Thursday, October 25, 2012

Today’s text

John 8:31-32

To the Jews who believed in him Jesus said: If you make my word your home you will indeed be my disciples; you will come to know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

Reflection

Freedom is what the truth does in us. It makes us free. If a word does not give freedom to our souls, it is not a true word, a word that bears the soul of Jesus to our soul.

For, the soul of Jesus is the soul of freedom, the soul of knowing the first and final truth of his life and ours.

God’s eternal invitation is to put ourselves inside and who and what he is that we may know who we are.

Come to me, he says. Lay down inside the truth that is in me. Live there for a while; your heart will grow large. You will come alive and bask in a truth that has always been there but which you may have never known.

So it is.

A young person sits on my couch, confirmation essay in hand, sharing what little they have learned of Christian faith through years of confirmation teaching. But their words and stories bear so much more than anything their young minds are able to put on paper.

I listen and hear the graces of their lives. I hear the beauty of love in their hearts, the passions that draw them closer to whatever it is they will become and the small acts of true goodness and strength that are not small at all.

I hear and see, and I bless them with the grace that is already in them, a grace they barely glimpse, if at all.

There are wonders in you, I tell them, and play their own words back to them so they cannot deny it or act as if I am telling them something false.

There are gifts in your soul that you did not seek, I say. You didn’t even know they are there. You are marvelous, graced with divine beauty and grace seeking to push out of your every pore.

I tell them the truth of what I see and hear in them.

Sometimes their faces get red, embarrassed however slightly, as they look at me with eyes that say, “You see that in me?”

Yes, dear child, I think but do not say, and so much more that you cannot understand right now.

But they hear me. No, more than me.

They have heard words of truth, words from the soul of Jesus about a Love that loves them and lives in them, a Love who gives them gifts that they may be the gift they are to the rest of us, so that we, too, may know the first and final truth.

We are Love’s children, Love’s treasured vessels, bearing the beauty of the One who hungers to live through all.

Breathe free, my children and release the Love you bear.

Pr. David L. Miller