Watching the water

Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’ (Luke 3:21-22)

On a hot June day, I visited the traditional site of Jesus’ baptism. Standing thigh deep in the Jordan River, I marked the foreheads of fellow pilgrims with the sign of the cross, my right side soaked as I reached into the stream over and over to make sure each one got suitably wet.

It’s impossible to say how our baptismal remembrance affected the 18 or so who stood with me in the river. The charter bus appeared to ferry us to the next holy site before we could gather our thoughts, let alone risk sharing them. Vulnerability is hard.

I didn’t want to go, then or now. I wanted to stay there, sit on the bank and watch the water flow south, carrying my mind into the depth of my heart.

And I didn’t want to be alone. I wanted to be there … with Jesus.

Even now, more than six years later, I imagine myself sitting there, beside Jesus, silent, as he prays, knowing only that I don’t know what to say, what to ask, or quite how I feel, except that I want to be there … with him … because being with him, feeling him near, I know that I don’t need to know what to say or what to do or what to ask … because I have what my heart needs.

It's like having loved someone for a very long time and feeling them love you for a very long time. When they are gone … for a few hours … or days … let alone forever … you feel incomplete, wanting only to touch them again, see their smile and feel their presence in the house because the rooms begin to echo with an emptiness only they can fill.

I suppose that’s the way human hearts are made, needy and always needing. Only fools deny this. The wise embrace it, letting their need lead them to love’s fulfillment, which is the only thing capable of filling the emptiness.

Follow your need far enough, and you might begin to realize you crave a love from which nothing, not even death can separate you, a love from which all love comes and to which every love points.

And this is why I go back, if only in my imagination, to sit on the bank watching the water. For Jesus came there, stood in the river among a bunch of people like me, shadowed by death, bearing the weight of their sins, longing for release.

Sitting beside him, heaven’s voice lingering in his ears, both of us enveloped in the warm rays of divine love, there is nothing to say or do. It’s enough just to be there … with him.

Far better than the coffee

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)

Good coffee brings people to this busy suburban corner. But most are looking for something more, as am I.

I didn’t get my favorite seat in the southeast corner of the café, today. Two elderly Japanese men occupy that space, chatting amicably in their native tongue.

To my right, a gravel-voiced businessman, white wires dangling from his ears, gazes into his laptop, speaking with an associate, chuckling at what he hears. ‘You make this fun,’ I hear him say.

Behind me, a high school girl studies her notes, as another girl stretches her legs on the chair in front of her and sinks into her book. All the while, steam hisses from an espresso machine as the barista, who called me by name, prepares the next drink.

Nothing unusual here; it’s like this most days. But don’t imagine it’s not special. It’s extraordinary, provided you have eyes to see and ears to hear.

Each of these lives—and all the rest you care to name—came to be in the Word Christ is, their souls imbued with his life and light. They are graced with the Joyful Love who willed each of them into existence, whether they know it or not.

Just look closely, the English mystic, Julian of Norwich, suggests, and you can see it. ‘God is everything that is good,’ she wrote, ‘and the goodness that everything has is God.’

Goodness is not hard to find in this place. It’s so plentiful it is nearly impossible to name it all. Students studying, a man enjoying work that appears natural for him, while two friends chat the afternoon away in the language in which they first heard words of love and care.

Christ’s light gets so buried in some lives and places it can disappear from our sight. But the light remains, however hidden, even in hard-bitten hearts and in the worst of circumstances.

But on days like today … and moments like this … the created goodness and beauty of human souls whispers the great truth our hearts most need to hear.

We live in a Christ-soaked world. The Incarnate Word of God, our beloved Christ, is born into a world where he has always been and will always be.

His appearance in human flesh, full of grace and truth, opens our eyes to see him in all that is good, feel him in all that is love, and savor his touch in the simple joy of being alive in a place like this … where you can hear his love chatting away in a language you can’t begin to understand.

Except, you actually understand quite well … that this is far better than your coffee.

With Mary, pondering

 When the angels went away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.” And they went with haste, and found Mary and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. And when they saw it they made known the saying which had been told them concerning this child…. But Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart. (Luke 2:15-17, 19)

I can’t let Christmas go. The world moves on, even the church moves on. But I cannot. I want only to linger at the stable, look at Mary, bask in the lamp light, stand among the shepherds and hold the child.

Not just for now, but tomorrow and every tomorrow to come because … standing among them in open-mouthed wonder … I know who I am.

A deep knowing, not of mind but heart, awakens within me as I watch the scene, waiting for the moment Mary nods at me to pick up the child and hold him in my arms, as I held my own children, my grandsons, and dozens of children who broke my heart in places I once travelled to tell their stories.

Holding Jesus, my soul awakens to the truth of my own being—and the being of every human soul that has … or ever will … draw the sweet breath of life on this unlikely little planet.

We hold a mystery, every last one of us, and that mystery is the Christ, the life and love he is within us. Not just in the good or the faithful, the just or the beautiful, but all of us.

We bear the life I hold in the arms of my heart at the Bethlehem manger.

The beauty of divine love at the heart of Jesus is our true identity. It is the soul, the deep heart, we forget or hide or lose or never knew, sleeping within, hidden beneath layer upon layer of facades, images and identities we project to the world.

But we are far more wondrous and beautiful than any of those things. We are embodied temples of the Love who made us, recipients of the love and life of Christ by virtue of being human, given, freely, gratis, in our creation in Christ’s image.

Tragically, many go to their grave without ever knowing, feeling or waking to the truth that the Love Christ is … is their divine DNA, an eternal loving joy eager to be born to life in them.

This is why I cannot let Christmas go, ever. I don’t want to forget. I want to feel and be alive with the life God is within me, filled with hope, brimming with joy and eager to love. So, I hold Christmas as long as I can.

Singing songs in the night to the Love he is, I imagine the scene where he is given to the earth and held in Mary’s arms. I stand among the dumbfounded shepherds, and I reach out to hold the child, eager for any small stirring of his life to wake in me … that I may feel one with him, one in the Love he is, warmed by the wonder that this Love lives also in me, hungry to fill every corner of my being and every moment of my consciousness.

Seasons change; Christmas too soon passes. But like Mary, I will pray and ponder, holding the Life he is in my heart, knowing the Love who holds us all.

‘Come, Jesus, glorious heavenly guest, and keep your Christmas in our breast.’ (Nikolai F.S. Grundtvig)

Every mother who has ever loved …

 And while they were there, the time came for her to be delivered. And [Mary] gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn. (Luke 2:6-7)

If there is anything more beautiful, I know nothing of it. Swaddling Jesus, Mary is an icon of every mother who has ever loved a child.

Holding him, mother and child as one, her gaze fixed on the life in her arms, she cradles him warm in the gentleness of an exquisite tenderness, shielding him from the cold and the perils of living in a world that is seldom so tender.

And all these centuries later, I sit in the chair where I pray … and weep … at the unspeakable beauty of this mother and child, as she wraps him in bands of love and worry, joy and fear.

I watch … and see so many others who live large in my memory, each shimmering with a beauty far beyond my speaking. They’re all Mary, every last one of them, and their children are all Jesus.

There are so many, like the refugee mother sitting on her suitcase in the rough gravel of a Macedonian hillside, cradling her infant in a thin blanket against a relentless late winter wind, wondering if they will ever be able to go home again.

There were Somali mothers sitting outside makeshift tepees, fashioned from corrugated tin and plastic from war-torn buildings, denying themselves food to feed their children with what little they had, and then, especially, there’s that other one in South Sudan, who in my heart stands for so many thousands.

Wrapping her little one in filthy rags, the only thing she had, she hummed as she kept watch, knowing those rags would soon be a burial shroud, so like the mothers of Gaza, today.

I see them all … others, too, as I watch Mary cradle Jesus.

For, there’s another image this night that also shimmers with Mary’s beauty, my beloved Dixie, 20 years old, looking more like 17, dark brown hair falling on her shoulders, just home from the hospital, holding our first born, her smile alive with a joy I don’t think any man can ever understand. We can only watch and give thanks that the Holy One allows us the vision of infinite beauty.

Yes, she is there, too, as I watch Mary, her eyes gazing at me from across the centuries, inviting me to open my arms and hold Jesus, to cradle him near—even as some of those mothers in those troubled places invited me to do what I most wanted to do—hold the precious lives of their children in my arms as if I could protect them from the brutalities to which darkened hearts had subjected them.

And here lies the mystery that reduces (or elevates) me to tears every year.

Jesus, the Christ child, who bears the heart of God, the soul of Infinite Mercy appears in human flesh that we, as Mary, may see and touch and fall in love with everything he is … awakened to the Love he is … in the unsearchable depths of our own souls.

O Come, let us adore him.

The Beauty we bear

 And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! … And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.”  (Luke 1:41-42, 45)

I remember her hands. It’s been so long that the images run together.  I cannot recall whether they were Meta’s hands or maybe Grandma Lena’s hands. Maybe it was both of them … and then some.

I see two weathered, wrinkled hands, blue veins showing through shiny, thin flesh, nearly transparent on back. But that never mattered. As I remember, the hands always came together, cupping the cheeks of our children as we brought them through the door, flesh on flesh, loving delight, a sacrament of welcome celebrating the unblemished beauty of children’s smiles.

I see those hands as I watch Elizabeth welcome Mary, the Mother of our Lord. I’m in the room as she hears Mary’s voice calling her name. I see Elizabeth’s startled face as the child in her womb kicks and turns.

And I see her as she bursts through the door and takes Mary’s face in her hands and calls her blessed. I see … and hold the moment in my heart, for it is resplendent with love’s beauty, the beauty for which I long as Christmas draws near.

Far from the desire to possess something, it is a desire to be possessed, swept up and enveloped in a loving beauty, like that of Mary and Elizabeth as they enfold each other in joyful arms.

Mary’s beautiful heart, open and receptive to birth the beauty of God’s great mercy from the darkness of her womb, Elizabeth blessed to see the Beauty she bears, they twirl together, arms around each other, caught up in the dance of the Love who chose them.

Watching them is a bit like being at Meta’s doorstep again … or Grandma Lena’s, where Love’s dance reached out and enchanted our hearts.

It’s beautiful, all of it, the stories surrounding Jesus’ birth, the stories of love’s beauty in our own little lives. They’re all the same story, of course—the story of the Great Love, who will stop at nothing in an unceasing effort to sweep us up into Love’s own beauty.

Mary and Elizabeth, Meta and Lena and my kids … and all the rest of us … we’re all part of it. And when we remember, when we tell ourselves the tales of Love’s breathless beauty, the Beauty Mary birthed into our troubled world … is born in us.

For Christ lies in our own hearts, ever waiting to be born anew. All of us are ‘meant to be mothers of God,’ Meister Eckhart wrote centuries ago, ‘for God is always needing to be born.”

And the world has no greater need.

An inside story

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. (Philippians 4:4-5)

Very little makes me happier than mud on my boots as I walk a trail far from the sounds of any road or highway. I prefer out of the way places … or days when rough forest trails are still wet from rain or melted snow.

I know I will be alone for most of the miles, and my mind will freely wander among mysteries I don’t understand and prayers I barely know how to speak. But I speak, nonetheless, stumbling over my thoughts, talking into the Great Silence, who sometimes speaks back in the secret room of my soul to which God alone has access.

Today, the sun momentarily breaks through a moody December sky as I rise out of the woods into a tall grass prairie. My boots sucking into the mud of a sodden trail, barely a foot wide, I walk through a dense tunnel of dry, dead grasses, taller than my head, rustling in a breeze too warm for this time of year.

And I stop … and look at the sky, realizing … I’m happy, no, something more, a quiet joy, feeling held … inside an immense embrace … by a Love who loves for me to know I’m loved, whose arms are the grasses enveloping me on every side.

This is why I come out here, to feel myself inside this Love who unleashes a fountain of joy from that secret, inner room that is God’s own.

It doesn’t happen every time. But today a great ‘yes’ erupts from the depth of my being, ‘yes’ to life, ‘yes’ to the world, ‘yes’ to the Loving Mystery who bids me to don my boots and come out here to rediscover who I am and where I live.

For I live in the embrace of a great and unimaginable Love who enfolds all time and existence … and most certainly the sodden trails of Spiers Woods on a gloomy December day.

‘Rejoice in the Lord,’ Paul writes. He doesn’t need to tell me twice. Not here. Not now. But I repeat his words, wondering if the most important word in his exhortation is the smallest … ‘in.’

Out here, I know where I am. I’m not just in the woods but in the Lord, which is to say inside the Love the Lord is, inside the creation that flows from the infinitely abundant store of God’s heart, inside the story of God’s endless machinations to awaken the souls of human beings to the Love who loves them, inside the divine drama that enfolds from the unlikely birth of a peasant child in a Bethlehem stable.

I can’t think of any place I’d rather be, but then … we are all in this place, like it or not, whether we believe it or not. The story goes on, and every human soul (and everything else) is either a willing or unwilling participant in the story of God’s infinite love for this troubled world.

The willing know how privileged they are to be included, and joy spills from their souls with shouts and songs and prayers, like the shepherds who were the first privileged to kneel in the dust at the feet of the Christ child.

Looking back on my hike, I wish I’d kneeled out there … all alone … in the mud. It was a good place to say, ‘thank you … for including me.’

I think I’ll go back soon.

David L. Miller

Songs in the night

 The Lord, your God, is in your midst; … he will rejoice over you with gladness, he will renew you in his love; he will exult over you with loud singing as on a day of festival. (Zephaniah 3:17-18a)

I’ve been singing more lately. Maybe, it’s because the darkness gathers so early … or because Christmas is near … or because I long for something I cannot give myself.

Yes, this, a lifetime of longing takes me to a chair by the window where I page through my hymnal, seeking songs my heart knows, like tonight … as a cold rain drizzles through the downspouts in the cold December darkness.

I ache to sing myself home … where the heart that I am … and the Heart who made me for himself … are one heart, one love, breathing in time, if only for a moment or two, for this … is heaven.

The longing grows stronger this time of year, or perhaps it is stronger at this time of life … when the heart finally wakes to the one thing it most needs.

Singing in the night, songs come one after another. Advent songs, Christmas songs, whispered in the dark silence of the house, my voice once strong, now a tremorous prayer for God’s great love to fill me whole, banishing every doubt and sorrow and setting my sluggish heart to flight.

Some songs I sing over and over again, night in and night out, knowing how deeply they touch me and awaken my heart to the Love who loves me.

The Spirit breathed those songs in the hearts of those so divinely privileged to make music of the soul. Through these songs, the same Spirit fans love’s flame within me, opening a door in my heart for which I have no key.

Love is the only key, the Love who loves me, the Love who sings to my soul even as I sing in the night.

We sing together, my Lord and I. We are one in the music of the night. One in love, one in Spirit, singing Love’s eternal song, my heart’s holy longing still, at rest.

No, it won’t last. Joy will slip away. The weight of the world will crush it from my heart. I will lose the melody in the midst of my moods, anxieties and contrariness. But Love’s holy song does not end or fade.

The One who sings with me in the night makes melody in every love and beauty that touches our senses to beguile our hearts. The Loving Mystery, whose face is our Lord Jesus Christ, everlastingly sings Love’s everlasting song, hoping we will hear … and sing … all the way home.

David L. Miller