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‘Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me.’ (John 14:1)
There is
nothing so practical, today, so needed and often missing within our hearts and
churches, than a clear sense and deep awareness of the presence of Christ within
our hearts.
Navigating the
daily onslaught of conflict, anger, party spirit and rage that poisons the discourse
of our nation requires careful tending of the place of knowing at the center of
our souls.
We need an interior
place to be, to rest, to return, a reserve of relative quiet and certainty unfazed
by the contesting opinions and incessant bursts of ‘Breaking News’ that inundate
our consciousness.
Unmoored and untethered
to the deep truth of our being, our hearts and minds get swept away in the tsunami
of information, opinions and memes pouring from every digital device we own,
connecting us to everything under the sun, except ourselves.
But even these,
my words, are more noise amid the din. What we need is to descend into the silent
soul, there to feel the ache of searching love that is the presence of the Love
who is searching for us, eager that we might shut off the noise, stop trying to
keep up with everything and listen.
‘We need only
to find a place where we can be alone and look upon Him present within us,’ St.
Teresa of Avila counsels. Again and again, she encourages us to go within, to ‘represent
Christ’ within us, holding and seeing an image of him within and resting there,
present to one another in love.
For her, this
often meant seeing him in Gethsemane or in his Passion, humbly speaking to him
of whatever was on her heart.
For me, often
as not, it is walking just behind him in the fields of Galilee or finding my way
to the hillside where he sat in silence, watching as the faint light of a day
newly born appeared over distant hills, his heart at rest in the Mysterious
Love who indwelt his being.
Welcomed into
that holy space, the noise of the world falls away, the troubles of yesterday
disappear and the Love he is blossoms within, its warmth at once revealing who
he is, the One with Whom he communed and the soul I truly am beneath the face I
show to the world.
I wish I
could live in this interior space always. I wish everything I said and did rose
out of this place of knowing. I’d be a much better and kinder person. But all-too-often,
the bitter conflicts and noise that roil our society floods my consciousness, and
I lose myself, living far from the place of knowing.
And I must
start again, just like so many other times, to find my way back to places I
have known him and known myself as the place of his abiding, the two of us
joined in one love.
The spiritual
life is wonderful, Thomas Merton once mused, ‘if you are content to always be a
beginner.’ Always starting anew. Knowing then not knowing; having then wanting;
finding then losing.
Returning
again and again to the place of knowing to hear his voice, ‘Don’t let your
hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me.’
David L. Miller
