The life of Brian

‘The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.^’ (Matthew 13:44)

Brian’s memorial service is this week. I’m out of town, so I won’t be there, but one image will haunt me that day, just as it has every day since I heard cancer had finally overtaken him, even though he still had so much living left to do.

I could tell you he was successful in business and a V.P. of an internationally-respected financial corporation. But I can say only a little about that because he never made a fuss about it. Other things were more important, as was clear the day I sat near him during a men’s retreat.

One guy told a story laced with pain and tears to a rapt room of about 30 men. When he sat, Brian immediately stood and said something as he walked toward the man. Maybe he said, ‘Let’s pray for him,’ or something like that. I don’t remember.

What I do remember is that six or eight men quickly joined Brian around the man and laid hands on him as Brian prayed. There was not a single moment of hesitation. He knew what to do, what his heart required, and so did those who joined him. He led; they followed.

And I marveled, as I still do. The image of him walking to the man’s side is fixed in my head, so too, the circle of men he gathered. I don’t remember what Brian prayed for, only that his words were full of faith and care.

The Kingdom of God is a soul transparent to the merciful heart of God. It is the beauty of a heart in which the heart of Jesus lives, breathes and walks across crowded rooms to bless another in their brokenness.

When the heart of Jesus appears before your eyes in the guise of a soul so near, feeling this heart, beating in your own chest, is the one thing you never want to be without.

Rest well, Brian, in the heart who lived so richly within you. I won’t forget.

David L. Miller

Speak gently

‘Here is my servant, whom I have chosen, my beloved, with whom my soul is well pleased. I will put my Spirit upon him …. He will not break a bruised reed or quench a smoldering wick until he brings justice to victory.  And in his name the gentiles will hope. (Matthew 12:18, 20-21)

The gentle tenderness of the voice of God contrasts sharply with typical Western images of God, which emphasize power not care, judgment not nurture.

Even our arguments against God’s justice or God’s existence focus on questions of power: If God is all-loving and all-powerful, then why this suffering, this war, this starvation, this killing cancer? The bitter cries denouncing God’s many failures extend from one century to the next without resolution.

I offer no explanations or apologies on God’s behalf, but I wonder if an all-powerful fixer of our woes or a retributive juggernaut crushing enemies and righting wrongs is what our hearts most desire … or need.

We are creatures born of love, our scriptures tell us, created in Love’s own image, and it is the presence of love that satisfies the human soul in ways the possession of power never can.

Perhaps this is why this description of Jesus, Beloved of God and of our hearts, run on a loop in my mind: He will not break a bruised reed or quench a smoldering wick until he brings justice to victory.  

I repeat them because the words I speak to myself about faults and failures that scar my soul, my history and people I love are far less than tender or gentle.

This is typical human behavior for most, if not all of us. The words we use in the silence of our hearts, judgments and condemnations we pronounce on ourselves, are often far harsher than anything we’d ever say to someone else.

Only another voice—a voice of infinite tenderness, animated by the divine Spirit—can save and free us to live as truly human souls.

So, speak gently to our hearts, Beloved Friend. Speak of a love that never fails, a love that transcends all limits and laughs at death. Fan our faith into a loving flame that believes all, hopes all and endures all, until your mercy fills all things.

David L. Miller

Seeds in the wind

Such great crowds gathered around [Jesus] that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. And he told them many things in parables, saying: ‘Listen! A sower went out to sow.’ (Matthew 13:2-3)

A few words fell from my lips as I was leaving the sanctuary today.

I did not plan to speak them. They just appeared, whispered loud enough for a mother and child to hear, as we dipped our hands in the font and made the sign of the cross on our brows.

‘Such a beautiful child,’ I breathed, murmured words likely lost in the rush to the parking lot. But I wonder.

How many words do I remember from decades past that live like daggers in my heart, attacking me in the dark when sleep eludes?

And why do I still hear Don Hutmacher’s voice, why do I remember his words from that long-ago day in the narthex, lifting me from the ditch into which I’d fallen?

Planted in the soil of my soul, these words live in me, some producing a harvest of life and love, generosity and grace, others the bitterness of resentment, distrust and self-hatred.

I certainly wish some didn’t grow into the weeds that sometimes choke my heart and turn me in on myself. But even then, sooner or later, the whispered call of love, long-ago planted in my heart, breaks through the hard crust of anger and self-pity, freeing me to love my oh-so-imperfect life and see the beauty of human souls who brush by me every day.

And so it was, today. ‘Such a beautiful child,’ I whispered, bending near the little girl, her jet-black hair a cascade of curls, as her mother guided the tiny, brown hand in the water then to the child’s head, making the sign of the cross.

‘Oh, say, thank you,’ the mother coached her daughter, who mumbled something I couldn’t understand.

It was an impulsive act on my part, likely to be lost in the wash of time and a million more important moments. But maybe not.

Maybe it’s just one of myriad seeds to fall in that child’s life and into the heart of her mother. Maybe it will grow along with others into a harvest of life and love, generosity and grace.

Maybe it is just one more way the Sower of goodness and grace casts seeds of life and beauty into the world, awakening love in the likes of us and inviting us to throw what beauty is ours into the winds of time. Who knows what might grow?

I’m sure Don Hutmacher didn’t imagine I’d be thinking about him 60 years after he left this earth, living now in union with the Love who was pleased to live in him—and in me … because souls like him planted seeds of life that grew.

David L. Miller

Where rest is found

 ‘No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.’ (Matthew 11:27-28)

Try as I might, I found little comfort kneeling in the pew as I prayed or even as the presider lifted the host, then the chalice, consecrating the bread and wine for the Eucharist.

Opening my hands to receive, I felt nothing to ease the ache in my heart for one whose mysterious sorrow I did not understand and could not assuage.

‘Have you no answer for me?’ I whispered as I returned to the pew and sat, before opening the hymnal to sing, which most often is my comfort.

Tracing the previous day, I saw my self-centered ways for what they are, a lifetime of relative selfishness, failing to notice and read the need of a soul I see too seldom but dearly treasure.

‘In curvatus est’ came to mind, remembered from decades old theology lectures. We are curved in ourselves. Yes, of course, describes my life perfectly, always concerned with my thoughts, my plans, my comforts, what I think I need to live and fulfill the life I have been given.

Little wonder I often feel alone. Even here, sitting in prayer, I hunger for rest and healing for myself, trying to see myself and the soul for whom I ache in the bosom of Jesus, both of us physically ‘in him,’ enveloped even as he is enveloped in the presence of the Father.

The image does not hold for long, nor can I hold it despite my best efforts. Not today. It is just another failed attempt to live with myself and my inability to bring comfort to anyone else.

But it awakens an awareness of love’s desire, and love’s desire is always to love, to find some way to give its heart to the heart of another for their healing, their fulfillment, their joy.

In this awareness, I know the heart of Jesus, who aches to illumine my heart with the knowledge of God imparted not as ideas, facts or insight, but as the experience of an impassable love at the core of my being.

The absorbing experience of love’s blessed ache unveils the heart of God within me. And I know what I must do to enter the rest Jesus gives and offer it to another.

His rest is known in the mystery of loving and being loved, not in passivity but as we participate in the living stream of giving and receiving whatever beauty of heart he awakens in us.

So, I take what he has given and offer such gifts of grace as are mine to share. Will it change anything? Will it salve the wounds I would heal? I do not know. All I know is that, in doing so, I am leaving it in Love’s own hands.

And that is enough.

David L. Miller

Captured

I pray that you may … know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God (Ephesians 3:18-19)

I love this photo. It tells me what I have most wanted, what I most want to be and where I truly live, where we all live.

The photographer who shot this frame was so moved he needed to track down the little boy held up to Pope Leo for blessing, on his recent pilgrimage to Spain. Surrounded by hundreds of thousands, for some reason, perhaps nothing more than proximity, his parents handed him to a security person to be blessed and loved, the moment captured in the near-miracle of exquisite timing.

I cannot capture all the things I see nor the things I feel, in this moment so beautifully frozen in time.

Here is a child, enveloped in a gaze of appreciative delight, his shy smile the only possible response to an undeniable love that asks nothing but hopes for everything, mostly that he should know that he is loved and wanted and treasured and beautiful.

How many live decades, if not their entire lives, wanting but never knowing what is being given to this child in this single moment?

Equally beautiful is the face of a human soul, filled with delight, moved, perhaps beyond his own expectation, to love the beauty and innocence and promise and shy smile of a child held before him in the serendipity of a single moment.

It is hard, no, impossible, to say who is more captured in this moment, the boy held in the Pope’s gaze or Pope Leo, for he, too, is captured by a love that transcends him, fills him, from a Source neither he nor anyone else controls.

We cannot will ourselves to such joy and appreciative delight. All that lies within our power is to refuse … or consent … when the flood of loving delight washes through our hearts and fills us. It flows from the heart of the One who is Loving Delight, eager for us to feel and bask in what, alone, can fulfill our hearts and lives, our share in God’s own joy.

As blessed as it is to know ourselves held in love’s holy gaze, like that little Spanish boy, I wonder if it is a yet greater joy to be so captured, so filled with loving delight, that it pours from our eyes and holds another human soul in the eternal gaze of the One who holds us in every time and every place.

For we live our lives in the light of God’s own face.

David L. Miller

An empty chair

 Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. (Matthew 11:28).

It is just an empty chair, a gray and white rocker on the balcony. I wiped it down from the rains that soaked the earth for the third night running and folded a towel on the seat, ready for Dixie to join me.

That won’t be for a while. She is able to sleep later than my body allows, a grace of which I am jealous. But it gives me time to sing my morning songs of praise, awakening my heart so I can settle in and read of Jesus, listening for his voice in my heart.

‘Come to me,’ he says, and I immediately see St. Teresa’s vision and borrow it for my use. In the vision, I am walking through the interior castle of my soul, making my way through the outer rooms toward the center where Christ dwells, his light flowing outward to the more distanced regions where I make my way.

Seeing the great distance between the beauty of his heart and the reality of my own, there is no discouragement, only hope. The light of the all-penetrating love of Christ stretches out to encompass me where I am, always a beginner in this life, never as close to him as I long to be.

The pain of this longing is never far away, sometimes muted, sometimes acute, a thirst only he can quench.

But even in the distant places, far from the center where Christ dwells, the light of his love and the warmth of his delight draw me onward that my heart might be saturated, absorbed in his beauty, joy and love.

With Teresa’s vision in my own heart, I see and feel your smile, Jesus, as you watch me continue my way, encompassed in the rays of the light emanating from your face.

You beckon me, all of us, to come to you and rest from the burden of our exile, separated as we are from the Love who is our true and final home.

There are days the warmth of your love sweeps me away, stilling every other thought and emotion, a foretaste of the final rest that awaits the end of our journey.

But that is not today. Today, the empty chair across from me stirs longing for my beloved to come and share this holy space with me. It awakens an inner emptiness, a longing for love’s presence that echoes the great longing for love’s completion of all things—a hunger for love to fill the earth as the waters cover the sea.

I had only to wait. Soon enough, she came, her smile shimmering with the beauty of the loving heart grace has long wrought in her. ‘Christ plays in ten thousand places,’ G.M. Hopkins wrote, ‘lovely in eyes not his.’ And surely here, to lighten the burden of exile, as we journey home, together.

David L. Miller

A contrary creed

‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. (John 3:16)

Details matter, and English translations of this well-known, little-understood verse of scripture obscure a detail that matters profoundly.

The Gospel of John makes a frequent distinction between believing ‘in Jesus’ and believing ‘into Jesus.’ It is obvious in the Greek original but disappears in most English translations.

Believing in Jesus is easy. Anyone can believe in Jesus. He lived, he taught, he was rejected and crucified. You can even believe that his death somehow offers forgiveness and an entry pass into heaven.

You can believe all these things without it changing even one thing about how you think, speak or act. You can believe them while holding all kinds of hateful, bigoted attitudes and beliefs about people you don’t like, like, say, people whose politics you detest or immigrants or non-binary folk or, well, fill in the blank.

This kind of ‘believing’ is what gives the Christianity a bad name and sends sensitive souls running for the church exit to escape the hypocrisy of indifference to—and often, complicity in—injustice and human suffering.

The debasement of what constitutes ‘Christianity’ in our current cultural crisis is rife with examples of Christians justifying indifference to the poor and suffering at home and abroad.

For example, millions suffer malnutrition, starve and die of preventable diseases in places where our nation was once an embodiment of compassion, all because our leaders sold voters on the gospel of ‘America First,’ a strange and selfish gospel imbued with the moral logic of a preschooler protecting his toys.

The chant of ‘America first,’ like ‘me first,’ is a contrary creed, a willful contradiction of everything Jesus taught and lived.

But believing ‘into Jesus’—and that is how this verse in the Gospel of John actually reads—doesn’t leave any part of your life and heart untouched or unchallenged by divine love.

Believing into Jesus is the continual and unending opening of one’s heart to the invasion of the love of Jesus until it permeates every pore. It is daily prayer, turning again and again to him that we may abide in the love from which nothing needs be hidden.

It is the daily return, morning by morning, to seek his face and know his heart that his way might become our way.

And it is also is refusing to turn aside when his love, like a searchlight, illumines the dark corners of our hearts or when it stings our egos, tearing down our protective facades to reveal our narcissism and selfishness.

Believing into Jesus is a lifelong journey into the love who frees us from ourselves for the sake of the world.

David L. Miller