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

 

 

 

 

Learning to hear

 Just after daybreak, Jesus stood on the beach; but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to them, ‘Children, you have no fish, have you? (John 21:4-5a)

Perhaps the greatest change in the life of my spirit is one of hearing. The voice of Jesus has so taken on love’s timbre that any given word or syllable, no matter how seemingly mundane, can evoke unexpected tears of consolation, flooding my being with the simple awareness of a profound, nameless love, intensely personal yet having neither shape nor image within the darkness that surrounds it on every side.

I read the ancient words, watching what Jesus does and listening to what he says, hoping to feel the heart from which they flow, knowing he is the face of the Holy Darkness, this inexpressible Love, who bathes the heart in peace. So, listen, as the risen Jesus suddenly appears to his friends on the lakeshore.

Children, you have no fish, have you? How should we hear Jesus’ words? Maybe as a simple statement of fact: They’ve caught nothing. But perhaps the words carry an echo of sympathy: You caught nothing, so there’s no breakfast on the beach. Or maybe there is a measure of reproof: “You have no fish, have you?” My boyhood heart was well-schooled to hear words like these as one more criticism that I had forgotten or done something wrong, again, no matter what I happened to be doing at the moment.

But imagine these words emerging from a sly smile with a lilt of affection. Imagine saying them to a disappointed grandchild to whom you are about to give a gift that will bring them delight. Imagine the delight you will feel, knowing what you are about to do and the joy it will bring them. Imagine the ache of love you feel for them, the love no words can express.

Just imagine. Feel the joy of loving, the deep beauty of your humanity. And right there, in the mystery of your own inscrutable heart, you will hear the heart of Jesus beating within your own breast, bathed in peace, enveloped in the Holy Darkness whose name is Love.

David L. Miller  

 

On the road

 

As they came near the village to which they were going, [Jesus] walked ahead as if he were going on. But they urged him strongly, saying, ‘Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.’ So he went in to stay with them. When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. (Luke 24:28-31)

Stop here. I don’t want to walk on. I need time to stand still and look around, time to feel and name this longing for Love’s living nearness. The day has come and gone, yet I wait for Easter unborn to dawn once more, pouring eternity’s light into this heart so that I truly know who I am, from whence I come … and to whom I go, lest I get lost on the road.

Longing for what I cannot give myself, hoping for healing as my 71^st year around the sun passes before my eyes, I seem little more than life’s spectator as one body part or another resists my will, at least for now.

Walking this road, I see them on theirs, three of them, standing in the middle of a dusty, footworn path, the sun sinking west on a warmer than normal spring day. Who really knows if it was warm or cold, cloudy or clear? For now, I see them as I see them, two men with Jesus, their hopes dashed, heartbroken, but feeling something else, something they couldn’t name and couldn’t let go.

So, they prayed the only words that came to heart, “Stay with us. Don’t go.” They didn’t know much. They didn’t know what or who they were asking. But they were certain of this: Being with him out there on the road was better than being anywhere else without him.

And that is still true. So, stay with me, Lord Jesus. Stay when it is night, when darkness clouds my heart and I long for the dawn. Stay with me when I lose my bearings and forget all the ways you have loved me on this journey. Stay when I need to stop and look around to catch up with my feelings or let them catch up with me. Stay when I am angry or sad and forget that you are always here.

Stay with us. Break open the bread of your abundant heart. Open our eyes and fill them with tears of knowing that your love lives, out here on the road.

David L. Miller

 One more time

Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, rose from supper, laid aside his garments, and girded himself with a towel. Then he poured water into a basin, and began to wash the disciples’ feet, and to wipe them with the towel with which he was girded. (John 13:3-5)

Hands and feet, water, a basin and towel. Blessed are those who have eyes to see holiness where it is pleased to appear, as in this hunted man as he kneels on a stone-cold floor and washes feet.

This is the last time Jesus will be alone with his friends before his enemies scourge him body and soul and hang him out to dry, an object of derision. He has one more time to love them, to touch them body and soul, hoping to open their hearts to everything that is in his God-haunted heart.

To remember, we gather and tell the tale one more time, imagining ourselves cloistered with him in that little circle as he pours water into a bowl of sun-burnt clay and ties a long cloth around his waist.

One knee on the cold stone, he grasps a foot, my foot, your foot, in his right hand, cups water from the basin and washes the dirt of living from the arch and sole. His eyes fix on his work, ours on his hand as water spatters back into the bowl, our hearts heavy with a lifetime of fears and regrets, betrayals and hurts, hectored by our failures to be everything we or someone else thought we could’ve, should’ve or might’ve done and been, if only … .

But none of that seems to matter here. All that matters is the hands and heart of Jesus, whose love requires him to kneel at the feet of the weary and unworthy, reverently touching us with the love that fills him from the great Loving Mystery with whom his heart is one, tenderly touching and washing away our suspicion that we are adrift in a universe uncaring, a world where our little lives don’t much matter.

And this … is who God is.

Jesus upends everything commonly thought about who God is and what God is about. It’s all turned upside down. Any heart who hungers for God best looks not for a high and mighty unmoved mover far distant from their flesh. Look, instead, at this man moved to his knees by a great, unconquerable love, loving his friends to the end despite their faults and failures, their betrayals and failure to grasp the love that was reaching to them in his every word and gesture.

The more human we see him, the more divine we know him.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

The great beauty

Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom (Matthew 21:43)

In every goodness, every graced smile and every beauty of the human heart, the kingdom of the Loving One is known, regardless of the doctrine believed or denied.

Graced are we, if we have eyes to see it. For then, every moment is an occasion for knowing the heart of God melting the icy cynicism that chills our hearts. Graced are we, too, if the love’s embers spark a tender flame for the crying needs that crowd the news any time you risk watching.

The Spirit, Jesus says, blows where it will, and we don’t control it. But we surely know Love’s Spirit when its breeze brushes our flesh and opens our heart.

We know when we feel gratitude for the holy privilege of being alive and when love for this earth and its troubled inhabitants bubbles within. We know when the world’s most bitter suffering awakens the heart’s most gracious impulse. We know when the simplicity of human grace and care awakens the beauty we hide and moves us to share whatever share of it still lives within us.

The blessed kingdom for which we long and desperately need comes only as we open our hearts to give and receive the Love who comes in every love and every beauty. Its beauty appears when we seek for others the kindness and justice we naturally want for ourselves. And it is blocked whenever we indulge our egos or demand our rights as if there were no higher call.

The kingdom’s great beauty shines in the crucified Jesus, who refuses his rights in the name of loving enemies and forgiving those who have no right to anything but his rejection and condemnation.

But it also belongs to those who hunger and thirst for that love, not only for themselves but for everyone and everything, everywhere. Lord only knows, most of us do a lousy job of loving that way, our best efforts stumbling at best.

But the desire to know and share the sweet fruits of this love are a sure sign the Spirit’s untamable winds are blowing. And blow they will, so often revealing God’s loving rule in places and people whom you’d least expect, even in yourself.

David L. Miller

 

                          

 

 Images

Jesus our Lord … was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification. (Romans 4:24b- 25)

Images imprint themselves on our hearts. We recall them when we hunger to remember and feel what we most need. So it is that I often recall a painting of Jesus blessing a gaggle of children. It hung on a gray, concrete wall in a long-ago Sunday school room. I remember because I was and always will be one of those little ones in need of his blessing.

Perhaps that is why the image of a twisted crucifix has also engraved itself on my heart. A dark-skinned Jesus hangs heavily on the nails, leprous and lifeless, his desiccated body shredded by torture. I saw it in a Spanish cathedral and couldn’t bring myself to take a picture of it. It’s too brutal, too troubling. But I cannot forget it. Every year since, I find it on the internet and let it take me in.

Looking at it, I see the suffering of forgotten people in places I will never be. I feel the Love who embraces them all and forgives everyone, everywhere, everything. And I weep, loving the One who bears shame and rejection that I may know the Great Heart for whom our aching hearts long.

David L. Miller

 

 

Always enough

For [the Lord] did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him. (Psalm 22:24)

A lazy afternoon. “Sorry I’m so quiet,” Dixie sighs, looking up from her book. “I’m not much company today."

“It’s alright,” I respond. “Your presence is enough.” And it is.

It’s enough to know she is here with me, and I am not alone, like so many who have lost their loves. It is for this, after all, that we are made, not the state of marriage necessarily but to know and share the comfort of other hearts.

Wonderfully human, this need. It stirs our hunger for others and for a much greater heart who is loving, powerful and near, a Blessed Presence who doesn’t run away or hide when we are hurt or afraid, forgotten or rejected.

We fly into the mercy of God on the wings on this need. Like so many of old and Jesus himself, we pray our distress, begging to feel the beams of Love’s presence enfolding and holding us near. Hungry to be heard, we call out to the One who never hides his face, who is always there and whose presence … is always enough.

Songs in the night

I commune with my heart in the night; I meditate and search my spirit (Psalm 77:6)

Sometimes I wake with a song silently singing in my mind. Old songs are just there, hymns and melodies resonant with the Love who is far warmer than sky-blue winter mornings. They wake my heart to the gift of a new day, and I smile back at this Love who is always there, no matter how long or dark the night.

It has always been so. Believers in the God who so loves us have long sung their joys and sorrows, hungry for words and melodies that fill their hearts and comfort their sadness.

Feeling lost and alone, the Psalmist wrote, “I commune with my heart in the night,” trying to remember what it was like to feel God’s love. Many translations render this verse, “I remember my songs in the night.” Of course. For our songs bear us into Love’s holy presence, healing our hearts and lifting us to laughter when nothing else can.

Sometimes only a song can say what needs to be said, so I’ll sing along, or least smile, when music opens my eyes.

David L. Miller

Just like them

Have … sympathy, love for one another, a tender heart, and a humble mind. (1 Peter 3:8)

I’ve come to the age of those I most wanted and needed when I was young. Their faces pass before my mind and bless me even though some are more than 40 years gone. And I wonder: Have I become more like these souls who showed me what it is to be human?

They’d all known hardship. Most had suffered losses that dampened their eyes long after the fact. But bitterness was unknown among them. They breathed kindness, a gentle humility that did not demand that life and others must go their way and do their bidding. Humble is the word. They needed less, demanded less and loved more, grateful for the gifts life had given.

I wanted to be just like them—still do. They left a great deal of joy and blessing in their wake, extending far beyond their time and place through the hearts they touched, like mine.

Love made them the way they were—are still are. Somehow, they looked around and knew: The fields and faces, streets and graces were all a sacrament of Love’s embrace. So, like them, I sit here in the presence of Christ’s great love, praying to be made human, like them.

David L. Miller

Circles of light & Sydney, too

When the wise men saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure-chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. (Matthew 2:1o-11)

I can’t let Mary go. Christmas has passed. The ornaments are stored in their boxes, but Mary remains. Her silent radiance still shimmers from the tapestry on the family room wall. Rapt in love, Mary’s eyes caress the infant Jesus, lying in the straw of a manger, while a shepherd leans on his staff to peer over her shoulder at the child.

One of the Magi kneels in adoration at the creche and offers his gift. Two others, gifts in hand, stand in reverence until it is their turn to kneel in the warm light around Mary and her child.

The shepherd, the magi … and me, all of us drawn to this circle of light that love might heal and restore our humanity.

Mary and this child, who is Love’s blessed face, is an icon, a holy image on which we gaze to be made human again. Drawn into this circle of light, we see and feel what God is doing in us and in everything. The Holy One is drawing us home into circles of love and light, circles of care and healing, where our vulnerabilities encounter Love’s great grace alive in human hearts and hands.

We are not and never were intended to be alone. Home is the circle of light that appears in every circle of care and belonging where love lives.

I see this sometimes when I watch the news and witness how human hearts gather around the needs of those who fall, who struggle or suffer outrageous fates, like a football player in the prime of life who collapses in cardiac arrest in front of a stadium full of people and millions of television viewers. Grown men kneel, cry and pray; paramedics rush to work their wonders, and watchers stand vigil at emergency room doors.

But I’m even more impressed by my young friend, Sydney, and the circle of light around her. It’s not just the little smile that crosses her lips as she works her phone and laptop from a hospital bed, but everything and everyone around her.

Eight days ago, she had a heart transplant, a harrowing experience for anyone, especially so if you are only 14. She is doing well and has every hope of being able to do things and live in ways that have not been possible for her.

It’s possible because of a host of people that daily surround her in this circle of light.

Nurses, doctors, therapists and specialist of many kinds: OT, PT respiratory, art therapy, psychological services: I neither know nor can name them all. But they’re all there, present in that circle with Sydney’s fantastic parents and twin brother, grandparents and family near and far; friends at work and school; members of her congregation and hundreds of others who have and continue to pray for her. And, most poignantly, there is a donor and family who gave an incalculable gift so that Sydney might live abundantly.

Quite some circle, all of it—all of them—aglow with light and life, love and hope, tears and joy, more beautiful than I have words to say, alight with the love that streams through the darkness of the centuries to this time, this place, this girl.

The warm circle of light around Mary and Jesus—and Sydney, too— reveals what our loving God has had in mind for us all along. And every time we find ourselves in such a circle, we are home, truly home … in the Light whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

 David L. Miller

 

 

 

A long night’s journey into life

A long night’s journey into life

I trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord, because he has dealt bountifully with me. (Psalm 13:5-6)

Tears are telling. Warm as life and silent as night, they are the voice of your soul. They come to remind you that you are so much more than the thoughts you direct from one thing to another to navigate your days.

They sneak up on you, these tears, like at a moment when gratitude overwhelms the heart from a hidden reservoir rising within to wash away everything that is not love.

It is then we are finally ourselves, not the one you routinely show the world but the self the Blessed Source made as an emblem of Love’s holy image in time and space.

So it was as, we sat at a table in a hospital lounge, waiting for news of a heart removed and another implanted in a young girl. We waited, parents and grandparents, pastors and friends, seated in a holy temple of healing, knowing our beloved lay in the hands of hearts dedicated to preserve what only One can create.

And all the while, we knew: in another room, in another hospital, in another town another family wept tears of another sort while giving a gift of life to be winged over a Midwest prairie and rushed through Chicago streets to waiting hands who would sew life back into a girl named Sydney. Our Sydney.

Opening my mouth to speak only tears came out, gratitude for a holy place given to heal what is broken, for the hands who packed a heart for travel, for the pilot of the plane, and the driver of the transport car, for the 24-hour days and long years of study and practice that enable human hands to do what was once unthinkable, for a grieving family that suffered the unthinkable and still managed to give; and for the family at this table so palpably filled with fear, love and hope that we might burst amid the long hours of unknowing.

Words capture but a glimpse of what our hearts know. Tears do that job. And two words, thank you. Thank you … for all of it, for all of us, for the whole blessed mess of living and dying, all of it teaching us the beauty of loving and discovering we are more human and more like you, Loving Mystery, than we had imagined.

Thank you for the love wringing prayers of hope and healing from our hearts and for the tears that do the talking when nothing else can.

And thank you, Holy One, for the beauty of a life preserved. Our Sydney.

David L. Miller

 The healing we need

Joseph went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn. (Luke 2:5-7)

It’s Mary I notice most of all when I close my eyes to see. So young, a blanket clutched around her shoulders, she trudges her pregnant weight alongside a man, a bit older, staff in hand, along a dusky road, the two of them, alone.

Dark hair framing her face, half-hidden, two fearful eyes peer into the unknown wondering what is next, where they will rest, sleep, huddle against the chill of night.

I have seen her in other faces and refugee places; afraid of what was behind them, they flee into the fear of what lies ahead, hoping for shelter and perhaps … someday … to return home.

That’s how I see Mary. But then the whole scene changes to a lonely place where cries of birth, unheard in the night, bring forth the child, and the light of love beckons me near to see something more.

Mary swaddles the child, warm eyes down, loving the life she labored into the night, wrapping him in new cloth, holding him close as breath, seeing nothing but him. How can it be? He who comes from eternity into time learned love’s first lesson in Mary’s arms, cradled in her heart, the two of them a portrait of the mystery we each are invited to live.

I want only to kneel and savor the warmth of their beauty enveloping my heart. But Mary looks up and extends the child toward my arms that I, too, may hold him.

And just then, Love’s holy nearness floods my eyes as I hold him close, my anxious heart calmed and healed, not by looking on from outside, but as I hold the Love Mary holds, and feel an all-consuming Love filling me whole.

This is the healing all the world needs and for which I so daily hunger, to hold the Love who holds me, to know him within … warming and filling every empty place, chasing out every doubt and fear until my heart knows the beauty in Mary’s arms deigns also to live in me.

This is Christmas, the wonder, the joy of eternity in time. It is the reason we gaze at the beauty of a mother and child … and discover we are not so lost as we feared. Never were. Never will be.

David L. Miller

Paper prayers

 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. (John 1:1-5)

Paper prayers

Call them the saints and martyrs of Iran, young women and men beaten in the streets and hung from construction cranes to warn others not to resist. Blessed are they, Holy One. I read their stories and life wells within me. Your life. Your Love. The Presence of a mystery I can neither define nor deny.

Thank you for living in me, born there long ago, breathing still though too many hours pass when your presence feels elusive and beyond my grasp. But that is exactly the problem. I try to grasp you who are Spirit and Life rather than waiting and watching, attending to moments that breathe life in my soul.

Today, it is seeing these young men and women crying for the freedom and dignity due every child of earth. It is you who cry aloud in their voices. All things come to be through you, bearing the mark, the shape, the echo, the hope, the beauty, the light and love you are. You are the light and hope brilliant in their sacrifice.

They are more alive in you, and you in them, than are so many of us who bear your name, O, Christ.

Still, their wounding and death open the deep inner door of my being, and you rush out, a torrent of passion and prayer demanding that you receive each blessed one of them into the arms of your eternal mercy where every child of earth knows their worth.

In a single moment, I feel your love flooding from the soul’s secret room where your heart and mine are not two but one. And with this I have what my chilly December heart needs, for I know you as the Love who holds me and those young souls, who abide in the rest that one day will receive me home, too.

Blessed are you, Holy One. You are the Unquenchable Light who shines in the hearts of great saints whose images grace my morning paper. You are the Love who awakens in our hearts and drives off the darkness. You are the Eternal Word who unveils your beauty in the child of Bethlehem.

Open our eyes to see and love you … wherever you choose to appear.

David L. Miller

 

Annunciation in the stockroom

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, ‘Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.’ But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid….” (Luke 1:26-30a)

I’ve seen her before. She cut her hair. Most of the pink ends are gone or stuffed in the khaki stocking cap pulled low near her ears, a few dirty blond strands trailing out.

“What can I get you?’ she asks, a cheery voice for the first in line. She pokes at the computer screen on the counter then spins right to pour a large bag of coffee beans in the grinder; turning heel, she heads to the storeroom to grab another.

Imagination takes over, blessedly, and a thought: It could have been her, back there in the stockroom as she went about her work, little suspecting a vision and a voice would interrupt all that is normal.

“Greetings, favored one. The Lord is with you,” the vision speaks. And she is; watching her work it’s clear: somewhere, someone already let her know she is favored. Only now, more. Startled, mouth open, speechless, she takes in the vision wondering who or what has come to this ordinary place on a gloomy Wednesday to announce what every heavy heart most needs to hear, “Don’t be afraid.”

But there is plenty to fear as this young woman, Mary, in my coffee shop vision, hears about bearing a child who bears the heart of heaven’s Unspeakable Love, a child who will break her heart in his desperate struggle to win ours.

That’s how it all starts, this Christmas we crave. It begins in the soul-deep craving in the heart of God for us, in an unspeakable longing for us to know, to be encompassed, finally home, in this Love who sends angels to young women in stockrooms.

Love craves for the beloved, hoping and hungry to enfold the whole bleeding world and our aching hearts in endless mercy, all the while whispering, “Do not fear.”

It’s not a hard thing to know. Rare is the heart who has never wanted to whisper those same words to a frightened child, a beloved friend, a soul on its final journey.

Such is the ache in the heart of God as Gabriel is dispatched to a young woman minding her own business in an out of the way place, telling Mary she would bear sorrow and beauty greater than any heart has ever known.

“Let it be it as you say,” Mary answered that long ago day, as does this young woman, reappearing from the stockroom to serve one more soul on a gloomy Wednesday, before kneeling at the display case to restock sandwiches and pastries, fruit juice and bottles of water.

It’s all so beautiful, the wonder of the whole story—of God becoming flesh, of a girl who said yes, of the Love who wants me and everyone who has ever longed for Love’s nearness. The whole mystery is right there, kneeling by the display case, begging me to notice.

Be born in me.

David L. Miller