Thursday, May 28, 2009

Today’s text

John 16:13-15

[Jesus says:] However, when the Spirit of truth comes he will lead you to the complete truth, since he will not be speaking of his own accord, but will say only what he has been told; and he will reveal to you the things to come. He will glorify me, since all he reveals to you will be taken from what is mine. Everything the Father has is mine; that is why I said: all he reveals to you will be taken from what is mine.

Reflection

I take no aim at completeness. Only in recent years, my Lord, have I become content with incompleteness, resigned in the knowledge that everything I touch and am will always remain less than whole, less than finished.

My heart rests easier on the days I manage to surrender the hunger for completeness and the illusion that it is attainable or even expected of me. I am what I am: perfectly incomplete, always unfinished and typically certain that I am meant for more. But seldom am I able to touch what that is.

But what that is … is not of my achievement or struggle, for it is the completeness of your love for this crazy world. That is the completeness for which I hunger, and I enter it only in surrender to the undeniable fact that I am far less than complete or whole, and the more I struggle under any other illusion, the more fragmented my soul becomes.

But you send the Spirit of truth: helper, advocate, friend, comforter, Paraclete; none of our terms exhausts the abiding of that Presence whose first mark in our souls is a loving resignation to your completeness.

In that release, that surrender to our incompleteness we begin to enter the complete truth of the complete love you are and in which you hold us.

All this mysterious Presence has and brings to us is in and from you, Loving Mystery. It is the substance that so filled my brother Jesus, whose soul resided completely in you.

So it is enough, sufficient for this day, any day. And with quiet confidence, I release myself, my incompleteness and insufficiency into the completeness of you who are complete truth, complete love.

I surrender to you again my illusions of controlling the events of my life, for you will fulfill your promise to send the Spirit of your completeness to me that I may savor the sweetness of what my soul can never attain, only receive.

Pr. David L. Miller