Against an infinite horizon

They said to each other, ‘Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?’ (Luke 24:32)

Final daylight swirling gold, purple and pink, colors fading, three gray shadows slog into the thickening darkness, insignificant against the horizon of an uncaring cosmos, insensible of their sorrow.

Silent, heads bent, they listen to the words of one who is always the stranger we long to meet along the way, the one whose heart knows what ours needs.

They’d just buried their hope, their dreams shattered by the implacable powers who ravage and rule the earth for their pleasure, crushing any who would dare imagine a world ruled not by the love of power but by the power of love. (Such are with us in every age. We know their names.)

Huddled together against the bitter chill of mortality, they mourn Jesus’ death … and their own, their shivered hearts shrinking in the bitter chill that it all means nothing: not their lives, their loves, their hopes that something truly alive and wonderful can blossom on earth and in their hearts—all of it empty because there is no truth, no life, no way that leads anywhere but to the silence of the tomb.

Their dearest hopes now buried and gone, sealed behind the cold, gray stone of Jesus’ tomb, they trudge home to salve their battered hearts.

And yet, and yet … there was something in the voice of the stranger who joined them along the Emmaus road, something that warmed the cold, dead embers of life and love and hope that had once burned in their hearts. Words, he spoke, of ancient promises and of the Gracious Wonder whose name is Love and whose gift is Life.

It was just a flicker at first, so small and frail they did not notice what was happening in their soul’s depth—not until the stranger blessed the bread, broke it and gave it to them as they sat at table.

In such familiar reverence, they noticed the warmth that had been building within them along the way. They realized they had met the stranger for whom every heart longs. They felt the Life he is alive in the places they felt most dead.

And they lifted their eyes to the once uncaring skies, there to see that we live against the horizon of an Infinite Love—stretching from eternity-to-eternity, enfolding every moment, walking many roads to meet us on the way, sometimes when we least expect.

David L. Miller