.

We passed it among ourselves, gently turning the pages to see the staves and notes traced by Wilhelm’s much younger hands, several of us brushing away tears, feeling the suffering hope in which he had created this masterpiece—and the long years and miles it had traveled with him to arrive at this moment to grace our lives and awaken our love for him, for God, for each other and for the glory of being a human soul in God’s own image.

We knew we sat in the presence of holiness and grace; we saw it in his eyes and felt it stinging our own.

Near Veteran’s Day, the congregation honors those who served with a red rose and special prayers at the start of the liturgy. The following Veteran’s Day I invited all our veterans to come forward for this observance, then looked over to Wilhelm in the second row.

He shook his head, no, but I insisted he come up, too, this one who served in an enemy army. How could we not honor his life, seasoned by war, deepened through suffering, graced by the Love shining in his old eyes?

Rest well, old man, and shine in the Love that illumined your life ... and mine. Thank you.

David L. Miller