Thursday, December 30, 2021

Love us home

Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being (Hebrews 1:1-3a)

It was almost midnight. Dixie’s timers had switched off the lamps an hour before. We climbed the steps from the garage into the living room.

Darkness shrouded everything but the tree in the corner. It’s nothing ostentatious, just a tree with tiny, colored lights reflecting off an angel and a few ornaments we’ve long had, each with a story to tell.

Simple things are the most beautiful and most likely to penetrate the heart. This was no exception. The lights in the darkness told me I was home, not just here in this room but in a Love who speaks wherever Love wants to speak, like in darkened rooms when all you want is your bed and sleep.

Love speaks in a million ways. This great and mysterious Love has found ways to get my attention since I was a boy hating school and playing with my dog.

And now we see what Love has always been whispering to our hearts. For we have seen Jesus, the beauty of grace untold, who wants only to love us home.

David L. Miller

Sunday, December 26, 2021

Christmas morning

The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. (John 1:9)

Winter light slants through blinds in the loft, finding faces on the tapestry that hangs on the west wall. Joseph and two magi stand there. But the golden beam leaves them in shadow to illumine Mary, the infant Jesus, and a magi kneeling at the manger.

The light lingers on their faces, drawing my eyes and heart into this circle of light where my every longing falls silent as the air around me.

A photo across the way fills the dining room wall. Black and white, a country road, lined by bare trees, stretches into the distance, disappearing into a thin morning fog.

I don’t know where it leads or will end ... for me or anyone else. But sitting in the light of Christmas morning, none of that matters. All that matters is sitting here, enveloped in this circle of light, barely breathing, but knowing the Loving Light of Christ will find me ... and you ... on every road we shall ever walk, bearing us joyfully home at journey’s end.

David L. Miller

Friday, December 24, 2021

This night

Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy (Luke 2:10)

All creation sings with joy this night, for heaven and earth are joined as one, never to part. 

The heart of God is unveiled in a human heart. God’s everlasting desire appears in a Bethlehem stable.

Eternal light overflows heaven and spills into our darkness as God comes to us in the Christ child, who is this world’s light. He comes to embrace the lost, beckoning us to our true home that we may bask in everlasting kindness.

For the One who comes has loved us since before the birth of time, delighting in the moment we first drew breath, seeking us every moment since.

Shepherds were the first to come his side. I like to think they are the first church of those who love him. I imagine myself kneeling there beside them, leaning close to see him. And why not?

For I belong to this long line of anxious, confused, needy, hopeful souls that extends through the centuries to this night when we gaze at his beauty once more, finally home.

David L. Miller

Thursday, December 23, 2021

What we see

For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all. (Titus 2:11)

I’ve always wanted to celebrate Christmas in a barn amid the mingled scent of Holsteins, manure and hay fragrant with red clover.

I see it. A half dozen cows, ready to be milked, shift their weight in the worn wooden stanchions. A mouse rustles among bales in the mow. A fly-specked light bulb casts a dusty glow, as in the barn I remember from my earliest days. 

In the back, beyond the cows, sits a manger on the old board floor, beside a couple, exhausted, as an infant lies in the straw.

This is what we see when the glory of God takes on mortal flesh. The Loving Mystery, who made the stars, lies there for our adoration. Christ appears, a helpless infant, humbly wrapped by peasant parents in a place far from the halls of power and influence. For those places have no room for him.

But here, in the tender simplicity of a sleeping infant, we meet the Love who hungers to commune, heart-to heart, with us, and transform us into Love’s own image.

David L. Miller

Wednesday, December 22, 2021

Swept up in joy

 O sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth. (Psalm 96:1)

A cold, winter wind shivers the line of trees outside my window, driving autumn’s last leaves down the street. But safe inside, children sing Christmas into my soul from the stereo, their song a sacrament of the Love no winter can chill.

Gloria in excelsis Deo, their voices dance weightless in the air, echoing the angels’ song, Glory to God in the highest. And though I will never be able to create such exquisite beauty, my earth-bound heart takes flight and joins the song of creation, praising the Love who comes to our lowest places, wraps us in a mantle of mercy and carries us home.

For Christ descends into the pains and losses that still our gladness to lift us from desolation into the delight of Love’s holy presence.

The Holy One created us to know the joy that wafts around, above and within me as children’s voices sing the truth we most need. Love comes. Love comes to sweep our hearts into joy, no matter how cold the winds blow.

David L. Miller

Tuesday, December 21, 2021

The hope of our longing

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. (Romans 1:7b)

The sights and sounds of this blessed season stir a primal longing for grace and peace within us. Try as it might, the world’s doubt and cynicism cannot kill the hope of our longing.

We hunger for grace, for an impossible and improbable love freely given, poured out, charming our hearts, igniting joy.

And grace comes. It comes in sunlight piercing the gloom of a winter day, playing across my desk, dispersing the clouds that shadow the heart. It awakens tears as I hug my grandsons, startled by the awareness that the love I feel is God’s love flowing through me, holding us fast, pulling us close so that we are one with this great and improbable Love.

This is the hope of our longing and the illumination of our understanding. For such moments of oneness reveal the mystery of our Lord Jesus Christ. He is the unity of transcendent, everlasting love and mortal life, whose grace draws us into the heart of God and satisfies our longing.

David L. Miller

Saturday, December 18, 2021

What Love does

‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel’, which means, ‘God is with us.’ (Matthew 1:23)


I sat in the courtroom behind my friend, accused of a crime he did not commit. We spoke each time the judge called a recess, and each time he thanked me for being there, with him, until one time when I finally knew exactly what to say.

“I am not here because you are in trouble,” I said. “I am here because I love you, and I carry the love of a whole community that loves you. I wouldn’t be anywhere else.”

Neither would the God who comes to us in our Lord Jesus Christ.

There’s division of opinion in the history of Christian thought. Some say God needed to become flesh, Emmanuel, because of our sin, our death and sorrow.

The other opinion holds that the Incarnation was God’s plan before the creation of the universe. In other words, Christ was always going to come from eternity into time even if there had been no sin, no death, no broken lives and wounded hearts to heal.

Christ comes because God longs to be with the beloved.

Love wouldn't have it any other way.

David L. Miller

Tuesday, December 07, 2021

Lost & found

What do you think? If a shepherd has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went stray? (Matthew 18:12)

It was the day my son was to audition at the Eastman School of Music. We stopped at a shopping mall to pick up something and kill a bit of time until the appointed hour.

At one point, Aaron went one direction; I went another, and somehow ... over 45 minutes or so ... I lost track of him. I walked the mall once, twice, three time or more with a growing sense of panic that something had happened to him in this place and city unknown to us, just as he was to embark on an adventure of great beauty and meaning for which I had prayed since the earliest days of his life.

Nothing unusual about this. I was just being a father, and my anxious emotions and fearful thoughts were exactly those of mothers and fathers since the dawn of time.

In such moments, the heart learns just how greatly it is possible to love. Gripped by a fear only love can create, we become what are, who we are, a little bit more than we usually are.

For each us, from the greatest to the least, the best to the worst, is an image of the Love in whose likeness we are fashioned, the Love who searches for the beloved.

And if we lose track of that, which we do all-too-often, this blessed season bears us into the mystery of God in whose image we are made. For in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Divine Majesty puts on flesh and reveals the Love who seeks us in all the places and all the ways we get lost, lest we forget exactly how precious we are.

David L. Miller  

 

 

Friday, December 03, 2021

An invocation of peace

The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. (John 1:9)

Prayer has no words today, but words have been my life so I must try to name what can’t be named, knowing only that I will fail and that failure at this is better than every success I have ever known.

For today I do not pray; I am prayed, a participant in a prayer that has neither beginning nor end. When it happens all one can do is to consent or refuse. And refusal is madness.

So I sit, speechless, as winter light slants through blinds in the loft, oblique rays finding faces on the tapestry that hangs on the west wall. Joseph and the magi stand there, but the golden beams pass over and leave them in shadow to illumine Mary, the child and one magi kneeling at the manger, as speechless as I.

Time stands still as the light lingers on their faces, embracing and holding them as one with the child, drawing eyes and heart into this circle of light where every longing falls silent as the air around them.

A photo across the way fills the dining room wall. Black and white, a gravel road stretches into the distance, lined by dark trees, leaves of summer leaves long gone. Disappearing into a thin morning fog, who knows where the road goes ... or ends? Perhaps a cottage where warmth and light welcome wandering souls home, where we finally see each other as we are, beloved beyond measure, though we knew it not.

And this is my life, our life, shrouded in unknowing, yet illumined by the mystery of the light that shines from this child, warming everyone who cares enough to come close and kneel there, taken in by Mary‘s wonder, enveloped in the light from that child that shines through the centuries to this day, this morning, this moment, filling the silence ... and me.

Silently, it speaks the knowledge of what cannot be known, the mystery of Loving Light that streams from eternity into time, sweeping our uncomprehending willingness into this prayer of blessed communion with the Love for which we have always longed.

And on the white mantle beside me, one word, spelled out in wooden letters, Peace.

What more is there to say?

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 

Tuesday, November 30, 2021

Among the trees

 When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? (Psalm 8:3-4)

‘Tis a gift to see. Walking west, November nearly gone, daylight fading, a valance of luminous orange clouds frame the horizon, shouting one last “alleluia” for the gift of light.

Extraordinary. Except it isn’t. Heaven’s display is common for any with a mind to stop and look, even here in this suburban woods as radiance pales to pink, filtered among trees, the fruit of their boughs, brown and dry, rustling at my feet as I stop and listen to the silence, grateful for eyes to see and a heart that knows.

Reach for the phone to picture it? No. Let it go. Just be here. Only the heart has a lens large enough to capture this day’s final grace with gratitude for the gift of seeing more than autumn’s end.

For both gift and Giver offer themselves in this moment.

The mystery of life is here—first, that anything at all should exist and second, that I should not only exist but be allowed, privileged to see, to feel, to know my little life caught up in a mystery as grand as the universe itself. Why? How? And what are these tears that sing a song of praise for which I have no words?

Perhaps it because here, standing still here among the trees, I know: There is Love within all this wonder and in the wonder of every love I have ever known.

And this Love wants me. Yes, wants me. And wants me to know what I know here, among the trees.

David L. Miller

 

Saturday, November 20, 2021

No sweeter word

Peace, peace, to the far and the near, says the Lord; and I will heal them. (Isaiah 57:19)

There is no sweeter word in our language than peace, and no experience that seems more elusive. Efforts to bring peace to our hearts fail because peace is not ours to give.

Peace is the gift of being enveloped in the light of Eternal Love, which is to say the Love God is.

Peace, Peace, to those far and near, Isaiah proclaimed to those who dwelt in desolation. Their spirits fainting, God seemed to have turned away from them. 

We know the feeling. The light of love fades, hope flees and our barren hearts wander in halls of sadness, lost and alone.

But God who dwells in realms unreachable is also near, ready to appear as we pray our aching hearts and discover God’s great love amid our humble tears.

Feeling again the warmth of the divine heart, we know ... God’s deepest desire is to speak peace to the needy and broken places within us.

So say it now, Peace.

Peace ... to every far part of your heart, every corner embraced in loving light.

David L. Miller

 

Tuesday, November 16, 2021

Within the gaze

Now [Jesus] was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, ‘Woman, you are set free from your ailment.’  (Luke 13:10-12)

We see ourselves in Jesus’ eyes as he watches the bent woman shuffling across the cobblestones.

She says nothing but longs for a life she cannot have. I suspect that is why she came to the synagogue the day Jesus was there, hoping for healing and release.

Still, she could not have known what was in Jesus’ eyes. She could not have known he would see and touch her with a healing hand, which irritated the synagogue leader who imagined good order is more important than divine compassion.

For that is what is in Jesus’ eyes, for each of us.

We live encompassed within the compassionate gaze of an Everlasting Love, who reaches out to enfold us in Love’s healing presence.

Not everything gets healed in this life. We all remain more than a little stooped and bent. Tragedy and sorrow persist, and even the touch of divine love leaves us hungry for more.

But take a moment. Imagine his eyes ... on you. Now, say his name, Jesus. Healing starts here.

David L. Miller

 

Saturday, November 13, 2021

Renew my heart

 Bless the Lord, O my soul ... who redeems your life from the Pit. (Psalm 103:2a, 4a)

We need not go far to know the Love God is for us. Our own bodies tell the tale.

Our anxious shoulders sigh with relief when a gentle word releases the grip of guilt or when open arms dissolve our shame. Our lungs fill with life as sickness fades and strength flows fresh into our limbs.

Light floods our hearts and evaporates our fear when the surgery is successful or when the garage door rumbles, telling us our beloved is safely home amid the storm.

Our ever-loving God is closer and kinder than we can ever understand. God is the love and grace who seeks and finds us wherever we go, however we struggle, in joy and pain, even when the troubles we endure are of our own making.

In many and various ways, Love comes to restore and renew us, saving us from sadness and despair, fear and doubt, lifting us even from the pit of death.

“Bless the Lord, O my soul,” the psalmist cried, loving the Love who seeks us our whole life through, saving us from all that would silence our praise.

David L. Miller

Thursday, September 30, 2021

Finding peace

 Whatever house you enter, first say, “Peace to this house!” And if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person; but if not, it will return to you. (Luke 10:5-6)

Emud shouted in my direction as he stumbled up the steps to his front door, juggling a package in one arm and his two-year old daughter in the other. I didn’t understand him but thought I heard the Arabic word for peace, salaam, through his accent.

“Peace to you,” I shouted back, and he smiled. I’d misunderstood him.

He was trying to tell me his wife had given birth to their third child. A son had joined his two gorgeous little girls who grace the world just by walking across the lawn ... and picking my flowers.

Emud beamed, juggled the black-haired angel in his arms and went into the house. I returned to the dirt in my flowerbed, feeling something I wish I could switch on anytime I needed it.

Peace.

Today is one of those days I wish I had that switch. But maybe I do. Maybe we all do.

Maybe it is as simple as savoring the beauty of children. Maybe it is misunderstanding your neighbor and giving him and yourself exactly what we all most need, a taste of what the entire world needs.

Maybe it is writing these simple, utterly inadequate words and realizing for the umpteenth time that the world is filled with glory and that glory is the Love who arises within us whenever we share a joy or a sorrow and exchange a single word, peace.

I remember when “sharing the peace” was introduced ... or reintroduced ... into Christian liturgies after centuries of its absence. Some found it intrusive, an interruption of their prayer and contemplation.

Loving time for silence, I understand this, but for me it is a sacrament of Love’s living presence, a joyous celebration of giving each other what we cannot give ourselves.

The blessed irony of peace is that the moment you give it away you find it in yourself—and learn how to live with your neighbor in this crazy world.

I hope I see Emud again today. I know exactly what I’ll say. “Peace to you, Emud. I look forward to seeing your son.”

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wednesday, September 29, 2021

Trust Love alone

When the days drew near for [Jesus] to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem(Luke 9:51)

The spiritual journey inevitably takes one from what is known to a new country, to ways and places where the joys and comforts of what was must be abandoned.

One can try to hold on, crossing back into old ways in a vain attempt to revive past graces, but they lose their savor. The place you knew and which knew you moves on. The tired cliché is correct: You can’t go home again ... because the home that was is no longer there. Everything changes and so do you.

The road is our home, the road ahead. The Spirit of Life always leads beyond what we have known and cherished to deeper truth and more difficult ways that the heart might surrender its rickety justifications and defenses and learn to trust Love alone.

Biblical stories echo this journey.

The ancient patriarch, Abraham, leaves home with Sarah, his wife, looking for a new land and a new life, somehow trusting the Lord will show him the place when the time is right.

The captive Israelites escape Egyptian bondage and wander homeless, seeking the land God promised yet constantly looking over their shoulders, wondering if they should have stayed in Egypt.

Now, Jesus leaves the lake and villages of Galilee to climb steeper hills in Samaria on his way to Jerusalem. Determination lines his face as he is resolute to complete his mission, likely aware he will die painfully in the process.

He could have stayed safely home in Galilee. Abraham could have remained in the old country. The Israelites could have stayed in Egypt and avoided the blistering heat and deprivation of the desert.

But they didn’t. They trusted the Mystery who spoke in their hearts was a great and unconquerable Love leading them and everyone with them home to a country more alive and beautiful than any they had ever known.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sunday, September 26, 2021

Wilhelm’s eyes

For your steadfast love is before my eyes, and I walk in faithfulness to you. (Psalm 26:3)

Rest well, old man. Rest in the Love I saw in your eyes.

Wilhelm Linss passed into the eternal love I knew in him on a sunny Saturday morning. That’s when I heard the news that I knew would soon come, regretting only that I was not there to bless him one more time as he had blessed me.

He always sat at the aisle-end of the second row of pews at the front of the sanctuary to shorten the distance between him and the Holy Eucharist at the time of distribution. His balance was failing. The last time I was to place the host in his hand he slipped and began to fall as I and one other soul privileged to love him interrupted his descent.

He righted himself and held out his wrinkled old hands to receive, one more time, as I fought back the tears of loving him and loving the Lord who held us both, the Lord and Love who holds him even now.

He was old in the truest sense, having lived fully the years he was granted, dwelling not in the shallows but in the depth of the beauty and ugliness, pain, absurdity and joyous glory of being human on this planet, his life caught up in the juggernaut of history that might have crushed him, but mercifully it did not. And many are better for it.

I came to know him best as he sat at my left elbow during the adult class and discussion that followed worship before the pandemic shuttered that joy. He couldn’t hear well so I often leaned left, speaking in his direction, knowing he wanted to hear, often asking for his thoughts, calling forth his years as a New Testament professor.

He spoke slowly and soft, as was his temperament, his accent thick, at times impenetrable, his words always welcome as we leaned-in to receive whatever came out of his one precious life.

Most precious of all was the day he shared what it was to be a POW in the waning days of WWII. He was drafted into the German army, a teenager, in the final months when the Nazis forced virtually all able-bodied males to serve, trying to stave off the inevitable destruction of the Third Reich.

Wilhelm, quickly captured, became a POW in a French camp where German professors, POWs like himself, began their own university to teach the next generation and stave off the aimless boredom of camp existence.

It was there he studied theology and continued to learn biblical languages, and it was there that he produced one of the most precious things I have ever held in my hands. Wilhelm brought it to our Sunday discussion to show us.

He had learned piano as a boy, and in the camp composed a little music. That is what he showed us, a short piano piece, written on strips of toilet paper. He fashioned the cover from thicker paper that had been cut from a sack that had contained flour or some other commodity. Wilhelm stitched the little booklet together with thread on the left margin.

We passed it among ourselves, gently turning the pages to see the staves and notes traced by Wilhelm’s much younger hands, several of us brushing away tears, feeling the suffering hope in which he had created this masterpiece—and the long years and miles it had traveled with him to arrive at this moment to grace our lives and awaken our love for him, for God, for each other and for the glory of being a human soul in God’s own image.

We knew we sat in the presence of holiness and grace; we saw it in his eyes and felt it stinging our own.

Near Veteran’s Day, the congregation honors those who served with a red rose and special prayers at the start of the liturgy. The following Veteran’s Day I invited all our veterans to come forward for this observance, then looked over to Wilhelm in the second row.

He shook his head, no, but I insisted he come up, too, this one who served in an enemy army. How could we not honor his life, seasoned by war, deepened through suffering, graced by the Love shining in his old eyes?

Rest well, old man, and shine in the Love that illumined your life ... and mine. Thank you.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Saturday, September 25, 2021

Fall into the Heart

While everyone was amazed at all that he was doing, he said to his disciples, ‘Let these words sink into your ears: The Son of Man is going to be betrayed into human hands.’ But they did not understand this saying... (Luke 9:43b-45a)

I understand why Jesus’ disciples didn’t understand. They didn’t want to. They didn’t want to consider the goodness they felt when near him could and would be lost. The life radiating from him illumined and warmed their mortal hearts with hope that life could be more than whatever small joys they managed to cram into a precious few years.

They had experienced the Extraordinary. Without Jesus, without his palpable nearness, the touch of his flesh and the sound of his voice, life would again become  ... normal, mundane, ordinary.

Who wants normal when you have known and felt that which exceeds every expectation? And who wants to contemplate the inevitable passing of everything we know and love and are?

All of life is shadowed by death, every loss a little reminder of what cannot be denied. Implicitly knowing this from our earliest days, we anxiously grasp as much as we can hold, a death-grip on whatever good has touched our lives and hearts.

But there is one more thing to know, just one ... that changes everything. The Love who gives life brings Life Extraordinaire from every loss, if we but release our grip on what was ... and trust that Love always has a new day waiting to be born.

This new day ... that can be everyday ...  radiates the Life and Love of being with Jesus, our souls alive with the hope and love he awakened in his first disciples and now in us.

It was necessary for him to suffer and die. Only so could he reveal the fundamental truth of our existence. The Love who holds us all never lets go.

So we ... in every struggle and every loss ... can release our grip and let ourselves fall into the heart of Love at heart of the universe.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 

Wednesday, September 22, 2021

In all that is love

 

Then Jesus called the twelve together and gave them power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases, and he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal. (Luke 9:1-20)

The kingdom of God is the energy of divine love pouring from the Loving Mystery, drawing all that is into its healing waters.   

To be captured in its flow, even for a moment, transports the heart into the joy-filled freedom of knowing all that we are is welcome, enveloped in the Love who draws us near to heal our hearts and make us whole.

The disciples knew this Love in Jesus’ presence as he sent them out to bless, heal and announce the great tide of God’s energetic love present among them. Their power was the surge of divine love awakened within them, freeing them from their fears to bless, welcome and share the Love inundating their hearts.

The power of the kingdom remains available to us in these latter days.

It is the joy and freedom awakened when our hearts know and are filled with the Love who embraces us despite ourselves, our sins and failures. The energy of divine love is known in all that is love, in the welcome of friends, the beauty of an autumn sun, the compassionate tear that stings our eyes over the suffering of a friend ... or of human souls a thousand miles away.

All of this and so much more is the energy of the Love who is and was and ever shall be embracing our lives, lifting us out of ourselves, out of our funk, that our startled faces may glow with the light of an eternal love, free and filled with the joy God intends.

David L. Miller

Tuesday, September 21, 2021

How to listen

 

Then pay attention to how you listen; for to those who have, more will be given; and from those who do not have, even what they seem to have will be taken away. (Luke 8:18)

It is not the knowledge of many things that fills the heart but the savor of a few. So listen ... and hear.

Hear the lilt of a voice that awakens hope, renewing confidence and joy. Savor the voice and the emotions stirred. They tell you how to listen to the Voice who speaks within you.

Even more, they are the Voice of Love restoring your wholeness and setting you free to live beyond the bondage of failures, sad memories and anxious preoccupations.

The human heart more easily dwells on what is wrong, what may go wrong, what is lost, what we no longer or could never have.

But the Voice of Love draws us forward, out of our internal quagmire into the lightness of being, out of isolation into the communion of mutual love and regard, out of ourselves into the wholeness of relationships that awaken gratitude for the goodness of life and the sacred beauty of loving laughter.

So listen to the moments that awaken life in your mortal being. Pay attention, not once in a while but every hour. Recall and retell moments that freed your heart to breathe. Turn them over. Examine them from every direction lest they be lost. 

And give thanks that the Voice of Love found you ... exactly where you are.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 

 

Saturday, September 18, 2021

Life beyond the weeds

 As for [the seed]that fell among the thorns, these are the ones who hear; but as they go on their way, they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature. (Luke 8:14)

More than ever I come to learn that one must live from within, daily reclaiming who you know yourself to be as a creature of Love’s presence,  discovering anew the hunger to know and become the Love the heart desires beyond all else.

Even the hunger for that Love is the Mystery, who is Love, present within, drawing us to know and become the fullness which is the proper destiny of every human soul.

The seed is the word of God, Jesus said, and it falls into various soils, every one of which is found within us. Word should be capitalized, of course, Word, Logos, Love incarnate.

The Word is the energy of the divine Spirit active in all that is, moving everything toward wholeness, to greater unity with others, with creation and with the mystery of Love who unceasingly draws us beyond ourselves to touch and know more love, beauty, joy and wonder.

The seed is sown, but the wounds of living, our anxieties and angers choke its growth, sometimes to the point we wonder if it has died within us. But the seed remains, still bearing the life of the One who is Love.

There is a strange horticulture that governs the growth of this seed. You can exhaust your time and energy hacking away at the weeds that get in its way, but this doesn’t help much because the damn things keep growing back. Meanwhile, you are frustrated and exhausted.

Time is better spent in places and with people among whom love and laugher naturally spring up to fill your heart with gratitude for the world around you and the simple pleasure of being alive for just that one moment.

The love that surges within is, of course, the Love from whom we come and to whom we go, and that Love is more effective with the weeds than our herbicides.

David L. Miller

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Wednesday, September 15, 2021

Through him

For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. (John 3:17)

Salvation through Christ is a participation game, not something we watch as innocent bystanders.

We pass through him, which means living through the experience of dying and rising, losing and discovering what we lost was a pale shadow of the life we receive, if we are willing truly to let go of what was.

Christ’s way must become ours, a way of trusting the unconquerable Love who awakens life in us exactly at the point we thought we had lost it, when what we imagined was most real and alive in us is stripped away.

Dead to what we thought we were and could yet be, we wait, even as he laid lifeless in the tomb, waiting for the great awakening to the truth that there is more.

And that more is life, deeper connection, greater awareness, more intimate communion, heart-to-heart, with the One who is Life and Love.

Every one of life’s defeats and losses is a dress rehearsal for the death we ultimately all die. But if we give ourselves to the process of dying and rising along life’s way, we begin to understand that ... just maybe ... there is nothing to fear at all.

There is life on the other side of every cross.

David L. Miller

Monday, September 13, 2021

Full of days

A good person out of the store of goodness in his heart produces good, but an evil person out of a store of evil produces evil; for from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks. (Luke 6:45)


Birthdays come and go for as long as we have them, and today is mine, age 69.

Prayers of late reach not to the past but toward what shall be, to whom I shall be, and this verse provides a focus as good as any other.

I want a heart as big and embracing as the hearts who have embraced me along the way, magnanimous hearts whose sharp edges had been worn smooth by life so that judgment falls away, allowing a gentle welcome for all sorts and conditions of our wounded humanity.

I am surprised to remember this is an old desire in me. As a boy I read Old Testament stories of Abraham, Isaac and David and would come upon a phrase that stopped me, “he died old and full of days.”

Even as boy I knew this is what I wanted. I prayed it aloud on my bed, and I knew it meant more than living a long time.

It meant savoring the days, holding everything close in the heart, joys and sorrows, success and bitter pains, rejecting nothing, trusting the Holy One is in each moment, in each experience offering beauty and grace, hope and love if you dare hold it close, not fearing the pain or loss.

I could not have written this at nine or 10, but in some hidden, inarticulate way I already understood because a Spirit beyond my own was breathing life into my heart.

How I wish I had always lived this wisdom instead of losing myself a million times and forgetting the grace my young heart already knew. I regret my lack of faith along the way, the times I substituted my plans for fulfillment for what God had in mind for me.

But it seems that God will not be cheated. The Spirit already present in childhood refuses to be refused, ever drawing us back to embrace what is, expanding our hearts into what we will yet be.  

So today, I remember souls who blessed me from the fullness of their hearts, praying that I, like them, may grow old and full of days, full of grace.

David L. Miller

Saturday, September 11, 2021

Our Lady of the Lights

 He will not break a bruised reed or quench a smoldering wick. (Matthew 12:20a)

Sobering memories dampen the spirit today, September 11, memories and faces.

There was the mother I met on her deck in Brooklyn a few days after the collapse of the World Trade Center towers in New York. Looking at the ash on the deck rail, she refused to disturb the dust, wondering aloud if it was her daughter.

I remember a parochial school teacher, her voice breaking as she described standing for hours at the school door, holding her student, waiting for a father who never showed up.

But more than these is the indelible image of a young woman at Union Square in lower Manhattan. She kept watch over thousands of candles as hundreds sat around her in stunned silence, staying long into the wee hours.

The memorial grew larger every night, and every night she was there when I sat among the silent and watched, transfixed by the beauty of her soul and the grieving love of those who held each other in the darkness.  

Night breezes would extinguish a few candles from time to time, and she would crawl among them, gently stretching and twisting lest she topple one of the fragile flames as she relit a smoldering wick.

She never lifted her eyes, not once that I could see. She kept watch over the lights as though they were her children, tenderly caring for each one through the night.

I never learned her name. She spoke to no one, and I didn’t dare interrupt her vigil. It would have been sacrilege to distract her from a work so holy.

When I wrote my story I called her Our Lady of the Lights, the Madonna of Manhattan.

Sitting there, we were all her children, the light of her love holding us all together, warming us in the night.

I wonder where she is today. I wonder if she ever really knew the beauty of what she did ... or how grateful at least one of us is 20 years later.

But I doubt I’m the only one.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 

 

Friday, September 10, 2021

Love has us all

 

But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. (Luke 6:35)


Nothing is less realistic than imagining you can work up pleasant thoughts about those who hurt or belittled you. We carry a thousand wounds from childhood and whenever we have been injured along the way, typically trying to push them aside as we age as if that were possible.

Ignore them as we may, they remain in wounded corners of the psyche, appearing at unpredictable times to remind us that there is work left undone.

Take a long walk away from the noise of traffic, construction down the street, a plane overhead, the music of a familiar voice calling you to necessities of the day. Soon enough, the mind becomes a quiet pool from whose depths  memories appear, words you wish you’d never heard, a disparaging glance, slights large and small that still cut from decades past.

No act of will can make them disappear, and the self-righteous ego rails against the hurt, conjuring reprisals to hurl against the ghosts that haunt your wounded heart. Or maybe that’s just me.

But I doubt it.

The necessary work is that of forgiveness, which is a really an invitation to ride the wave of a very great love, letting it pick you up and carry you along until it breaks on the rocks, splashing over the wounded places in your heart and the wounding faces you have long carried.

Maybe then you can see them as they are, every one of them as imperfect as yourself and as needy. And as loved, by the Love who is that wave longing to lift us from old hurts into the freedom to let it go, knowing ... Love has us all, every last one of us.

It the only healing.

David L. Miller

 

Thursday, September 09, 2021

One of the crowd

And [Jesus] came down with them and stood on a stretch of level ground. A great crowd of his disciples and a large number of the people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon came to hear him and to be healed of their diseases (Luke 6:17-18a)


You don’t really understand this scene until you imagine yourself amid the crowd, craving Jesus’ touch, knowing you have needs you cannot meet.

It is better to speak of need instead of needs, however. What niggles deeply within is the hunger to feel truly and wonderfully alive, to be lifted beyond the sadness of our mortality and be touched by something, by someone who fills our being with a life that transcends the life we are living.

This is why they clamored after Jesus. They craved the mysterious something that was in him, aching to feel and know it within themselves. Surely, they suffered diseases and maladies of all sorts, but beneath these was the gift and burden of their humanity crying out for food that satisfies the hunger they could not name.

Our humanity begins to die within us when this desire is lost to the despair of believing there is nothing more to life than getting the best we can out of the years we have.

They are my brothers and my sisters, these souls who crowded near Jesus, who hungered to touch him, who wanted him to hear their voices and turn and see them and reach out his hand.

When you feel this, when you see that hand reaching out and pulling you into an embrace, it is then you understand what words cannot convey. You know the heart of the One who is the heart of God for whom your heart hungers.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

Monday, September 06, 2021

The final freedom

 

September 6, 2021

On another sabbath  [Jesus]entered the synagogue and taught, and there was a man there whose right hand was withered. The scribes and the Pharisees watched him to see whether he would cure on the sabbath, so that they might find an accusation against him. (Luke 6:6-7)

It is Jesus’ freedom that most impresses me and which I most want. Opponents watch his every move, seeking opportunities to pounce, but Jesus is marvelously free from all this.

Neither the judgments of opponents nor the approval of friends define or determine his actions. He acts according to inner impulse, living out the identity he is within, undeterred by those who denounce him.

What defines him, of course, is the oneness he shares with the Loving Mystery with whom his heart communes. He is like all the rest of us in this regard. Only in communion with a great love do we know and find freedom to be the soul we are.

I find myself in a unique position, different from any I have known in my 69 years. Many things that defined me are gone ... and gone for good—professional standing, role, place and position, along with whatever privileges and respect they afforded.

What is left, however, is greater than what was before, an opportunity to enter the final freedom found only as one releases the external supports the insecure heart uses to give itself significance, an opportunity to allow my heart to rest in God alone.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 


 [D1]

Monday, August 30, 2021

Just breathe

 

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me
    because he has anointed me
        to bring glad tidings to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives.”
(Luke 4:18)


Back in his hometown, Jesus preaches a sermon that begins with these words. Everything goes well until he suggests the good news he brings cannot be limited to “people like us.”

This is the first and last thing one should know about the Spirit of God. It cannot be hemmed in, limited or predicted. The Spirit blows where it will, Jesus was known to say. You never know how or in whom the Spirit may show up.

But you can recognize it whenever and wherever it appears, if you know what to look for.

The Spirit has one big work: breathing life into creation, which means you and everything else there is.

If you are walking down the street and see the silly smile of someone who is happy just to be alive, grateful for reasons they may not understand, you are seeing an example of the Spirit’s best work.

The Spirit is about freedom, about life, about feeling your heart lift from burdens that literally crush life out of you. It is about liberation for people oppressed by anything and everything—physically, emotionally and spiritually—that crushes their spirits and drains their joy for the wonder of being alive.

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, Jesus said at his hometown sermon, which means he is about liberating bodies, minds and spirits that they might shine with the light of life within them.

That light and life is the Spirit’s breath that is in everything that lives, right down to the spastic squirrels burying acorns among my black-eyed susans.  

The Spirit’s greatest friends have been busy in Covid wards and Afghani airports and Louisiana bayous. Wherever you see life doing battle with death ... know who you are looking at.

And take a very deep breath.

David L. Miller