Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Today’s text

Psalm 30:8-10

To you, Yahweh, I call, to my God I cry for mercy. What point is there in my death, my going down to the abyss? Can the dust praise you or proclaim your faithfulness? Listen, Yahweh, take pity on me, Yahweh, be my help!

Reflection

My soul cries for a great open space where my heart may breathe free.

The morning sun awakens in the Earth the full promise of spring. Green shoots push insistently through winter’s cold dust. Nothing can stop it. The good Earth will bloom with joy and color.

May it lift also me, for the weight of the past clings to my heart. I want only that my steps should slow and anxiety cease. I hunger for freedom from all constriction that tightens the chest and prevents me from living in the fullness of loving joy. This alone is really living.

In my mind’s eye, I see the life I want, a life I sometimes live but too often am unable to enter. I see the life for which you intend me: unrushed, confident, gentle, a soul quiet amid the contingencies and constant changes of life.

It is the calm of love that I want, the peace of walking in a love that is so total, so complete that the slings and arrows of dumb chance and human pettiness no longer disturb.

Death is not a condition at the end of my days. It is any day when such love is not known in the pit of one’s soul. For it is this that made me, and this for which I am made. Apart from such knowing of love I feel separated from my Source, from the fountain that is your life.

So I cry for mercy. No great peril faces me this day, only small challenges. But it is these that most threaten the soul as years and decades pass. They slowly wean us from the richness of love we need.

So slowly, so insidiously we begin to imagine we can live, truly live, without this sublime knowledge of you, Holy One. After a while we fail to notice we are eating crumbs from the table, scrambling to get by, living on morsels of the banquet of grace that would flood our soul and fill our being with the love you are.

Our souls are famished for want of the love that fills the heart with every confidence and the music of easy laughter.

So have mercy on me. Do not let me fall into death this day. May the life I know only in the fullness of your love fill me--and fill another heart well known to me, a soul who this day faces challenges far greater than my own.

Lord, have mercy. Do not let her fall into the abyss, for who can praise you there?

Pr. David L. Miller