On the Mount with Jesus and Fr. Dennis

 As [Jesus] came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, ‘If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. (Luke 19:41-42)

We come to Jesus in the hour of our need, but to know him we must stand at his side in the hour of his sorrow.

It helps to see and hear the places and moments, the words and small movements through which his heart is revealed. Watching closely, we hear what words cannot tell and feel his soul, speaking to our own.

He sits on the Mount of Olives, the ridge overlooking Jerusalem from the east. Shadows deepen in Kidron, the valley below him, as the remainder of the day fades, the towers of the city the last to savor the light.

His head turns from one side to the other, savoring the city before him, right to left, north to south and back again, his eyes embracing the thick, gray stones of the city wall he knows will not stand the violent storms soon to come, in the brutal crush of history.

He is silent. No words. None are needed. His silence voices the wonder of who he is, what he feels and what we most need to know.

Slowly, his lips form words …  seen as much as heard, the whispered longing of a grieving heart. ‘If only … .

‘If only you knew the things that make for peace.’

The words hang in the air, echoing a love that is true, bearing the sadness of the times and the bitterness to come. He has a death to die, and the city will see destruction as empires clash, unleashing a river of tears of which his own are the foretaste.

How can I not love a heart who loves like this, who looks over the city who will hate and reject him and love it still, down to the last lost soul? If his is the heart of God, then the victory over all that is hate is certain.

And there is only one good thing to do. Stand with him, stand by him, as his eyes embrace the city of his sorrow, our hearts softened to see as he sees and feel as he feels, sharing his sorrow. Knowing, too, it is not only Jerusalem he surveys, but the conflicts and burdens of our time and place, for we, too, do not know the things that make for peace.

Perhaps we can learn by standing by Jesus, watching him, as he loves the city which will destroy him. Perhaps then we can feel and become the love that refuses to hate in the face of rejection, the mercy that embraces the brokenness of our times without rancor, seeking only to pour the oil of consolation on those whose struggles are greater than our own.

It can be a small thing that maybe isn’t small at all. Perhaps this is why Fr. Dennis appeared in my prayer. As I watched Jesus surveying the city, I suddenly saw Fr. Dennis there, standing beside the place Jesus sat.

An older priest on Chicago’s south side, Fr. Dennis ferries Venezuelan immigrants to the parish house where he lives to do their laundry, so they can avoid the laundromats and ICE agents.

Who knew laundry could be one of the things that make for peace? Fr. Dennis figured it out, standing with Jesus in a place of his sorrow. Perhaps we can, too.

David L. Miller

The eyes of longing

‘When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?’ (Luke 18:8b)

The heart is a lonely hunter, and it is no less true when the hunter is the divine heart. Loneliness and longing echo through the heart of Jesus in any number of stories the New testament records, including this haunting question.

Jesus gazes into the future with aching eyes, wondering aloud if any will know him when he appears. Will any be waiting? Will any be watching? Will any be praying and hoping for the healing and mercy he brings?

Will his eyes meet the watchful longing of tired souls yearning for him to shower justice, mercy and peace on this fractured world? Or will our hearts surrender hope, no longer believing, expecting or even desiring the healing only love can bring?

The image of God he unveils is not one of impenetrable power. He reveals the longing heart of a lover who hungers to be known and received by the beloved, who cannot rest content until the hearts for whom he hungers are gathered, safe and at home, encompassed in his love.

The desire I feel in him is reason enough for me to love Jesus and to call him my brother. For in his aching eyes, I see the reflection of my own. And in his lonely question, I feel his mercy, his longing for my heart to be one, finally at home in the great, eternal love of his heart.

In this, we are joined, his heart and mine, already one. The ache in my heart for healing and peace and mercy and everything this world so badly needs is the presence of his Spirit within my own, a share in his life and an answer to his lonely question.

Yes, Lord, you will find faith, for the flame of your love lives in the longing of our hearts. And we cannot be content with anything less than you.

David L. Miller

The divine must

 Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? (1 Corinthians 3:16)

There’s a straight line between the most beloved Christian saint and 14 mothers sitting in the middle of Beach Street in Broadview, IL. That line runs straight through our hearts, and if we have the courage to listen it can save us from ourselves.

Just over 800 years ago, Francis Bernardone sat in the dilapidated church of San Damiano near Assisi wondering what to do with his heretofore dissolute life. Staring into the image of the crucified Christ, he heard or felt or intuited the voice of Christ speaking ‘in a tender and kind voice’ within him.

He didn’t immediately become St. Francics. That took more time, but he left a different person than when he entered, drawn forward by a ‘divine must’ that he knew he must obey and follow where it led.

I don’t know any of the 14 mothers who protested outside the Broadview detention center where ICE warehouses the immigrants it brutalizes on their raids around Chicago and suburbs—throwing people to the ground, piling on and cuffing them, asking questions later, if at all.

From one point of view, their protest appears futile. I doubt it will penetrate the cauterized hearts of the ICE officers whose brutalities occupy the evening news most nights.

Nor do I expect it will curb the cruelty of Trump administration officials whose deceitful tongues drip with a smug, arrogant, venomous malice, taking pleasure in the fear and suffering of human souls, as they peer down from the lofty perch from which they view the world.

I have no idea whether those moms are atheists or agnostics or Christians or Muslims or all or none of the above. But I do know this: Somehow in some way, the Voice who spoke to St. Francis at San Damiano spoke in them, and they did not dismiss the movements in their hearts.

They obeyed the internal and likely insistent ‘must’ that appeared within them, nudging their hearts from the immobility of helplessness in the face of official injustice and cruelty.

They are not alone. The Voice of San Damiano speaks everywhere, seeking a hearing in every heart. And now, as in every age, those with a heart of flesh hear the call; they feel the ‘must’ and do what love requires. Look around and listen.

A priest on the south side of Chicago drives immigrants to the rectory of his parish so they can do their laundry without risking the laundromat where ICE agents prowl.

Whistles and car horns echo along city streets as neighbors follow marauding agents, warning people to stay away. Parents and teachers keep watch and wait, protecting immigrant children and parents, providing transportation and safe harbor.

Courageous souls go into the streets to pray, protest and hold their cell phones aloft to document the truth of what is really happening, undermining the constant lies of those who seek to justify the great indecency playing out on our streets.

I feel it, too, as my wife, Dixie, and I, shopped and loaded the trunk of our car on two consecutive days with food for the pantry which is serving an overload of families as SNAP is shut down.

Like so many others, we heard something like what St. Francis heard, and we knew what we had to do, obeying the ‘must’ we felt within.

We live in difficult times when the better angels of our hearts and the soul of our nation are under assault by nihilistic forces that value power above all else.

Listening and responding, hearing and obeying the divine must—the inner voice of love, the blessed rage for justice and kindness—saves us from descending into helpless despair and the bitterness of anger and cynicism.

The inscrutable urging within is the Spirit of the One who brings good news to the poor and release to the captives. And when we heed and obey this gracious Voice, we, too, find true freedom.

The cry of the saints

 You are the light of the world (Matthew 5:14a)

For all the saints, who from their labors rest, Who Thee by faith before the world confessed, Thy Name, O Jesus, be forever blessed. Alleluia. Alleluia. (All Saints Day hymn)

I sang the words to myself in the usual chair where I pray as the sun flowed through the southeast windows of the house. As always, one face came to mind first, my father, Lavern Miller, for whom I’ve now sung this hymn for 24 All Saints Days, since he was delivered from terrible debilitation into light eternal.

I see and feel him there with so many others, who in strength and assurance or in weakness and wavering faith confessed Jesus as Lord of life and death, heaven and earth. Jesus was our hope in those final days when all he could feel was his emptiness and need, as life slipped away.

I still feel the comfort of Jesus’ presence hovering over the scene in his cramped room, holding his hand, enveloped in a cloud of Presence lingering above his bed, waiting for the hour of deliverance.

Whispering in his ear, assuring his trembling heart, Jesus is Lord became my silent cry, a defiant affirmation, a shaking fist in the face of the specter of death and his soul-crushing suffering.

All Saints Day never fails to take me back there, consoling my heart. But the day and it signature hymn also carries me to the streets of the city and suburb where I live, raising a compelling question: What does it me to confess Jesus is Lord here and now?

For 20 centuries, Jesus is Lord has been the confession of all who place their faith and hope in him.

But what does it mean for us to confess Jesus is Lord in a country where government-mandated masked marauders engage in thuggish brutality, shattering the lives and families of immigrants, most of whom have been in the U.S. for years, if not decades, living productive lives?

At the very least, we must listen to the cry in our hearts that shouts, ‘No, this should not be.’ This is the voice of Jesus, our risen Lord, alive within the depth of our being, crying out for kindness and justice for souls created in God’s image, calling us to give ourselves more deeply to God’s work of giving life to the world.

Created in, by and for the love of God, Christ is the center of every human soul. There is no person on earth in whom we should not be prepared to see the presence of Christ.

Today, he is violated on the streets of our cities and suburbs as human beings are hunted down as if they were rabid beasts.

Christ not only suffers in these, mostly brown-skinned people, who are being profiled and targeted. He also suffers in the souls of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem and Thomas Homan and all who birthed this diabolic scheme that is brutalizing hearts and splintering families, while fanning the rancid anger and bigotry long present in our nation.  

Christ lies at the center of their souls, too, suffering, grievously wounded, buried deep beneath passions of greed, anger, pride, hate and vanity that plague all of us to one extent or another. But they have become particularly virulent and malignant in this administration.

But we who hear the voice of Christ within us must love and serve him by naming the ways and places he suffers in distressing disguise—especially today in the lives of the poor and in those who face government brutality.

Only so, do we join the cry of the saints of every age, Jesus is Lord.

Anne and the roses

The heavens are telling the glory of God …. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth. (Psalm 19:1-4)

It happens every fall. I talk to my plants. I talk to the trees on my walks in the woods. I talk to the fields, dusty with harvest on the rolling hills of my childhood.

Sometimes, I talk to them in the summer, too, the petunias and begonias and mums that light up the patio and the balcony, the day lilies in the flower beds and certainly the roses by the southwest corner of the house. I tell them how they bless me.

But our exchanges become more poignant as October goes. An urgent impulse builds within to say ‘thank you,’ not once, but again and again. Thank you.

The words come of their own accord, tears, too, as another summer slips away, its colors fading, one less, now, in the store of summers I have been given to savor the sun’s embracing rays—feeling myself so graciously, so gratuitously loved by the Blessed Author, who wrote me into the script of a great story whose ending we do not see.

But the wonder of light and color and beauty fires hope to carry the soul through winter’s sleep. Too soon, it will come upon us to silence the earth and bid us to rest in peace—knowing earth’s Beloved Author will write another summer into the story, because that’s what love does. Love always has another chapter to write. Always.

But this chapter is not quite done. Words must be spoken.

Rounding the southwest corner of the house, I stop and take a long, loving look at the last roses of summer. Five blossoms remain, one falling apart, three faded by a recent frost and one small, elegantly-formed, velvety red blossom sings out its name, undimmed and undaunted.

This is what remains from the hundreds of blossoms the bush produced this year, planted three years ago in a patch of soil that had killed everything else I dared plant there. Little wonder I consider every rose a defiant shake of the fist in the face of all that is loss and death, a triumphant yes of life praising the verdant heart of life’s loving Source.

At the corner of the house, under a crystal blue sky and in the sight of confused neighbors who might have wondered to whom I was talking, I did what my heart required, obedient to love’s insistence.

Touching my heart, an involuntary gesture, the words came simple and true:

Thank you for your beauty. Thank you for the miracle of color. Thank you for singing the glory of the One whose beauty you share. Thank you for revealing my deepest desire and prayer that … maybe … someday … if only for a moment … I might shine with heaven’s light as beautifully as you.

I might add one more bit of thanks: Thanks for reminding me of life and beauty amid the vicious social divisions and the ugliness of hate that have poisoned the air we breathe. You gentled my heart, whispering a word of love you received from the One who is Love.

The roses were healing balm for my soul amid the bitterness of our times. Nothing surprising about this. Mystics and contemplatives and Jesus, too, heard Love speak in deserts and mountains, forests and flowers, in rivers that flow and winds that blow.

‘Every common bush is afire with God,’ Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote, which is to say, alight with love.

A teenage Anne Frank knew this even as she hid from the Nazis in the darkest of times. ‘The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely, or unhappy is to go outside,’ she wrote, ‘somewhere where they can be quiet, along with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature.’ 

I think Anne must have seen the roses.

The last rose of summer

He was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.’  He said to them, ‘When you pray, say: Father, hallowed be your name. (Luke 11:1-2)

Red roses have dwindled to a few on the west side of the house. Once, there were dozens. Now, I can count their number as I steer the car into the garage. Each one grows more precious as the days pass, stirring my heart to praise the Beauty to whom they sing in silent witness.

A single rose strains high above the rest, struggling to open fully, hungry for heat on these cool October days. I cheer her labor, hoping there will be enough time and warmth for her to fulfill her promise before frost stills her song and wilts her splendor.

I watch and hope for her for she speaks my hidden truth. I, too, long for the warmth of a sun that once warmed me.

Warmth and light embraced me when I was an anxious, insecure child, walking with confidence into only one place in my entire world, the door of St. Paul Lutheran Church in Warren, Il. I was safe there, wanted, secure and home, taken in by souls who had no idea how good the warmth of their normal, ordinary, casual welcome felt to me.

Taken in—small words, but they keep returning as I think of those days. I was taken in, welcomed in this community of hearts, who left their homes every Sunday to gather at the stone church on the west edge of town to sing and pray, listen to the pastor, drink coffee and talk about the weather or whatever was happening in our largely insignificant little village.

But it was not insignificant to me, not then or now. It was the breath of life, the warmth of the sun, water for my thirsty soul.

I remember their smiles decades later; I suppose because I needed them so badly. I still hear their voices, laughter in the narthex, serious tones in Sunday school rooms, gentle urgings for us to open our mouths to sing or recite the catechism—but also to quit poking each other, sit down and behave.

I belonged and knew l belonged on a level far deeper than consciousness. I long for this warmth and light as I make my way further into (gulp) the eighth decade of life. I still have so much I want to be and live and love and give, and I long to feel taken into the light and warmth of a loving community, feeling alienated, as I do, from the faith community that was once home.

I know I am not alone in this.

Perhaps that is why I feel a deeper yearning in the disciple’s plea, ‘teach us to pray.’ I wonder if what they really wanted was—not simply to pray—but to feel inside the warmth and love of the Holy Mystery within whom Jesus communed, the one he called Father, the one he revered and who revered him.

Seeing Jesus at prayer, perhaps they wanted to feel the encompassing embrace of the divine essence as he did, to be enveloped in one all-embracing love, so that their hearts might open and their lives unveil the beauty our loving Creator had sown in their souls.

Each of them … and me … like the last rose of summer, incomplete, not fulfilled, longing to sing one more song of praise for the wonder of light and love, warmth and beauty, before October goes.

Waiting for the sun to rise

And [Jesus] said to him, “Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.” (John 1:51)

I’m tired.

I’m weary of the hate and anger, bitterness and political division that is draining kindness, trust and hope from so many. I’m tired of the rage and mayhem piped into our consciousness through every digital device we own, tired of the shootings and burnings and destruction.

I am tired of the callous cruelty of masked brutes hunting down immigrants who are just working their jobs and caring for their families, treating them like rabid animals, unburdened by the humanity of those they abuse and the lives they destroy.

And I am heartsick that souls I once knew and served and loved now think of me as ‘the other,’ sick to death that they have become ‘the other’ in my heart, too. Once, they were human souls for whom I’d gladly rise in the wee hours had they any need of their pastor and friend.

I grieve the loss of what once was natural as breathing, tired of the passions of anger and resentment that imprison my heart. I fight them, but they are too strong.

The only thing that really helps is you, O Lord, seeing you, hearing you, singing about you so that the sorrow of my soul becomes prayer and my heart is restored, warmed in the rays of your goodness.

I wonder about the times when you were weary, not just tired, but soul-weary from the weight of loving the resistant, the rejecting and even the hateful, not to mention those who were just slow to understand.

You stepped away. You sat in the silent darkness waiting for the sun to rise, your heart turned to the Love who filled you … and who stirs in me, too.

Perhaps that is what I am doing here, fingers on these keys, sitting in the darkness, waiting for the sun to rise, refusing to deny how profoundly the darkness of these hateful, divisive times has darkened my heart, even as thoughts of my own end haunt me in the night, reminding me of decades I wasted and people I hurt, attempting to heal my own wounds and exorcise my demons by making a name for myself.

I cannot, of course. Only love casts this kind out, the Love ceaselessly streaming from the heart of your mercy, Jesus, to we who sit in the darkness. ‘Come to me all you who are weary,’ you say; you will see heaven opened.’

Indeed, I see you, even in my heavy heart, dear Friend. For what is this sorrow, if not your love within me, longing for a more gracious world? And what is this ache, if not a prayer for the freedom to love and laugh and embrace the world with a generous heart, your heart, Jesus?

So, I see, now; even this darkness is my friend, bearing me to your side that we may wait, together, for the sun to rise, as it will. It always does.