The great beauty

Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom (Matthew 21:43)

In every goodness, every graced smile and every beauty of the human heart, the kingdom of the Loving One is known, regardless of the doctrine believed or denied.

Graced are we, if we have eyes to see it. For then, every moment is an occasion for knowing the heart of God melting the icy cynicism that chills our hearts. Graced are we, too, if the love’s embers spark a tender flame for the crying needs that crowd the news any time you risk watching.

The Spirit, Jesus says, blows where it will, and we don’t control it. But we surely know Love’s Spirit when its breeze brushes our flesh and opens our heart.

We know when we feel gratitude for the holy privilege of being alive and when love for this earth and its troubled inhabitants bubbles within. We know when the world’s most bitter suffering awakens the heart’s most gracious impulse. We know when the simplicity of human grace and care awakens the beauty we hide and moves us to share whatever share of it still lives within us.

The blessed kingdom for which we long and desperately need comes only as we open our hearts to give and receive the Love who comes in every love and every beauty. Its beauty appears when we seek for others the kindness and justice we naturally want for ourselves. And it is blocked whenever we indulge our egos or demand our rights as if there were no higher call.

The kingdom’s great beauty shines in the crucified Jesus, who refuses his rights in the name of loving enemies and forgiving those who have no right to anything but his rejection and condemnation.

But it also belongs to those who hunger and thirst for that love, not only for themselves but for everyone and everything, everywhere. Lord only knows, most of us do a lousy job of loving that way, our best efforts stumbling at best.

But the desire to know and share the sweet fruits of this love are a sure sign the Spirit’s untamable winds are blowing. And blow they will, so often revealing God’s loving rule in places and people whom you’d least expect, even in yourself.

David L. Miller

 

                          

 

 Images

Jesus our Lord … was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification. (Romans 4:24b- 25)

Images imprint themselves on our hearts. We recall them when we hunger to remember and feel what we most need. So it is that I often recall a painting of Jesus blessing a gaggle of children. It hung on a gray, concrete wall in a long-ago Sunday school room. I remember because I was and always will be one of those little ones in need of his blessing.

Perhaps that is why the image of a twisted crucifix has also engraved itself on my heart. A dark-skinned Jesus hangs heavily on the nails, leprous and lifeless, his desiccated body shredded by torture. I saw it in a Spanish cathedral and couldn’t bring myself to take a picture of it. It’s too brutal, too troubling. But I cannot forget it. Every year since, I find it on the internet and let it take me in.

Looking at it, I see the suffering of forgotten people in places I will never be. I feel the Love who embraces them all and forgives everyone, everywhere, everything. And I weep, loving the One who bears shame and rejection that I may know the Great Heart for whom our aching hearts long.

David L. Miller