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A long night’s journey into life
I trusted in your
steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will
sing to the Lord, because he has dealt bountifully with me.
(Psalm 13:5-6)
Tears are telling. Warm as life and silent as night, they are
the voice of your soul. They come to remind you that you are so much more than
the thoughts you direct from one thing to another to navigate your days.
They sneak up on you, these tears, like at a moment when
gratitude overwhelms the heart from a hidden reservoir rising within to wash away
everything that is not love.
It is then we are finally ourselves, not the one you routinely
show the world but the self the Blessed Source made as an emblem of Love’s holy
image in time and space.
So it was as, we sat at a table in a hospital lounge, waiting
for news of a heart removed and another implanted in a young girl. We waited,
parents and grandparents, pastors and friends, seated in a holy temple of healing,
knowing our beloved lay in the hands of hearts dedicated to preserve what only
One can create.
And all the while, we knew: in another room, in another hospital,
in another town another family wept tears of another sort while giving a gift
of life to be winged over a Midwest prairie and rushed through Chicago streets
to waiting hands who would sew life back into a girl named Sydney. Our Sydney.
Opening my mouth to speak only tears came out, gratitude for a
holy place given to heal what is broken, for the hands who packed a heart for travel,
for the pilot of the plane, and the driver of the transport car, for the 24-hour
days and long years of study and practice that enable human hands to do what
was once unthinkable, for a grieving family that suffered the unthinkable and
still managed to give; and for the family at this table so palpably filled with
fear, love and hope that we might burst amid the long hours of unknowing.
Words capture but a glimpse of what our hearts know. Tears do
that job. And two words, thank you. Thank you … for all of it, for all
of us, for the whole blessed mess of living and dying, all of it teaching us
the beauty of loving and discovering we are more human and more like you,
Loving Mystery, than we had imagined.
Thank you for the love wringing prayers of hope and healing
from our hearts and for the tears that do the talking when nothing else can.
And thank you, Holy One, for the beauty of a life preserved.
Our Sydney.
David L. Miller
