My name … and yours

 There is … one God and Father of us all, who is above all and through all and in all. (Ephesians 4:6)

Tears sometimes surprise. All it takes is a word, a remembered face, a memory thought lost in the wash of time. Without notice, your eyes moisten, your voice cracks and something deeper than you could summon rises from hidden depths to tell you who you are.

So it was over coffee, remembering a colleague I once knew, though not well. From his widow, I learned he had died of a terrible disease seven years before. I’d not known of it since we lived thousands of miles apart.

What brought tears was not his death, but the way he must have suffered, a suffering in which death comes as grace. Imagining his last days kicked open the doors of my heart, unleashing an immense love and exquisite tears, which are the only language capable of expressing the soul’s deep truth.

And that truth … is Love, the Loving Mystery who is above all and through all and in all, including our own conflicted, contradictory selves.

At the core of the human person, in the heart’s inmost room, a sanctum so many never find or enter, dwells the Beloved, the Love who is beyond time and space and yet whose presence permeates and preserves all creation, a living, breathing, flowing current of life and love chanted by the birds who greet me every morning as I drink my coffee and wake to a new day.

Love is my name, the true name of every human being, created as we are as sacramental bearers of the Love for whom no name will do, yet all of us so marred and scarred by life and sin that we forget … or never discover … who we are and the glory for which we are made.

Our most exquisite moments appear when Love’s immensity floods every corner of our being. And for whatever time this lasts, we are truly ourselves, free from the narrow confines of ego, seeing, feeling and knowing as God sees and feels and knows.

Someday, St. Paul said, we will fully know as we are known. That day has not yet come, but sitting on the balcony, with tears in my eyes, I caught a glimpse.

David L. Miller