A light in Bethlehem

 There shall be no harm or ruin on all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11:9)

Ancient voices console me this Christmas Day. Their hearts reach across many centuries to find my heart, even as Bach’s celebration of ecstatic joy dances from the radio and lifts my heart from the sadness of these times. Thanks, Johann, I needed that.

Or maybe I shouldn’t thank you at all.

Perhaps this is just one more way, one moment in a lifetime of moments when the Word who is God becomes flesh … or at least waves of sound … to lift me out of myself. But it’s more. Out of myself, I enter the joy of communing with the Love ‘who comes from the great and everlasting day of eternity into our little moment of time.’ Thanks to St. Augustine for that phrase.

But much more, I give thanks for the One whose coming we celebrate this holy day. For, the Mystery he is comes in every moment, marrying divine love with created matter that we might see and feel and fall in love with the light and love he is.

‘Those who see light are in the light sharing its brilliance,’ according to Irenaeus, another ancient voice echoing in me 18 centuries after he left the scene.

Just so, our Christmas endeavor must be to see light in these sad times. Seeing saves us from ourselves when the worries and wars of the world make it nigh unto impossible to sing Joy to the World with the energy it deserves, to say nothing of the vigor our hearts desperately need.

If we can just see, we may yet become words of divine light and beauty ourselves, just as God intended. It’s difficult most days, but then ....

Well, then I see a Palestinian pastor lighting a candle beside a Jesus doll nestled among broken, jagged pieces of concrete in the chancel of Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem. That’s where we see Christ this Christmas, he says, buried in the rubble waiting for us to see and love him there.

Yes, but he might also look in a mirror, although I suspect he does little of that because his eyes are fixed on the sorrows of his place and time and people. But if he did, he might see himself aglimmer with the light of Christ’s own sorrow, born of the Love of whom Jesus is the face.

He says this time has challenged his faith like no other he has known. How, after all, can one sing, ‘glory to God in the highest,’ when your soul bears the weight of war and the deaths of children?

Yet, he fans my hope as he lights a votive in his little church in Bethlehem where Christ, the light of the world, first drew breath. For I feel his love, and the love I feel is not just his but the love of the One who is Love, and it fills the heart with joy and ecstasy, and sorrow and longing, and all the other emotions Christ yet feels for our lives and troubled orb.

And with this comes an ancient longing. ‘There shall be no harm or ruin on all my holy mountain,’ God promised in Isaiah’s prophecy, ‘for the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.’

I long for that day. It’s certainly not here yet. We’re still a long way off. But sometimes, in ancient voices and lit candles, glorious music and loving souls, I feel its beauty and taste its goodness and know: I am not alone.

David L. Miller

Tears of light

 The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. (John 1:9)

I’m told the sun converts four million tons of its substance into light every second of every day, giving life to this blue and green marble that is our home. But today, Old George Way receives little from the sun’s constant generosity.

Ashen rays filter through the leaden gloom of winter clouds, heavy with rain, hanging low on the bare oaks at the end of the street out my west window.

Dreary as Old George feels this morning, places too many to number languish and despair, bereft of the faintest glimmer of any light capable of lifting human hearts to believe that the life of joy and beauty for which they hunger can ever be theirs.

Darkness covers the earth and thick darkness the peoples; so wrote the prophet Isaiah, 2500 years ago, give or take. I’d have thought he’d just watched the evening news, sitting beside me on the couch.

Maybe that is why tears warm my eyes as these words cross my lips: ‘The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.’

I long for this light … and die when I feel its absence.

I want to feel the light of an eternal loving presence when the light of life grows dim and when the news is darker than gray December mornings.

I need to know there is a light that never dies, never fades, a light that was already present when this improbable universe exploded into existence in an unimaginable burst of splendor—so that the improbable reality of my own existence might be possible. I want to feel the miracle of this light (even more improbably) alive in my own confused and conflicted heart, making me glad to be alive, loving my loves and knowing theirs.

I need to see and feel this light so I can believe that the light who is Love is always shining, even when my heart is dim and my eyes do not see.

Knowing: Its goodness glimmers in great and common moments, in all that is good and just, beautiful and lovely, in all that is love and that delights the heart with gratitude for the joy of being alive and able to feel creation’s wonder touching the gentle senses of your flesh.

The One who is the true light, who enlightens everyone and everything, this Jesus, the Light made flesh, reveals the beauty of the divine face. Born amid the poverty of a dark time and place, we seek and look for his light in every time and place, knowing there is no darkness that he will not invade and bathe with the loving light of his presence.

Seeing his face, the light he is awakens the warmth of his beauty in the depth of our souls, and we discover exactly who we are and for what we are born.

And this, I suppose, is the meaning of my morning tears. The light I seek has found me … once more.

It never grows old.

David L. Miller

 

Journey in search of a soul

[John the Baptist] proclaimed, ‘The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.’ (Mark 1:7-8)

Tradition sometimes pictures John, the Baptist, as an angry, brazen fellow bellowing out in the desert wastes about sin and righteousness and the need to change … or run, because someone was coming who would burn the chaff in the fires of divine wrath.

There must have been a great hunger for personal reformation and a society more just and decent than their daily scramble to get by; otherwise, it is hard to imagine why John attracted any following at all, let alone the crowds that braved the desert heat and rugged journey to go see what all the commotion was about.

He was a curiosity, with his itchy camel hair tunic, gobbling locusts for nutrition and robbing bees of their honey to choke it all down. Perhaps, he reminded people of wild-eyed prophets of old, afire with a word of God burning in their bones they had to speak lest they risk losing their souls.

And it was likely the concern for their own souls that drew more than a few.

There’s something about our souls. They are ours, and yet not, a gift, an expression, even, yes, an incarnation of the Great Soul who is Love. We can lose track of our souls amid myriad voices shouting from one media or another, telling us what we should say, do, wear, watch, buy and care about, lest we miss the moment.

But that core, the apex of the soul, as medieval mystics called it, belongs only to God, for it is the life of God within our lives, hungry for home, crying to connect, for union with the Love who gives life to all that lives.

We can lose track of our souls and often do. They can get beaten down, shouted out and forgotten, but they do not die. The life of the soul is always there, reminding and even cajoling the heart, irritating our ease with the intuitive awareness that we are more … and are made for more … and will never feel at home in this world until our hearts are one, at rest in the Love for whom the soul within us longs.

I have no idea what I would have heard had I taken my journalist’s notebook and interviewed the pilgrims going out to John, trying to learn what on earth stirred them from comfortable homes to listen to a ragged voice telling them to repent of their misdirected lives.

I suspect most of them would have fumbled about unable to tell me. The real motivations that move the deepest things in us are necessarily deeper than our stumbling tongues can tell. Always were, always will be.

But at root, the reason is surely love, for love is the substance of the soul we lose and one hopes find again in this life. They went into the wild country hoping to find their souls to feel truly alive again, knowing the Great Soul who wouldn’t leave them satisfied with the lives they had.

They were intended for something more, something wild and free, wonderful and joyous, and the voice of soul within them, the Love who does not die, was still, blessedly audible in their restlessness. We should all be so blessed.

I understand these pilgrims. We all can. That restlessness for more, for the More that satisfies the heart, so common and real, is the breath of God’s being within our own.

I understand something about John, too. ‘I am not worthy to untie his sandals,’ he said, speaking of Jesus. But I suspect he would have been glad to do it, honored actually, to which, I say, ‘You take the left foot, John. I got the right.’

It seems a good place to find one’s soul.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 

The way of peace

As Jesus came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. (Luke 19:41-42)

Moments come that remind me why I love Jesus and want to live my life in close proximity to who he is, what he said and what he did, although I will always be a poor example of what it means to be one of his followers.

I see his face as he looks up at the walls of Jerusalem and weeps. Perhaps it is the violence of our times, but imagining his tears I know him as the heart whom I can trust with my own.

His love for human souls in all their lost, confused and self-destructive ways wets his cheeks with compassion for the world I see on the daily news, the world I live in whether I like it or not. There are plenty of days I want to shut the world out and let my heart rest because I think I cannot take much more.

But he doesn’t. He lets it all in, feeling the sorrowful ways of this tit-for-tat world to which nations sacrifice their children, century after century, in a doomed, determined desire to gain some measure of security that no amount of power can ever secure, typically doing little more than making the next bloody conflict inevitable.

There is no peace there. The way of peace is the way of this weeping man outside the walls of Jerusalem.

A few days later, Jesus hangs on a cross, the tool of the practical and powerful protectors of this world’s wisdom, convinced someone must die to make an example and maintain order, the infernal logic of ‘the way things are.’

But Jesus shows another way, a harder way that breaks the bloody chain of history. His lifeblood dripping away, he does not descend into hatred and bitterness. He refuses the siren call for revenge, retribution or some ‘proportional response.’ He transforms his pain into a peace offering, extended even to those who have no interest in understanding or accepting it.

This is the way of peace so seldom tried. ‘If only,’ he cried. ‘If only, you knew the things that make for peace.’ But we don’t. Or if we do, our hearts are too fearful to beat back our self-protective impulses long enough to see the need and humanity of those we imagine so different from ourselves, failing to see that there can be no peace for us unless there is peace for everyone.

Maybe we will never learn. Maybe the body count will never be high enough to move nations and their leaders to say ‘enough!’ And maybe it is asking too much of them to imagine ways of dealing with violence and hatred that don’t involve more hatred and violence. Maybe we are stuck forever in this ugly cycle. It’s just the way things are.

It is this that moved Jesus to tears as he surveyed the walls of Jerusalem. And it is this that makes me love and trust him as the one, the way, we most need to help us imagine another way.

I adore you, O Christ, and I bless you; by your holy cross you redeem the world.

David L. Miller

Are you still there, George? We need you.

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: “May they prosper who love you. Peace be within your walls, and security within your towers.” (Psalm 122:6-7)

There’s a Greek Orthodox church and school in Beit Sahour. The Palestinian town sits just east of Bethlehem and south of Jerusalem. Its name, Beit Sahour, means ‘house of the watchers,’ near Shepherd’s Field where a few sheep roamed a near hillside when I last visited, 18 years ago.

The scene has faded in my mind with the years, but two faces are as clear as the day I first met them, George Sa’adeh, the principal of the school, and his 12-year-old daughter, Kristina, whose dark eyes shimmered from a photo near his desk.

Amid the sickening bloodshed in Israel and Gaza, I wonder if George is still there and whether his heart is as true, as good, as holy … and as wounded … as the day I first met him.

I’ve heard it said that in love’s service only wounded soldiers can serve. If so, George is a general in that gracious force, or should be.

Two years before I met him, Israeli soldiers mistook his car for that of a terrorist and a command was given to shoot. Countless rounds riddled the vehicle, and George was shot nine times. His wife and oldest daughter were also shot multiple times and carry shrapnel in their bodies. But Kristina, shot in the head, is forever 12, shining in a more elevated sphere than we, the earth-bound, can yet imagine.

George’s qualification for love’s army is not, however, his grief, but what he and his wife did with the sorrow that lacerates their hearts and always will on this side of the veil. The bitterness of a soldier’s mistake, killing your daughter, is easily enough to fire a life of endless hatred.

But it didn’t. ‘My wife and I, with our faith in Christ, we managed to continue our life,’ George told me. ‘I have faith Kristina is in heaven with God. The pain, with love, we will make it something for others. We are against killing. If I create hate in myself, it will destroy me and others.’

After Kristina’s death, George and his wife began meeting regularly with a group of other parents, Palestinian and Israeli, all who have lost children in the internecine conflict that once again stains the land with the blood of the innocent and sentences human hearts to lives of interminable sorrow.

They talk, tell stories of their children and grieve … together. ‘It’s the only club in the world that doesn’t want new members,’ George told me on my first visit. And no one in those gatherings, I am willing to suggest, forgets the common humanity that joins them to every other soul in the room beyond the boundaries of race, language, faith and bitter history, for its as clear as the tear-stained cheeks and weary weight of interminable grief in the eyes of souls who might otherwise have never met.

I don’t know if George’s group managed to continue meeting through the years, or if it is even possible for groups like it to meet amid the seething anger and fear that seizes the souls of the peoples of that land.

But I hope they can. And if not now, soon, for a sense of our shared humanity teeters on the verge of extinction, if it has not already expired among Jews and Palestinians in the land we call holy.

And not only there, but here, in our cities’ streets, on college campuses, in neighborhoods where synagogues and mosques, Jews and Arabic peoples are threatened by benighted hearts who cannot see what George and those who meet with him know all too well: We all love our children and hunger for respect and want to be free from fear to seek the lives God so graciously gives us.

Sooner or later, the bombs will stop falling in Gaza, missiles will cease flying toward Tel Aviv and the fighting will quiet, at least for a time. In the lull, I pray bitter enemies may be able to look at each other across the littered landscape and, perhaps, for a moment, see at least a shadow of themselves in the fearful faces of each other.

George and his friends in Love’s tattered army can show us how it’s done. They, alone, know the way of peace.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 

 

 

Among the trees

 It was in those days that he went onto the mountain to pray, and he spent the entire night in prayer to God. Then, when it was daylight, he summoned his disciples and chose twelve of them, whom he designated as apostles. (Luke 6:12-13)

Yesterday, I shot my best photo waist high and straight down.

There were too many people, noisy people, on the main trails at Knoch Knolls, so I found little-walked paths, narrow and neglected, at times indiscernible from the floor of the forest surrounding them.

I fancy myself an adventurer, but that is a romantic illusion. These days my adventures are two-fold: First, finding forest trails few people walk on the edge of suburbia, and second, staring at this keyboard waiting for words that will wake the Love latent in my soul to satisfy my heart’s hunger for transcendence.

I go to the woods hoping to escape the unceasing noise of the world, including the sound of my own voice, the endless chatter of the mind trying to name everything as if to make it meaningful. Adam’s endless task grows more wearisome as I age and realize how little I have ever understood anything, despite the torrent of words that poured from my younger self as I attempted to reduce mystery into meaning and make sense of things.

Standing still, silent among the trees, seems a more authentic response to the indecipherable mystery of one’s existence.

Pushing deeper into the woods, the echoes of human presence faded until there was only the rattle of brittle leaves clinging to limbs and branches in the cool October breeze. Others surrendered to the season, falling like snowflakes, seesawing to-and-fro, slowly gliding to the soil beneath my boots where they will accomplish their final purpose of feeding the earth just as they have for countless millennia—and as they will, long after I am able to walk these trails, seeking my heart.

The least I can do is to stop and say, ‘thank you’ to the trees and the breeze, to the rustle of leaves and the kaleidoscope of color coating the ground, myriad maple leaves, millions and more, in yellow shades, golden hues and ruddy reds beyond any Crayola could ever produce.

Pulling my phone from my back pocket, I turned left and right, looking behind and before, to take a photo. It didn’t matter where I focused. A riot of color covered everything in an impressionist wash of wonder, maple leaves lapping over the dark toe of my boots as I shuffled. Holding the phone waist high, I shot straight down, one, two, three photos, then stopped, happy just to be there.

No words were needed. In the vast, yawning eons of time, creation and improbability, I was there, somehow chosen and appointed to witness this and bring witness to the wonder no tongue can tell, surely not mine.

One either believes that the cosmos and one’s surprising existence is the result of blind chance, signifying nothing. Or, one dares imagine that your life is chosen and purposeful, willed and wanted by a Great Mystery who desires your existence and longs for your presence.

And for this, I can only smile, believing my smile is a share in the much greater joy of the One who speaks of love in silent leaves, hoping we will notice.

Jesus prayed in silence on the mountain before choosing the 12 whom he would draw close and train to carry out his mission. I don’t know how the Loving Mystery spoke in his soul so that he knew who to choose. I don’t believe he heard an audible voice, any more than I heard a voice on this overcast Saturday afternoon.  

But I believe he communed heart-to-heart with the Great Love who smiled at me in the silence of Knoch Knolls. And I believe this Love filled him and opened his awareness of those who would welcome the joys and suffer the sorrows of being with him.

They were chosen to witness who Love is and what Love does, but then … so was I, among the trees.

David L. Miller

 

Amado, in Paradisum

‘No eye has seen, no ear has heard, nor has the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him.’ (1 Corinthians 2:9)

 

I had no words. Kneeling at the casket of my friend, Amado, words failed me.

Words usually come easily. Most often, I don’t have to fight to find them. Sometimes, they come and transport my earth-bound heart to a wondrous space where all that exists is the Love God is, and I am there, inside, enveloped by Love, and everything else melts into insignificance.

But not here, not on my knees, not as my hands rested on the dead-cold stiffness of ‘Mado’s thick hands, product of the mortician’s art and the inevitable inevitability that we all know is coming and are never ready to face.

I tried, but tripped over myself every time I tried to say the old words—words I know well, words that flowed like a fountain of life in other moments, no matter how extreme. I wanted to walk my friend to heaven’s door and let him go, knowing all is well even though nothing is right. But each time I tried, the syllables tumbled and stumbled over each other and fell to the floor, cold as death.

‘Rest eternal, grant him, O Lord’ 

‘May light perpetual shine upon him.’

‘Receive him into the fullness of your love with all the beloved who have gone before.’

Any of the old words would have been enough to quiet my soul. I have spoken them hundreds of times, and hundreds of times peace flooded my heart and soothed the souls of those being left behind. The words took me … and so many others … to a place where Love was undeniably real and filled with the promise beyond every other promise, the hope beyond every other hope, the life for which our souls long but barely taste on this side of the veil.

But there was no flow. No peace. No consolation. The old phrases tangled and twisted around each other in an amorphous mass, my heart cold as ‘Mado’s dead hands, once strong, both of us there, he in his casket and me on my knees, both of us clothed in our incapacity, arrayed in the nakedness of our undeniable humanity.

Amado 42 and me 71, our roles might well have been reversed, or so I whispered to him as I knelt, aching for the one thing I cannot live without—light, the light of eternity warming my soul with the assurance of the Love who is, and was, and always will be, the Love who is the living and the dead and the risen again, the Love who smiles on the death of the saints and draws them into the eternal embrace we know only in our most graced moments.

Wanting this, but feeling none of it, I let go of the words that have long consoled my heart, the words that failed me, or I them, as I knelt before the form of my friend who was no longer there.

The old words gone, I conjured the image that closes my morning prayer every day, without exception. “Keep calling to me,” I pray. ‘Keep calling until I stand with all the saints and angels and holy ones around your throne, chanting ‘yes’ to all you are and all you have done.’

At this, the image returns. A great crowd. Dad is there, so is Eilert and Magdalena, Fred and Max, who used to bring me vegetables and Bob who lived down the street when I was a boy. Grandma is there, Dixie’s grandma, too. And Rod, dear Rod, like ‘Mado leaving us so soon; 41 years, 42? What’s that? The blink of an eye. But they are there and others too many to name, and so many others whom I cannot name, all of them gathered before a great throne of love, consumed with joy and light wrapping them into the One who is Light.

And now, ‘Mado, I see you there, brother. Go on. Go ahead. Don’t look back. Walk into the Light for which we long. And greet my friends, won’t you? There are a few who may admit to knowing me. And tell them, thanks. And thank you, too, my friend. Just … thank you. Sorry words failed me the other day. I know it doesn’t much matter now, except to me because I didn’t get to say, didn’t know how to say what my heart needed to say.  But later, I thought of this. They are not my words, far more beautiful than any I can produce. Still, I give them to you now, and offer them to the Great Love who loved us from the beginning and always will.

May the angels lead you into paradise; may the martyrs greet you at your arrival and lead you into the holy city, Jerusalem. May the choir of angels greet you and, like Lazarus, who once was a poor man, may you have eternal rest.

 

David L. Miller

 

Saint ‘Mado, my brother

Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, ‘Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?’ I said to him, ‘Sir, you are the one that knows.’ Then he said to me, ‘These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. (Revelation 7:13-14)

 

My friend, Amado Martinez, died last Friday night. He was 42, and I loved him. He called me his brother.

We worked together at the same church. I was a pastor. He was the custodian there, like his dad, Manny, before him.

As I know the story, Manny, immigrated from Mexico with his family and worked as a custodian at an elementary school across the street before also taking on the church job.

He brought ‘Mado to work with him to keep him out of trouble with Latin gangs and the police as had happened with a couple of Amado’s much older brothers. It worked.

Amado learned the place, the people and the job, all of which loved him like they loved his father. Manny never retired, never got the chance. He worked until he died, as I understand it, on a day after working at the church, cleaning, polishing, fixing, overseeing the heating and cooling systems, keeping the place going.

That’s when ‘Mado took over, doing the same job, and … like his father … working until the day he died. Last Friday, he left work, returning home to Silvia, his two sons and daughter, not feeling well. Silvia convinced him to go to the hospital where he soon coded and died … in the same emergency room that had saved his life a few years before when he had been shot on his porch in a drive-by.

‘Mado nearly bled to death that night and spent about a month in the hospital recovering and doing therapy on his arm and vocal cords. He was told he might never speak again. But he did, a little weaker, a bit softer, but his voice and his spirit were still there through his recovery and as he returned to work.

He never needed a strong voice, at least not at church. He spoke softly and moved quietly as he coursed through the weekly routines of keeping the building in shape. A big-boned man, let’s say he had just one speed and could move through the weekday darkness of the narthex silent as night. Most days, he worked for hours, and you barely knew he was there.

He never liked to dust things, which is the worst thing we could say about his work as a custodian. He could always find other things that needed to be done, which was never a problem because he had a mechanic’s mind. I often said he could have been an engineer or at least a skilled tradesman, if circumstances had offered him a chance to study. But finances and family responsibilities never allowed what many of us take for granted.

Instead, he developed a wide set of handyman skills and knew where everything was in a complicated set of buildings. He loved to tinker and fix what was worn and broken, saving the church thousands of dollars by keeping old equipment running long after it might have been replaced. It came to him naturally. His family was constantly short of money, and he’d long before learned to make do and keep things going. It was the church’s privilege to help him out on any number of occasions. Now, I hope they remember Silvia and his kids.

There are stories I cannot tell about ‘Mado’s struggles, things that only he and a few others know about. But I can say he carried and immense weight of responsibilities for several generations of his family, including his aging mother in dialysis. And I can say that local police harassed him and his family for years, and once tried to pin a charge on him for a crime he had nothing to do with.

It was my privilege to be with him as that played out. When it finally got to court, ‘Mado sat at the defendant’s table with his lawyer, while I sat in the gallery with his family, listening to a police evidence technician grossly misrepresent facts in an effort to convict him. Sitting there, I prayed with all my might. The judge did better; he threw it out, recognizing nonsense when he heard it.

At every recess in the case, ‘Mado thanked me for being there, always quiet, always gracious, never bitter or seeming to be angry with what was being done to him. I may have been angry enough for both of us.

After the case was dismissed, ‘Mado and members of his family hugged and talked in the corridor outside the courtroom while the prosecutor and a couple of police huddled in another corner wondering aloud what had happened to their case. I almost stepped over and told them what I thought of their pernicious prosecution, but ‘Mado was calm, at least on the outside, and I wasn’t about to dishonor him by giving way to the rage I felt at the months of harassment, lies and hellish stress they’d inflicted on a profoundly good and decent man and his family.

Now, he’s dead, and I wonder how many years the immensity of stress and struggle stole from him, even as death steals him from a family that sorely needs him.

For 13 years, I watched him care for the congregation’s home like his own home. I saw him bear the burdens of his life with strength, grace and dignity, even when circumstances aligned against him. I watched how he loved his boys, whom he sometimes brought to work with him even as his father had brought him. And I saw the sparkle in his eyes when Silvia gave birth to their daughter, a couple of years after he had nearly died from that gunshot. She’s four now, if I count correctly, and she needs the father he was and would always have been for her.

But for all the sadness of his passing, there is one thing above all for which I will remember him and give thanks for his life. ‘Mado texted me shortly after I left my position at the church. After expressing concern for my family and my future, he wrote:

 ‘Just wanted to let you know you will always be a dear friend of mine and if you ever need anything feel free to call me. I also wanted to thank you again for everything you've done for me. You supported me in my darkest hours. You have the gift of showing people it's going to be okay when they can’t see past their trauma. … I hope God keeps on blessing you in any journey you take from here. I love you brother, take care.’

Two years later, I still have that text on my phone. I see no reason to delete it.

David L. Miller

 

What the bird said

What the bird said

‘Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watch-tower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country.  When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce. (Mathew 21:33-34)

My Saturday hike nearly done, seven miles behind me, the trail along Saganashkee Slough narrows to a foot path not 12 inches wide.  As I pick my way, boots squishing through the marsh, a great blue heron flaps across the lake toward a grove of lake lettuce along the north shore where I walk.

I call it lake lettuce because I don’t know its real name. A dense grove of thick stems rise from the shallows, each with a single shamrock-green leaf, hands waving in the cool autumn breeze that descends across the steep ridge of old oaks and walnut behind me.

From a distance, the grove looks like a small island, perhaps to the heron, too, as it heavily pumps its wings against the breeze, searching for a place to settle near and search for small fish. But seeing me, the great bird flaps once, hangs in mid-air, then squawks and turns west, drifting to the water’s flat surface streaked now with hues of gold and blue in the late afternoon light.

And I? I get to watch. I get to see … this, simply given, just there … for me to notice, feeling something that takes time to reveal itself. The heart, at least mine, is slow to catch up with what we hear and see and feel, if ever we do.

But 24 hours on, I think I hear something of what the heron was saying in his (or her) indecipherable squawk. I can make it out now. Two words: not mine.

That’s what the heron said. This world, the sunlight refracting on the water, the grandeur of a bird in flight (I have always been jealous of them); the dense woods where I walk among trees that were there before I was born and will last long after. None of it mine.

Nor even is my life, my breath, my body, my skills, my past and future, whatever it may be; to say nothing of the lives and loves near to me and those worlds away. All of it sheer, unadulterated gift. All of it belongs to what Jesus and Hebrew prophets before him sometimes called a vineyard, God’s vineyard.

And I get to live here. My privilege is the heron in flight, autumn light on the water, the feeling of my boots in the marsh, the October breeze whispering that winter is not far; all of it and quadrillions more, are not many things, but one great thing, one immense vineyard, one life, to be received with joy, tended with care and shared with all.

It seems to me that Jesus and my brother, the heron, were saying pretty much the same thing, letting me know what the owner of the vineyard always had in mind.

David L. Miller

One moment

God is love and those who abide in love, abide in God, and God abides in them (1 John 4:16b)

Creation speaks; sometimes, we hear. Occasionally, we understand, but words are insufficient, their poverty apparent.

She was nine, maybe 10, simultaneously dismounting her bike while holding it against the gravity of the steep slope where Belmont meets Maple Avenue.  Pony tail trailing behind her, she dug her feet into the sidewalk and stopped just before her front tire tumbled over the curb and into the street as cars braked for a red light.

“Be careful little one,” I said, as she stopped fewer than 10 feet from my bumper. She couldn’t have heard me. The car windows were closed, but something within sprang open as an awareness rushed in to fill every corner of my consciousness.

I saw her face, the look in her eyes, and in an instant felt how wondrously precious life is, her life, every life, and what an unspeakable tragedy it would be for that life to be lost and the world denied whatever beauty will come to be through the precious, irreplaceable years she has on this good and green earth.

But these are mere words, and there were no words in that moment, only awareness, an intuition of life as a holy and unimaginable gift—and love, love for the life of that girl, love for my own life and all the loves within it that so love me in spite of myself, love for the inexplicable Source of the loving awareness that evaporated every other thought and feeling for one precious second.

Whatever we know of God in this life, whatever our senses can perceive and hold, savor and share (in some utterly inadequate way) was present in that awareness, as love banished everything from my soul but its own wondrous reality, freeing my heart to see as love sees and to know as God knows.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 

 

Joined in chocolate

For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them. (Matthew 18:20)

Last Thursday night, a sacred assembly gathered people of at least four generations from several states, and most of them were not even in the same room.

No, Zoom wasn’t involved. The means of communication was a cookbook compiled by a group of women in the fellowship hall of a country church on the Great Plaines of Nebraska more than 40 years ago. More on that in a moment.

The blessed assembly started with a hungry phone call from a college freshman in Madison, Wisconsin. That call vibrated in a stage manager’s pocket at Lyric Opera of Chicago.  “Mom, I need the brownie recipe.” Not just any brownie recipe, mind you, but the brownie recipe. Everyone in our family knows what that means.

Quickly, came our daughter’s reply, “Call your brother; I’m in the middle of a rehearsal,” and moments later another phone jingled in a suburb 20 miles away. The recipe delivered; brownies were baked in a dormitory kitchen just in time to save a group of students from the delirium of chocolate withdrawal.

But about that recipe. It lives in a cookbook, a three-ring binder with a blue cover adorned with a white, pencil sketch of that country church, located a few miles north of Superior, Nebraska. The recipe lists seven ingredients and a few simple directions, with the contributor’s name neatly typed below: “Carol Warneking,” who lived then and now on a farm a few miles southwest of Salem Lutheran where the cookbook was edited and assembled.

When she submitted it, I’m sure Carol had no thought that her recipe might become famous in Madison, Wisconsin. I wonder if she would even take credit for it. The recipe might have traveled through several generations before her.

Nor have I any idea how many generations of how many families have used that recipe on the faded page of that well-worn cookbook, ready-to-hand in my wife, Dixie’s, bookcase. She made brownies and taught it to our son and daughter, making brownies, too, and teaching our three grandsons, Zach, Ben and Ethan, who apparently are keeping this noble tradition alive.

All of us, multiple generations, joined in chocolate, which makes me think of Jesus because Jesus and chocolate have been linked in my mind since the church dinners of my childhood.

Each one was a sacred assembly, not just because of chocolate but because of the connectedness of all of life and most certainly our connections with each other, sacraments that they are.

The connections that feed our hearts, awaken gratitude and keep us human, the connections that bind us together in communities of care are expressions of divine presence, physical manifestations, incarnations, if you will allow me, of the Infinite Love who seeks to capture our hearts in small and large ways, like in a pan of brownies shared across generations unknown.

Where two or three gather in my name, I am there, Jesus says. You would be right to object that those waiting for chocolate from that dormitory kitchen had not gathered in Jesus’ name. Or did they?

With all my heart, I confess that Jesus is the face of the Great Mystery, the Infinite Love, the Immortal Mercy who labors, most often unknown and unrecognized, in the secret depths of matter and our every experience, hungry to gather us into one great love. Wherever love and care touch our flesh to delight our senses and move us to share, the gracious beauty present in Jesus is surely present with us … and especially when chocolate is involved.

A final thought: If this should find its way to any of those who ate Carol’s brownies in that Madison dormitory, ask Ben about guacamole.

 

Love knocks

Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to them and eat with them, and they with me. (Revelation 3:20)

The calendar says September, but my weather app reads 95 degrees Fahrenheit. A clutch of locust leaves arching over the balcony whispers the gilded glory to come, but not yet. Autumn still holds her gentle breath, waiting the time of sighs to release us once more.

That day will come. What we have is where we are now, today. Wherever that is and in whatever condition we find ourselves, the One who is Love comes to our door and knocks. We don’t need to wait, just look around.

Today, that knock is an out-of-the-blue email from someone I barely know, wondering if I knew her long-deceased missionary brother, the favorite of the family, killed in a horrible accident. I will write later, the mind says.  No, comes another voice. Do it now.

A quick note. Yes, I knew him long ago. Five minutes later comes her reply, laced with the joy of love remembered and living still, thankful for a few hastily written words from someone she barely knows.

So, it is: Love knocks, every day, in the movements of our minds and hearts, in intuitions and impulses, coaxing us to share or at least notice whatever good or beauty appears.

Love knocks hoping we might open the door and discover …

• that the fact of our existence is unfathomable, that we live wondrous lives in a universe more graced and connected than we can imagine,
•  that the joy of our beloved’s smile is more beautiful than anything on earth,
•   that this tiny blue and green dot of a planet, a pin prick of faintest light in the darkness, is the only island of life we know in the yawning immensity of the cosmos,
• ·         that everything and everyone we have ever known or loved is on that that pin prick and is willed, loved and cherished by the Unfathomable,
• ·         that just a few golden leaves insinuating the hope of autumn are sufficient to ignite an unbidden, visceral ‘yes’ exploding from your heart, ‘yes’ to the world, to your place within it and to all the pains and joys, missteps and unlikely events that somehow have conspired to make you … you … and to bring you to this place, this day, this moment.

Amid it all, the risen Christ speaks, ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock.’ Every day. Every moment bids us to surrender ourselves without delay to the undeniable intuitions and impulses of love, awe, wonder and beauty awakened within, sharing what we have been given to give, knowing the sweetness of his heart within our own.

Sea of love

 We declare to you what was from the beginning … what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete. (1 John 1:1a, 3-4)

‘You live in a sea of love,’ so went the words I whispered to Ben on the night before he left for the university. I wanted to give him what I want, what I need, naming the only thing that truly fills the heart with joy: to know, to feel, to live in awareness of an ocean of love surrounding your whole being so that there is nowhere to fall that the waters will not hold you.

I did not lie to him, though some might suggest I indulged in a fantasy. It’s undeniable: The things we fear can and will happen to us and those we love; hurts and wounds are unavoidable and there are those who don’t give a wink that we bleed or that the knife that cut us was in their hand. And sometimes, we ourselves are the assailant.

But when I think of Ben stepping deeper into the complexity of that world (and remembering how naïve, lost and unprepared I was at his age), I find comfort and hope in the sea of love surrounding him—the love of his parents, his brother and Dixie, my wife; also, the professors, tutors, helpers and strangers who, perhaps without even knowing it, will become bearers (sacraments!) of the Love who alone satisfies the human heart.

And I think of myself, believing, trusting, knowing by experience that the love I whispered in his ear in the darkness of a Saturday evening is not my private possession but the Love and Light of the One who was from the beginning, the One who labors in all that is good and true, the Love who flows like a river amid our aches and pains, wants and needs, hopes and ambitions, successes and failures, carrying us out of isolation toward one, great sea of Love.

‘Father, may they all be one,’ Jesus once prayed, ‘as you and I are one.’ It’s a dream, God’s dream for the world and every last one of us. We are a long way from it. But the dream already comes true, like in the unmistakable joy of whispering words of the love you need into another heart.

David L. Miller

Even the crumbs

She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.’ Then Jesus answered her, ‘Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.’ (Matthew 15:27-28b)

When I ask, Grandson Ben tells me what he is seeing and doing in the hospital. Sometimes, his father needs to leave the room when the tale grows graphic, but the rest of us stay to marvel at what he’s learning and the verve with which he throws himself into it.

Me? I’m entranced by the energy of what it means to be 18, like Ben, daily meeting a kaleidoscopic parade of cultures, languages, personalities, needs, suffering, triumphs, failures, squalid seediness and immense dignity as it passes through the halls, all the while robing up and putting on an extra pair (or two) of latex gloves (just in case) to offer care because that is why you are there.

“It’s never the same. You don’t know what’s going to happen next,” Ben tells us. “That’s why I like it,” and I understand him because that gene runs in the family. Today, he mentions a young man with syphilis, who is also HIV positive. Across the table, my mother looks at me and shakes her head. “And we’re supposed to consider him a child of God,” she says. “It’s hard.”

“No, it isn’t,” I say softly, though I wonder if she heard me. It is not hard to imagine a series of terrible choices driven by unruly passions and normal human needs that might lead someone to disaster as they vainly tried to comfort their sorrows, assuage their loneliness or fill an inner emptiness they little understand.

It is not hard to imagine a childhood of pain or abuse or neglect leading to a life of addiction, dissipation and disaster. Nor is it hard to imagine Ben’s patient suffers bitter pains and recoils in fear from what lies before him … because all of us have and will know pain and fear, along with all the beauties of being human souls made in the image of Infinite Love, longing to feel that Love filling every empty place of our conflicted and complicated hearts.

Children of God, we are, all of us, including the woman who came to Jesus asking him to heal her daughter from the demon or disease or whatever it was that tormented her day and night. She and her daughter were outsiders, Canaanites, and Jesus didn’t jump to the task and heal her, instead referring to her as a ‘dog,’ an ethnic slur.

I don’t know why he did that (and there’s no end to the speculation), but I am certain this story is true because early Christians would never have made up a tale that seems to put Jesus in a bad light.

The bright light, however, is not on Jesus but on the Canaanite woman who intuitively knew the good things in this life, like blessing, healing and care, are not just for the good, the privileged, the lucky and those who have done everything right, but also for those like her whom some deem unworthy.

And why? Because in this life (and the next) we eat from the Master’s table, who unlike us is infinitely generous. The woman knew what the good, the privileged, the lucky and those who have done everything right often fail to understand. It’s all grace, this life, even the crumbs. To say nothing of the life to come.

David L. Miller

This not that

 Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this. Ten young women took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom.  Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. When the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them, but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. (Matthew 25:1-4)

The joy we crave has a door, and it is this, not that.

This is the present moment, right in front of us. Often as not, we miss this … because our eyes and heart are fixed on that … over there, something that isn’t here, or at least not yet and maybe never will be. Like it or not, we are where we are.

Sometimes our this is eminently embraceable, like when Dixie trundles sleepy-eyed down the hall each morning and into my arms as she has for decades, longing for touch, knowing, too, that I have her coffee set up for her.

But sometimes our this is exactly what we most fear. My friend receives a diagnosis nobody wants, and his wife wonders if the foundation of their life together will soon crumble to dust. Who can throw their arms and heart around this … as it threatens to still the sweet grace of long-shared laughter?

It feels insensitive or even inhuman to suggest human hearts should or even can embrace such a moment, but the importunate truth is that this … is the only place grace and love can be known. This moment, with whatever quagmire of emotion warms or chills the blood, is where we meet or fail to greet the Love who awaits us there. Every moment is filled with the potential to draw fuller love and life from the well of our souls where the Love Who Is … is pleased to dwell.

The bridegroom approaches, according to Jesus’ parable of the wise women, ready to be welcomed by souls who manage to stay open to Love’s nearness, no matter how troubling life can be. It is they who enter the feast to celebrate the marriage of heaven and earth, drinking the sweet wine of divine love, which never runs dry, not in this life or in the mystery beyond.

Lord knows, I do this poorly. Aggressive drivers, casual disrespect and about a thousand other things can roil my heart, evaporating awareness that the present moment is a door through which to enter—and be—the joy of Love’s living nearness. Missed opportunities litter most lives, and I am no different.

But each day comes anew. Letting go of what was, I light the lamp of awareness once more, hungry to greet the One who breathes joy into willing hearts.

David L. Miller

Treasure hunt

 The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. (Matthew 13:44)

The cinder trail at McKee Marsh splits a few hundred yards into the hike. You can walk east or west from that point, but if you continue straight, into the cattails and eye-high marsh grass, you would slosh your way to the place where a treasure was unearthed in 1977.

Workers scooping sticky mud from the bottom of the marsh came upon the thick bones of a wooly mammoth from the last ice age, more than 10,000 years ago. All in all, 75 percent of a complete skeleton was painstakingly discovered and reassembled.

Hard to imagine that this place on the edge of suburbia was once so wild, but walkers still come here looking for treasure, although few of them might put it that way. The treasure we seek is ourselves, or at least that deeper, more human part of ourselves we call heart … or soul.

Turning east, I find mine about a mile into the hike on a weather-worn wood platform, built above the level of the cattails.

It’s a place to watch herons and egrets picking their way among the shallows, looking for small fish, but they are not here today. The water level is too low, the pond nearly dry, sending the birds to seek their lunch in the West Branch of the DuPage River a short flight away.

Pausing on the platform reveals only the crystal blue dome of a summer sky, and lazy white cumulus clouds lingering high, with nowhere to go and no need to hurry off. The luminous dome encircles green horizons in every direction, holding everything I see and feel and am in a single embrace.

Standing here, it is easy to understand why ancient souls imagined the earth was flat, encircled by the dome of the sky, awed by the expanse of the heavens into which they gazed. Equally ancient, is the gratitude that cries from hidden depths within me, as an unseen rooster crows from a leafy ridge far to the west.

Encompassed within the embrace of an august sky, my heart gives wild praise for everything green I see, for trees and meadows, grasses and cattails, for the winding cinder path that leads me, for the rooster whose song I join, for the awareness of being one with the profusion of life that surrounds me at every hand and for the love I feel for it all and even for my own life, diminished some by age and ailment, but my heart able to feel more than ever it has … and certainly more than I ever can say.

I don’t know if is best to say our souls are saved or simply discovered in moments when love fills every space within you and wild gratitude bursts the seams of your heart. Perhaps both. But I do know that this love is a great and holy treasure that points to a far greater love more luminous than a summer sky. And the greatest treasure of all is to find this love hidden in your own mortal heart.

If you look outside yourself, you will never find God, according to Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart. But once you discover God there, well, life becomes a treasure hunt.

 David L. Miller

Heaven in the Quonset

The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Behold, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is justified by her deeds.” (Matthew 11:19)

The Nelson auditorium is a corrugated steel quonset that rises like a half-moon on the east side of Main Street, otherwise known as Nebraska State Highway 14. When I left there, 38 years ago, the population sign read 750, but I think the pollsters were two sugar-high five-year-old boys having a clicker-counter contest. I suspect the actual number was a third less.

But the number of souls makes less difference that their quality, and to this day the souls I knew there still bring tears to my eyes when their faces appear out of the ether and parade through my mind. Some of those faces have long rested beneath the ground they loved and worked to make a life for themselves and their families. Most things in Nelson revolve around agriculture in one way or another. People pray for rain, hate hail, work hard and often play even harder, which is why I think of the auditorium.

As I recall it, the quonset is a 70- or 80-foot-long cylinder, walls sloping to the foundation. Inside, there was a basketball floor with an elevated stage at the far east end for community plays and follies, all local talent. One year, my wife, Dixie, was a saloon dancer, and I sang in a barber shop quintet. I don’t think the New York Times ever sent a reviewer. Their loss. It was a hoot.

As a local pastor, I don’t know how many wedding receptions I attended there. They coalesce in my mind into one great celebration. There was always music and long tables of food, self-serve for the most part. Cuisine was basic and plentiful, sandwiches, ham, roast beef and barbeque, and five-gallon bowls of potato salad. There was pinkish punch for those who didn’t indulge and a brewery of beer for the majority.

No one bothered to watch the door or check invitations, and as the night deepened, I recall times a couple of stragglers would wander in from Sportsman’s Corner down the street because food and beer flowed freely here, and, after all, this was a community celebration, right?

Certainly, there were toasts as well as a few colorful blessings and embarrassing moments recounted by friends and well-wishers who, oft as not, made a joke of it because telling someone straight out what is in your heart might make your eyes leak.

All in all, it was community and love and joy and, in my imagination, rather like celebrating a meal with Jesus, that wine bibber and party boy who was regularly denounced for eating and drinking with the wrong sort of people. A drunk and a glutton they called him.

The Kingdom of God is like a wedding feast, Jesus said on more than one or two occasions. And on more than one or two occasions, I walked among the revelers in the auditorium thinking about why Jesus used weddings to tell us what happens when heaven marries earth and they are joined as one.

I didn’t have to think long. Looking at their faces, I knew. Life and love and the heart of God are far better than I know how to say.

 David L. Miller