I will not leave you

 

‘I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me … . On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. (John 14:18-20)

Too soon, comes the time to say goodbye and bless each other for journeys whose endings we cannot see.

Like last year and the year before and the year before and the year before, I will bless retreatants I have guided through the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises for 34 weeks. Wanting to hold on just a little bit longer, we will let go of our weekly conversations, hoping to hold fast to what our hearts have come to know and love more deeply than before.

One will return to his substance abuse work with fresh perspective, another to discover what it means to be an ordained deacon, and a third to living, loving and serving in the wake of the violent death of her children.

And I, like always, will grieve letting them go. Saying ‘goodbye’ will be hard, the way it has been hard other times I’ve had to say ‘goodbye’ to places and people I loved.

But what we have known in and among us will not be lost, neither to me nor to them. With them, listening to them, sharing with them, I have received a great gift, the greatest of all.

Preparing for our last time together, a love for each of them—a love beyond any I thought was in me—bubbled up from an internal depth over which I have no control, a living spring of life and joy, Christ within, loving them through me and carrying my will along for the ride.

Coursing through my heart, Christ filled and warmed me through, lifting me beyond all petty self-concern, wanting only to give the fullness of my heart away that the loving joy I felt might fill the hearts of those I have been privileged to serve, all of us joined in his joy.

Savoring this, it will be easier come Tuesday when we bless and send each other into our respective futures. Yes, there may be an occasional text or phone call, but our lives will go in different directions far spread across half the country.

But we will never travel alone. We go knowing the fulfillment of great promise. ‘I will come to you,’ Jesus said that long ago day as he prepared the hearts of those who most loved him for his departure, saying it also to us.

I will come to you and when I do you will know that I am in you and you are in me, encompassed in the fullness of grace and love that is the Father’s heart.

We don’t know the ways we may see and know Jesus any more than we knew how he’d appear in and among us when we first met and took this journey together through a 500-year-old set of spiritual exercises.

But the living Christ kept his promise within and among us in surprising ways, sometimes in spite of resistance to opening our hearts to reveal the hurts and hopes that brought us together in the first place.

I will not leave you, he says. Whatever comes and wherever the road takes us it will never lead beyond the reach of my promise.

David L. Miller

The place of knowing

‘Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me.’ (John 14:1)

There is nothing so practical, today, so needed and often missing within our hearts and churches, than a clear sense and deep awareness of the presence of Christ within our hearts.

Navigating the daily onslaught of conflict, anger, party spirit and rage that poisons the discourse of our nation requires careful tending of the place of knowing at the center of our souls.

We need an interior place to be, to rest, to return, a reserve of relative quiet and certainty unfazed by the contesting opinions and incessant bursts of ‘Breaking News’ that inundate our consciousness.

Unmoored and untethered to the deep truth of our being, our hearts and minds get swept away in the tsunami of information, opinions and memes pouring from every digital device we own, connecting us to everything under the sun, except ourselves.

But even these, my words, are more noise amid the din. What we need is to descend into the silent soul, there to feel the ache of searching love that is the presence of the Love who is searching for us, eager that we might shut off the noise, stop trying to keep up with everything and listen.

‘We need only to find a place where we can be alone and look upon Him present within us,’ St. Teresa of Avila counsels. Again and again, she encourages us to go within, to ‘represent Christ’ within us, holding and seeing an image of him within and resting there, present to one another in love.

For her, this often meant seeing him in Gethsemane or in his Passion, humbly speaking to him of whatever was on her heart.

For me, often as not, it is walking just behind him in the fields of Galilee or finding my way to the hillside where he sat in silence, watching as the faint light of a day newly born appeared over distant hills, his heart at rest in the Mysterious Love who indwelt his being.

Welcomed into that holy space, the noise of the world falls away, the troubles of yesterday disappear and the Love he is blossoms within, its warmth at once revealing who he is, the One with Whom he communed and the soul I truly am beneath the face I show to the world.

I wish I could live in this interior space always. I wish everything I said and did rose out of this place of knowing. I’d be a much better and kinder person. But all-too-often, the bitter conflicts and noise that roil our society floods my consciousness, and I lose myself, living far from the place of knowing.

And I must start again, just like so many other times, to find my way back to places I have known him and known myself as the place of his abiding, the two of us joined in one love.

The spiritual life is wonderful, Thomas Merton once mused, ‘if you are content to always be a beginner.’ Always starting anew. Knowing then not knowing; having then wanting; finding then losing.

Returning again and again to the place of knowing to hear his voice, ‘Don’t let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me.’

David L. Miller

The inner voice of love

[The shepherd of the sheep] goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers. (John 10:4b-5)

There is a voice of quiet amid the clamor, a prayer of peace beneath the cacophony and conflict that commands the daily news.

It is your voice, Jesus. I heard it on the lips of elders who spoke in ways I most needed to hear when I felt weak and unworthy, insignificant and insecure.

You spoke of love, of wanting me, of beauty and kindness and care, of compassion for a world of hurt. Your voice claimed a space, a room in my heart that was created especially for you, a place nothing else should ever occupy and nothing else can ever satisfy.

I sit and pray each day hoping to descend into that space, to enter that room where you so lovingly abide that I may hear your voice and feel my heart one with you.

Somedays, the door opens, tears moisten my eyes and I know what human hearts were fashioned to feel and know. Other times, the door is closed. I cannot enter, and I realize that entering is not something I can command but is your gift.

I can only ask, seek and knock, aching for the door to open that the miracle of oneness may wash away every hurt I have ever known, every sadness I have ever felt and every moment I have ever felt lost and alone. All of it swept away in love’s cleansing current.

This is your gift today. For reasons known only to your Spirit, the door opens, and I enter the place of hearing and knowing the Love that does not die and will never cast me out.

I see my life, the years and decades, the places and ways, so many more than I know or can name, where I heard the voice of your love calling me to stay near, telling me that all the voices that ever troubled me, including my own self-condemnation, were telling me lies.

And for all this, I praise you, for you are my only peace. You are my joy. You are my final and fondest hope. You are the Love I hear in every love and every beauty and every joy that frees me to live and love beyond the prison of ego and anxiety.

So, help me, Dearest Heart. Help me hear your voice amid the clamor, conflicts and cacophony that command the daily news. Help me hear you when my heart is cold and dark, when the nights are long and sleep won’t come. Help me hear you when memories taunt and accuse, and when I feel my life has too little mattered.

Help me hear the inner voice of love, from the place of your abiding, that like the faithful ones who blessed me, I may speak of love and beauty and kindness and compassion in these bitter times, when voices of hate demean the dignity of human beings you made for yourself.

Help the hurt and broken ones hear your voice and know the love you are so pleased to share, even with me, right here and right now.

David L. Miller

Against an infinite horizon

They said to each other, ‘Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?’ (Luke 24:32)

Final daylight swirling gold, purple and pink, colors fading, three gray shadows slog into the thickening darkness, insignificant against the horizon of an uncaring cosmos, insensible of their sorrow.

Silent, heads bent, they listen to the words of one who is always the stranger we long to meet along the way, the one whose heart knows what ours needs.

They’d just buried their hope, their dreams shattered by the implacable powers who ravage and rule the earth for their pleasure, crushing any who would dare imagine a world ruled not by the love of power but by the power of love. (Such are with us in every age. We know their names.)

Huddled together against the bitter chill of mortality, they mourn Jesus’ death … and their own, their shivered hearts shrinking in the bitter chill that it all means nothing: not their lives, their loves, their hopes that something truly alive and wonderful can blossom on earth and in their hearts—all of it empty because there is no truth, no life, no way that leads anywhere but to the silence of the tomb.

Their dearest hopes now buried and gone, sealed behind the cold, gray stone of Jesus’ tomb, they trudge home to salve their battered hearts.

And yet, and yet … there was something in the voice of the stranger who joined them along the Emmaus road, something that warmed the cold, dead embers of life and love and hope that had once burned in their hearts. Words, he spoke, of ancient promises and of the Gracious Wonder whose name is Love and whose gift is Life.

It was just a flicker at first, so small and frail they did not notice what was happening in their soul’s depth—not until the stranger blessed the bread, broke it and gave it to them as they sat at table.

In such familiar reverence, they noticed the warmth that had been building within them along the way. They realized they had met the stranger for whom every heart longs. They felt the Life he is alive in the places they felt most dead.

And they lifted their eyes to the once uncaring skies, there to see that we live against the horizon of an Infinite Love—stretching from eternity-to-eternity, enfolding every moment, walking many roads to meet us on the way, sometimes when we least expect.

David L. Miller

What the heart wants

Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.’ Thomas answered him, ‘My Lord and my God!’  (John 20:26b-28)

Knowledge is not experience, and experience is what the heart wants. It is what the heart requires to know what can be known no other way.

Easter comes with the proclamation of Christ’s resurrection, and email peppers me with books and articles offering proof or disproof of the holy miracle.

I spurn them all, although there was a time they held interest for me. That is long gone now, along with my painful straining to rationalize what neither I nor anyone else can prove … or for that matter, disprove.

I’m not interested. It’s all a striving after the wind.

I want what Thomas wanted … and got, the experience of seeing and feeling and hearing a great and final word of ‘peace’, spoken over my life with all its confusion and failures, sins and failed promise, wonderings and doubts and unanswered questions.

I want to touch the wounds of love that testify to the world that there really is a Love that does not break, a Love that never turns back, a Love for which there is no line it refuses to cross, no depth to which it will not go, no death it will not suffer, no depth of hell to which it will not descend to find the likes of me.

It is not the knowledge of many things that fills the heart. It is this, the experience of Love Uncontainable.

I come to the old stories, told again and again through the centuries …  and to me by hearts in whom that Love lived and lives still.

I come neither wanting nor seeking to know the meaning of it all. I speak the words, listening, waiting and watching for that which stirs my heart to love and long for the Loving Presence I have craved since early days.

Seeing Jesus’ shattered hands, the love I see wakes a great and surpassing love within. Amid tears and quiet joy, my heart awakens to the truth that I and the Love He Is are one, even on days when I am cold as stone and believing is hard.

But that’s not today.

Today, I see those ruined hands raised in peace, and my heart knows as only hearts can … that he is the Love Uncontainable who will haunt my heart until I am wholly his.

Who knows what tomorrow will bring? My heart may not be so acutely certain of Love’s living presence as today. But I will look and listen, attending to what I read and hear, to faces known and strangers who pass, eager for that which stirs my heart to love and longing, giving thanks that the Love Who Lives … lives everywhere.

David L. Miller

Easter in the bunker

Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. (John 20:6-7)

I would have picked up the grave cloths, held them in my hands, savored their texture, stroked my cheek with the fabric and breathed in the fragrance of the soul they’d held. Anything … just to feel his presence.

I can imagine it, but imagination quickly transports me 33 years into the past and a place thousands of miles away, a concrete bunker on the edge of a civil war.

In the back, squatting on the dirt floor, a mother fingered the dirty rags in which she’d wrapped her child, a little girl. The child was starving, dying, beyond help even if medical help had been near, which it wasn’t.

I think of her every year as imagine how tenderly Jesus’ friends wrapped him in death. I watch their hands and soon see this mother tugging at the filthy bands of cloth around her child, covering her, keeping watch, a death watch, which would end with the child laid beneath soil of a troubled land where this scene was playing out hundreds of times every day.

I know. The image is too sad for today, or so I was informed in no uncertain terms the one time I told the story on an Easter morning.

But each year, the hands of Jesus’ friends and the hands of this mother blend and merge in the sacred, unpredictable ways of memory where meaning is made and the Spirit does her best work.

Only now, this year, I imagine holding Jesus’ grave cloths to my cheek and am transported across 33 years to the back corner of that bunker, where I pick up the filthy strips of once-white cotton laying in the dirt, abandoned, cast off.

And at this, I know that for which I hope: to feel his risen presence, the presence I felt that decades old day when I prayed for that child through tears and marked her with the sign of the cross, hoping with all my might that the Resurrection is real for the whole suffering world … and especially for that little girl … and the mother who wrapped her in bands of love … the two of us, held in one hope.

No one needed to tell me ‘Christ is risen’ that day. He was right there.

David L. Miller

Of Mary and Pete Hegseth

 

There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. (John 12:2-3)

‘Where are you?’ An inner voice says. ‘What do you see?’

With that, I am invited into my senses, freed from my busy mind’s need to make meaning of words.

The scene comes alive not only in sight but in the aromatic oil of anointing, a healing fragrance rising, floating, drifting across the room, filling my senses.

For a moment, I am there in the splendid silence as Mary rises and brushes back her hair, perfumed now with precious nard, having wiped Jesus’ feet.

More fragrant, still, is the loving reverence that moved her blessed act, throwing aside all utilitarian concerns about how much it cost and how it could have sold and the money give to the poor.

Moved to her knees, all that mattered was loving the Love that unleashed love’s gracious flow from the depth of her heart, a fountain of life to which she gave no resistance, allowing herself to be carried away, as totally given to God’s loving purpose as the soul whom she anointed.

We should all be so free, for she is a portrait of human fulfillment, love’s completion in a human soul at least for this one moment. Seeing her, I witness what my soul most wants and surely needs.

Tragically, I also feel the discordant debasement of Christian faith and witness among those, such as our nation’s chest-thumping Secretary of War, who invoke the name of Jesus to bless the ‘lethality’ of violence upon ‘those who deserve no mercy.’

How, I wonder, again and again. How can anyone employ the name of Jesus to bless the very opposite of that which Jesus sought to awaken in every human heart? And how can those who worship and believe Jesus is the merciful heart of God for all people not shout their objections to such obvious sacrilege, the desecration of the name of Jesus?

I have no convincing answer, only an invitation to watch Mary shake out her hair as the fragrance of love fills the air.

David L. Miller