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

A many splendored glory

The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one. (John 17:22)

Green Valley in the early morning shimmers green and gold. A serpentine cinder path winds 100 yards or so along the east branch of the DuPage River. A Heintz 57 of grasses coats the marsh between the path and the stream to the east.

Old oaks line each side of the path, straining high to touch hands above in a cathedral arch, framing the way south. Sunlight streams through the canopy, dappling my way, playing touch and go on the petals of purple and white wildflowers randomly scattered among the grasses.

They enchant and stop me several times to take a closer look. ‘Do you know what these flowers are?’ I ask a lone hiker going the other way. He doesn’t know either, but it doesn’t matter.

Why should I want or need to know their name? Would it make them one iota more beautiful or more mesmerizing? Would it make me more grateful for their existence beside me on this Spring day?

No. My question is a feeble attempt at control, as if I could sum up a beauty for which no name is adequate. Naming them would only create a distance between myself and the truth of their splendor. It would pollute the purity of the gratitude, love, joy and thanks they awaken within me, a gratuitous, unsolicited gift from life’s lavish Source.

Walking on, two miles south, a dead tree, rises some 70 feet or so beside the river. Pale gray, stripped clean of bark by decades of wind and weather, a few shattered limbs twist high and lifeless, ending precipitously in dagger-stark points against the blue of the sky.

They make a fine perch for an eagle protecting a nest deeper in the trees, while looking for an unsuspecting fish in the stream unlucky enough to become lunch.

I go to see if he is still there, and he is, so high and confident of his place in the world that my presence is of no concern to him. But for me he is grace and beauty and assurance that being alive and being here is a marvelously wonderful thing for which I have no words, just the moisture in my eyes to express appreciation and praise. A good enough prayer.

It is hard to walk and pray, but I try, stopping where I must to refocus my wandering thoughts on one word that keeps drawing me … glory. Jesus’ words are the impetus for my reflection.

‘The glory you have given me I have given them.’ Jesus says, praying to the Father. Perhaps it is my surroundings, but an image comes to mind as I meditate on his glory.

I see him in near darkness, sitting on the ground by a fire, holding a piece of bread he has just broken from the loaf he handed to the person next to him. His smile wide and spontaneous, he looks across the flames at a friend with loving pleasure, filled with delight at the goodness of the bread, the warmth of the fire and for the love that fills him for this one moment with this one person, invisible to my eyes, whom he graces with that smile.

I don’t imagine it is me at whom he smiles. It could be anyone and is everyone. I just know I am irretrievably captivated and captured by the love conveyed in his smile without one word being spoken.

If glory is the shining forth of the love and power and beauty of God, I see and know it in this image, shimmering with the love present in all the other times and places the glory of God shined forth in Jesus, like when he touched and healed, or when he forgave his killers and then spoke peace to those who denied and ran away from him in the hour of his suffering.

Jesus is the glory—the power, beauty and love—of God. He is the glory I see and feel and know in my own flesh, awakened by his love on a May morning … sprung fresh from Gods own heart.

David L. Miller

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