Withness

One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding [Jesus] and saying, ‘Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!’ But the other rebuked him, saying, ‘Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? … Then he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ He replied, ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.’ (Luke 23:39-40; 42-43)

Your presence is enough, I say to my beloved, Dixie, when she apologizes for falling asleep (again) in the middle of a movie. And it is. It is enough that she is here, with me, and I am not alone, bereft of the love that has enabled most of whatever it is that I am, have been and will yet be, a sacrament of the Greater Love whom I ceased trying to name years ago.

It is a kind of paradise to know yourself attended by a love you neither deserve nor imagined could be quite real because it seems too good to be true. But isn’t this what we want and need from the loves of our lives?

Our silent hearts, if not also our lips, speak the truth: Please, whatever happens, be with me. A more sincere prayer is difficult to imagine.

Little wonder, then, that Jesus’ words stir the heart “You will be with me in Paradise,” he promises. The two most important words are … with me, for with him we feel and know a Withness without limits. With him, we can walk the way of our lives, looking to our side, seeing him near, feeling the Love who inhabits him whole, knowing the Presence who stills our noisy hearts.

Such is my prayer many days. Let me feel and know myself with you, for with you everything is alright and without you nothing is right.

Perhaps this is why the death of the taunting criminal beside Jesus is most poignant on this winter day. For if paradise is to be with a great and ever-attending love, then despair, hell, is a closed heart no long praying, hoping and longing for whatever Love’s living presence might give in whatever place you find yourself.

Wherever that is, the promise of Jesus is that the Love you want and so desperately need wants you even more. Our hunger to be with a great and constant Love is the echo of God’s hunger in the mystery of our own hearts.

David L. Miller