tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-339717772024-03-16T13:52:07.129-05:00Praying the mysteryReflections on Scripture and the experience of God's presence in our common lives by David L. Miller, an Ignatian retreat director for the Christos Center for spiritual Formation, is the author of "Friendship with Jesus: A Way to Pray the Gospel of Mark" and hundreds of articles and devotions in a variety of publications. Contact him at prdmiller@gmail.com.David L Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01356806900819424388noreply@blogger.comBlogger1553125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33971777.post-5067501601456876722024-03-15T18:34:00.005-05:002024-03-15T18:34:46.643-05:00Nightlight<p> <i><span style="background: white; font-family: "Segoe UI", sans-serif; font-size: 14.5pt; line-height: 107%;">And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will
draw all people to myself.</span></i><span style="background: white; font-family: "Segoe UI", sans-serif; font-size: 14.5pt; line-height: 107%;"> (John
12:32)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Perhaps it was the setting, a hospital room when I
couldn’t rest, sleep or find any comfort. Maybe at another time the image, the juxtaposition,
would not have struck me, but lonely hours staring at the ceiling affects your
vision … and opens your heart.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Three parents stared from a silent television screen,
receiving hugs from supporters who visited them in solidarity with their grief
and calls for justice. They will never get it, however. Justice would mean
getting their children back, alive and well. But they are gone, slaughtered in
an elementary school room in Uvalde, Texas, two years ago.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Justice, for them, lies far beyond human reach, in a
realm more gracious than anything we might imagine let alone provide.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">For the time being, there is grief, the consolation of
tender hearts and the faint hope that public authorities will hear them and respond
like it was <i>their</i> children who were cut off from their precious lives by
a shooter and his soulless killing machine.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Who knows what beauty and joy would have graced their
families and community through the irreplaceable lives of these children? For
this, we should all grieve. The Holy One gave those lives not just to their
parents, their families and to one Texas town …. but to every one of us. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But it was more than this, more than my frustration of another
night tethered to heart monitors in a hospital bed that moved my tears. There
was an image. Behind the faces on the TV screen, a crucifix hung on the wall over
their shoulders.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">My bleary eyes could not make out much detail on the cross.
It looked to be plaster with little color that I could see in the darkness.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But it was just right, in exactly the right place … as if
forces beyond us curated the scene, a juxtaposition of shattered hearts
standing there as the Crucified, arms spread wide by the ugly brutality of this
world, his arms, above and around them … and me in that cursed bed, all of us in
need of healing. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And there he was … and is … and always will be, arms
open, Love giving itself away, refusing to hate, lost in love for a world that
hates far too much and all-too-often. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">That’s who Jesus is, the crucified and risen one, Incarnation
of the Love who embraces all that we are, all that we have suffered and
celebrated, all that makes us laugh and cry, enfolding the worst and best of us
in an overflowing triune Love that has neither beginning nor end.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I cannot explain it and am certain I will never have such
wisdom, but I know there is healing in those arms. More than once or twice I
have tasted it, many more. And I know … that plaster crucifix, on a wall
somewhere in Uvalde, Texas, speaks to places in our hearts that only Love can
reach, transforming sorrow into hope and death into life. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">In the darkness of night, only a crucified savior will
do. Nowhere is God any greater … than on that cross.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">David L Miller<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>David L Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01356806900819424388noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33971777.post-17777376776192150092024-03-04T10:58:00.001-06:002024-03-04T10:58:16.985-06:00<p> <b><span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">A clean and open space</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><b><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";"><o:p> </o:p></span></b></span><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Making a whip of cords, he (Jesus) drove all of
them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the
coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. He told those who
were selling the doves, ‘Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s
house a market-place!’</span></i></span><span class="text"><span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> (John 2:15-16)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">All in all, it’s not a very ‘sweet Jesus’ sort of thing
to do. But I understand the impulse.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Walking into the temple precincts, Jesus twists together
a whip of cords, upends the tables of the money changers; their coins ching and
clatter across the pavement. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Swinging the whip above his head, he drives off the
merchants with their birds and lambs and cattle and who knows what else,
clearing out an empty space until all that remains is him, standing alone in
the courtyard, catching his breath, looking around for who or what he has yet
to chase off. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">He wants the temple—the ‘Father’s house’—to be a meeting
place where human hearts might know and feel the Great Heart who loves and
longs for them, a space to pour out their loves and hurts that they might meet
and enter the Love who is their home, their hearts enfolded in the divine heart.
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I felt something of the same yesterday while visiting a
church that was new to me. The choir stood at the director’s command, a flute
from a hidden corner intoned an exquisite passage, inviting the heart to rest,
wait and listen for the voices to breathe their harmonies over the gathered
people. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A spiritual, deep and soulful washed over us, the congregation
rapt, moved but unmoving in the pews around me, until it was over. The final
note hung in the air a nanosecond as a moment of sweet, mystic communion was
about to gather every heart into one love for the Holy God who inspires such
beauty and devotion.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But it was not to be, the congregation broke into simultaneous
applause, unable to leave a tender moment alone, as they did every time someone
sang or played or spoke, shattering any opportunity for silent communion with each
other in the Great Love who woke us from sleep and called us together. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There was no open space for the heart to breathe and pray
and be.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I was not tempted to make a whip of cords and drive these
good people out, but I certainly wanted to tie their hands that they might let Beauty’s
presence wash over them and grace their hearts with whatever the Holy One might
give them.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Just so, I think I understand Jesus as he stands out of
breath in the middle of the courtyard.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">He cleared an open space where the clamor of buying and
selling, of work and worry is stilled, a space where human hearts are relieved
of the compulsion to fill every single moment with sound and motion—all the
things we do in our vain attempts to fill our life with meaning or to drown out
the nagging doubt that our lives and all we do to fill them has any meaning at
all, that the emptiness we sometimes (often?) feel has no cure.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But the heart does not lie. Our hearts know we are made
for love, to be filled with affection and warmth, to find ourselves amid the mutuality
of giving and receiving that makes us truly human and truly glad to be graced
with the privilege of drawing breath on this wonderous little corner of the
cosmos.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We need a clean, open space to feel what we feel and to
speak our fears and needs and hopes from the hidden silence of our hearts. And
there, exactly there, in that open space, we meet the one who is the face of
the hunger within us.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">He is not only the fire of our hunger but also the food
and drink that satisfies the heart’s ancient longing, standing in the open space,
ready to hear, ready to heal, ready to receive, ready to welcome us that we may
be taken into the Heart he is. Heart-to-heart, we meet and know the Love who
made us, the Love who ever awaits us, the Love who lies waiting to live and
breathe through our holy and precious lives.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">David L. Miller<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>David L Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01356806900819424388noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33971777.post-62412974851812897322024-02-25T16:10:00.002-06:002024-02-25T17:54:44.398-06:00If dreams there be …<p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; line-height: 107%;">You have heard that it was said, “You shall love
your neighbor and hate your enemy.” </span><span id="en-NRSVA-23279">But I say to you, Love your enemies and
pray for those who persecute you,<b><sup> </sup></b>so that you may be
children of your Father in heaven</span></i></span><span class="text"><span style="background: white; line-height: 107%;"> (Matthew
5:43-45a)</span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Verdana",sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Songs and dreams tell us who we are, who we are meant to
be, the soul who longs to live through the one precious life we are given. They
alone unlock the hearts secret room, releasing desires over which reason has
neither control nor arms to reach. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Verdana",sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">So it is, that on a single day, two moments come that
have absolutely nothing to do with each other, except for the voice of soul
speaking through both.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Verdana",sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">The song came first, a movie theme, <i>Il Postino,</i> decades
old, but what does age matter? Beauty, love and wonder know no age. It began
with the soft trill of a single flute, then a violin, a love theme, its melody gentle
and flowing, filled with an insatiable ache to touch and know and be absorbed,
lost in love’s embrace. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Verdana",sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">The heart is much quicker than the mind, and in an
instant my heart prays silently then with words to be one, lost in the song,
not to hear it with the ear but to be inside the ache of its melody, wounded
and wanting, flowing in the stream of love and longing.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Verdana",sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">And for a moment, prayer has its answer; thought is
dispersed, the mind falls silent as death and the heart is carried away in the
wonder of beauty. I am in the song and the song is in me, and we are one. Lost
in love’s melody, once more I know I am Love’s blessed image, beloved from all
eternity, enclosed in the heart of the One who sings love songs in my soul. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Verdana",sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Feeling this, there is neither need nor want for anything
more than Love’s constant return that, however unlikely, I might become the Love
who dwells in the inner mansion of this heart, instead of the imposter who so
often wears my face.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Verdana",sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Is this but a romantic dream? Well, there was a dream
this same day. It left a lingering image, a memory, as sleep slipped away. A golden-haired
girl, age 3, in a soft-green and white checkered dress. She wandered up the
aisle of a crowded chapel, packed for a graduation ceremony. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Verdana",sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Slowly looking
around, she passed the president of the seminary who was speaking at the
lectern. Climbing a couple of steps, she walked among and around the knees of faculty
in academic robes and full regalia seated there—looking for me. But she cannot
find me because I am sitting far to the side, several rows deep among the graduates,
barely able to see what was happening. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Verdana",sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">This wasn’t just a dream. It happened. And the moment lives
in my heart, which is why, I suppose, it appeared in my dream. But in my dream,
something happens that didn’t happen. I rise, scoop her up, enfold her in my
arms, enclosing her in my heart so that the moment might live forever, shining
with love’s beauty, revealing once and for all what human beings are made of
and made for.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Verdana",sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Savoring that image, I know that the love in which I hold
her … is the Love who holds and encloses me in the divine heart, living still
in this precious life with which I have been graced. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Verdana",sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">If dreams there be, and if dreams come true, may this one
forever haunt my days and nights … until the Love who inspires them expands my
heart to love all that God loves. Perhaps then, I shall truly sing the song
that God never ceases to sing, lost in love’s melody.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span face=""Verdana",sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">David L. Miller<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Verdana",sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span face=""Verdana",sans-serif" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>David L Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01356806900819424388noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33971777.post-44372153170695822472024-02-17T14:46:00.002-06:002024-02-17T14:46:24.710-06:00Only for the sick<p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"> <span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; line-height: 107%;">After this Jesus went out and saw a tax-collector
named Levi, sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ </span><span id="en-NRSVA-25128">And he got up, left everything, and followed him.</span>
</i></span><span class="text"><span style="background: white; line-height: 107%;">(Luke 5:27-28)</span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">Who doesn’t want a second chance? Or a third or
fourth … or, Lord knows, how many is enough before we get it right? Life, that
is. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">But then we never do get it quite right … or even
close. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">And if I needed a reminder, the ash-smudged
foreheads that greeted me along grocery store aisles came as an irksome spur, <i>once
again,</i> to take a close look at my life—my patterns of living and speaking
and acting through seven decades—and recognize, <i>once again,</i> that I have received
a lot more in this life than I have given.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">I have not become the soul of life and love and
grace I might have, could have, should have (and wanted to) become. But
strangely, I am still haunted by an unmistakable beauty that hungers to live … in
and through … the one life I have been given. It won’t let me go.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">Amid this comes the darkness of the wee hours
when sleep slips away and you stare into the abyss of knowing it is later than
you think: There are not nearly enough years left for you to live the fullness
of the beauty that lies hidden in your heart.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">If only, </span></i></span><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">one thinks …. If only
I could do it all over again, I would have been smarter, better, braver, bolder,
kinder and more faithful. I would not have indulged my vanity or wounded anger
or lust or greed or fear … or whatever bedevils your heart, striving as we all
do to fill the emptiness and soothe wounds we may have carried for decades.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">It is then, in the middle of the mess, amid the
quagmire of <i>could’ves, would’ves</i> and <i>should’ves,</i> that Mercy comes
to call. <i>‘Follow me. I want you.’</i><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">Such was Jesus’ invitation to Levi, a member of the
most reviled occupation of the time, tax collectors. In Caravaggio’s painting
of this scene, an astonished Levi, leaning over the day’s ill-gotten proceeds,
points at himself as if to say, ‘<i>Who, me?’ </i><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">Yes, you … Levi, and we, too. For, Mercy comes to
those who live amid the quagmire of unresolved feelings and regrets, sins of which
we are ashamed and memories that make us wince. I do not come for those who
have no need of a physician, Jesus says, but those who are sick. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">So yes, I want you</span></span><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 14.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">.</span></i></span><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">Rising from his chair, Levi followed, and in my
mind, this day, I, too, rise and fall at Mercy’s feet, Jesus lifting me to his
side, for a moment his arm around me before I disappear into him—and realize
the truth.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">I am, this life, with all the messes I have made,
the hurts I have caused and, yes, the good and graces I have tried to share,
all of it is enveloped in him, taken into the Love he is, Mercy enfolding all
that I am so that all that I am (however haltingly) might become mercy and
grace, love and beauty, no longer lost or alone but human and whole, at home in
the Love who heals.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">David L. Miller</span></i></span><i><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";"><o:p></o:p></span></i></p>David L Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01356806900819424388noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33971777.post-84900965232057436372024-02-11T16:01:00.005-06:002024-02-11T16:01:32.611-06:00 As you see so shall you be<p><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">A leper<sup> </sup>came
to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, ‘If you choose, you can
make me clean.’<b><sup> </sup></b>Moved with
pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him,
‘I do choose. Be made clean!’</span></i></span><span class="text"><span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> (Mark 1:40-41)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">I have reached the point in recent years where (on
good days) I realize that getting the point is not the point. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">Hard as it is to let go of wringing an idea or
some takeaway from my morning meditation, it is refreshing, if a bit
unsettling, to settle into a moment of awareness, realizing that what I seek is
already in me … and I am in it.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">The unsettling part is letting go of the need to
make something of the time, to walk away with an idea I can share or write
about, which, ironically, is exactly what I am doing.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">But to write about what happened today, last
night and several days running seems impossible because it is so nebulous—tangible,
yes, and assuredly real, but elusive as the air of love I was breathing, or
better, that was breathing through me.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">The story is simple, a leper, an outcast in the
grip of gross disfiguration physically, emotionally and socially. And then, an
outstretched hand and Jesus’ voice: <i>I choose</i>. I choose you. I choose
this moment to touch and heal and love and give you back your life. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">The words are barely necessary. The hand is
enough. If all I ever knew of Jesus was this moment, this outstretched hand, it
would be enough for me to love him and want to be with him, just to feel him
near.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">But there’s more. For the superlative gift is not
seeing him and knowing he is compassion, divine and real, human and present
right there before my eyes. The greater gift is finding that same love alive
and breathing from some secret source hidden in the depth of your being.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">And greater still is silently knowing that the Love
breathing in him and in you surrounds and envelopes us and everything we can imagine
in an invisible ocean of Presence, Love’s boundless sea. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">The non-point of all this is that we pray and
meditate <i>not</i> (or surely less) to get something, find answers or reach an
insight. We come and look at Jesus to savor Love’s truth until it awakens within
us the Love we truly are, and in whom we live, though we knew it not.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">We come to see and savor Love’s own soul, for as
we see so shall we be. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">David L. Miller<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>David L Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01356806900819424388noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33971777.post-73810131920422026322024-02-05T13:50:00.002-06:002024-02-05T13:50:25.238-06:00Faces at the door<p><i><span style="background: white; color: #010000; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And the whole
city was gathered around the door. And he cured many …. In the morning, when it
was still dark, [Jesus] got up and went out to a deserted place …. When they
found him, they said to him, ‘Everyone is searching for you.’</span></i><span style="background: white; color: #010000; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> (Mark 1:33-37)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Faces. Just look at the faces. Forget your theology, your
ideology, your politics and everything else that blinds or obscures or restricts
your field of vision.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Just look and see, and you will know.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A black-haired girl with earnest eyes raises a crooked
stick on which someone attached a ragged white flag ripped from a bed sheet.
Around her lies the rubble of her life, a Gazan city of crumpled gray concrete
broken in the bombardment, her punishment for having the bad judgment of being
born at this time and place.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Miles away, in Jerusalem streets, weary faces walk in the
torchlight wearing love’s worry for faces they fear they will never again see, hoping
their shouts will bring their beloved home from captivity, while neighbors
well-known to them mourn the slaughtered.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I don’t have to wonder at the expression of those who
gathered at the Capernaum door of the house where Jesus was staying. I just
watch the news and feel the ache of hearts longing for restoration, hoping to
feel whole and safe, wrapped in love’s warmth, free from the fears that nag
every moment of their waking existence and haunt their dreams so that there is
no escape.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Nor need I wonder why Jesus’ friends panicked when they
woke and didn’t see him sleeping across the room, his breathing keeping time
with their own, reassuring them that the one essential soul in their life was
not lost to them.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Faces, all of them, longing to feel seen and safe, whole
and hopeful, hoping that the hidden soul within them might rest in the peace of
Love’s presence.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">‘Everyone is looking for you,’ Jesus’ friends breathed in
anxious voice, upon finding him alone on a hillside.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Of course, we all are. The girl with the flag, the protestors
in the street, the faces at Jesus’ door, you, me, the next guy who passes us on
the street—all of us looking for a great love that can make us whole.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">All of us, in one way or another, whether with flags or
shouts, silent prayers or hidden longings we barely recognize within ourselves:
We pray.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We pray because we are human and mortal and so very incomplete,
yet still alive with the hope that there is One who can make us whole, One who completes
us, One who is the longing of every human heart—One who <i><u>is </u>that very longing</i>
… living in the soul’s hidden depth.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And that One … begs to be seen in the eyes of that girl
in Gaza, to be heard in the voices of those longing for their lost ones, and to
be welcomed in the hidden corners of our hearts longing for Love’s healing
touch.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We stand at the door, all of us, one great prayer, secretly
bearing the Love who awakens our hope for Love’s completion.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">David L. Miller<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>David L Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01356806900819424388noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33971777.post-18363122080186716962024-01-31T15:50:00.000-06:002024-01-31T15:50:03.888-06:00With Lo in the flow<p><i><span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and
brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here
with us?’ And they took offence</span><sup data-fn="#fen-NRSVA-24408b" data-link="[<a href="#fen-NRSVA-24408b" title="See footnote b">b</a>]"> </sup>at <span style="font-size: medium;">[Jesus]</span></i><span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-size: medium;">.</span></span><span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> (Mark 6:3)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">I have no idea who Lo is, his background or how he came
to work at a suburban Cosco. But he made my day.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">He saw me, and for a moment I truly felt seen, welcome
and received as we shared a moment. And laughter.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The laughter was directed at my head of white hair, revealing
my age and releasing me from the idiocy of having to fumble through my wallet
to produce my driver’s license or AARP card in order to purchase the bottle of
wine amid the milk and butter, coffee and assorted items on this day’s grocery
run.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I saw his name tag as we left the checkout, while trying,
without success, to identify the origin of his accent. But it didn’t matter because
something utterly ordinary and wonderfully transcendent passed between us in an
instant.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">What to call it? Flow, maybe? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The flow of kindness, mutual humanity, basic respect,
gentle humor, yes, all this, but more, because it made us—or at least me—happier,
more alive and hopeful, open and kind, whatever the day might bring.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There was one more thing: It also made me feel less alone.
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Our aloneness in this increasingly anxious and impersonal
age is killing us, literally, or so a growing number of medical studies tell us.
Their bottom line: Loneliness has the same health effect as smoking a pack of
cigarettes a day.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But loneliness kills us spiritually well before we are
ready for the undertaker. It makes us feel cut off from the flow of human kindness
that would pull us into its stream, bathing our hearts in the awareness that we
are seen and recognized, known and valued, respected and worthy of care.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There are sacraments of this kindness and care. Today, one
of them was named Lo, and for a moment, an instant, I knew myself with Lo in
the flow of goodness and gentle grace.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">As a Christian, I have a name for this flow. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">‘I am the bread of life,’ Jesus says, in the Gospel of John.
‘I am the Good Shepherd.’ ‘I am living water.’ The list goes on, and today I
will add a couple more predicates to Jesus’ sentence.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I am the flow of life and love that illumines your heart.
I am the joy that fills you when you feel seen and treasured. I am the kindness
that lifts your heart and restores your joy. I am the elation that comes when Love’s
living flow washes through your heart. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And I am also the sadness, the longing ache of feeling
cut off, rejected and invisible. For, the Love that I am longs to flow through all
that is, every moment, every conversation, every day. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The divine life and love that filled Jesus frustrated him
thoroughly when the gift he offered was refused and denied, when he was
dismissed as the boy from down the street, nothing special.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But the flow goes on—within, beneath, around and through
all that is—finding its way despite the rocks and walls, hard heads and
calcified hearts that would hold it back.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And sometimes, Lo and behold, we find ourselves right in the
middle of it. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">David L. Miller<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>David L Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01356806900819424388noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33971777.post-34146480313950849992024-01-21T18:03:00.003-06:002024-01-21T18:03:27.888-06:00So, this is life<p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; line-height: 107%;">Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news
of God, </span><span id="en-NRSVA-24228">and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the
kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’</span></i></span><span class="text"><span style="background: white; line-height: 107%;"> (Mark 1:14b-15)</span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The kingdom of God is near. The kingdom of God is
within you. The kingdom of God is among you. The kingdom of God is spread out
on the earth and people do not see it.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">I surely don’t know what went through the minds
of those who first heard words like these from Jesus. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">A kingdom? You mean, like Rome? Like the kings
who rule and tax and run things, whom we avoid as much as possible so we can live
our lives with little interference from the powerful who know little of our
lives and couldn’t care less as long as their coffers are full?<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">No, another kingdom, make that a new reality, a
new way of being awakened in the hearts of those who first heard Jesus. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">Why did people come to him? And why did the first
followers drop their nets and take up with him, having no idea what they might feel
or see or suffer?<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">Or did they? Did they feel more alive in his
presence for reasons they could not understand? Did they hang on his words because
they felt more alive, more human, more hopeful and whole so that they wanted
more of whatever it was that was in him—and whatever it was that was coming to
life in them when he was near?<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">In other words, maybe they followed and stayed
near him for exactly the same reason I get up every morning and read a story of
Jesus, watching and waiting for whatever feelings and thoughts, questions and awareness
bubbles up—because on most days I feel more alive, more free, more loved, more
whole and able to love this crazy world and live with joyful gratitude for the
life I have been given; every morning, the cold corners of my heart fill and
warm making me glad to be alive because I catch a glimpse of this Jesus, feeling
for the breadth of a breath the bottomless love that he is and knowing, this is
life.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">Salvation is one word for this, the life of God—which
is to say Immortal and Impassable Love—claiming greater territory and rule in
the rugged terrain of my tangled heart. And I am glad. For it’s a new day, the
rule of God is more with and in me, opening my eyes to its beauty spread out on
the earth in creation’s wonder and in the loveliness of gracious faces alive
and shining, whether they know it or not, with the One who is always near, bringing
the kingdom<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">David L. Miller<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";"><o:p> </o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";"><o:p> </o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";"><o:p> </o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";"><o:p> </o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";"><o:p> </o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";"><o:p> </o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";"><o:p> </o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";"><o:p> </o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";"><o:p> </o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";"><o:p> </o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";"><o:p> </o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";"><o:p> </o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";"><o:p> </o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";"><o:p> </o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";"><o:p> </o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";"><o:p> </o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";"><o:p> </o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";"><o:p> </o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";"><o:p> </o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";"><o:p> </o:p></span></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";"><o:p> </o:p></span></i></span></p>David L Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01356806900819424388noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33971777.post-46000516297007523532023-12-25T16:58:00.004-06:002023-12-25T16:58:31.234-06:00A light in Bethlehem<p> <i><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There shall be no harm or ruin on all my holy
mountain; for the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the
waters cover the sea</span></i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">. (Isaiah 11:9)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Ancient voices console me this Christmas Day. Their hearts
reach across many centuries to find my heart, even as Bach’s celebration of ecstatic
joy dances from the radio and lifts my heart from the sadness of these times.
Thanks, Johann, I needed that. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Or maybe I shouldn’t thank you at all. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Perhaps this is just one more way, one moment in a
lifetime of moments when the Word who is God becomes flesh … or at least waves
of sound … to lift me out of myself. But it’s more. Out of myself, I enter the
joy of communing with the Love ‘who comes from the great and everlasting day of
eternity into our little moment of time.’ Thanks to St. Augustine for that
phrase. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But much more, I give thanks for the One whose coming we celebrate
this holy day. For, the Mystery he is comes in every moment, marrying divine
love with created matter that we might see and feel and fall in love with the
light and love he is. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">‘Those who see light are in the light sharing its brilliance,’
according to Irenaeus, another ancient voice echoing in me 18 centuries after
he left the scene. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Just so, our Christmas endeavor must be to see light in
these sad times. Seeing saves us from ourselves when the worries and wars of
the world make it nigh unto impossible to sing <i>Joy to the World</i> with the
energy it deserves, to say nothing of the vigor our hearts desperately need. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">If we can just see, we may yet become words of divine light
and beauty ourselves, just as God intended. It’s difficult most days, but then
....<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Well, then I see a Palestinian pastor lighting a candle beside
a Jesus doll nestled among broken, jagged pieces of concrete in the chancel of
Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem. That’s where we see Christ this Christmas,
he says, buried in the rubble waiting for us to see and love him there.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Yes, but he might also look in a mirror, although I suspect
he does little of that because his eyes are fixed on the sorrows of his place
and time and people. But if he did, he might see himself aglimmer with the
light of Christ’s own sorrow, born of the Love of whom Jesus is the face. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">He says this time has challenged his faith like no other
he has known. How, after all, can one sing, <i>‘glory to God in the highest,’</i>
when your soul bears the weight of war and the deaths of children?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Yet, he fans my hope as he lights a votive in his little
church in Bethlehem where Christ, the light of the world, first drew breath. For
I feel his love, and the love I feel is not just his but the love of the One
who is Love, and it fills the heart with joy and ecstasy, and sorrow and longing,
and all the other emotions Christ yet feels for our lives and troubled orb.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And with this comes an ancient longing. ‘There shall be
no harm or ruin on all my holy mountain,’ God promised in Isaiah’s prophecy, ‘for
the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover
the sea.’<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I long for that day. It’s certainly not here yet. We’re
still a long way off. But sometimes, in ancient voices and lit candles, glorious
music and loving souls, I feel its beauty and taste its goodness and know: I am
not alone.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">David L. Miller <o:p></o:p></span></p>David L Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01356806900819424388noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33971777.post-31875012583340479962023-12-22T15:06:00.004-06:002023-12-22T15:06:50.584-06:00Tears of light<p> <i><span style="background: white; font-family: "Segoe UI", sans-serif; font-size: 14.5pt; line-height: 107%;">The true light, which enlightens everyone, was
coming into the world</span>.</i><span style="background: white; font-family: "Segoe UI", sans-serif; font-size: 14.5pt; line-height: 107%;"> (John 1:9)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk154144240;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I’m
told the sun converts four million tons of its substance into light every
second of every day, giving life to this blue and green marble that is our home.
But today, Old George Way receives little from the sun’s constant generosity. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk154144240;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Ashen
rays filter through the leaden gloom of winter clouds, heavy with rain, hanging
low on the bare oaks at the end of the street out my west window.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk154144240;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Dreary
as Old George feels this morning, places too many to number languish and despair,
bereft of the faintest glimmer of any light capable of lifting human hearts to believe
that the life of joy and beauty for which they hunger can ever be theirs. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk154144240;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Darkness
covers the earth and thick darkness the peoples; so wrote the prophet Isaiah, 2500
years ago, give or take. I’d have thought he’d just watched the evening news,
sitting beside me on the couch.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk154144240;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Maybe
that is why tears warm my eyes as these words cross my lips: ‘The true light,
which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.’ <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk154144240;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I <i>long</i>
for this light … and die when I feel its absence. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk154144240;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I
want to feel the light of an eternal loving presence when the light of life
grows dim and when the news is darker than gray December mornings. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk154144240;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I
need to know there is a light that never dies, never fades, a light that was already
present when this improbable universe exploded into existence in an
unimaginable burst of splendor—so that the improbable reality of my own existence
might be possible. I want to feel the miracle of this light (even more improbably)
alive in my own confused and conflicted heart, making me glad to be alive, loving
my loves and knowing theirs.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk154144240;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I <i>need</i>
to see and feel this light so I can believe that the light who is Love is always
shining, even when my heart is dim and my eyes do not see. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk154144240;"><i><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Knowing</span></i></span><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk154144240;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">: Its goodness glimmers in great and
common moments, in all that is good and just, beautiful and lovely, in all that
is love and that delights the heart with gratitude for the joy of being alive
and able to feel creation’s wonder touching the gentle senses of your flesh.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk154144240;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The One
who is the true light, who enlightens everyone and everything, this Jesus, the
Light made flesh, reveals the beauty of the divine face. Born amid the poverty of
a dark time and place, we seek and look for his light in every time and place, knowing
there is no darkness that he will not invade and bathe with the loving light of
his presence. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk154144240;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Seeing
his face, the light he is awakens the warmth of his beauty in the depth of our
souls, and we discover exactly who we are and for what we are born.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk154144240;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And
this, I suppose, is the meaning of my morning tears. The light I seek has found
me … once more.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk154144240;"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It
never grows old.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk154144240;"><i><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">David
L. Miller<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></p>
<span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk154144240;"></span>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>David L Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01356806900819424388noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33971777.post-1071192915552835082023-12-17T17:48:00.000-06:002023-12-17T17:48:05.483-06:00 Journey in search of a soul<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">[John the Baptist]</span></i><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> proclaimed, ‘The
one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop
down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you
with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.’</span></i></span><span class="text"><span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> (Mark 1:7-8)<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Tradition sometimes pictures John, the Baptist,
as an angry, brazen fellow bellowing out in the desert wastes about sin and righteousness
and the need to change … or run, because someone was coming who would burn the
chaff in the fires of divine wrath.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There must have been a great hunger for personal
reformation and a society more just and decent than their daily scramble to get
by; otherwise, it is hard to imagine why John attracted any following at all,
let alone the crowds that braved the desert heat and rugged journey to go see what
all the commotion was about.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">He was a curiosity, with his itchy camel hair tunic, gobbling
locusts for nutrition and robbing bees of their honey to choke it all down.
Perhaps, he reminded people of wild-eyed prophets of old, afire with a word of
God burning in their bones they had to speak lest they risk losing their souls.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And it was likely the concern for their own souls that
drew more than a few. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There’s something about our souls. They are ours, and yet
not, a gift, an expression, even, yes, an incarnation of the Great Soul who is
Love. We can lose track of our souls amid myriad voices shouting from one media
or another, telling us what we should say, do, wear, watch, buy and care about,
lest we miss the moment.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But that core, the apex of the soul, as medieval mystics
called it, belongs only to God, for it is the life of God within our lives,
hungry for home, crying to connect, for union with the Love who gives life to
all that lives.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We can lose track of our souls and often do. They can get
beaten down, shouted out and forgotten, but they do not die. The life of the
soul is always there, reminding and even cajoling the heart, irritating our
ease with the intuitive awareness that we are more … and are made for more … and
will never feel at home in this world until our hearts are one, at rest in the
Love for whom the soul within us longs.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I have no idea what I would have heard had I taken my
journalist’s notebook and interviewed the pilgrims going out to John, trying to
learn what on earth stirred them from comfortable homes to listen to a ragged
voice telling them to repent of their misdirected lives.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I suspect most of them would have fumbled about unable to
tell me. The real motivations that move the deepest things in us are
necessarily deeper than our stumbling tongues can tell. Always were, always
will be.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But at root, the reason is surely love, for love is the
substance of the soul we lose and one hopes find again in this life. They went
into the wild country hoping to find their souls to feel truly alive again, knowing
the Great Soul who wouldn’t leave them satisfied with the lives they had.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">They were intended for something more, something wild and
free, wonderful and joyous, and the voice of soul within them, the Love who
does not die, was still, blessedly audible in their restlessness. We should all
be so blessed.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I understand these pilgrims. We all can. That
restlessness for more, for the More that satisfies the heart, so common and
real, is the breath of God’s being within our own. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I understand something about John, too. ‘I am not worthy
to untie his sandals,’ he said, speaking of Jesus. But I suspect he would have
been glad to do it, honored actually, to which, I say, ‘You take the left foot,
John. I got the right.’ <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It seems a good place to find one’s soul.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">David L. Miller<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span></p><p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span></p><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></div><div class="x1e56ztr" data-block="true" data-editor="d5mmp" data-offset-key="eik94-0-0" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin-bottom: 8px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"></div>David L Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01356806900819424388noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33971777.post-36104129506361276012023-11-26T18:46:00.000-06:002023-11-26T18:46:03.227-06:00 The way of peace<p><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">As Jesus came
near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, “If you, even you, had
only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are
hidden from your eyes. </span></i></span><span class="text"><span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">(Luke 19:41-42)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">Moments come that remind me why I love Jesus and
want to live my life in close proximity to who he is, what he said and what he
did, although I will always be a poor example of what it means to be one of his
followers.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">I see his face as he looks up at the walls of Jerusalem
and weeps. Perhaps it is the violence of our times, but imagining his tears I know
him as the heart whom I can trust with my own.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">His love for human souls in all their lost,
confused and self-destructive ways wets his cheeks with compassion for the
world I see on the daily news, the world I live in whether I like it or not. There
are plenty of days I want to shut the world out and let my heart rest because I
think I cannot take much more.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">But he doesn’t. He lets it all in, feeling the sorrowful
ways of this tit-for-tat world to which nations sacrifice their children, century
after century, in a doomed, determined desire to gain some measure of security that
no amount of power can ever secure, typically doing little more than making the
next bloody conflict inevitable.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">There is no peace there. The way of peace is the
way of this weeping man outside the walls of Jerusalem. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">A few days later, Jesus hangs on a cross, the
tool of the practical and powerful protectors of this world’s wisdom, convinced
someone must die to make an example and maintain order, the infernal logic of ‘the
way things are.’ <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">But Jesus shows another way, a harder way that breaks
the bloody chain of history. His lifeblood dripping away, he does not descend
into hatred and bitterness. He refuses the siren call for revenge, retribution or
some ‘proportional response.’ He transforms his pain into a peace offering,
extended even to those who have no interest in understanding or accepting it.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">This is the way of peace so seldom tried. ‘If
only,’ he cried. ‘If only, you knew the things that make for peace.’ But we don’t.
Or if we do, our hearts are too fearful to beat back our self-protective
impulses long enough to see the need and humanity of those we imagine so
different from ourselves, failing to see that there can be no peace for us
unless there is peace for everyone.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">Maybe we will never learn. Maybe the body count
will never be high enough to move nations and their leaders to say ‘enough!’
And maybe it is asking too much of them to imagine ways of dealing with
violence and hatred that don’t involve more hatred and violence. Maybe we are
stuck forever in this ugly cycle. It’s just the way things are. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">It is this that moved Jesus to tears as he surveyed
the walls of Jerusalem. And it is this that makes me love and trust him as the one,
the way, we most need to help us imagine another way.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">I adore you, O Christ, and I bless you; by your
holy cross you redeem the world.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">David L. Miller<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></p>David L Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01356806900819424388noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33971777.post-48507008407929937312023-11-22T16:23:00.001-06:002023-11-22T16:23:37.444-06:00Are you still there, George? We need you.<p><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; line-height: 107%;">Pray for the peace of Jerusalem:</span> “May they
prosper who love you.</i></span><i><span style="line-height: 107%;"> <span class="text"><span style="background: white;">Peace be within
your walls,</span> and security within your towers.”</span></span></i></span><span class="text"><span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> (Psalm 122:6-7)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There’s a Greek Orthodox church and school in Beit Sahour.
The Palestinian town sits just east of Bethlehem and south of Jerusalem. Its
name, Beit Sahour, means ‘house of the watchers,’ near Shepherd’s Field where a
few sheep roamed a near hillside when I last visited, 18 years ago. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The scene has faded in my mind with the years, but two
faces are as clear as the day I first met them, George Sa’adeh, the principal
of the school, and his 12-year-old daughter, Kristina, whose dark eyes shimmered
from a photo near his desk. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Amid the sickening bloodshed in Israel and Gaza, I wonder
if George is still there and whether his heart is as true, as good, as holy …
and as wounded … as the day I first met him. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I’ve heard it said that in love’s service only wounded soldiers
can serve. If so, George is a general in that gracious force, or should be.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Two years before I met him, Israeli soldiers mistook his
car for that of a terrorist and a command was given to shoot. Countless rounds
riddled the vehicle, and George was shot nine times. His wife and oldest
daughter were also shot multiple times and carry shrapnel in their bodies. But Kristina,
shot in the head, is forever 12, shining in a more elevated sphere than we, the
earth-bound, can yet imagine.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">George’s qualification for love’s army is not, however,
his grief, but what he and his wife did with the sorrow that lacerates their hearts
and always will on this side of the veil. The bitterness of a soldier’s
mistake, killing your daughter, is easily enough to fire a life of endless
hatred.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But it didn’t. ‘My wife and I, with our faith in Christ,
we managed to continue our life,’ George told me. ‘I have faith Kristina is in heaven
with God. The pain, with love, we will make it something for others. We are
against killing. If I create hate in myself, it will destroy me and others.’<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">After Kristina’s death, George and his wife began meeting
regularly with a group of other parents, Palestinian and Israeli, all who have
lost children in the internecine conflict that once again stains the land with
the blood of the innocent and sentences human hearts to lives of interminable sorrow.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">They talk, tell stories of their children and grieve …
together. ‘It’s the only club in the world that doesn’t want new members,’ George
told me on my first visit. And no one in those gatherings, I am willing to suggest,
forgets the common humanity that joins them to every other soul in the room beyond
the boundaries of race, language, faith and bitter history, for its as clear as
the tear-stained cheeks and weary weight of interminable grief in the eyes of
souls who might otherwise have never met.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I don’t know if George’s group managed to continue meeting
through the years, or if it is even possible for groups like it to meet amid the
seething anger and fear that seizes the souls of the peoples of that land.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But I hope they can. And if not now, soon, for a sense of
our shared humanity teeters on the verge of extinction, if it has not already
expired among Jews and Palestinians in the land we call holy. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And not only there, but here, in our cities’ streets, on
college campuses, in neighborhoods where synagogues and mosques, Jews and Arabic
peoples are threatened by benighted hearts who cannot see what George and those
who meet with him know all too well: We all love our children and hunger for respect
and want to be free from fear to seek the lives God so graciously gives us. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Sooner or later, the bombs will stop falling in Gaza, missiles
will cease flying toward Tel Aviv and the fighting will quiet, at least for a
time. In the lull, I pray bitter enemies may be able to look at each other across
the littered landscape and, perhaps, for a moment, see at least a shadow of
themselves in the fearful faces of each other.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">George and his friends in Love’s tattered army can show
us how it’s done. They, alone, know the way of peace.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">David L. Miller<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>David L Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01356806900819424388noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33971777.post-6702836638614507032023-10-29T18:29:00.002-05:002023-10-29T18:29:17.961-05:00Among the trees<p> <span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">It was in those days that he went onto the
mountain to pray, and he spent the entire night in prayer to God.<b><sup> </sup></b>Then,
when it was daylight, he summoned his disciples and chose twelve of them, whom
he designated as apostles.</span></i></span><span class="text"><span style="background: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> (Luke 6:12-13)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">Yesterday, I shot my best photo waist high and straight
down. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">There were too many people, <i>noisy</i> <i>people</i>,
on the main trails at Knoch Knolls, so I found little-walked paths, narrow and
neglected, at times indiscernible from the floor of the forest surrounding
them.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">I fancy myself an adventurer, but that is a
romantic illusion. These days my adventures are two-fold: First, finding forest
trails few people walk on the edge of suburbia, and second, staring at this keyboard
waiting for words that will wake the Love latent in my soul to satisfy my
heart’s hunger for transcendence.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">I go to the woods hoping to escape the unceasing
noise of the world, including the sound of my own voice, the endless chatter of
the mind trying to name everything as if to make it meaningful. Adam’s endless
task grows more wearisome as I age and realize how little I have ever
understood anything, despite the torrent of words that poured from my younger
self as I attempted to reduce mystery into meaning and make sense of things.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">Standing still, silent among the trees, seems a
more authentic response to the indecipherable mystery of one’s existence. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">Pushing deeper into the woods, the echoes of
human presence faded until there was only the rattle of brittle leaves clinging
to limbs and branches in the cool October breeze. Others surrendered to the
season, falling like snowflakes, seesawing to-and-fro, slowly gliding to the
soil beneath my boots where they will accomplish their final purpose of feeding
the earth just as they have for countless millennia—and as they will, long
after I am able to walk these trails, seeking my heart. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">The least I can do is to stop and say, ‘thank
you’ to the trees and the breeze, to the rustle of leaves and the kaleidoscope
of color coating the ground, myriad maple leaves, millions and more, in yellow
shades, golden hues and ruddy reds beyond any Crayola could ever produce.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">Pulling my phone from my back pocket, I turned left
and right, looking behind and before, to take a photo. It didn’t matter where I
focused. A riot of color covered everything in an impressionist wash of wonder,
maple leaves lapping over the dark toe of my boots as I shuffled. Holding the
phone waist high, I shot straight down, one, two, three photos, then stopped,
happy just to be there.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">No words were needed. In the vast, yawning eons
of time, creation and improbability, I was there, somehow chosen and appointed
to witness this and bring witness to the wonder no tongue can tell, surely not
mine.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">One either believes that the cosmos and one’s surprising
existence is the result of blind chance, signifying nothing. Or, one dares
imagine that your life is chosen and purposeful, willed and wanted by a Great
Mystery who desires your existence and longs for your presence.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">And for this, I can only smile, believing my
smile is a share in the much greater joy of the One who speaks of love in
silent leaves, hoping we will notice.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">Jesus prayed in silence on the mountain before choosing
the 12 whom he would draw close and train to carry out his mission. I don’t
know how the Loving Mystery spoke in his soul so that he knew who to choose. I
don’t believe he heard an audible voice, any more than I heard a voice on this
overcast Saturday afternoon. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">But I believe he communed heart-to-heart with the
Great Love who smiled at me in the silence of Knoch Knolls. And I believe this Love
filled him and opened his awareness of those who would welcome the joys and
suffer the sorrows of being with him.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">They were chosen to witness who Love is and what
Love does, but then … so was I, among the trees.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";"><br />
<i>David L. Miller<o:p></o:p></i></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>David L Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01356806900819424388noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33971777.post-45906676049455063012023-10-20T15:42:00.003-05:002023-10-20T15:42:46.107-05:00Amado, in Paradisum<p><i><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><span style="background: white; line-height: 107%;">‘No
eye has seen, no ear has heard,</span> nor has the human heart conceived, </span></i><i><span style="line-height: 107%;"><span class="text"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;">what God has prepared for those who love him.’</span> </span></span></span></i><span class="text"><span style="background: white; font-family: "Segoe UI", sans-serif; font-size: 14.5pt; line-height: 107%;">(1 Corinthians 2:9)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">I had no words. Kneeling at the casket of my friend, Amado,
words failed me.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Words usually come easily. Most often, I don’t have to fight
to find them. Sometimes, they come and transport my earth-bound heart to a
wondrous space where all that exists is the Love God is, and I am there, <i>inside</i>,
enveloped by Love, and everything else melts into insignificance.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But not here, not on my knees, not as my hands rested on
the dead-cold stiffness of ‘Mado’s thick hands, product of the mortician’s art
and the inevitable inevitability that we all know is coming and are never ready
to face.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I tried, but tripped over myself every time I tried to say
the old words—words I know well, words that flowed like a fountain of life in
other moments, no matter how extreme. I wanted to walk my friend to heaven’s
door and let him go, knowing all is well even though nothing is right. But each
time I tried, the syllables tumbled and stumbled over each other and fell to
the floor, cold as death. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">‘Rest eternal, grant him, O Lord’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">‘May light perpetual shine upon him.’<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">‘Receive him into the fullness of your love with all the
beloved who have gone before.’<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Any of the old words would have been enough to quiet my
soul. I have spoken them hundreds of times, and hundreds of times peace flooded
my heart and soothed the souls of those being left behind. The words took me …
and so many others … to a place where Love was undeniably real and filled with
the promise beyond every other promise, the hope beyond every other hope, the
life for which our souls long but barely taste on this side of the veil. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But there was no flow. No peace. No consolation. The old
phrases tangled and twisted around each other in an amorphous mass, my heart
cold as ‘Mado’s dead hands, once strong, both of us there, he in his casket and
me on my knees, both of us clothed in our incapacity, arrayed in the nakedness
of our undeniable humanity.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Amado 42 and me 71, our roles might well have been
reversed, or so I whispered to him as I knelt, aching for the one thing I
cannot live without—<i>light</i>, the light of eternity warming my soul with
the assurance of the Love who is, and was, and always will be, the Love who is
the living and the dead and the risen again, the Love who smiles on the death
of the saints and draws them into the eternal embrace we know only in our most
graced moments. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Wanting this, but feeling none of it, I let go of the
words that have long consoled my heart, the words that failed me, or I them, as
I knelt before the form of my friend who was no longer there. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The old words gone, I conjured the image that closes my
morning prayer every day, without exception. “Keep calling to me,” I pray. ‘Keep
calling until I stand with all the saints and angels and holy ones around your
throne, chanting ‘<i>yes’</i> to all you are and all you have done.’<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">At this, the image returns. A great crowd. Dad is there,
so is Eilert and Magdalena, Fred and Max, who used to bring me vegetables and
Bob who lived down the street when I was a boy. Grandma is there, Dixie’s
grandma, too. And Rod, dear Rod, like ‘Mado leaving us so soon; 41 years, 42?
What’s that? The blink of an eye. But they are there and others too many to
name, and so many others whom I cannot name, all of them gathered before a
great throne of love, consumed with joy and light wrapping them into the One
who is Light. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And now, ‘Mado, I see you there, brother. Go on. Go
ahead. Don’t look back. Walk into the Light for which we long. And greet my
friends, won’t you? There are a few who may admit to knowing me. And tell them,
<i>thanks</i>. And thank you, too, my friend. Just … <i>thank you.</i> Sorry
words failed me the other day. I know it doesn’t much matter now, except to me
because I didn’t get to say, didn’t know how to say what my heart needed to
say.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But later, I thought of this. They
are not my words, far more beautiful than any I can produce. Still, I give them
to you now, and offer them to the Great Love who loved us from the beginning
and always will. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-color-alt: windowtext; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;">May the angels lead you into paradise; may the martyrs greet you at your
arrival and lead you into the holy city, Jerusalem. May the choir of angels
greet you and, like Lazarus, who once was a poor man, may you have eternal
rest.</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-font-kerning: 0pt; mso-ligatures: none;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">David L. Miller<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>David L Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01356806900819424388noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33971777.post-19175764043837552342023-10-16T15:21:00.000-05:002023-10-16T15:21:21.177-05:00<p><b><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Saint ‘Mado, my brother</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><i><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="background: white; color: black;">Then one of the
elders addressed me, saying, ‘Who are these, robed in white, and where have
they come from?</span><span style="background: white; color: black;">’ </span><span id="en-NRSVA-30808" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">I said to him, ‘Sir, you are the one that
knows.’ Then he said to me, ‘These are they who have come out of the great
ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the
Lamb</span></span></i></span><span class="text"><i><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-size: medium;">.</span></span></i></span><span class="text"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Segoe UI",sans-serif; font-size: 14.5pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span></span><span class="text"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Segoe UI",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">(Revelation
7:13-14)</span></span><b><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">My friend, Amado Martinez, died last Friday night. He was
42, and I loved him. He called me his brother.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We worked together at the same church. I was a pastor. He
was the custodian there, like his dad, Manny, before him.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">As I know the story, Manny, immigrated from Mexico with
his family and worked as a custodian at an elementary school across the street
before also taking on the church job.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">He brought ‘Mado to work with him to keep him out of
trouble with Latin gangs and the police as had happened with a couple of
Amado’s much older brothers. It worked.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Amado learned the place, the people and the job, all of
which loved him like they loved his father. Manny never retired, never got the
chance. He worked until he died, as I understand it, on a day after working at
the church, cleaning, polishing, fixing, overseeing the heating and cooling
systems, keeping the place going.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">That’s when ‘Mado took over, doing the same job, and …
like his father … working until the day he died. Last Friday, he left work, returning
home to Silvia, his two sons and daughter, not feeling well. Silvia convinced
him to go to the hospital where he soon coded and died … in the same emergency
room that had saved his life a few years before when he had been shot on his
porch in a drive-by. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">‘Mado nearly bled to death that night and spent about a
month in the hospital recovering and doing therapy on his arm and vocal cords.
He was told he might never speak again. But he did, a little weaker, a bit
softer, but his voice and his spirit were still there through his recovery and
as he returned to work.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">He never needed a strong voice, at least not at church.
He spoke softly and moved quietly as he coursed through the weekly routines of
keeping the building in shape. A big-boned man, let’s say he had just one speed
and could move through the weekday darkness of the narthex silent as night.
Most days, he worked for hours, and you barely knew he was there.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">He never liked to dust things, which is the worst thing
we could say about his work as a custodian. He could always find other things
that needed to be done, which was never a problem because he had a mechanic’s
mind. I often said he could have been an engineer or at least a skilled
tradesman, if circumstances had offered him a chance to study. But finances and
family responsibilities never allowed what many of us take for granted.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Instead, he developed a wide set of handyman skills and
knew where everything was in a complicated set of buildings. He loved to tinker
and fix what was worn and broken, saving the church thousands of dollars by keeping
old equipment running long after it might have been replaced. It came to him
naturally. His family was constantly short of money, and he’d long before
learned to make do and keep things going. It was the church’s privilege to help
him out on any number of occasions. Now, I hope they remember Silvia and his
kids.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There are stories I cannot tell about ‘Mado’s struggles,
things that only he and a few others know about. But I can say he carried and
immense weight of responsibilities for several generations of his family,
including his aging mother in dialysis. And I can say that local police
harassed him and his family for years, and once tried to pin a charge on him
for a crime he had nothing to do with. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It was my privilege to be with him as that played out.
When it finally got to court, ‘Mado sat at the defendant’s table with his
lawyer, while I sat in the gallery with his family, listening to a police evidence
technician grossly misrepresent facts in an effort to convict him. Sitting
there, I prayed with all my might. The judge did better; he threw it out,
recognizing nonsense when he heard it. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">At every recess in the case, ‘Mado thanked me for being
there, always quiet, always gracious, never bitter or seeming to be angry with
what was being done to him. I may have been angry enough for both of us.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">After the case was dismissed, ‘Mado and members of his
family hugged and talked in the corridor outside the courtroom while the
prosecutor and a couple of police huddled in another corner wondering aloud
what had happened to their case. I almost stepped over and told them what I
thought of their pernicious prosecution, but ‘Mado was calm, at least on the
outside, and I wasn’t about to dishonor him by giving way to the rage I felt at
the months of harassment, lies and hellish stress they’d inflicted on a
profoundly good and decent man and his family. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Now, he’s dead, and I wonder how many years the immensity
of stress and struggle stole from him, even as death steals him from a family
that sorely needs him.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">For 13 years, I watched him care for the congregation’s
home like his own home. I saw him bear the burdens of his life with strength,
grace and dignity, even when circumstances aligned against him. I watched how
he loved his boys, whom he sometimes brought to work with him even as his
father had brought him. And I saw the sparkle in his eyes when Silvia gave
birth to their daughter, a couple of years after he had nearly died from that
gunshot. She’s four now, if I count correctly, and she needs the father he was
and would always have been for her.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But for all the sadness of his passing, there is one
thing above all for which I will remember him and give thanks for his life.
‘Mado texted me shortly after I left my position at the church. After
expressing concern for my family and my future, he wrote:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘</span></i><i><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Just wanted to let
you know you will always be a dear friend of mine and if you ever need anything
feel free to call me. I also wanted to thank you again for everything you've
done for me. You supported me in my darkest hours. You have the gift of showing
people it's going to be okay when they can’t see past their trauma. … I hope
God keeps on blessing you in any journey you take from here. I love you brother,
take care.’<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Two years later, I still have that text on my phone. I see
no reason to delete it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">David L. Miller<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>David L Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01356806900819424388noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33971777.post-62448674676903841182023-10-08T18:10:00.004-05:002023-10-08T18:10:41.052-05:00What the bird said<p><b><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">What the bird said</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><i><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: medium;"><span style="background: white; color: black; line-height: 107%;">‘Listen to another parable. There was a landowner
who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and
built a watch-tower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country. </span><b><sup><span id="en-NRSVA-23859" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span></sup></b>When the harvest time had
come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce.</span></i></span><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";"> (Mathew 21:33-34)<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">My Saturday hike nearly done, seven miles behind
me, the trail along Saganashkee Slough narrows to a foot path not 12 inches
wide. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As I pick my way, boots squishing through
the marsh, a great blue heron flaps across the lake toward a grove of lake
lettuce along the north shore where I walk.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span class="text"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI";">I call it lake lettuce because I don’t know its
real name. A dense grove of thick stems rise from the shallows, each with a
single shamrock-green leaf, hands waving in the cool autumn breeze that descends
across the steep ridge of old oaks and walnut behind me.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">From a distance, the grove looks like a small island,
perhaps to the heron, too, as it heavily pumps its wings against the breeze, searching
for a place to settle near and search for small fish. But seeing me, the great
bird flaps once, hangs in mid-air, then squawks and turns west, drifting to the
water’s flat surface streaked now with hues of gold and blue in the late afternoon
light.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And I? I get to watch. I get to see … <i>this</i>, simply
given, just <i>there</i> … for me to notice, feeling something that takes time
to reveal itself. The heart, at least mine, is slow to catch up with what we hear
and see and feel, if ever we do.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But 24 hours on, I think I hear something of what the
heron was saying in his (or her) indecipherable squawk. I can make it out now.
Two words<i>: not mine.<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">That’s what the heron said. This world, the sunlight refracting
on the water, the grandeur of a bird in flight (I have always been jealous of
them); the dense woods where I walk among trees that were there before I was
born and will last long after. None of it mine. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Nor even is my life, my breath, my body, my skills, my
past and future, whatever it may be; to say nothing of the lives and loves near
to me and those worlds away. All of it sheer, unadulterated gift. All of it belongs
to what Jesus and Hebrew prophets before him sometimes called a vineyard, God’s
vineyard. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And I get to live here. My privilege is the heron in flight,
autumn light on the water, the feeling of my boots in the marsh, the October
breeze whispering that winter is not far; all of it and quadrillions more, are not
many things, but one great thing, one immense vineyard, one life, to be received
with joy, tended with care and shared with all.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It seems to me that Jesus and my brother, the heron, were
saying pretty much the same thing, letting me know what the owner of the
vineyard always had in mind.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">David L. Miller<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>David L Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01356806900819424388noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33971777.post-33795874143698135942023-09-30T14:01:00.005-05:002023-09-30T14:01:39.124-05:00One moment<p><i><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">God is love and
those who abide in love, abide in God, and God abides in them</span></i><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> (1 John 4:16b)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Creation speaks; sometimes, we hear.
Occasionally, we understand, but words are insufficient, their poverty
apparent.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">She was nine, maybe 10, simultaneously
dismounting her bike while holding it against the gravity of the steep slope where
Belmont meets Maple Avenue. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pony tail
trailing behind her, she dug her feet into the sidewalk and stopped just before
her front tire tumbled over the curb and into the street as cars braked for a
red light.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">“Be careful little one,” I said, as
she stopped fewer than 10 feet from my bumper. She couldn’t have heard me. The
car windows were closed, but something within sprang open as an awareness
rushed in to fill every corner of my consciousness.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">I saw her face, the look in her eyes,
and in an instant felt how wondrously precious life is, her life, every life,
and what an unspeakable tragedy it would be for that life to be lost and the
world denied whatever beauty will come to be through the precious, irreplaceable
years she has on this good and green earth.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">But these are mere words, and there
were no words in that moment, only awareness, an intuition of life as a holy
and unimaginable gift—and love, love for the life of that girl, love for my own
life and all the loves within it that so love me in spite of myself, love for
the inexplicable Source of the loving awareness that evaporated every other
thought and feeling for one precious second.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Whatever we know of God in this life,
whatever our senses can perceive and hold, savor and share (in some utterly inadequate
way) was present in that awareness, as love banished everything from my soul
but its own wondrous reality, freeing my heart to see as love sees and to know as
God knows.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">David L. Miller<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>David L Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01356806900819424388noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33971777.post-20774616085136380652023-09-10T17:17:00.004-05:002023-09-10T17:17:56.355-05:00Joined in chocolate<p><i><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">For where
two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.</span></i><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> (Matthew 18:20)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Last
Thursday night, a sacred assembly gathered people of at least four generations from
several states, and most of them were not even in the same room. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">No, Zoom wasn’t
involved. The means of communication was a cookbook compiled by a group of
women in the fellowship hall of a country church on the Great Plaines of
Nebraska more than 40 years ago. More on that in a moment.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The blessed assembly
started with a hungry phone call from a college freshman in Madison, Wisconsin.
That call vibrated in a stage manager’s pocket at Lyric Opera of Chicago. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Mom, I need the brownie recipe.” Not just any
brownie recipe, mind you, but <i><u>the</u></i> brownie recipe. Everyone in our
family knows what that means. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Quickly, came
our daughter’s reply, “Call your brother; I’m in the middle of a rehearsal,” and
moments later another phone jingled in a suburb 20 miles away. The recipe delivered;
brownies were baked in a dormitory kitchen just in time to save a group of students
from the delirium of chocolate withdrawal.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But about
that recipe. It lives in a cookbook, a three-ring binder with a blue cover adorned
with a white, pencil sketch of that country church, located a few miles north
of Superior, Nebraska. The recipe lists seven ingredients and a few simple
directions, with the contributor’s name neatly typed below: “Carol Warneking,”
who lived then and now on a farm a few miles southwest of Salem Lutheran where
the cookbook was edited and assembled.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">When she
submitted it, I’m sure Carol had no thought that her recipe might become famous
in Madison, Wisconsin. I wonder if she would even take credit for it. The
recipe might have traveled through several generations before her.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Nor have I
any idea how many generations of how many families have used that recipe on the
faded page of that well-worn cookbook, ready-to-hand in my wife, Dixie’s, bookcase.
She made brownies and taught it to our son and daughter, making brownies, too, and
teaching our three grandsons, Zach, Ben and Ethan, who apparently are keeping this
noble tradition alive.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">All of us, multiple
generations, joined in chocolate, which makes me think of Jesus because Jesus and
chocolate have been linked in my mind since the church dinners of my childhood.
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Each one was
a sacred assembly, not just because of chocolate but because of the connectedness
of all of life and most certainly our connections with each other, sacraments
that they are. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The connections
that feed our hearts, awaken gratitude and keep us human, the connections that
bind us together in communities of care are expressions of divine presence,
physical manifestations, incarnations, if you will allow me, of the Infinite
Love who seeks to capture our hearts in small and large ways, like in a pan of
brownies shared across generations unknown.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Where two or
three gather in my name, I am there, Jesus says. You would be right to object
that those waiting for chocolate from that dormitory kitchen had not gathered
in Jesus’ name. Or did they? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">With all my
heart, I confess that Jesus is the face of the Great Mystery, the Infinite Love,
the Immortal Mercy who labors, most often unknown and unrecognized, in the secret
depths of matter and our every experience, hungry to gather us into one great
love. Wherever love and care touch our flesh to delight our senses and move us
to share, the gracious beauty present in Jesus is surely present with us … and especially
when chocolate is involved.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A final
thought: If this should find its way to any of those who ate Carol’s brownies
in that Madison dormitory, ask Ben about guacamole. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>David L Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01356806900819424388noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33971777.post-39620381346794542462023-09-04T15:26:00.000-05:002023-09-04T15:26:24.048-05:00Love knocks<p><i><span style="background: white; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears my
voice and opens the door, I will come in to them and eat with them, and they
with me.</span></i><span style="background: white; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> (Revelation 3:20)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The calendar
says September, but my weather app reads 95 degrees Fahrenheit. A clutch of locust
leaves arching over the balcony whispers the gilded glory to come, but not yet.
Autumn still holds her gentle breath, waiting the time of sighs to release us
once more.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">That day will
come. What we have is where we are now, today. Wherever that is and in whatever
condition we find ourselves, the One who is Love comes to our door and knocks. We
don’t need to wait, just look around.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Today, that
knock is an out-of-the-blue email from someone I barely know, wondering if I knew
her long-deceased missionary brother, the favorite of the family, killed in a horrible
accident. I will write later, the mind says. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No, comes another voice. Do it now. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">A quick
note. Yes, I knew him long ago. Five minutes later comes her reply, laced with the
joy of love remembered and living still, thankful for a few hastily written words
from someone she barely knows.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">So, it is:
Love knocks, every day, in the movements of our minds and hearts, in intuitions
and impulses, coaxing us to share or at least notice whatever good or beauty
appears.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12pt;">Love
knocks hoping we might open the door and discover …</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 12pt;">that </span><span style="background: white; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; text-indent: -0.25in;">the fact of our existence is unfathomable, that we live wondrous
lives in a universe more graced and connected than we can imagine,</span></li><li><span style="color: black; font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="background: white; color: black; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">that the joy of our beloved’s smile is more beautiful than anything
on earth,</span></li><li><span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span><span style="background: white; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">that this tiny blue and green dot of a planet, a pin prick of
faintest light in the darkness, is the only island of life we know in the yawning
immensity of the cosmos,</span></li><li><span style="color: black; font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="background: white; color: black; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">that everything and everyone we have ever known or loved is on
that that pin prick and is willed, loved and cherished by the Unfathomable,<o:p></o:p></span></li><li><span style="color: black; font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><span style="background: white; color: black; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">that just a few golden leaves insinuating the hope of autumn
are sufficient to ignite an unbidden, visceral ‘<i>yes’</i> exploding from your
heart, ‘<i>yes’</i> to the world, to your place within it and to all the pains
and joys, missteps and unlikely events that somehow have conspired to make you …
<i>you</i> … and to bring you to this place, this day, this moment.<o:p></o:p></span></li></ul><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Amid it
all, the risen Christ speaks, ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock.’ Every
day. Every moment bids us to surrender ourselves without delay to the undeniable
intuitions and impulses of love, awe, wonder and beauty awakened within, sharing
what we have been given to give, knowing the sweetness of his heart within our
own.<o:p></o:p></span></p>David L Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01356806900819424388noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33971777.post-1651612052227785872023-08-27T19:10:00.007-05:002023-08-27T19:10:55.614-05:00Sea of love<p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span><i><span style="background: white; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">We declare to you what was from the beginning …<span class="text"> what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship
with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus
Christ. </span><span id="en-NRSVA-30527">We are writing these things so that our<sup data-fn="#fen-NRSVA-30527a" data-link="[<a href="#fen-NRSVA-30527a" title="See footnote a">a</a>]">
</sup>joy may be complete.</span></span></i><span class="text"><span style="background: white; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> (1 John 1:1a, 3-4)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">‘You live in
a sea of love,’ so went the words I whispered to Ben on the night before he
left for the university. I wanted to give him what I want, what I need, naming
the only thing that truly fills the heart with joy: to know, to feel, to live
in awareness of an ocean of love surrounding your whole being so that there is nowhere
to fall that the waters will not hold you.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I did not
lie to him, though some might suggest I indulged in a fantasy. It’s undeniable:
The things we fear can and will happen to us and those we love; hurts and wounds
are unavoidable and there are those who don’t give a wink that we bleed or that
the knife that cut us was in their hand. And sometimes, we ourselves are the
assailant.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But when I
think of Ben stepping deeper into the complexity of that world (and remembering
how naïve, lost and unprepared I was at his age), I find comfort and hope in the
sea of love surrounding him—the love of his parents, his brother and Dixie, my
wife; also, the professors, tutors, helpers and strangers who, perhaps without even
knowing it, will become bearers (sacraments!) of the Love who alone satisfies
the human heart.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">And I think
of myself, believing, trusting, knowing by experience that the love I whispered
in his ear in the darkness of a Saturday evening is not my private possession
but the Love and Light of the One who was from the beginning, the One who labors
in all that is good and true, the Love who flows like a river amid our aches
and pains, wants and needs, hopes and ambitions, successes and failures, carrying
us out of isolation toward one, great sea of Love.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">‘Father, may
they all be one,’ Jesus once prayed, ‘as you and I are one.’ It’s a dream, God’s
dream for the world and every last one of us. We are a long way from it. But the
dream already comes true, like in the unmistakable joy of whispering words of the
love you need into another heart. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">David L.
Miller</span></i><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><br /><p></p>David L Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01356806900819424388noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33971777.post-6569471570180898932023-08-20T16:53:00.000-05:002023-08-20T16:53:17.720-05:00Even the crumbs<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><span style="background: white; color: #010000; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the
dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.’ Then Jesus
answered her, ‘Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.’
</span></i><span style="background: white; color: #010000;">(Matthew 15:27-28b)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: white; color: #010000;"><span style="font-size: medium;">When I ask, Grandson Ben tells me
what he is seeing and doing in the hospital. Sometimes, his father needs to
leave the room when the tale grows graphic, but the rest of us stay to marvel
at what he’s learning and the verve with which he throws himself into it.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; color: #010000; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Me? I’m entranced by the energy of
what it means to be 18, like Ben, daily meeting a kaleidoscopic parade of
cultures, languages, personalities, needs, suffering, triumphs, failures,
squalid seediness and immense dignity as it passes through the halls, all the while
robing up and putting on an extra pair (or two) of latex gloves (just in case)
to offer care because that is why you are there. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; color: #010000; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-size: medium;">“It’s never the same. You don’t
know what’s going to happen next,” Ben tells us. “That’s why I like it,” and I
understand him because that gene runs in the family. Today, he mentions a young
man with syphilis, who is also HIV positive. Across the table, my mother looks
at me and shakes her head. “And we’re supposed to consider him a child of God,”
she says. “It’s hard.” <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; color: #010000; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-size: medium;">“No, it isn’t,” I say softly,
though I wonder if she heard me. It is not hard to imagine a series of terrible
choices driven by unruly passions and normal human needs that might lead
someone to disaster as they vainly tried to comfort their sorrows, assuage their
loneliness or fill an inner emptiness they little understand.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; color: #010000; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-size: medium;">It is not hard to imagine a
childhood of pain or abuse or neglect leading to a life of addiction, dissipation
and disaster. Nor is it hard to imagine Ben’s patient suffers bitter pains and recoils
in fear from what lies before him … because all of us have and will know pain
and fear, along with all the beauties of being human souls made in the image of
Infinite Love, longing to feel that Love filling every empty place of our
conflicted and complicated hearts.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; color: #010000; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Children of God, we are, all of us,
including the woman who came to Jesus asking him to heal her daughter from the
demon or disease or whatever it was that tormented her day and night. She and
her daughter were outsiders, Canaanites, and Jesus didn’t jump to the task and
heal her, instead referring to her as a ‘dog,’ an ethnic slur.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I don’t know why he did that (and there’s no end to the
speculation), but I am certain this story is true because early Christians
would never have made up a tale that seems to put Jesus in a bad light. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The bright light, however, is not on Jesus but on the Canaanite
woman who intuitively knew the good things in this life, like blessing, healing
and care, are not just for the good, the privileged, the lucky and those who
have done everything right, but also for those like her whom some deem unworthy.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-size: medium;">And why? Because in this life (and the next) we eat from the
Master’s table, who unlike us is infinitely generous. The woman knew what the
good, the privileged, the lucky and those who have done everything right often
fail to understand. It’s all grace, this life, even the crumbs. To say nothing
of the life to come.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-size: medium;">David L. Miller</span><o:p></o:p></span></i></p>David L Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01356806900819424388noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33971777.post-71752025935370815152023-08-11T18:40:00.002-05:002023-08-11T22:11:09.687-05:00This not that<p><span style="font-size: medium;"> <i><span style="background: white; color: #414141; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 107%;">Then the
kingdom of heaven will be like this. Ten young women took their lamps and
went to meet the bridegroom.<sup> </sup> Five of them were foolish, and five were
wise. When the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with
them, but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps.</span></i><span style="background: white; color: #414141; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 107%;"> (Matthew 25:1-4)</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; color: #414141; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The joy we crave has a
door, and it is <i>this</i>, not <i>that.</i> <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><span style="background: white; color: #414141; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 107%;">This</span></i><span style="background: white; color: #414141; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 107%;"> is the present moment, right in front of us. Often
as not, we miss <i>this</i> … because our eyes and heart are fixed on <i>that</i>
… over there, something that isn’t here, or at least not yet and maybe never
will be. Like it or not, we are where we are.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; color: #414141; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Sometimes our <i>this</i>
is eminently embraceable, like when Dixie trundles sleepy-eyed down the hall
each morning and into my arms as she has for decades, longing for touch, knowing,
too, that I have her coffee set up for her.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; color: #414141; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-size: medium;">But sometimes our <i>this</i>
is exactly what we most fear. My friend receives a diagnosis nobody wants, and
his wife wonders if the foundation of their life together will soon crumble to
dust. Who can throw their arms and heart around <i>this</i> … as it threatens to
still the sweet grace of long-shared laughter?<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; color: #414141; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-size: medium;">It feels insensitive or
even inhuman to suggest human hearts should or even can embrace such a moment,
but the importunate truth is that <i>this</i> … is the only place grace and
love can be known. This<i> </i>moment, with whatever quagmire of emotion warms
or chills the blood, is where we meet or fail to greet the Love who awaits us there.
Every moment is filled with the potential to draw fuller love and life from the
well of our souls where the Love Who Is … is pleased to dwell. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; color: #414141; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The bridegroom approaches,
according to Jesus’ parable of the wise women, ready to be welcomed by souls
who manage to stay open to Love’s nearness, no matter how troubling life can
be. It is they who enter the feast to celebrate the marriage of heaven and
earth, drinking the sweet wine of divine love, which never runs dry, not in
this life or in the mystery beyond.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; color: #414141; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Lord knows, I do this
poorly. Aggressive drivers, casual disrespect and about a thousand other things
can roil my heart, evaporating awareness that the present moment is a door
through which to enter—and be—the joy of Love’s living nearness. Missed
opportunities litter most lives, and I am no different.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; color: #414141; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-size: medium;">But each day comes anew.
Letting go of what was, I light the lamp of awareness once more, hungry to greet
the One who breathes joy into willing hearts.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="background: white; color: #414141; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-size: medium;">David L.
Miller<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p>
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<!--[endif]--></span><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></p>David L Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01356806900819424388noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33971777.post-84049117829418035092023-08-06T10:05:00.001-05:002023-08-06T10:05:11.381-05:00Treasure hunt<p> <i><span style="background: white; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">The kingdom
of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up;
then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field</span></i><span style="background: white; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">. (Matthew 13:44)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">The cinder trail at McKee
Marsh splits a few hundred yards into the hike. You can walk east or west from
that point, but if you continue straight, into the cattails and eye-high marsh
grass, you would slosh your way to the place where a treasure was unearthed in
1977.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Workers scooping sticky
mud from the bottom of the marsh came upon the thick bones of a wooly mammoth
from the last ice age, more than 10,000 years ago. All in all, 75 percent of a
complete skeleton was painstakingly discovered and reassembled. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Hard to imagine that this
place on the edge of suburbia was once so wild, but walkers still come here
looking for treasure, although few of them might put it that way. The treasure
we seek is ourselves, or at least that deeper, more human part of ourselves we
call heart … or soul. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Turning east, I find mine
about a mile into the hike on a weather-worn wood platform, built above the
level of the cattails. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It’s a place to watch
herons and egrets picking their way among the shallows, looking for small fish,
but they are not here today. The water level is too low, the pond nearly dry,
sending the birds to seek their lunch in the West Branch of the DuPage River a
short flight away.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Pausing on the platform
reveals only the crystal blue dome of a summer sky, and lazy white cumulus
clouds lingering high, with nowhere to go and no need to hurry off. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The
luminous dome encircles green horizons in every direction, holding everything I
see and feel and am in a single embrace.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Standing here, it is easy to understand why ancient
souls imagined the earth was flat, encircled by the dome of the sky, awed by the
expanse of the heavens into which they gazed. Equally ancient, is the gratitude
that cries from hidden depths within me, as an unseen rooster crows from a
leafy ridge far to the west. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Encompassed within the embrace of an august sky, my
heart gives wild praise for everything green I see, for trees and meadows,
grasses and cattails, for the winding cinder path that leads me, for the
rooster whose song I join, for the awareness of being one with the profusion of
life that surrounds me at every hand and for the love I feel for it all and
even for my own life, diminished some by age and ailment, but my heart able to
feel more than ever it has … and certainly more than I ever can say.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I don’t know if is best to say our souls are saved or
simply discovered in moments when love fills every space within you and wild
gratitude bursts the seams of your heart. Perhaps both. But I do know that this
love is a great and holy treasure that points to a far greater love more
luminous than a summer sky. And the greatest treasure of all is to find this
love hidden in your own mortal heart.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">If you look outside yourself, you will never find God,
according to Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart. But once you discover God there,
well, life becomes a treasure hunt. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> David L. Miller</o:p></span></p>David L Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01356806900819424388noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33971777.post-26600870158732938072023-07-30T16:01:00.004-05:002023-07-30T16:05:12.890-05:00<p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">Heaven in the Quonset</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">The Son of
man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Behold, a glutton and a drunkard,
a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is justified by her deeds.”</span></i><sup data-fn="#fen-RSV-23478e" data-link="[<a href="#fen-RSV-23478e" title="See footnote e">e</a>]" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span></sup><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">(Matthew 11:19) <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">The Nelson auditorium is a corrugated steel quonset that
rises like a half-moon on the east side of Main Street, otherwise known as Nebraska
State Highway 14. When I left there, 38 years ago, the population sign read
750, but I think the pollsters were two sugar-high five-year-old boys having a
clicker-counter contest. I suspect the actual number was a third less.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">But the number of souls makes less difference that
their quality, and to this day the souls I knew there still bring tears to my
eyes when their faces appear out of the ether and parade through my mind. Some
of those faces have long rested beneath the ground they loved and worked to make
a life for themselves and their families. Most things in Nelson revolve around
agriculture in one way or another. People pray for rain, hate hail, work hard
and often play even harder, which is why I think of the auditorium.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">As I recall it, the quonset is a 70- or 80-foot-long cylinder,
walls sloping to the foundation. Inside, there was a basketball floor with an
elevated stage at the far east end for community plays and follies, all local
talent. One year, my wife, Dixie, was a saloon dancer, and I sang in a barber
shop quintet. I don’t think the New York Times ever sent a reviewer. Their
loss. It was a hoot.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">As a local pastor, I don’t know how many wedding receptions
I attended there. They coalesce in my mind into one great celebration. There
was always music and long tables of food, self-serve for the most part. Cuisine
was basic and plentiful, sandwiches, ham, roast beef and barbeque, and five-gallon
bowls of potato salad. There was pinkish punch for those who didn’t indulge and
a brewery of beer for the majority. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">No one bothered to watch the door or check invitations,
and as the night deepened, I recall times a couple of stragglers would wander
in from Sportsman’s Corner down the street because food and beer flowed freely
here, and, after all, this was a community celebration, right?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Certainly, there were toasts as well as a few colorful
blessings and embarrassing moments recounted by friends and well-wishers who,
oft as not, made a joke of it because telling someone straight out what is in
your heart might make your eyes leak.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">All in all, it was community and love and joy and, in
my imagination, rather like celebrating a meal with Jesus, that wine bibber and
party boy who was regularly denounced for eating and drinking with the wrong
sort of people. A drunk and a glutton they called him. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">The Kingdom of God is like a wedding feast, Jesus said
on more than one or two occasions. And on more than one or two occasions, I
walked among the revelers in the auditorium thinking about why Jesus used
weddings to tell us what happens when heaven marries earth and they are joined
as one.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">I didn’t have to think long. Looking at their faces,
I knew. Life and love and the heart of God are far better than I know how to
say. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> David L. Miller</o:p></span></p>David L Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01356806900819424388noreply@blogger.com2