Saturday, August 22, 2015

Saturday, August 22, 2015

John 6:65

And he said, ‘For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father.’

The beauty you are

Deep calls to Deep; Love calls to Love.

The Love you are, Holy One, calls to the Love that is your image in us. Your Love is the core, the soul of every human being.

In every love we know, you draw us to the Love you are. Every love comes to awaken the Love you are in us that we may commune in joy with you and shine with the beauty of your grace.

We come alive in the communion of Love with Love. Our eyes glisten with love and hope. Our hearts sing songs of joy and of the Love that fills us. We become who we are … who you are in each of us.

For the Love you are shines through the veil of our fleshly existence. Our ordinary human lives—wherever we are and however we are shaped—become a holy canvas on which you paint an image of Love for all with eyes to see.

It is your pleasure, Great Love, it is your holy delight to draw us to yourself, enfold us in your embrace and light our eyes with the startled joy of discovering we are more loved, precious and wanted than we could have ever known.

It is your joy to reveal the Love you are, the Love hidden in our very souls, through our brother Jesus. You give him to us and say, “Look, this is what you are, too, an image of the joyous light and Love I Am.

“Your fear and wounds mar and hide your inner beauty, which will shine with the light of my glory if only you will come and feel what is in him. For what is in him is me, and what is in you is the Love I am.

“So come and know me. Know the Love I am. Know the light of my glory that shines in Jesus. Know I come to you in the grace of every love.

“I come that you may know me … and finally see the beauty I see in you.”

Pr. David L. Miller


Friday, August 21, 2015

Friday August 21, 2015

Psalm 84:1-2

How glorious is your dwelling place. O Loving Creator of the universe! My soul aches for the abode of the Beloved; All that is in me sings for joy to the living Heart of Love! (Paraphrase, Nan C. Merrill)

The street where you live

You never know where you will find it, or it will find you.

Great Love surprises. You never know when it will wash over you and fill you—warm with the knowledge that that dwelling place of God is everywhere.

We dwell within you, Holy One, within the compass of Great Love. All that is dwells within you. Every place is holy for every place is held inside the Great Love you are. And every place can shine and fill the heart with beauty and joy.

No one else might have seen a thing, but I felt and knew you among the towering condos along Lake Shore Drive as I stepped from greening parkland onto walks bordered by plants and flowers, excited children laughing at the joy of being under the brilliant blue of a late summer sky.

I knew Great Love for all I saw, for the towering buildings, the children and the greening of the city, for every soul who walked the streets, for all who live high above in the surrounding towers and those who labor behind the scenes to make it all work so people may live.

All of it. For a shining moment nothing escaped the embrace of my heart. I felt it all connected, everything needing everything else and everything inside a Great Love, held and treasured by the Great Love that embraces all … and that lives mysteriously in me.

My soul sang with the joy of knowing … what no book or teacher can convey. I knew You, even as I know you now as fingers rattle these keys and carry me into awareness of Great Love that shined through everything I saw on one summer’s day.

The abode of God is everywhere … and everything is in you, Holy One.

Why and how do I see and know this mystery in this one time and place but miss it in so many others? Why do whole days go by without clear vision and soul-filling awareness of the Great Love you are?

I cannot answer. Perhaps some places are thin to the eyes of my heart, allowing the Light and Love you are to shine through the veil of creation that I might see and know.

Or perhaps the experience of love anywhere in our lives … opens our eyes to the Great Love who is everywhere.

However awareness comes, Great Love, Thank you.

Thank you for summer days that enlighten my heart and fill me. Thank you for calling me beloved … on a city street where the belovedness of all was clear as a summer sky.

Pr. David L. Miller


Thursday, August 20, 2015

Thursday, August 20, 2015

Psalm 84:10-11a

For a day within the Heart of Love is more to be desired than a thousand years elsewhere. I would rather be a servant in your dwelling place, than live in riches among those who know not Love. For the Beloved is as radiant as the sun, as strong as a steel shield, and invites each one to come, to partake of the Banquet. (Paraphrase, Nan C. Merrill)

Heart of Love

Where is this Heart of Love if not in the depth of our souls where we may retreat and rest and know you, showered by the great rain of grace that washes away every fear and enlivens our hearts with hopes that do not die?

Open the doors of our hearts that we may enter the Holiness within us, the secret province of soul where you dwell full of Love and Peace, welcoming us to come away from the busyness of life and know the Banquet that fills the soul when we dwell in you.

For your Heart is Love unbounded, the home where we may dwell wanting, needing nothing … because we have you. We are enclosed within you, surrounded and safe in the Love that never dies, the Love who calls us, “My joy, my delight.”

We live in the light of your delight, Holy One. But we forget and lose ourselves, our peace and place in the soul’s inmost room.

Our feet take us many places. Our lives make many connections with other lives, some filled with joy and others staggering beneath the burdens and sorrows that come to every life.

Draw us back into yourself when thoughts and anxieties cloud our hearts and we wander far from the inner room of knowing you … and knowing ourselves in you.

May our hearts retreat and rest in the Heart of Love you are within the secret province of our souls. May every word flow from this Eternal Spring of Loving Grace you are within.

Expand our hearts. Make them large and spacious with room for others to dwell with us, enclosed, safe and surrounded in the Heart of Love … where there is room for everyone.

Knowing your Heart is better than life itself. You are my joy, my delight, my Eternal Beloved.

Pr. David L. Miller


Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

John 6:66-69

Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him. So Jesus asked the twelve, ‘Do you also wish to go away?’ Simon Peter answered him, ‘Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.’

Places in the heart

Dusk fades; the day nearly done. A cardinal lights on the side fence, a female, hopping from one post to another, coming closer to my chair. For a full minute she watches me, then flits and is gone … home, I suspect, to a nest in the neighbor’s yard where she has raised her young.

My heart flies with her to a place invisible to the eye, a place in the heart where I know your Heart. This is where I go to know the life eternal You are, resting as the cardinal in her nest, knowing the Love that is Home.

Where shall we go? Where can we know the Love who is beyond the dim flicker of stars in the twilight? Where is the place, near as our flesh, always waiting, always eager to welcome and fill us with the life that is Life?

You are the place. You invite me to dwell in your Heart and be filled with the Love that holds and works in every heart and in everyplace I go.

“Come, dwell in me,” you invite. “Rest in this knowing. I am your home.

“Surrender your unfulfilled hopes, your unfinished plans, your incomplete life and rest in the Love I am. Release it all. Be patient. Force nothing. There is no need.

Trust and know … the Love I am will never depart and will unfold a way for you that is full of Life and the Love your heart craves.

“You were made for me, and the Life I am is for you … and in you, shining in the diamond of your soul and reaching beyond the twilight stars.

“Believe these words. Trust them … and know."

Pr. David L. Miller



Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Ephesians 6:16-17

With all of these, take the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

Trust … and know

I want to live in a state of totally absorption in Love, the Love God is, totally rapt in the totality of the Love that so completes me that it is impossible to want anything more.

This is not an unusual desire. It is simply human. Created in the image of Great Love only Great Love completes us.

Nor is this a romantic dream that can never come true. Mystics and contemplatives of many traditions speak of being caught up in the fullness of God, the fullness of Love. They strain for words to say what cannot be said.

And they seek to remain unified, one with the Love filling them, bearing the blessed calm of this oneness with them wherever they go, always knowing … the One Love God is.

To know this for even a moment is to know salvation, and once you have known it you want it … always.

But life happens, fragmenting consciousness and drawing us from the sacred place in our souls … that sacred inner room where we experience oneness with the One Love.

It is then that faith shields us from doubts, impatience and skeptics’ taunts that God is unreal. Our mantra must be trust … and know— know that the Love that filled you in utter oneness endures.

Trust that the Great Love who found you will draw you back into its fullness and the joy for which every human soul is intended.

Trust and know … Love is, Love endures, Love will find you. Be patient. Love has its time and ways, and there is never anything to fear, not really. For the One Love who finds us … will find and fill us again and again.

We are never quite sure when or who or even what will awaken our souls, but we know the Great Love seeks us in the sounds and moments of our days and nights. With open hearts, we trust and know.

Pr. David L. Miller







Monday, August 17, 2015

Monday, August 17, 2015

John 6:56

It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.

Hands

Old and young, parents with children in tow, the sick and worried, the hope-filled and shattered whose jobs, health or relationships are falling apart.

They shuffle to the kneeler where I stand with nothing but my hands and prayer to offer. They come, wanting that word which will open their awareness to a healing love that will ignite hope and set them free from the worry that possesses them.

They all want the same thing … life. And I can give them … nothing.

Still they come because they believe in a Love that can touch, hold and protect them, and change their lives.

They believe …that Love is mediated by human hands and words in ways they cannot understand. And so do I.

So I lay hands on their heads and speak their hopes, praying back their fears with words of love, words that let them know that whatever the future holds, you … Holy One hold the future, and the Love you are will always be enough for us. Always.

Words of Spirit, words of Love, the Love that was and is and always will be. 

And Life happens. The Life you are opens up in our souls and flows through our smiles and tears, connecting our fears and hopes to the Great Love you are.

And we know: We are not alone. 

The Love you are is never a breath away but closer than our breath, and in the touching and speaking you awaken our spirits and we feel alive again with hope for the day.

There is more than nothing in my hands and the words I speak are not empty, but full ... of you.

These hands bear a Great Grace, an Immense Mercy not of my own creation but of the Spirit … who is the Life who fills every emptiness.

Pr. David L. Miller