The center holds

 ‘If any of you put a stumbling-block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell. (Mark 9:42-43)

At first blush, there is no good reason Jesus’ words should move spiritual consolation in anyone’s heart, let alone mine. A cold wave of nausea churns at the hollow of my gut as I imagine his image. Surely, it is intended for me.

I have caused little and not-so-little ones to stumble, my words, attitudes and actions falling far short of faithfulness any number of times. I doubt I’ll ever stop carrying the moment I extended my hand to a parishioner as the congregation passed the peace during worship.  ‘I’m ashamed to know you,’ he said, refusing my hand. ‘No kind of leadership at all.’

He spoke for himself, but I’ve no doubt others share his judgment, and some for better reasons than he had. I pray they will find ways to release those judgments, not for my sake but for their own peace and spiritual health.

Ironically, or not, my consolation is found exactly in the words that would condemn me. Re-reading Jesus’ words, tears spring to my eyes as a wave of love rises and swamps my soul, filling me with love for everything he is. For Jesus speaks in great love, calling me from all peripheral concerns to the center of life, to its purpose and goal—eternal life.

This is what most matters, entering, knowing and living intimately with God whose love shines in the face of Jesus. Even his dire warnings speak his great love as he calls us to throw away everything and anything that would keep us from the fulfillment of our existence, which is to live, heart-to-heart, now and forever, with the Love who is the Source of all life.

‘Everything and anything’ include the judgments of others and those we exact on ourselves for the sins and failures that haunt us. There is one cure. All of them evaporate like morning mist in the warm rays of the Love who keeps calling us to life’s true center, the love of the One who showers mercy on his failing friends and forgives even his persecutors.

There is no end to the number of times we need to remind ourselves of this, lest something other than God’s love rules at the center of our hearts. Perhaps we need to be like my old friend, Bob. I held his hand and prayed with him in his final weeks. ‘Tell me that verse again,’ he’d ask on every visit. ‘You know the one. I need to remember.’

‘Yea, Bob, I remember,’ I’d say. ‘There is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus.’

Bob would exhale, long and deep, and lie back in his bed feeling something that looked a lot like peace. And I fell silent. There was nothing more needing to be said. We rested in life’s true center. Nothing else mattered.

David L Miller

Old souls, needed now

But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace. (James 3:17-18)

The goal of my life is to become … or increasingly become … an old soul.

I’ve known my share of them through the years, men and women, no two quite alike. But each stirred a desire to be like them … in one way or another.

Every one of them was more patient that I am and not as angry. There was an oasis of peace around them that invited you to drop your guard and just … be. They never seemed to hurry as if there was somewhere more important to be or someone more important to see.

They breathed contentment with their lives, a warm acceptance of what is … even though nearly every one of them had suffered loses and pain which they carried to the end of their days.

What I appreciated most was that they were gentle, gentle with themselves, gentle with the world around them and gentle with me.

They made a deep impression on me, especially when I was very young. For reasons buried deeply in my nature, I desperately wanted to be seen. I wanted to be accepted. I wanted to be loved. I wanted to find a few gentle voices where I knew I was safe because the world was filled with rigid rules and critical eyes, eager to judge.

Looking back, I am sometimes thankful for those harsh voices and the wounds they inflicted. They sensitized my heart to the presence and ways of love, which is to say the voice of God. They moved me to seek that love all the more, and because of them … I know God all the more.

But I am far more grateful for the old souls in whom the Soul of the Universe sought and found my heart, suffering, now, each day to awaken in me the gentle beauty the Holy One breathed in them.

Not only in me, of course. For this is the holy labor of God’s Spirit within every human heart, a labor in which we share through our prayer and by placing ourselves in tender places and with gracious faces where God finds and awakens the beauty of love deep within us.

The curation of love is our contemplative work in these days, not first loving … but letting ourselves be loved, bathing in Love’s holy sacraments that gentle our hearts and make us fit instruments to balm the bitter, divisive times in which we live.

The voices that dominate our social and political life are neither peaceable nor gentle. Rancorous party spirit, bitter divisions, character defamations, hatred and hypocrisy run rampant in a virulent battle for dominance, in which I want no part.

But to one extent or another, the conflicts of our age won’t leave us alone. They touch our families and relationships, our communities, churches and nation, poisoning hearts with the toxic venom of sarcasm, cynicism, contempt and despair.

The antidote, the only antidote, to the poison coursing through many hearts, is the Love who makes souls old and wise, gentle and peaceful, full of mercy … and hope.

Abide there.

David L. Miller