Posts
I pray that you may … know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God (Ephesians 3:18-19)
I love this
photo. It tells me what I have most wanted, what I most want to be and where I
truly live, where we all live.
The
photographer who shot this frame was so moved he needed to track down the
little boy held up to Pope Leo for blessing, on his recent pilgrimage to Spain.
Surrounded by hundreds of thousands, for some reason, perhaps nothing more than
proximity, his parents handed him to a security person to be blessed and loved,
the moment captured in the near-miracle of exquisite timing.
I cannot
capture all the things I see nor the things I feel, in this moment so
beautifully frozen in time.
Here is a
child, enveloped in a gaze of appreciative delight, his shy smile the only
possible response to an undeniable love that asks nothing but hopes for
everything, mostly that he should know that he is loved and wanted and
treasured and beautiful.
How many live
decades, if not their entire lives, wanting but never knowing what is being
given to this child in this single moment?
Equally
beautiful is the face of a human soul, filled with delight, moved, perhaps
beyond his own expectation, to love the beauty and innocence and promise and
shy smile of a child held before him in the serendipity of a single moment.
It is hard,
no, impossible, to say who is more captured in this moment, the boy held in the
Pope’s gaze or Pope Leo, for he, too, is captured by a love that transcends
him, fills him, from a Source neither he nor anyone else controls.
We cannot
will ourselves to such joy and appreciative delight. All that lies within our
power is to refuse … or consent … when the flood of loving delight washes
through our hearts and fills us. It flows from the heart of the One who is
Loving Delight, eager for us to feel and bask in what, alone, can fulfill our
hearts and lives, our share in God’s own joy.
As blessed as
it is to know ourselves held in love’s holy gaze, like that little Spanish boy,
I wonder if it is a yet greater joy to be so captured, so filled with loving
delight, that it pours from our eyes and holds another human soul in the
eternal gaze of the One who holds us in every time and every place.
For we live
our lives in the light of God’s own face.
David L. Miller
