Friday, November 27, 2009

Friday, November 27, 2009

Today’s text

1 Thessalonians 3:12-13

May the Lord increase and enrich your love for each other and for all, so that it matches ours for you. And may he so confirm your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless in the sight of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones.

Reflection

The only holiness we have is the love that you wring from our stingy souls. And wring is the correct word, as we cling with death grip to our puny self-respect and the carefully tended masks that hide the need we fear to name.

I grow more insular each year, more drawn into myself, protecting my thoughts and anxieties, yet continually more needing the simplicity of connection, accepting friendships where all that matters is transparent humanity.

I long for moments of discovery when the beauty of a human heart shines through the bruises and wounds apathetic life inflicts on our fragile souls. And fragile, they are, easily lost to apathy or anger, to old wounds and suspicious bitterness born of too little love and too much living.

We hunger for the sacrament of safe space, for space in which false faces fade and masks are put away, and we risk needing and being needed. We need to become children again, unashamed of our want.

It is then that joy surprises us as we taste the happy communion for which you made us Holy One, a joy in which the love we know and share streams from the depth of eternity.

Most times we arrive at this grace only after denials of our needs are stripped away, when failed attempts to fill the hole in our hearts have proved futile, when you reveal (again) to our recalcitrance that we cannot be human except through surrender to need and love.

In that surrender we know you; even those who say they don’t believe know you, though they do not know how to name you.

But then neither do I. Who can name you?

For you are the Love that has left this wound, this need for Love in our hearts, and you are the Love that alone can heal us. Every love is a sacrament of the Love you are.

And loving is our only holiness, a share in the mystery of your life.

So let it be.

Pr. David L. Miller