The great beauty

Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom (Matthew 21:43)

In every goodness, every graced smile and every beauty of the human heart, the kingdom of the Loving One is known, regardless of the doctrine believed or denied.

Graced are we, if we have eyes to see it. For then, every moment is an occasion for knowing the heart of God melting the icy cynicism that chills our hearts. Graced are we, too, if the love’s embers spark a tender flame for the crying needs that crowd the news any time you risk watching.

The Spirit, Jesus says, blows where it will, and we don’t control it. But we surely know Love’s Spirit when its breeze brushes our flesh and opens our heart.

We know when we feel gratitude for the holy privilege of being alive and when love for this earth and its troubled inhabitants bubbles within. We know when the world’s most bitter suffering awakens the heart’s most gracious impulse. We know when the simplicity of human grace and care awakens the beauty we hide and moves us to share whatever share of it still lives within us.

The blessed kingdom for which we long and desperately need comes only as we open our hearts to give and receive the Love who comes in every love and every beauty. Its beauty appears when we seek for others the kindness and justice we naturally want for ourselves. And it is blocked whenever we indulge our egos or demand our rights as if there were no higher call.

The kingdom’s great beauty shines in the crucified Jesus, who refuses his rights in the name of loving enemies and forgiving those who have no right to anything but his rejection and condemnation.

But it also belongs to those who hunger and thirst for that love, not only for themselves but for everyone and everything, everywhere. Lord only knows, most of us do a lousy job of loving that way, our best efforts stumbling at best.

But the desire to know and share the sweet fruits of this love are a sure sign the Spirit’s untamable winds are blowing. And blow they will, so often revealing God’s loving rule in places and people whom you’d least expect, even in yourself.

David L. Miller