The way home

 Because your heart was penitent and you humbled yourself before God when you heard his words against this place and its inhabitants, and you have humbled yourself before me, and have torn your clothes and wept before me, I also have heard you, says the Lord (2 Chronicles 34:27)

On pilgrimage in Spain, I kept my wits about me watching for trail markers. Sometimes, the marker was no more than a smudge of faded orange paint on a rock or tree or fence post. Twice, I lost my way and turned back to find the right path.

This is an image for the spiritual life. Sometimes, we fail to pay attention and lose our way. We don’t stop to ask where our attitudes and actions are leading.

Whole nations do the same, which is what faced King Josiah, who inherited a mess from his predecessors. The people of Judah, led by dissolute kings, imported foreign gods and vile practices into the temple, polluting people’s faith and morals. One of Josiah’s predecessors ritually sacrificed his son.

The discovery of the book of God’s law—much of Deuteronomy—during temple renovations shattered Josiah’s heart. Hearing God’s word, Josiah humbled himself and led reforms to restore faith and justice to the nation.

But try as he might, the die was cast. The cancer was too advanced. Disastrous days and alien powers would soon crush the nation. They’d lost their way … and without humility … refused to turn around.

Humble our hearts, O Lord, that we may daily seek your face and walk your way.

 David L. Miller

On the ridge

The Lord is king, he is robed in majesty; the Lord is robed, he is girded with strength. … More majestic than the thunders of mighty waters, more majestic than the waves^[a] of the sea, majestic on high is the Lord! (Psalm 93:1, 4)

 An arboretum path near my home leads up a ridge, through a dense wood of oaks and maples, before opening into an expansive meadow sprinkled with wildflowers.

I love climbing the ridge and breaking into the sunlight surrounded by the profusion of yellow and white, gold and green where birds swoop for seeds and butterflies sample the sweet flora.

Standing there, arms spread wide, open to the sky, I praise God for what I see and feel and know in that moment. The Lord is king, and there is no other. God reigns, ever-ordering and restoring a world of wonder, grace and beauty amid the chaotic mess we humans tend to make of it.

It is a good walk, especially when the cacophony of voices in the news—and the restless voices inside my head—fracture my consciousness with the incessant discord of the world.

Somedays, it seems everything is coming apart, flaying off in disparate directions. And then, there is the reality that hurts happen and our hearts sometimes break. But on the ridge, I know what the Holy One wants us all to know.

Always good to know … when the days are difficult, the nights are long and tomorrow … so unknown.

 David L. Miller

Coming home

 Jesus answered him, ‘Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. (John 14:23)

Years ago, I ceased to call any place home. This, in part, is because my family made many moves that took us to unexpected places.

Amid our moves, home became … and is … not a place but a person, a relationship of love and care in which Dixie and I look at each other and say: You are my home.

It is something like this that Jesus extends to our needy hearts, only more and better. He lived in loving union—heart-to heart—with the all-loving One he called the Father.

And we who know him, who have tasted the love he is, are drawn into the unceasing flow of love between Jesus and the Father. We are enveloped inside their relationship, sharing in their union, just as our children and grandchildren share in the love flowing between Dixie and me.

As human souls, our home is not a place but this flow in which we are bathed in the Love who smiles on our existence, who forgives and showers mercy on our messy lives and breathes the Spirit of love into our hearts.

Just so, you wake me again, Holy One, that … once more … I may pray to you, hoping only to rest in my heart’s true home. Grant me your peace.

David L. Miller

The voice

[Jesus] was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, ‘Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?’ He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Peace! Be still!’ Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them, ‘Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?’ (Mark 4:38-40)

I visited my old home church last Sunday. I love the place, especially the mural behind the pulpit where Jesus ascends into heaven, his hands raised in blessing, which blessed me many times when I was a boy.

Settling in, I was eager not just to see that mural, but to hear … the voice. The preacher delivered what, for some, I’m sure, was a perfectly acceptable sermon. His sentences were well-crafted, the logic was clear, point followed point, and there was biblical warrant for all he said.

But something was missing. I ached to hear Jesus, not the author of the most recent book the preacher had read or his experience at Culver’s when no one looked up from their cell phone to receive his greeting.

I felt like that group of Greeks who once approached Jesus’ disciples, asking, ‘We want to see Jesus.’ I wanted to hear him. A word or two would have been enough, something I could whisper when frustration or anger, anxiety or impatience floods my heart, something to remind me to whom I belong when I forget.

Something like, ‘Peace, be still.’ Okay, that’s three words, but who doesn’t need to hear them from time to time … or every day?

Or how about his rebuke of the disciples, scared spitless as their boat rolled and pitched in the waves, ‘Have you still no faith?’

That sounds harsh, judgmental, but not really. It’s an invitation to trust that there is One—there is always One—who sees our fear, knows our need and envelops our every moment in deathless love, One who longs for us to cast aside our sadness and doubtful fears and delight in the Love who holds us.

Or how about, ‘Why are you afraid?’ Those would have been good words, too, not only because a tornado demolished a nearby church the night before but because everybody in that room harbored fears they fear to share, everybody there exists in a country roiled by anger and distrust, eroding once stable institutions and relationships, making many loathe to talk to friends or family members on the ‘other side.’

Then, there was the woman, sitting to my right, in the early stages of figuring out how to live without the love of her life, who now rests in the cemetery a mile west of the church. Others likely looked around at the mostly-empty church, wondering if the place that blessed them will be there for another generation—and whether that generation will care.

All this made everyone in that room … average, typical, needing the same thing I needed: the voice who says, ‘Peace be still;’ the voice who asks, ‘Why are you afraid?’ the voice who challenges, ‘Have you no faith’ … and winks, knowing we do, but it flickers in the wind sometimes.

I whisper his words to my heart, but I also need someone to speak the words so I hear the voice … and know I am not alone.

David L. Miller

Apophatic wonder ... or why I want to share a beer with Aquinas

I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven … and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat. (2 Corinthians 12:1, 4)

‘The end of my labors has come. All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.’

These words—and their source—should make me stop in my tracks, shut down my computer and never write another word. They were uttered nearly 750 years ago by Thomas Aquinas, perhaps the greatest mind of his or almost any age.

He had written commentaries on Scripture, Aristotle and other philosophers, produced his own philosophical works, addressed a host of disputed theological subjects and was deep in the process of producing his Summa Theologiae, his great work of systematic theology, writing at a furious pace.

But he never finished it. He stopped, December 6, 1273, put his pens in a drawer and never took them out again.

And why? Because at mass he had seen or felt or experienced something so great, so transcendent that he looked upon the 100 or so works he’d produced and judged them as so much straw, worthy of being cast in the fire, even though his works influence Christian theological thought in significant ways to this day.

I have no idea what … exactly … he saw, nor do I understand most of what he wrote. He is beyond me. But I do not for a moment imagine that his experience is different in kind, only in degree, from the apophatic wonder that graces the souls of millions who have known the immensity of a great love filling them with the Wonder who transcends all thought, language and human capacity for understanding.

Apophatic wonder is a knowing that goes beyond all thought and sensation, beyond light and limits, beyond darkness and brilliance, beyond sight and seeing, yet as real as the tears in your eyes and the fullness of Being within your own being.

I had not thought about Aquinas in years until this past week while viewing Facebook videos sent to me from several sources. I watched what I could stomach from several well-known speakers, men who have sold millions of books to Christians around the country and the world.

But I soon stopped because I was struck by the nauseating marriage of arrogance and self-congratulatory narcissism that characterized the speakers, so terribly pleased with themselves as they blithely dismissed the ‘benighted’ positions of other Christians whose understandings differed from their own. It was the kind of preening display that makes those outside the church rightly recoil in disgust.

Entirely missing was any shred of humility about themselves and the human incapacity to grasp divine mystery. I could discern nothing of the grace that touched Aquinas on that December day, to say nothing of poorer souls and weaker minds like mine, who have seen and felt and known the Wonder whom language cannot capture and before whom all thought falters and falls silent into a truer worship.

St. Paul said he considered everything else in his life as crap (I am cleaning up Paul’s actual word), compared to knowing Christ. His accomplishments, his reputation, his learning—all of this was mere waste, he wrote, compared with deep, mystical knowledge of God in Christ.

He had no words for what happened to him when he was caught up in the ‘third heaven.’ All he really knew was that he had known God revealed in the depth of his own being. After that, nothing else much mattered except knowing this One, this Wonder, this Love who strips away all our pride and presumption and fills us with gratitude for life and love and every good gift of God’s own giving that graces our existence.

And lest you imagine this is all beyond you, really, who has not been knocked out of their apathy by the beauty of creation, the wonder of loving and being loved, the grace and gift of waking up alive in this world and wondering, how is it that I am, that I am alive, here and now? Who has not had the experience of feeling thankful, not for any particular reason but … just because?

Apophatic wonder, a holy gift, a knowing beyond all knowing of the Love who is beyond everything we can imagine, yet right here and now, making every word of mine feel like ‘so much straw.’

But I take joy in my failed attempts to name the Unnameable and look forward to sharing a beer with Aquinas. We have things to talk about.

David L. Miller

In search of home

Looking at those who sat around him, Jesus said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.’ (Mark 3:35)

I think I want to start a house church … or participate in one that would have me.

It’s not just that I am no longer at home in church life as I have known it, nor that I sometimes despair of ever finding it again. I am moved by something I see in Jesus’ eyes.

I imagine his expression as he speaks, the tone of his voice, the tilt of his head, the glint in his eyes, and I meet a man, a soul I know, however poorly or in part, and I fall in love as when, as a boy, he touched me again and again with a love I knew nowhere else.

These days, or at least this day, I feel his hunger, an unrequited longing like the yearning that unsettles my heart, especially as Sunday morning approaches and I have no place I truly want to go.

What I’d like to do is gather around a cup and a loaf of bread in someone’s living room or at a picnic table in a park. We’d sing or at least croak out a song that opens our hearts, pray a psalm and listen to a story of Jesus. Then, talk. Just talk about what we see and feel as we watch him and listen to his voice, sharing whatever hopes or pains, joys or sorrows he stirs in us.

Perhaps we’d share where we have truly loved during the week and where that seemed impossible for us, knowing that each time we have loved or struggled to do so we have known him, his Spirit, awake in our mortal bodies. Then, we’d break bread and share the cup the way he told us to do.

All this is to say that I want what Jesus wanted for himself.

His longing is obvious as he surveyed the sea of faces pressing near to see and touch him. So often misunderstood, reviled and rejected, he looked into their eyes; he felt the hunger of their hearts, and he knew: Here are my brothers and sisters, my mothers and fathers. These are my people, heart of my heart.

Repeating his words, feeling their texture on my tongue, I cannot miss the love he felt for these searching souls, who hungered to know the One from whom all good and graces flow like rays from the morning sun.

When he was with them, he was truly home, and that’s what I want.

I want to gather around a loaf and a cup and look into the eyes of souls who want to know the love of Jesus. I want to be with hearts who know that living this love, however poorly, partially and with myriad failures, is still the very best occupation of life. I want to be with brothers and sisters who are just as restless and just as needy for this Love as I am.

Then, I’ll be home.

David L Miller

 

 

In praise of flesh

For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. (Mark 12:25)

Tell me, Lord, what is the first sacramental moment of the morning? Is it when I inhale my first conscious breath of the day? Or maybe when I see the pale, gray light of predawn through the sheers on the bedroom window?

Perhaps it is when my feet feel the coolness of the floor as I stumble to the kitchen to make coffee, or when I open the balcony door and the sweet breath of a new day embraces my face and wakes my heart.

Or, just maybe, it is when I hear Dixie open the bedroom door and shuffle down the hall, half awake, eyes mere slits, not yet ready for the light of day. Meeting her half way, I take her face in my hands, one on each cheek, as she looks up and wearily smiles, our silent eyes joined in a love for which I will never find words.

For a moment, we stand there, kiss, and she folds herself into my arms, body-to-body, flesh-to-flesh, knowing this is the only way we ever want to start the day, vaguely aware of what we cannot stomach to say, knowing …  this is not forever despite our fondest desires.

Love, yearning, loss, joy and wonder in an unspoken moment starts the day once more, our souls aligned with a current of love that precedes us not by light years but eternity.

All this—the breeze, the morning light, love’s embrace—all if it is ours through the wonder of being flesh, bodies, through which something more than physical sensation touches our souls, stirring awareness that knowing and being this love is the very thing for which we are made.

We are children of the Love who is and was and will always be, even though we won’t be, at least not in this bodily state. Beyond this life? I have no crystal ball, no mystic vision except of the Love for whom all my attempts at naming are but an infant’s babble.

But I think, no, I’m sure, Christ smiles on my babbling, not with indulgence but delight, which is why I still keep trying, however vainly, to put words to what the heart feels and knows beyond knowing. I think God is amused, which, all in all, is a pretty good reason to keep writing, keep trying.

But I wonder about Jesus’ words concerning those who rise from the dead. I’m not sure I want to be like an angel in heaven when my time here is done. I like being a body and feeling all those things that speak love to my heart, all those moments that awaken a love beyond any I thought I’d ever feel. They fill me with the assurance of love’s holy eternity.

Putting the best construction on Jesus’ words, maybe the angels live in rapture, feeling everywhere, in everything and every moment what I know when I hold my beloved’s face in my hands. Maybe their angelic bodies feel this love not just for this one or that, but for everyone and every blessed thing God has made.

If that’s what Jesus has in mind, I guess that’s okay with me, but I never want to lose the soul-to-soul connection that happens in the hallway every morning. Body-to body, flesh-to-flesh, it’s an intimation of eternity.

David L. Miller