October 22, 2009

Reflection

The color of paradise

The trees grow bright with praise, lit from within by colors no hand can produce, except yours, Loving Mystery.

Fall comes demanding poetry to capture the colors. But our flat souls lie content with mere prose, words that tear and strain to describe the beauty our eyes caress--and this feeling that arises from a place we cannot name, except that it is in us.

Awaking, I open the door and smell the earth, moist and fresh. My heart rises for reasons it refuses to tell me, but I know: all is well and will be so.

This lightness of being … and hope is the greatest I have known in days, and it comes at the end of things.

Summer is gone. Autumn comes reminding me again that all things end. The warm sun wanes, and winter (too soon to come) must be endured … again, until I am no more.

But the colors speak, an impressionist’s palette of burnished red and gold constantly remixed, shimmering fire and translucent gold, falling by the millions in piles school children shuffle through on their way to more mundane concerns.

Gold leaf covers the back patio inches deep awakening a quiet joy I can neither bid nor stop. Its source is as mysterious as the hand who paints the earth on this October morning.

Too soon it will all be gone. The colors will fade to brown and be swept into gutters. Cold rains will turn the decaying mass to thick dark sludge as we enter winter’s trudge.

But today I have seen the brilliance, the colors lit from within by the uncreated light of the One who is Being itself. I have seen, and having seen I cannot be the same.

Eternity appeared on Janes Avenue, and I was there. And more: the Spirit who paints cool fall days gave me eyes to see the fire that burns in the Heart of Love for whom I most hunger.

That Mystery paints the day with brilliance and wonder, so that with eyes of the heart, we may see the beauty of the One who treasures and holds us, who decorates fall days with the light of eternity that we may know we are made for more than just trudging through our days.

We are made to know more love, more beauty, more wonder than we can imagine. We are made for the More that shines through autumn days and in the beauty of our brother Jesus, who is lit from within by the Love that will not let us fall into the gutter and be swept away.

Some say the life of faith is about avoiding sin and being righteous … that this most glorifies God. But the glory of fall days suggests otherwise.

Maybe our life is about seeing and knowing the More that shines through every beauty, every love, every caring word--and every fresh, moist Autumn morning that awakens the awareness that all is, indeed, well.

And it is, for we rest in the hands of the Maker of the Morning, who decorates the day with the color of paradise.

And in seeing this, our little lives are colored with the beauty we see, alight with a glory beyond all time.

Pr. David L. Miller