What the cranes said

Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? (Matthew 6:26)

You hear sand hill cranes before you see them. Sometimes you hear them but never see them at all because they fly so high. I heard them three or four times before I came to an opening in the forest and saw them circling just east of me.

Putting the tip of my tongue on the roof of my mouth, I blew from my throat, imitating the alto trill of their call. They ignored me. They just kept circling, round and round, going nowhere in particular, a convention of cranes, rather like church committees and assemblies that once were my lot to suffer through.

With each turn in the crystal blue of a November sky, however, more appeared, enlarging the flock from dozens to hundreds, their cries louder now, excitement building, drawn together by an ancient magnetism neither they, nor I, understand, but which tells them that their autumnal journey should not be taken alone.

And I, on my autumnal journey, am … well … jealous. I’ve always been jealous of birds, they for whom flight is like breathing, and I whose soul was meant for soaring, so often earthbound, my heart drawn to heights of love and joy by an ancient magnetism of a mysterious Something or Someone for whom the human heart longs from the very moment of birth.

I’ve been trying to name this Someone or Something all my life, hoping, finally, to make it my own, wanting to belong … fully and forever ... to the Mystery for which I most long—one with the Love who sometimes whispers to me, ‘We are one. We are one. Do not fear. We are one.’

Maybe the cranes hear this voice, too, in their own way. Their gathering, a congregation of flight, climbing higher now, making ready to embark to winter’s home, safe from the cold soon to descend on these woods.

Just as they set out, a southbound jet out of O’Hare, 25 miles north, passes by, little higher than their altitude. Ten thousand feet is nothing to them, just a nice glide path. And with that, they go, and I turn west, down a slope deeper into the woods, mostly denuded of the canopy that obscures the sun through the summer months.

Unlike the cranes, I’m alone, but smiling for reasons I don’t fully understand. My autumnal journey continues and not just in these woods. I’m 72, now, and wish I had a few more companions for my journey home, which I hope continues for a long time. I want to keep coming here to see the cranes and listen to whatever they have to tell me. They’ll pass this way again in the spring, and I know they’ll make me smile.

Maybe they are the voice of the Great Mystery—or at least one voice—telling me the truth. Do not fear. We are one, all of us together … in one great Love.

If that’s all I ever know of this Mystery, it’s enough.

David L. Miller

A weary wandering toward home

[Jesus said], ‘How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!’  (Luke 13:34)

Just one word. That’s all it took to awaken tears of bone-deep longing, as the sun struggled to break through the stone-gray gloom of an unpromising morning.

Little light penetrates these November clouds, come one day early. Nor have I much light of my own to contribute. Another source must be found.

Weariness weighs the heart, worries, yes, for a family member carrying heavier loads that I can imagine … and can do nothing to lift.

But there’s also the weariness of our times, the fear and anger, accusations and recriminations that poison the public square and make a ‘newsie’ like me want to turn it all off—the politicization of … everything, the divisions, the doom-speaking of rival parties and candidates, the word ‘fight’ that appears on the lips of all sides, telling adherents they must fight for their rights, fight for the country, fight for democracy, fight or lose your freedom, your country, your way of life, fight … and we win.

Or do we? Any victory that makes losers only perpetuates love’s destruction.

I am tired of it all, weary of it all, sick to death of the conflict, the lies, half-truths, distortions and divisions, my head sinking into the pillow with a heavy sigh these nights, hoping for rest that refreshes the heart.

Rising, I make coffee and shuffle to my chair, hoping to sink into my soul where love’s flickering flame might revive awareness of who I am and whose I am … and just who it is that holds my times, these times and all time in the palm of an ever-loving hand.

Still, I wonder: Is this feeling desolation or a strange and difficult consolation because it brings me back … and closer … to Jesus who is this love?

If desolation is the darkness of feeling far from the warming rays of divine sunlight, perhaps … this weariness is not desolation at all. Perhaps it is a share in the longing of Jesus, who births tears in my eyes with a single word, ‘gather.’

That part of my heart that beats in time with his longs with him for the pain of our splintered humanity where trust dies beneath the power of invective, yielding a harvest of hate celebrated and magnified by party spirit of all types and paraded for profit across multiple networks.

How often, how long, how much … I have wanted to gather you into a protective love where knowing, breathing, abiding and sharing this love evaporates every us-and-them into we and us.

This is the voice of Jesus in these times, in every time. And the frustrated tears of our longing to be gathered beyond the weary sorrows of our divisions is the holy consolation of knowing his heart within our own, love’s living hope refusing to die, hungry to be gathered home.

And if you’ll pardon me, the sun (truly) just found its way through the gloom to warm my window. As it always will.

David L. Miller

Dust

As for mortals, their days are like grass; they flourish like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more. But the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting. (Psalm 103:15-17a)

‘God is having a reveal party,’ Dixie said, as we drove east into the night. And so it was. A lingering sunset blazed pink and blue, purple and orange, before fading to a pale yellow as the sun disappeared beneath the horizon.

Rolling hills gave way to flatlands as prairie counties passed by our widows, Jo Daviess to Stephenson, Winnebago to Ogle, Dekalb to Kane then home to DuPage.

Every turn and every bend on every road along the way well known to us, down to the rough patches in the pavement we know to avoid, each passing scene evoking memories of decades gone when there was more than one beloved old soul to visit on these trips.

Our conversation recounts the conversations of the day, naming what meanings we find, fading gradually into a knowing silence hovering over the dull thrum of tires on the roadway, as love’s long liturgy bids us to rest in each other’s presence.

Outside, dust from darkening fields rises as combines make their way like great ships across a seemingly endless sea of corn stalks on either side of the road. The stalks dry, dead and brittle brown, full ears of corn hanging heavily, head down, ready for harvest. The chattering sickles of the combines cut the stalks low, leaving a stubble, but raising great clouds of dust I feel on my lips and taste on my tongue.

It’s a sacrament for me. I run my tongue across my lips and smile, savoring the goodness of each particle of earth that yields a harvest of life, gratitude trickling from my eyes, love for the ground, for the dust, for the souls who work the soil, plant the seed and run the combines that accompanied virtually every mile of our journey, gathering in the grain.

All of us feeling and tasting the dust, perhaps realizing that … we are dust, of one being with the dust from which we are made … and which we will become—just like those souls, now gone, I think of with unspeakable gratitude on every one of these journeys. They, too, loved this dust and taught me to love it.

Into the night, we drove, the dust having colored the sunset hours before, coloring, too, the orange harvest moon, impossibly large, rising in the northeast, as we reached the final leg of our journey. A line of purple clouds streamed across its face, it’s pale light falling gentle on autumnal fields.

‘It’s good to be alive on this planet,’ I whispered, half aloud. Seemed absurd to say it, where else would or could I be? But the gratitude I felt was not; it was as real as anything I’ve ever known.

David L. Miller

Flow

‘Therefore I tell you, [Jesus said] do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? (Matthew 6:25)

I saw it again the other day. Flow.

It started with a TV interview with Al Pacino, the Academy Award winning actor. Pacino described the day his eighth-grade teacher came to his house and told his mother to encourage him to keep acting, keep getting up on stage. She saw something come alive in him every time he performed in a school play.

Pacino shared early days working in small theaters in New York City, amazed and totally one with some elixir of life in his soul, knowing he had to do this. It didn’t matter if I was successful or not, he said, whether I had money or not, whether anyone liked me or not. This was my life. I had to do it.

On the stage, bringing a character to life, he came alive. The outward expression of his life and work flowed seamlessly with an inner current of creative love and joy he didn’t create but discovered within himself. He was one with himself and, as a person of faith, I’ll venture to say he was one with the Creative Love who fashioned the mystery of his soul.

‘It is in this unity of love that life consists,’ Julian of Norwich, writes in her Showings of Divine Love.

Yes, not in what we wear or how we look or whether we have money or success or comfort or struggle, life is oneness with a love that makes everything else but itself irrelevant.

When the love that is our true nature finds its natural expression, a flood of joy and freedom flows like a fountain, filling our soul, lighting our eyes, awakening our energies. We flow, one with ourselves and with the Love who made us, each of us an embodied expression of the Loving Mystery who transcends our knowing.

But as we flow with this love, we do know.

We know God, for we are one with the Love who made us, fulfilling the hope for which we were created. And we are free. Distractions disappear. Worries about how we are doing evaporate. We go with the flow, knowing we were made to enjoy this grace, this bliss, this comfort, this joy, this unity of hearts.

Sometimes, this happens in prayer or song, when love surrounds and silences the heart, words having become both unnecessary and meaningless because a great love has swamped our being.

Two friends, professors at college and graduate school levels, speak of moments when they totally forget themselves and are ‘carried away,’ a most helpful phrase. Doing becomes being, and being becomes doing as they give themselves fully to the moment, freely pouring out what they know, utterly forgetful of all other concerns.

As a boy, I recall adults in my life counseling me or someone else not to get too carried away with what we were saying or doing. All things in moderation seemed to be their message. Certainly, there is some wisdom in this.

But the life to which Jesus invites us, the life that he gives us is all about being carried away in the flow of a great love, carried away by beauty, carried away by the surge of joy that fills us when we fall upon that which God fashioned us to be and do.

It takes years, really decades, to discover what Pacino found on his eight-grade stage, and then only if you are awake, careful to notice when and where the love that you are, the love that lives at your core, begins to flow and render everything else … irrelevant.

David L. Miller

If only

A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus (tired from his journey) said to her, ‘Give me a drink’.  ^… The Samaritan woman said to him, ‘How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’  … Jesus answered her, ‘If you only knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, “Give me a drink,” you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.’ (John 4:7, 9-10)

‘If you only knew,’ how does Jesus say this? How does he sound?

Is it a weary sigh of resignation, Jesus, moist with sweat, collapsing at the village well after a hard walk in the mid-day sun? Hearing the woman, is his voice but a mumble, ‘if only,’ trailing off, all the while knowing she doesn’t know and likely will never know? ‘If only’ … hanging heavy with the regret of graces unknown, beauty untasted and love lost.

Or shall we hear him a different way?

If you only knew, perhaps Jesus’ words tug the corners of his mouth into the faintest grin, a small tired smile, a sideways glance, knowing what is his to give, knowing she soon will know, soon will wake and feel something she has never known, the love who sees the jagged ruins of her life, of marriages and lovers found and lost, the condemnations of self and community, knowing she may yet know herself in the circle of a loving light that makes everything but itself … irrelevant.

If you only knew, a low chuckle plays at his throat, the gladness of giving, finding joy in the woman’s surprise soon to come as she finds herself found, finally, by a love who wakes a spring of joy, wetting her long-parched heart, flowing from a depth of soul she’d long since forgotten, having lost who she truly is.

It’s a mystery to me how this happens, how living water first trickles among the cracked earth of sadness, cynicism and despondency, how it moistens the soil of our discontent, rising to crack the hard shell around our hearts and wash away the bondage of dark moods and desolating disappointments with ourselves and others.

It doesn’t happen quickly enough, as far as I’m concerned, not when the heart is dry, dark moods prevail and I can’t find my way to sunlight. I understand the woman at the well all too well. ‘Give me this water, so I will never be thirsty again,’ she asks.

But how? And where? Ignatius Loyola counsels that in times of desolation we should avoid being alone with our darkness, tell someone else and go to places of consolation. He sang Basque folk songs, gazed into the wonder of the night sky, felt the warm sun on his back and prayed his sadness, remembering and savoring moments of Jesus’ loving nearness, when grace and love awakened tears of gratitude for the gift of being alive.

Just so, I listen as the music swells from the stereo, Tchaikovsky, today, then turn my sideways glance toward Jesus’ face, weary at the well. ‘If you only knew,’ he says, gladness tugging at the corners of his mouth, a knowing smile, knowing, as he does, that the time of my knowing will come with joy and tears as living water finds and flows into the parched places of my heart.

Somehow, seeing his ‘if only’ smile is enough. It cuts through the sadness. I feel his humor, his playfulness, the gladness of his giving … and know that I am known. Drinking in his smile, there is no ‘if only,’ for I am with him.

David L. Miller

The center holds

 ‘If any of you put a stumbling-block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell. (Mark 9:42-43)

At first blush, there is no good reason Jesus’ words should move spiritual consolation in anyone’s heart, let alone mine. A cold wave of nausea churns at the hollow of my gut as I imagine his image. Surely, it is intended for me.

I have caused little and not-so-little ones to stumble, my words, attitudes and actions falling far short of faithfulness any number of times. I doubt I’ll ever stop carrying the moment I extended my hand to a parishioner as the congregation passed the peace during worship.  ‘I’m ashamed to know you,’ he said, refusing my hand. ‘No kind of leadership at all.’

He spoke for himself, but I’ve no doubt others share his judgment, and some for better reasons than he had. I pray they will find ways to release those judgments, not for my sake but for their own peace and spiritual health.

Ironically, or not, my consolation is found exactly in the words that would condemn me. Re-reading Jesus’ words, tears spring to my eyes as a wave of love rises and swamps my soul, filling me with love for everything he is. For Jesus speaks in great love, calling me from all peripheral concerns to the center of life, to its purpose and goal—eternal life.

This is what most matters, entering, knowing and living intimately with God whose love shines in the face of Jesus. Even his dire warnings speak his great love as he calls us to throw away everything and anything that would keep us from the fulfillment of our existence, which is to live, heart-to-heart, now and forever, with the Love who is the Source of all life.

‘Everything and anything’ include the judgments of others and those we exact on ourselves for the sins and failures that haunt us. There is one cure. All of them evaporate like morning mist in the warm rays of the Love who keeps calling us to life’s true center, the love of the One who showers mercy on his failing friends and forgives even his persecutors.

There is no end to the number of times we need to remind ourselves of this, lest something other than God’s love rules at the center of our hearts. Perhaps we need to be like my old friend, Bob. I held his hand and prayed with him in his final weeks. ‘Tell me that verse again,’ he’d ask on every visit. ‘You know the one. I need to remember.’

‘Yea, Bob, I remember,’ I’d say. ‘There is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus.’

Bob would exhale, long and deep, and lie back in his bed feeling something that looked a lot like peace. And I fell silent. There was nothing more needing to be said. We rested in life’s true center. Nothing else mattered.

David L Miller

Old souls, needed now

But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace. (James 3:17-18)

The goal of my life is to become … or increasingly become … an old soul.

I’ve known my share of them through the years, men and women, no two quite alike. But each stirred a desire to be like them … in one way or another.

Every one of them was more patient that I am and not as angry. There was an oasis of peace around them that invited you to drop your guard and just … be. They never seemed to hurry as if there was somewhere more important to be or someone more important to see.

They breathed contentment with their lives, a warm acceptance of what is … even though nearly every one of them had suffered loses and pain which they carried to the end of their days.

What I appreciated most was that they were gentle, gentle with themselves, gentle with the world around them and gentle with me.

They made a deep impression on me, especially when I was very young. For reasons buried deeply in my nature, I desperately wanted to be seen. I wanted to be accepted. I wanted to be loved. I wanted to find a few gentle voices where I knew I was safe because the world was filled with rigid rules and critical eyes, eager to judge.

Looking back, I am sometimes thankful for those harsh voices and the wounds they inflicted. They sensitized my heart to the presence and ways of love, which is to say the voice of God. They moved me to seek that love all the more, and because of them … I know God all the more.

But I am far more grateful for the old souls in whom the Soul of the Universe sought and found my heart, suffering, now, each day to awaken in me the gentle beauty the Holy One breathed in them.

Not only in me, of course. For this is the holy labor of God’s Spirit within every human heart, a labor in which we share through our prayer and by placing ourselves in tender places and with gracious faces where God finds and awakens the beauty of love deep within us.

The curation of love is our contemplative work in these days, not first loving … but letting ourselves be loved, bathing in Love’s holy sacraments that gentle our hearts and make us fit instruments to balm the bitter, divisive times in which we live.

The voices that dominate our social and political life are neither peaceable nor gentle. Rancorous party spirit, bitter divisions, character defamations, hatred and hypocrisy run rampant in a virulent battle for dominance, in which I want no part.

But to one extent or another, the conflicts of our age won’t leave us alone. They touch our families and relationships, our communities, churches and nation, poisoning hearts with the toxic venom of sarcasm, cynicism, contempt and despair.

The antidote, the only antidote, to the poison coursing through many hearts, is the Love who makes souls old and wise, gentle and peaceful, full of mercy … and hope.

Abide there.

David L. Miller