Saint ‘Mado, my brother

Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, ‘Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?’ 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. (Revelation 7:13-14)

 

My friend, Amado Martinez, died last Friday night. He was 42, and I loved him. He called me his brother.

We worked together at the same church. I was a pastor. He was the custodian there, like his dad, Manny, before him.

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.

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.

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.

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.

‘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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

 ‘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.’

Two years later, I still have that text on my phone. I see no reason to delete it.

David L. Miller

 

What the bird said

What the bird said

‘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.  When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce. (Mathew 21:33-34)

My Saturday hike nearly done, seven miles behind me, the trail along Saganashkee Slough narrows to a foot path not 12 inches wide.  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.

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.

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.

And I? I get to watch. I get to see … this, simply given, just there … 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.

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: not mine.

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.

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.

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.

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.

David L. Miller

One moment

God is love and those who abide in love, abide in God, and God abides in them (1 John 4:16b)

Creation speaks; sometimes, we hear. Occasionally, we understand, but words are insufficient, their poverty apparent.

She was nine, maybe 10, simultaneously dismounting her bike while holding it against the gravity of the steep slope where Belmont meets Maple Avenue.  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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 

 

Joined in chocolate

For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them. (Matthew 18:20)

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.

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.

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.  “Mom, I need the brownie recipe.” Not just any brownie recipe, mind you, but the brownie recipe. Everyone in our family knows what that means.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

 

Love knocks

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. (Revelation 3:20)

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.

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.

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.  No, comes another voice. Do it now.

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.

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.

Love knocks hoping we might open the door and discover …

• that the fact of our existence is unfathomable, that we live wondrous lives in a universe more graced and connected than we can imagine,
•  that the joy of our beloved’s smile is more beautiful than anything on earth,
•   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,
• ·         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,
• ·         that just a few golden leaves insinuating the hope of autumn are sufficient to ignite an unbidden, visceral ‘yes’ exploding from your heart, ‘yes’ 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 … you … and to bring you to this place, this day, this moment.

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.

Sea of love

 We declare to you what was from the beginning … 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. We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete. (1 John 1:1a, 3-4)

‘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.

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.

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.

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.

‘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.

David L. Miller

Even the crumbs

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.’ (Matthew 15:27-28b)

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.

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.

“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.”

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

David L. Miller

This not that

 Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this. Ten young women took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom.  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. (Matthew 25:1-4)

The joy we crave has a door, and it is this, not that.

This is the present moment, right in front of us. Often as not, we miss this … because our eyes and heart are fixed on that … 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.

Sometimes our this 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.

But sometimes our this 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 this … as it threatens to still the sweet grace of long-shared laughter?

It feels insensitive or even inhuman to suggest human hearts should or even can embrace such a moment, but the importunate truth is that this … is the only place grace and love can be known. This 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.

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.

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.

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.

David L. Miller

Treasure hunt

 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. (Matthew 13:44)

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.

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.

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.

Turning east, I find mine about a mile into the hike on a weather-worn wood platform, built above the level of the cattails.

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.

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. The luminous dome encircles green horizons in every direction, holding everything I see and feel and am in a single embrace.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 David L. Miller

Heaven in the Quonset

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.” (Matthew 11:19)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

 David L. Miller

 Enter my joy

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. (Matthew 11:28-29)

What do we hear in Jesus’ voice as he speaks these words? What is his expression as he beckons us to come near that we might find rest for our souls? This moment, like so many in the gospels, invites imagination.

Most often, I suspect we hear gentleness in his voice and see compassion on his face. And why not? I know of no one who has not needed a safe place to fall, a gentle presence in which to collapse when life is hard, death is near and the heart weary and worn.

Entering the heart of the One who bids me to come to him is about the best reason I know to pray my life, to speak what my heart feels, trusting his heart is eager to hear and envelop my joys and sorrows in the ocean of love he is. Silent joy often comes when words are done, and the heart sinks into his presence.

But there is another way to see and receive the gift in Jesus’ words. His invitation to lay the weight of our lives at his feet follows a moment of exuberant joy as he looks at the humble poor, the open hearts and eager souls who hang on his words, feeling their spirits take flight as divine love embraces their lives and fills their hearts.

Happiness glistens in his eyes, and laughter plays across his lips as he sees the reign of God, the gracious will of the Holy Mystery, coming to life in the lives of those who little imagined God would choose to live in them.

Filled with gratitude, his invitation spills across the centuries, the generous overflow of a happy heart eager for us to know what he knows, feel what he feels and be filled with the loving joy of the One who fills him.

David L. Miller

 At that time Jesus said, ‘I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. (Matthew 11:25-26)

The infallible sign

I come to pray each day hoping to see Jesus. I want two things. First, I want to see him touching, teaching or healing someone and feel his love passing through the centuries and into me, so that my heart and his are joined in one love.

My second hope is to see and feel his joy, which I believe is a missing ingredient in much of contemporary Christianity. So much of what I see is so serious, so grim, so critical, so negative in its judgements and critiques—or so listless in its practice—that I wonder why anyone would want to have anything to do with it.

As a child, my little home church sang a few verses of Psalm 51 as members’ offerings were carried forward to the altar. “Restore to me the joy of thy salvation,” we sang these words every single Sunday, as if to remind ourselves that joy is an infallible sign of God’s presence and the fulfillment of God’s desire for us. As much as ever, the words are much-needed prayer as news near and far, from the personal to the global, threatens to deflate our spirits.

Increasingly, I have adopted a hermeneutic of joy as I meditate on a passage of the Bible or read the events of my life to see what the Spirit is saying in and around me. I look for the joy of Jesus as he heals, teaches or blesses. I ask, what is the joy, the fulfillment of heart to which this biblical passage leads me; or what does this moment of my mortal life invite me to notice and feel, celebrate and share?

Sometimes, this is easy to see, like in the passage I quoted above. Jesus surveys the knot of people gathered around him and releases a heart-of-gratitude cry to the heavens for those who feel a new world, a new way of being breaking forth in their presence and within their hearts as they watch what he does and listen to what he says.

But others, proud, self-possessed and self-satisfied hearts, don’t get it. They busily employ their critiques, deconstructing and judging his every turn, unable to see let alone feel the wonder of divine love shattering the barriers of human understanding, as Jesus creates a new community in which all that really matters is the welcome of the One who is Love Unbounded.

Joy fills and spills from his every pore as he looks at those who come to him, loving them whole, happy that they see and feel what the others could, too, if they had eyes to see and ears attuned to the music of divine love. But only the humble can hear, and only the fumbling can find … for they know their need.

Jesus’ joy is like what happens when a generation or three of your family is gathered around the dinner table heaped with more food than they can possibly eat. If you are like me, a moment comes when you lean back and watch, listening to the ebb and flow of voices and laughter, filled with gratitude for every face and for the wonder that you are there … feeling more love for them than you can put into words without blubbering all over the mashed potatoes and making a perfect fool of yourself.

Joy, heart-filling, soul-spilling happiness for the miracle of your own blessed life and the wonder that you can feel a love so much greater than any you imagined you could ever bear: it’s a Jesus moment, the kind that restores your joy and thereby saves your soul, washing away every trace of cynicism about life’s true meaning and unassailable beauty.

I have come that my joy may be in you, Jesus once told his friends. That is why tomorrow morning, while the coffee is brewing, I will read another Bible story about Jesus, hoping to feel the joy that spills from his heart as he loves the hungry souls of people like me.

Again and again, his joy has saved me from my moody melancholies, from the unrest of our riven times, from the cynicism that tempts me to believe our little lives don’t much matter and from common wounds, worries and weariness that weigh on us all.

And tomorrow, I suspect he’ll do it again.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finding joy

On the last day of the festival, the great day, while Jesus was standing there, he cried out, ‘Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, “Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’ (John 7:37-38) … I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. (John 15:11)

I’ve been laughing more lately. I think I know why, but I do not want to claim too much. The human heart is mysteriously convoluted, making dubious most claims of self-knowledge.

All I can say is that I am trying to adopt a hermeneutic of joy, more carefully noting when I smile and at what, slowing down to savor moments of affection when my heart is moved by a face, a moment, a shape or color, a soul near or even a fleeting image from the television screen.

I want to feel joy. I crave joy, which means I have a lot of company. Our whole riven world craves joy, since most of what we see and watch as the news rolls by kills our joy. But joy is something more, something deeper than happiness. Nor is it dependent on pleasant times and favorable events.

Heavens, one of the most joyful memories of my life is the day of my blessed father’s funeral. I sat with my sister and brothers behind our childhood home, drinking wine and swapping stories about a struggling man whose imprint lives in each of our hearts, along with the love we will always feel for him. There was no laughter without tears that day, and no tears without laughter. I do not know that I have ever felt more connected with my four siblings than on that day on the patio.

So, what is joy? How does it happen? Where is it found, or does it find us?

I make no pretentions of possessing answers. But these questions keep bringing me back to small, often hidden, out of the way moments when the billowing heart reaches to enfold and hold a moment, any given moment, in loving affection and appreciative delight.

Joy is not merely the pleasure of taking in the beauty of flowers on a summer morning. It is the rush of love for the wonder of beauty, for the miracle of color, form and fragrance delighting your senses in a single moment you didn’t see coming. It is intuitively knowing the beauty you see and the love you feel are not two separate things but are all part of one great love, one great beauty that for one blessed moment you finally see.

Joy, it seems, is the presence of this love filling your being and fulfilling your existence as a human soul created in Love’s blessed image. It is the silent connection I knew as Dixie and I entered the sanctuary last Sunday and took our place. Several near us knelt in their pew; one, eyes tightly closed, appeared rapt in prayer. I know nothing about them, not their names or stories, nor the hopes and needs that moved them to their knees, for this is a new place for us. But tears of loving recognition moistened my eyes for the beauty of hearts unashamed to acknowledge their need and vulnerability, hungry for a grace beyond any this world can provide. A stranger, I was at home among people in whose hearts I recognized my own.

Joy is less about being loved than it is about being love. We crave being loved, and most of us want to be loved for our own sweet selves, which, of course, aren’t always so sweet or lovable. Being loved that way is exactly what Jesus says God does and who God is, a flowing fountain of infinite love in which we are quite welcome to stand.

It is a joy to find a place where that fountain naturally splashes over us and makes us new. This is where true joy begins. But the fulfillment of our joy, the completion of our humanity, happens not in the awareness of being so-loved but in knowing this holy fountain flowing within us so that we are one with the One whose joy it is to love such as us.

Every day is a precious privilege, an invitation to open our eyes and ears to Love’s blessed flow in our little corner of the world, knowing God is eager … to share the joy.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 

Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.  Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’  When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. (John 20:19b-22)

As I am known

It is not enough for me to hear. I need to see … and feel. I do not want merely to hear Jesus' words. Nor is my heart satisfied to stand apart, looking at him as he looks at me, even in the light of resurrection morning.  

I want to know what is in him … in me … that I may know as I am known. More. I want to know the world as he knows it, embracing it all in the all-embracing love to which he welcomes me to this morning place where I receive the day.

Waves of pink petunias flow from the pot beside me on the balcony, each bloom a miniature megaphone proclaiming love’s abundance. Their voices blend with the chatter of sparrows, deep within the honey locusts that line the street. A lone cardinal perches higher up, calling to his more prosperous neighbors in the oaks of the next subdivision.

Creation sings, and my privileged heart hears, but it is not enough. The heart longs for something much more. I want to embrace them in a heart full of love for every blessed thing I see, delighting in each finger leaf of the locusts, feeling what Jesus felt as his gaze lingered over the wild grasses and yellow flowers sprinkled on Galilean hillsides.

I want to feel the delight of holding and cherishing them all in a great and imponderable love, hungry for my heart to expand and extend to people going to their jobs on this May day and across oceans to battered souls far removed from my morning reverie.

In other words, I want to know the love of Jesus surging within me. It is an audacious prayer and foolish, because I know I am weak and cannot stand the pain of loving a broken world the way he loves it … and me.

Still, I surely want the joy of it, and joy comes as I see him appearing in the light of his resurrection, his hands raised in blessing for his frightened friends, his lips forming a single word, Peace.  And in my heart, I am right there beside them, as surely as I sit here contemplating the scene.

I see … and feel … his light stretching out to envelop us all and fill me whole, freeing me to breathe as he breathes his Spirit, his imponderable love, into the poverty of my heart so that I am rich with the Mystery he is.

And for one precious moment among the petunias, my prayer is answered. For, I know this weary and wondrous world … and myself, as I am known.

David L. Miller

Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.  While I was with them, I protected them in your name that you have given me. (John 17:11b-12a)

Wrapped in the name

“This sucks,” Rachel announced, as we walked in the early dark across the parking lot, after Ben’s graduation. She paused, then sighed, “but it is as it should be,” resigned to the river of time that would soon carry her eldest to university classrooms, beyond reach of her morning hugs and the fierce love that possessed her since she first cradled this black-haired boy in a Chicago hospital, husband Armando at her side.

Fierce is the only way she knows how to love, as those blessed to be recipients of her passions well know. But loving is not only the joy of graduation nights. It also means losing and hurting and fearing and letting go when you want to hold fast, wrapping your beloved in protective arms when you know what the world can do to them.

It’s life, as it should be. If I needed a reminder, I saw it the next day as I drove down Belmont Avenue and saw the sign in front of Puffer Elementary announcing the date for kindergarten registration. Exciting, yes, but in mere weeks other parents will stand at bus stops or the school house door holding a small hand they are not quite ready to release.

“For God’s sake, protect them,” the heart cries, and it is a holy cry, a prayer wrung also from the heart of Jesus as he takes leave of those he loved in the world and loved to the end. I wrapped them in your name, the name you gave me, he prays to the Loving Mystery he calls Holy Father.

The name is not a mere word or label spoken on the breath. It means the heart, the substance, the deepest, truest, reality of all God is. The name is the fierce love and hope the Holy One holds for each of us and the crazy world in which we live and die. The name is the divine determination to hold us fast in love’s embrace as we wander far from the places that gave us birth.

The name is the Living Presence who is ever near when we lose our way. It is the Mystery of renewing breath when the world does its worst to extinguish our joy. The name is the Love who filled our hearts in the early dark of a parking lot, transforming us into sacraments of divine grace.

We go our ways, as do our beloved, never knowing exactly where we will go or how far. Joys will come, sorrows, too; hurts will wound, and hopes will rise, perhaps none greater than those we imagine as our beloved set out on their course.

We can’t go with them, so we pray with Jesus. Protect them, dear God. Protect us all. For heaven’s sake … and for our own, wrap us in your name.

David L. Miller

Out and in

I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. (John 15:19b)

Out of the world and into myself, I followed an elderly African American couple through the Menards parking lot. They doddered ahead of Dixie and me, hobbled by age and infirmity. Turning around, they worried they were in our way. But they were not in the way. They are the way, their smiles an invitation to come out of the world and into the way of life.

So, too, was this morning’s post from a former student, her eyes alight with the delight I first saw in her when she was five, throwing cream pies in my face at a church fair. Now, she graduates college, and the loving satisfaction I feel is surpassed only by the rapt embrace of my grandson, Ben, on his first day after high school, poignant with tears of joy, relief and sorrow for what he endured.

All of this occurs in the world, of course, but each is a moment when the swirling love of the blessed Trinity calls me out of the world and its benighted values and into the way of Jesus, where only love and loving matters.

Perhaps my hearing improved when I turned 70 (How did that happen?), but the noise of the world I well knew and which knew me is fading into the background, and the inner voice of love, which was always there, sounds clearer and more compelling, making me wish I had been a better listener in decades past.

“Come out,” the voice says. Come out of the anxious tyranny of trying to keep up. Release every attempt to convince yourself and anyone else that you were stronger, smarter or more important that than you are. Come out of the world’s addiction to status, popularity, power and the diabolical need to be right, this cancerous blight on the heart.

Flee the deadly urgency of digital screens cajoling you to care about a million things that don’t much matter. And while you are at it, quit running from the nagging suspicion that you have been an imposter, projecting an image, laboring at tasks and responsibilities for which you were never quite qualified. That’s true of everyone in one way or another. It’s called life. We’re never fully ready for where we find ourselves or what comes at us. So, come out of all this anxious self-preoccupation.

Flee all of this. It doesn’t define you. Listen, instead, to the inner voice of Love who calls you out of this world and into the life of God. It is the voice of Jesus, the living Spirit of Love, alive in the deep, inner center of which you become aware in unguarded moments when you most feel that which you most need.

Times come, moments when sorrow or pain, need or beauty, simple kindness or gentle affection tugs our hearts into the way, the truth and the life of Jesus’ self-giving love. So often, small moments, infinitesimal instances are the most profound, the most pristine. They speak in unexpected ways and unlikely places, like in a parking lot when you realize what life is and what it is for.

 David L. Miller

Washed in the waves

 Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. (John 14:1-3)

I liked hearing the preacher last Sunday. I’d not been to church in four months or so and for the most part had not missed it. Worship had grown stale. Sunday morning had become a desolation of the heart, drowning love and joy in the stagnant waters of formalistic routine.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the church’s historic liturgy, music and rituals that invite reverence, praise and gratitude for graces given. They connect us with the people of God from ages past, not to mention the God who is our help and hope in every age.

This was exactly what I was not finding, no matter how much I threw myself into the hymns, prayed along with the intercessions and opened my heart to the homily. Sunday to Sunday, I left the sanctuary less alive and able to love than when I entered.

I blame no one. My experience is just that. Mine. Others may have left the same service feeling the fresh wind of the Spirit blowing through their hearts. Not me. I spent despondent Sunday afternoons, wanting the tears and joy that come so freely when I sit in my morning chair and open my Bible to savor the image of Jesus, feeling the tenor of his voice awaken Love’s presence in my heart.

Last week, my prolonged absence from the gathered people of Jesus became too heavy to bear. I searched for a place I could be an anonymous face in the crowd, unknown except to the Love who was calling me home. I longed for a place I could be just one more face at Jesus’ table, one more pair of empty hands eager to receive his food and drink, one more voice confessing its sins, one more heart hoping to leave the sanctuary lighter and more alive for having been there.

I searched church websites for a place to go, but my Saturday evening scrolling turned up nothing promising. Sunday morning, I arbitrarily decided to drop in at a place Dixie and I regularly pass as we run errands. It was the church shopping equivalent of opening the Bible and blindly pointing at a page, hoping to find a word to address whatever distress you are feeling at the moment.

Sometimes it works.

Happiness met me at the door as a group of children, white, black and brown, spring carnations in hand, prepared to process into the sanctuary as the music of Handel floated through the door. I took my place, sitting as far from the front and as out of the way as possible. A priest of indiscernible ethnicity, at least to me, entered and addressed us as I pawed through the hymnal.

I missed much of what he said. His staccato jumbled into a tangled mass as I struggled with an unfamiliar accent. But as the liturgy went on, it didn’t matter. I understood everything I needed to hear and I suspect everything he wanted us to understand, as he smiled and turned smoothly from one element to the next.

Undulating waves of affection flowed back and forth across the room, rising and falling and returning again and again, like breakers on the shore, each wave washing over the gathered souls, dissolving the boundaries between us. Awash in a single sea, we rose and fell with each surge and swell, joined in the love flowing from the leader’s joy across the room and back again in rhythmic sway.

No one was excluded, not the youngest children nor the most elderly. We were caught up together, gathered as one, praying the prayers, singing the songs and listening to the plain words and unadorned sentences of a simple message inviting us to trust the Love who wants us, the Love who promises to come to us and for us wherever we are, even when we die.

I dropped into church hoping to find something for myself, only to be caught up in this sea of love, one with everyone else in the room. Sometimes I think of God as an all-embracing field of energy, the energy of love, everywhere active, drawing us and everything else into one great love, one harmonious wholeness. This is what I felt in that room on a Sunday morning, for which I thank God—the priest, the musician and most certainly the carnation-bearing children who brought tears to my eyes.

It occurs to me that my Sunday morning experience is not just a moment but a revelation, an incarnation of what all of reality is. We live and move and have our being in this great field of Love who struggles against all odds and our worst instincts to pull us toward each other—or at the very least to hold us and every whirling thing from flying off in every direction.

It’s a complicated thought, and I think there is some truth in it. But it all starts with the clear, simple words I leaned in to hear as Love’s waves washed over us. Don’t worry, the words said. I want you. I’ve got you. I will bring you to where I am. I want you with me, no matter what.

David L. Miller

The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8)

Impossible

Impossible. Impossible to predict. Impossible to control, altogether free, appearing where it will, this surge of love wells within, flooding me whole, rendering anything other than love impossible.

Love blows, Love flows, today through a mundane moment of memory: A young woman, 15 minutes out of cosmetology school, awkward and unsure, attempted to cut my hair as I sat in the chair, increasingly anxious over her ever-deeper snips, wondering what I would see in the mirror when she was done.

The cut lasted … a long time.

Two months later, the memory of her unleashes a flood of love for an anxious human heart trying to make her way, find her place, gather her confidence, the stumbling of a spring colt trying to find its feet in a wide pasture. Such beauty, and one way or another, we’ve all been there, little knowing how beautiful our fledging efforts are in the heart of God.

But why? Why do such unpredictable moments open the soul’s inner doors releasing a rush of love beyond any you sought or intended?

Or today? Why does a great hawk—riding the currents above Greene Valley, hundreds of feet above the East Branch of the DuPage, gliding, circling, searching—awaken a wordless wave of love and gratitude flowing free from a place within I don’t control?

What is this Love that is so truly in me, closer than my breath, yet so far beyond and greater than anything I can create or command? Who is this Love whose smile surrounds me as the doors of my heart are swept open, and for one blessed moment that Love and me are one, not two—and I know that it is for this that we are each created?

The Spirit blows where it wills, Jesus says. You never know when it will blow through your day or how it might surprise you, to say nothing of the myriad ways it has shaped your life without you knowing a thing about it.  

On our best, most blessed days, we are awake just enough to welcome Love’s breezes blowing through our lives. When you do, don’t do anything. Just stand there, wherever you are, and feel it. Say a quiet thank you; then let Love do whatever it wants with that heart of yours.

David L. Miller

Then the women said to Naomi, “Blessed be the Lord, who has not left you … . He shall be to you a restorer of life and a nourisher of your old age.” (Ruth 4:14-15a)

The One who is Always

Seek beauty. Hold it fast. Love sings its holy name in every exquisite moment that we may know the Love who always is, wanting only for us to know there is an always, as our times so quickly pass.

That Always shines in Naomi’s old eyes, as she gazes into the face of an infant, cradling the future of her family and our lives in her arms.

The child is Obed. No reason for you to know him, except that he became the father of Jesse, the father of King David, a man whose passions for life, love and God made him more beloved than any leader in Israel’s long history, despite his wayward appetites. They remembered even 1000 years later when Jesus’ rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, hailing him as the Son of David.

Naomi could not have dreamed any of this as she held the child of Ruth, her daughter-in-law. She only knew that her hard history—losing a husband and two sons amid famine and flight—had finally found some redemption, a reason to hope as she looked into the child’s eyes trying to imagine what dreams might still find fulfillment.

Perhaps … the One who is Always was not done with her …. or with anyone.

Imagining her, watching her hold the child, it is impossible to know what is more beautiful, the light in her eyes, the curve of the infant’s cheek or the flame of hope fired in her old heart.

Who knows what is yet to come, what beauty and wonder remains to be born, not Naomi nor any of us? The other day Dixie showed me a snapshot of me holding grandson Ben. He in a blue onesie, maybe two months old, his dark Latin eyes fixed on my blues, the capture of a single moment never to be repeated exactly the same way again, printed on paper, engraved ever-more deeply in my heart. And hope? What heart can hold it all?

Next month that black-haired infant in a onesie graduates high school, his eyes as alive as ever, and mine, like Naomi’s, filled with love and hope that only beauty can birth, beauty born of the Love who is Always, always with us, always beyond us, breaking open our hearts to love and hope beyond our wildest expectations.  

David L. Miller