Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Today’s text

Isaiah 43:1

And now, thus says Yahweh, he who created you, Jacob, who formed you, Israel: Do not be afraid, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by your name, you are mine.

Reflection

Do I hear a cry in your voice, Loving Mystery, or is it my cry that falls on the ear?

No, there is but one single cry. It calls out of your great heart and finds its echo in my own soul. Yes, this is what I think, what I feel, what I hear.

“You are mine,” your eternal heart cries out. “I created you; I formed you. Come find your rest in my encircling presence, in the arms of my everlasting embrace which even now holds all time, all space.

“I will that my pain and yours should cease, for I, too, endure sorrow until all my wandering ones are at home, at peace, at rest.”

I hear your cry and feel that pain, knowing it, finally, not as my lonely sorrow, but as the sadness of your great heart, which I, too, feel when my heart feels far from you.

But I am not, for all that is resides in your immensity, encircled by arms of grace in the field of your Spirit’s play, seeking to draw me, the resistant, into the joy of knowing I dwell constantly in the atmosphere of love--of Love, who wants only that I should see and rest at home in this mystery, at peace and whole.

This comes to me in this instant, and an image appears in the mind’s eye: arms vast as the universe itself, no larger, a circle drawing in, ever so slowly, all that is, and I am in that embrace, but so seldom do I look and see the Drawing Love you are.

But right now, I know all this, as you invite me to make my home in you: you, who will cry for me until the day I rest finally and fully in you, who are Love.

Until then, I will know that when my soul grows sad and lonely that it is not my loneliness I feel, but the echo of your own, calling me home, to calm your cry.

Pr. David L. Miller