Nothing days

 So you have pain now; but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you. On that day you will ask nothing of me. (John 16:22-23a)

I long for nothing days, days when I neither want nor need anything. I speak not of food, drink and shelter but of soul satisfaction, the holy contentment of sensibly dwelling in the atmosphere of love as ubiquitous and embracing as air, each breath a sacrament filling my lungs, expanding my heart and moistening my eyes with the joy only love can bring.

There may have been great saints and mystics who enjoyed such days, but most typically they speak of moments that come and fill everything in them before fleeing, leaving the memory of divine sweetness that spoke to them of another world, another time to which we all actually belong.

St. Teresa spoke of moments of union that lasted no more than the length of a single “Our Father … .” Ignatius Loyola often climbed to the roof of the Roman house where he lived his last two decades and looked into the starlit sky, whispering, ‘O Dios.’ Over and over again, ‘O Dios.’

Yes, O God, I would know you full and complete, but I am flesh and blood and mortal and everything my heart knows of you pales in comparison to what my soul wants and needs to arrive and know the wonder of what I was created to know and be. So it was for Ignatius and for me and for every human being still capable of feeling the hunger of their own soul.

We have pain now. The pain of living in a world where the Love God is seldom has its way—and never fully. The good suffer, the unjust prosper, sudden illness, outrageous fate and tragedy hover over our beloved.

Then, too, there is the inescapable pain of incompletion, as we feel the insufficiency of everything attainable. Always, we want more because we are created for the More God is, for Love’s holy completion in our own hearts and the heart of the world.

But we are seen, always, by the One who is Love, and times appear when the senses of our soul are quickened to feel and know the wonder of Love all-surrounding, moments of breathing this holiness into our lungs until it fills every last, lost corner of our being.

Let’s call them ‘nothing moments’ when there is nothing more to want or ask because we have the one thing our soul always needed.

Heaven’s door swings open affording a taste, a vision of the world to which we belong and for which we so often long. Even the most fleeting glance of this vision awakens boundless gratitude for the holy privilege of being a human soul, capable of knowing the great Love who sees us, always.

Grant, O Lord, this grace to us all.

David L. Miller