Monday, June 27, 2015

Galatians 2:20

It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

The song of peace

It happened again on Sunday. I realized again why I am Christian, why I am a pastor and how inadequate my words have been through decades of writing as I try to describe the awareness of being one with God, inside God as God is inside you, with nary a bit of separation between.

The tradition calls it union or unitive experience. For many it happens in prayer or being in the wonder of nature, but on Sunday song carried us beyond ordinary consciousness into knowledge of that which is true every moment.

The music carried us away … into the place we always are, in God, with the wonder of God somehow simultaneously in us.

“Peace be yours” we sang over and over in response to the cantor’s song as she named the nations of the earth. Peace be yours. Peace be yours.

It was our prayer for a broken and fragmented world, for our divided nation and the distress and wounds of our own hearts. Peace be yours.

Somewhere in the repetition I became aware that I did not … we did not … stand outside of God, at some distance imploring God to give us the peace we cannot give ourselves and our world.

The song, the chant carried me into awareness that God was praying in us and through us. My voice and the Voice of Love were one and the same voice; God was praying in our prayer, the prayer of the song.

But it had ceased to be a prayer at all. It had become benediction, blessing. The Holy One was within us, within our souls and our assembly, singing through us, pouring out the blessing for which our song pleaded. Peace be yours.

And it was … and is ours. The Loving Mystery was pouring out the substance of the divine heart on us and through us, peace be yours, peace be yours, and all we needed to do was to let the steady flow carry us along into the awareness that God and we are not two but one.

We were in God, in the flow of peace that springs from the Mystery of the Love God is. The wonder of this One is in us, singing, blessing, giving us the desire of our hearts. We had become God’s song of peace, discovering our true identity, the who we most truly are.

We are the song of peace, the voice of the Voice who sang through us on a Sunday morning. We are one with the One, and for a few holy minutes we knew it beyond any doubt.

And now we pray the song of God’s heart may sing through us on Mondays, too.

Peace be yours.

Pr. David L. Miller