With Mary, pondering

 When the angels went away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.” And they went with haste, and found Mary and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. And when they saw it they made known the saying which had been told them concerning this child…. But Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart. (Luke 2:15-17, 19)

I can’t let Christmas go. The world moves on, even the church moves on. But I cannot. I want only to linger at the stable, look at Mary, bask in the lamp light, stand among the shepherds and hold the child.

Not just for now, but tomorrow and every tomorrow to come because … standing among them in open-mouthed wonder … I know who I am.

A deep knowing, not of mind but heart, awakens within me as I watch the scene, waiting for the moment Mary nods at me to pick up the child and hold him in my arms, as I held my own children, my grandsons, and dozens of children who broke my heart in places I once travelled to tell their stories.

Holding Jesus, my soul awakens to the truth of my own being—and the being of every human soul that has … or ever will … draw the sweet breath of life on this unlikely little planet.

We hold a mystery, every last one of us, and that mystery is the Christ, the life and love he is within us. Not just in the good or the faithful, the just or the beautiful, but all of us.

We bear the life I hold in the arms of my heart at the Bethlehem manger.

The beauty of divine love at the heart of Jesus is our true identity. It is the soul, the deep heart, we forget or hide or lose or never knew, sleeping within, hidden beneath layer upon layer of facades, images and identities we project to the world.

But we are far more wondrous and beautiful than any of those things. We are embodied temples of the Love who made us, recipients of the love and life of Christ by virtue of being human, given, freely, gratis, in our creation in Christ’s image.

Tragically, many go to their grave without ever knowing, feeling or waking to the truth that the Love Christ is … is their divine DNA, an eternal loving joy eager to be born to life in them.

This is why I cannot let Christmas go, ever. I don’t want to forget. I want to feel and be alive with the life God is within me, filled with hope, brimming with joy and eager to love. So, I hold Christmas as long as I can.

Singing songs in the night to the Love he is, I imagine the scene where he is given to the earth and held in Mary’s arms. I stand among the dumbfounded shepherds, and I reach out to hold the child, eager for any small stirring of his life to wake in me … that I may feel one with him, one in the Love he is, warmed by the wonder that this Love lives also in me, hungry to fill every corner of my being and every moment of my consciousness.

Seasons change; Christmas too soon passes. But like Mary, I will pray and ponder, holding the Life he is in my heart, knowing the Love who holds us all.

‘Come, Jesus, glorious heavenly guest, and keep your Christmas in our breast.’ (Nikolai F.S. Grundtvig)

Every mother who has ever loved …

 And while they were there, the time came for her to be delivered. And [Mary] gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn. (Luke 2:6-7)

If there is anything more beautiful, I know nothing of it. Swaddling Jesus, Mary is an icon of every mother who has ever loved a child.

Holding him, mother and child as one, her gaze fixed on the life in her arms, she cradles him warm in the gentleness of an exquisite tenderness, shielding him from the cold and the perils of living in a world that is seldom so tender.

And all these centuries later, I sit in the chair where I pray … and weep … at the unspeakable beauty of this mother and child, as she wraps him in bands of love and worry, joy and fear.

I watch … and see so many others who live large in my memory, each shimmering with a beauty far beyond my speaking. They’re all Mary, every last one of them, and their children are all Jesus.

There are so many, like the refugee mother sitting on her suitcase in the rough gravel of a Macedonian hillside, cradling her infant in a thin blanket against a relentless late winter wind, wondering if they will ever be able to go home again.

There were Somali mothers sitting outside makeshift tepees, fashioned from corrugated tin and plastic from war-torn buildings, denying themselves food to feed their children with what little they had, and then, especially, there’s that other one in South Sudan, who in my heart stands for so many thousands.

Wrapping her little one in filthy rags, the only thing she had, she hummed as she kept watch, knowing those rags would soon be a burial shroud, so like the mothers of Gaza, today.

I see them all … others, too, as I watch Mary cradle Jesus.

For, there’s another image this night that also shimmers with Mary’s beauty, my beloved Dixie, 20 years old, looking more like 17, dark brown hair falling on her shoulders, just home from the hospital, holding our first born, her smile alive with a joy I don’t think any man can ever understand. We can only watch and give thanks that the Holy One allows us the vision of infinite beauty.

Yes, she is there, too, as I watch Mary, her eyes gazing at me from across the centuries, inviting me to open my arms and hold Jesus, to cradle him near—even as some of those mothers in those troubled places invited me to do what I most wanted to do—hold the precious lives of their children in my arms as if I could protect them from the brutalities to which darkened hearts had subjected them.

And here lies the mystery that reduces (or elevates) me to tears every year.

Jesus, the Christ child, who bears the heart of God, the soul of Infinite Mercy appears in human flesh that we, as Mary, may see and touch and fall in love with everything he is … awakened to the Love he is … in the unsearchable depths of our own souls.

O Come, let us adore him.

The Beauty we bear

 And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! … And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.”  (Luke 1:41-42, 45)

I remember her hands. It’s been so long that the images run together.  I cannot recall whether they were Meta’s hands or maybe Grandma Lena’s hands. Maybe it was both of them … and then some.

I see two weathered, wrinkled hands, blue veins showing through shiny, thin flesh, nearly transparent on back. But that never mattered. As I remember, the hands always came together, cupping the cheeks of our children as we brought them through the door, flesh on flesh, loving delight, a sacrament of welcome celebrating the unblemished beauty of children’s smiles.

I see those hands as I watch Elizabeth welcome Mary, the Mother of our Lord. I’m in the room as she hears Mary’s voice calling her name. I see Elizabeth’s startled face as the child in her womb kicks and turns.

And I see her as she bursts through the door and takes Mary’s face in her hands and calls her blessed. I see … and hold the moment in my heart, for it is resplendent with love’s beauty, the beauty for which I long as Christmas draws near.

Far from the desire to possess something, it is a desire to be possessed, swept up and enveloped in a loving beauty, like that of Mary and Elizabeth as they enfold each other in joyful arms.

Mary’s beautiful heart, open and receptive to birth the beauty of God’s great mercy from the darkness of her womb, Elizabeth blessed to see the Beauty she bears, they twirl together, arms around each other, caught up in the dance of the Love who chose them.

Watching them is a bit like being at Meta’s doorstep again … or Grandma Lena’s, where Love’s dance reached out and enchanted our hearts.

It’s beautiful, all of it, the stories surrounding Jesus’ birth, the stories of love’s beauty in our own little lives. They’re all the same story, of course—the story of the Great Love, who will stop at nothing in an unceasing effort to sweep us up into Love’s own beauty.

Mary and Elizabeth, Meta and Lena and my kids … and all the rest of us … we’re all part of it. And when we remember, when we tell ourselves the tales of Love’s breathless beauty, the Beauty Mary birthed into our troubled world … is born in us.

For Christ lies in our own hearts, ever waiting to be born anew. All of us are ‘meant to be mothers of God,’ Meister Eckhart wrote centuries ago, ‘for God is always needing to be born.”

And the world has no greater need.

An inside story

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. (Philippians 4:4-5)

Very little makes me happier than mud on my boots as I walk a trail far from the sounds of any road or highway. I prefer out of the way places … or days when rough forest trails are still wet from rain or melted snow.

I know I will be alone for most of the miles, and my mind will freely wander among mysteries I don’t understand and prayers I barely know how to speak. But I speak, nonetheless, stumbling over my thoughts, talking into the Great Silence, who sometimes speaks back in the secret room of my soul to which God alone has access.

Today, the sun momentarily breaks through a moody December sky as I rise out of the woods into a tall grass prairie. My boots sucking into the mud of a sodden trail, barely a foot wide, I walk through a dense tunnel of dry, dead grasses, taller than my head, rustling in a breeze too warm for this time of year.

And I stop … and look at the sky, realizing … I’m happy, no, something more, a quiet joy, feeling held … inside an immense embrace … by a Love who loves for me to know I’m loved, whose arms are the grasses enveloping me on every side.

This is why I come out here, to feel myself inside this Love who unleashes a fountain of joy from that secret, inner room that is God’s own.

It doesn’t happen every time. But today a great ‘yes’ erupts from the depth of my being, ‘yes’ to life, ‘yes’ to the world, ‘yes’ to the Loving Mystery who bids me to don my boots and come out here to rediscover who I am and where I live.

For I live in the embrace of a great and unimaginable Love who enfolds all time and existence … and most certainly the sodden trails of Spiers Woods on a gloomy December day.

‘Rejoice in the Lord,’ Paul writes. He doesn’t need to tell me twice. Not here. Not now. But I repeat his words, wondering if the most important word in his exhortation is the smallest … ‘in.’

Out here, I know where I am. I’m not just in the woods but in the Lord, which is to say inside the Love the Lord is, inside the creation that flows from the infinitely abundant store of God’s heart, inside the story of God’s endless machinations to awaken the souls of human beings to the Love who loves them, inside the divine drama that enfolds from the unlikely birth of a peasant child in a Bethlehem stable.

I can’t think of any place I’d rather be, but then … we are all in this place, like it or not, whether we believe it or not. The story goes on, and every human soul (and everything else) is either a willing or unwilling participant in the story of God’s infinite love for this troubled world.

The willing know how privileged they are to be included, and joy spills from their souls with shouts and songs and prayers, like the shepherds who were the first privileged to kneel in the dust at the feet of the Christ child.

Looking back on my hike, I wish I’d kneeled out there … all alone … in the mud. It was a good place to say, ‘thank you … for including me.’

I think I’ll go back soon.

David L. Miller

Songs in the night

 The Lord, your God, is in your midst; … he will rejoice over you with gladness, he will renew you in his love; he will exult over you with loud singing as on a day of festival. (Zephaniah 3:17-18a)

I’ve been singing more lately. Maybe, it’s because the darkness gathers so early … or because Christmas is near … or because I long for something I cannot give myself.

Yes, this, a lifetime of longing takes me to a chair by the window where I page through my hymnal, seeking songs my heart knows, like tonight … as a cold rain drizzles through the downspouts in the cold December darkness.

I ache to sing myself home … where the heart that I am … and the Heart who made me for himself … are one heart, one love, breathing in time, if only for a moment or two, for this … is heaven.

The longing grows stronger this time of year, or perhaps it is stronger at this time of life … when the heart finally wakes to the one thing it most needs.

Singing in the night, songs come one after another. Advent songs, Christmas songs, whispered in the dark silence of the house, my voice once strong, now a tremorous prayer for God’s great love to fill me whole, banishing every doubt and sorrow and setting my sluggish heart to flight.

Some songs I sing over and over again, night in and night out, knowing how deeply they touch me and awaken my heart to the Love who loves me.

The Spirit breathed those songs in the hearts of those so divinely privileged to make music of the soul. Through these songs, the same Spirit fans love’s flame within me, opening a door in my heart for which I have no key.

Love is the only key, the Love who loves me, the Love who sings to my soul even as I sing in the night.

We sing together, my Lord and I. We are one in the music of the night. One in love, one in Spirit, singing Love’s eternal song, my heart’s holy longing still, at rest.

No, it won’t last. Joy will slip away. The weight of the world will crush it from my heart. I will lose the melody in the midst of my moods, anxieties and contrariness. But Love’s holy song does not end or fade.

The One who sings with me in the night makes melody in every love and beauty that touches our senses to beguile our hearts. The Loving Mystery, whose face is our Lord Jesus Christ, everlastingly sings Love’s everlasting song, hoping we will hear … and sing … all the way home.

David L. Miller

Nothing much

And this is my prayer that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you determine what is best (Philippians 1:9-10a)

Nothing much happened this week. But here I am, my heart hungry for something to share, so I will share my nothing much. Perhaps it is like yours.

I saw sand hill cranes again this week. Like always, I heard their soprano trill before my eyes found them against a freezing blue sky, wondering why they had not flown south a month ago, wondering, too, how they know how to mill around until they form a huge wedge and make their way, wondering, too, where I would be in the wedge if I were a crane, not in front to be sure, but in the middle somewhere, happy just to be among friends, which I was … just watching them, grateful, too.

It was nothing much, but I gave thanks for the Maker of cranes who enchant me and gladden my heart.

Then, there was yesterday at Starbucks. A Middle Eastern boy, seven, I’d say, thick waves of jet-black hair covering his head. Holding the door for his parents to leave, I also stepped through the doorway to purchase my daily fortification. Turning back, I held out my hand in a ‘give-me-five’ fashion. His brown hand quickly slapped down on mine. ‘Thank you, young man,’ I said. He smiled and turned to his parents, and we went our ways, his mom and dad obviously and properly proud of their boy.

It wasn’t much. But standing in line to place my order, the image of his little hand smacking mine lingered, and I gave thanks, praying for that boy, hoping his parents make a few more like him. The world needs them.

Then, there are the words that pull at my heart each day when I read my Bible and pray whatever the words move in me. ‘The Lord will come to his temple,’ I read in Malachi, the prophet. At this, I see Jesus walking in the temple in Jerusalem, beckoning me to be with him. And hope fills me, for I know: He will come, just as he always comes to this heart of mine, assuring me that I belong to him and am not alone.

It's nothing much, just a moment of time, a moment of prayer no one else sees or hears, but for the time of this knowing I am changed into an image of the love I see and feel.

Or, I read ‘the word of God came to John in the wilderness,’ and immediately feel my tears, knowing that the One John promised has come … and will come … and is already here … in this strange and undeniable hope brimming within me, his Spirit breathing life and love into my morning soul.

It's not much, but I remember despairing days when I felt so little, if any of this, and I give thanks for the love of this Holy Mystery who comes to people like me in the wilderness of living … and always will … because for reasons beyond our ken … you and I, God says, are dear to me, precious in my sight.

So precious, St. Paul says, that Christ will complete the work he has begun in us … that our ‘love may overflow more and more.’ Reading this, I look across the living room where sits my beloved Dixie in the morning light in the chair where she always sits, and I get it.

This miracle of love transpires the same way it has for centuries: little by little, as the Great Love, who is more patient than time, works his magic … when it seems nothing much is happening.

A place for our eyes

‘When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified ...' Then [Jesus] said to them, ‘Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven. (Luke 21:9-11)

I wonder what ‘the burn’ looks like now. Different, I’m sure; better, I hope, for it’s been more than 40 years since I saw it. But it keeps coming to mind because of the anxious Facebook posts and news stories that greet me any time I choose to pay attention.

I saw the burn while backpacking in Rocky Mountain National Park. Our guide said he brought all his groups to this place. Slowly … and sadly, he walked us through several hundred acres of blackened pine and aspen stumps, a needless fire, the result of human carelessness.

He had an eye for destruction and a heart for the violated wilderness, but there was another place for our eyes he did not seem to notice.

It was late spring and a profusion of wildflowers and grasses covered the landscape. New shoots from seeds released in the fire had sprouted tiny trees, new growth pressing through the soil.

The whole scene was alive with life … and hope, which is exactly what I don’t read in those Facebook posts or hear in the news since the presidential election.

Fears of a dystopian future are far more common, human rights ignored and violated, immigrant and undocumented workers swept up and sent away, decimating their hopes, their families and perhaps also sectors of the U.S. economy.

More than a few gaze across the broad landscape of our society no longer recognizing the country they thought they knew … nor their churches, which they have long loved.

In so many places, the future looks dark ... or at least murky, the country riven by poisoned politics and a wide variety of ‘isms,’ racism, sexism, nationalism, globalism, isolationism, etc. etc., not to mention old-fashioned vices like greed and narcissism that erodes trust and feeds cynicism about whether things can or ever will improve.

All of this is worthy of our concern and action, but what most worries me about the darkness of our present time is its capacity to convert us.

What we attend to is what we love, St. Augustine said, and what we love we will become. It’s a variation on a well-known contemplative adage: We become what we contemplate.

Fixation on the darkness or troubles of the moment—or the era—desolates the heart so that we see little else. Imprisoned in a world of our making, we no longer have eyes to see the wildflowers that can and will grow because ‘the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and … bright wings,’ as Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in the depths of his darkness.

In his soul, I hear the soul of Christ, who did not shy from the suffering and tribulations that stain human history with blood and tears. Wars, insurrections, famines, earthquakes, plagues, all that and more will come. It’s the stuff of every age and generation. Ours is little different.

But ‘do not be terrified,’ Jesus said, words that echo through history … and certainly through the hearts of martyrs and mystics, who never lost sight of the beauty of our hope, trusting that we and this world are loved with an everlasting love.

Just keep your heart open, one of those mystics, Julian of Norwich, tells us, ‘and you shall see it.’

David L. Miller

Hey, Jimmy. Meet Herb

Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18)

My prayer began in the car, at the intersection of Maple and highway 53. But maybe that’s just when I noticed what was happening.

Jimmy Buffett sang on the radio, Remittance Man, a song I didn’t know, but know all-too well, about a wayfarer wandering from one port of call to another because he cannot return home.

The Spirit blows where it wills, Jesus once said, and the sea breezes of Jimmy’s songs are as good a place as any. And so it was, his lyrics stirred a deep longing.

I kept listening, hoping the song would offer a verse of redemption, of healing, but it was not to be. The remittance man just keeps wandering the world, round and round, ever longing, never home.

The light turned green, and I kept driving, down the hill then back up to College Drive, a left turn then another into St. Procopius Abbey for a walk on a light-deprived November day … and to pray.

I don’t think prayer is a particularly religious thing, that is to say, everyone does it, religious or not. They may or may not ever notice it, and if they do, they are likely to call it something else. But it is prayer nonetheless, the remittance man’s longing for home where lies tender absolution for whatever failures of our humanity may haunt us.

Often as not, our prayers are not bidden by us, not chosen, but are awakened in odd moments, unguarded moments, when a song, a stray word, an old hurt, a familiar face on a faded photograph, or … whatever … unveils the deep hope of our soul for which we have no name other than … home … or love … or God. Maybe they are all the same, or at least so it seems to me.

We are never far from home. The Word, the Living Flame of Love, the Wonder who is God speaks, warms and awakens tears from the deep center of our being, awaiting their moment to remind us that we bear a beauty beyond all telling, welcoming us to know ourselves as temples of the Love from whom all things come and to whom all things go.

‘I am,’ the Voice says. ‘I am the hope of your longing. I am the Love who calls you home. I am the secret center of your soul. I am the home that is now and forever, if you would but come to me and rest.

‘I am the One you cannot conceive, but whose touch you know in all that is good and love and beauty and hope, in the sweetness of joy and the silent tears of your sadness. I am, and I am here.’

Yes, and in Jimmy Buffett songs and in the gnarly briars of the Abbey Woods that snare my hair and tear at my jacket, and definitely in the six, grazing deer who greeted me in the meadow—the gentility of their steps revealing the Grace of the One who longs for my heart, their stillness a call to be still and know the Heart who is the answer to every prayer.

Bidding the deer farewell, I walked to the half-light of the chapel and sat to pray, but there was little need. I sang hymns written by my old friend Herb and his friend Carl, asking God to let them know how grateful I am for the words and music they left us when they went home a few years ago.

I suspect I will continue to sing those songs until it is my time to join them. Then, we can sing together … and Jimmy can join in.

David L. Miller

What the cranes said

Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? (Matthew 6:26)

You hear sand hill cranes before you see them. Sometimes you hear them but never see them at all because they fly so high. I heard them three or four times before I came to an opening in the forest and saw them circling just east of me.

Putting the tip of my tongue on the roof of my mouth, I blew from my throat, imitating the alto trill of their call. They ignored me. They just kept circling, round and round, going nowhere in particular, a convention of cranes, rather like church committees and assemblies that once were my lot to suffer through.

With each turn in the crystal blue of a November sky, however, more appeared, enlarging the flock from dozens to hundreds, their cries louder now, excitement building, drawn together by an ancient magnetism neither they, nor I, understand, but which tells them that their autumnal journey should not be taken alone.

And I, on my autumnal journey, am … well … jealous. I’ve always been jealous of birds, they for whom flight is like breathing, and I whose soul was meant for soaring, so often earthbound, my heart drawn to heights of love and joy by an ancient magnetism of a mysterious Something or Someone for whom the human heart longs from the very moment of birth.

I’ve been trying to name this Someone or Something all my life, hoping, finally, to make it my own, wanting to belong … fully and forever ... to the Mystery for which I most long—one with the Love who sometimes whispers to me, ‘We are one. We are one. Do not fear. We are one.’

Maybe the cranes hear this voice, too, in their own way. Their gathering, a congregation of flight, climbing higher now, making ready to embark to winter’s home, safe from the cold soon to descend on these woods.

Just as they set out, a southbound jet out of O’Hare, 25 miles north, passes by, little higher than their altitude. Ten thousand feet is nothing to them, just a nice glide path. And with that, they go, and I turn west, down a slope deeper into the woods, mostly denuded of the canopy that obscures the sun through the summer months.

Unlike the cranes, I’m alone, but smiling for reasons I don’t fully understand. My autumnal journey continues and not just in these woods. I’m 72, now, and wish I had a few more companions for my journey home, which I hope continues for a long time. I want to keep coming here to see the cranes and listen to whatever they have to tell me. They’ll pass this way again in the spring, and I know they’ll make me smile.

Maybe they are the voice of the Great Mystery—or at least one voice—telling me the truth. Do not fear. We are one, all of us together … in one great Love.

If that’s all I ever know of this Mystery, it’s enough.

David L. Miller

A weary wandering toward home

[Jesus said], ‘How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!’  (Luke 13:34)

Just one word. That’s all it took to awaken tears of bone-deep longing, as the sun struggled to break through the stone-gray gloom of an unpromising morning.

Little light penetrates these November clouds, come one day early. Nor have I much light of my own to contribute. Another source must be found.

Weariness weighs the heart, worries, yes, for a family member carrying heavier loads that I can imagine … and can do nothing to lift.

But there’s also the weariness of our times, the fear and anger, accusations and recriminations that poison the public square and make a ‘newsie’ like me want to turn it all off—the politicization of … everything, the divisions, the doom-speaking of rival parties and candidates, the word ‘fight’ that appears on the lips of all sides, telling adherents they must fight for their rights, fight for the country, fight for democracy, fight or lose your freedom, your country, your way of life, fight … and we win.

Or do we? Any victory that makes losers only perpetuates love’s destruction.

I am tired of it all, weary of it all, sick to death of the conflict, the lies, half-truths, distortions and divisions, my head sinking into the pillow with a heavy sigh these nights, hoping for rest that refreshes the heart.

Rising, I make coffee and shuffle to my chair, hoping to sink into my soul where love’s flickering flame might revive awareness of who I am and whose I am … and just who it is that holds my times, these times and all time in the palm of an ever-loving hand.

Still, I wonder: Is this feeling desolation or a strange and difficult consolation because it brings me back … and closer … to Jesus who is this love?

If desolation is the darkness of feeling far from the warming rays of divine sunlight, perhaps … this weariness is not desolation at all. Perhaps it is a share in the longing of Jesus, who births tears in my eyes with a single word, ‘gather.’

That part of my heart that beats in time with his longs with him for the pain of our splintered humanity where trust dies beneath the power of invective, yielding a harvest of hate celebrated and magnified by party spirit of all types and paraded for profit across multiple networks.

How often, how long, how much … I have wanted to gather you into a protective love where knowing, breathing, abiding and sharing this love evaporates every us-and-them into we and us.

This is the voice of Jesus in these times, in every time. And the frustrated tears of our longing to be gathered beyond the weary sorrows of our divisions is the holy consolation of knowing his heart within our own, love’s living hope refusing to die, hungry to be gathered home.

And if you’ll pardon me, the sun (truly) just found its way through the gloom to warm my window. As it always will.

David L. Miller

Dust

As for mortals, their days are like grass; they flourish like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more. But the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting. (Psalm 103:15-17a)

‘God is having a reveal party,’ Dixie said, as we drove east into the night. And so it was. A lingering sunset blazed pink and blue, purple and orange, before fading to a pale yellow as the sun disappeared beneath the horizon.

Rolling hills gave way to flatlands as prairie counties passed by our widows, Jo Daviess to Stephenson, Winnebago to Ogle, Dekalb to Kane then home to DuPage.

Every turn and every bend on every road along the way well known to us, down to the rough patches in the pavement we know to avoid, each passing scene evoking memories of decades gone when there was more than one beloved old soul to visit on these trips.

Our conversation recounts the conversations of the day, naming what meanings we find, fading gradually into a knowing silence hovering over the dull thrum of tires on the roadway, as love’s long liturgy bids us to rest in each other’s presence.

Outside, dust from darkening fields rises as combines make their way like great ships across a seemingly endless sea of corn stalks on either side of the road. The stalks dry, dead and brittle brown, full ears of corn hanging heavily, head down, ready for harvest. The chattering sickles of the combines cut the stalks low, leaving a stubble, but raising great clouds of dust I feel on my lips and taste on my tongue.

It’s a sacrament for me. I run my tongue across my lips and smile, savoring the goodness of each particle of earth that yields a harvest of life, gratitude trickling from my eyes, love for the ground, for the dust, for the souls who work the soil, plant the seed and run the combines that accompanied virtually every mile of our journey, gathering in the grain.

All of us feeling and tasting the dust, perhaps realizing that … we are dust, of one being with the dust from which we are made … and which we will become—just like those souls, now gone, I think of with unspeakable gratitude on every one of these journeys. They, too, loved this dust and taught me to love it.

Into the night, we drove, the dust having colored the sunset hours before, coloring, too, the orange harvest moon, impossibly large, rising in the northeast, as we reached the final leg of our journey. A line of purple clouds streamed across its face, it’s pale light falling gentle on autumnal fields.

‘It’s good to be alive on this planet,’ I whispered, half aloud. Seemed absurd to say it, where else would or could I be? But the gratitude I felt was not; it was as real as anything I’ve ever known.

David L. Miller

Flow

‘Therefore I tell you, [Jesus said] do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? (Matthew 6:25)

I saw it again the other day. Flow.

It started with a TV interview with Al Pacino, the Academy Award winning actor. Pacino described the day his eighth-grade teacher came to his house and told his mother to encourage him to keep acting, keep getting up on stage. She saw something come alive in him every time he performed in a school play.

Pacino shared early days working in small theaters in New York City, amazed and totally one with some elixir of life in his soul, knowing he had to do this. It didn’t matter if I was successful or not, he said, whether I had money or not, whether anyone liked me or not. This was my life. I had to do it.

On the stage, bringing a character to life, he came alive. The outward expression of his life and work flowed seamlessly with an inner current of creative love and joy he didn’t create but discovered within himself. He was one with himself and, as a person of faith, I’ll venture to say he was one with the Creative Love who fashioned the mystery of his soul.

‘It is in this unity of love that life consists,’ Julian of Norwich, writes in her Showings of Divine Love.

Yes, not in what we wear or how we look or whether we have money or success or comfort or struggle, life is oneness with a love that makes everything else but itself irrelevant.

When the love that is our true nature finds its natural expression, a flood of joy and freedom flows like a fountain, filling our soul, lighting our eyes, awakening our energies. We flow, one with ourselves and with the Love who made us, each of us an embodied expression of the Loving Mystery who transcends our knowing.

But as we flow with this love, we do know.

We know God, for we are one with the Love who made us, fulfilling the hope for which we were created. And we are free. Distractions disappear. Worries about how we are doing evaporate. We go with the flow, knowing we were made to enjoy this grace, this bliss, this comfort, this joy, this unity of hearts.

Sometimes, this happens in prayer or song, when love surrounds and silences the heart, words having become both unnecessary and meaningless because a great love has swamped our being.

Two friends, professors at college and graduate school levels, speak of moments when they totally forget themselves and are ‘carried away,’ a most helpful phrase. Doing becomes being, and being becomes doing as they give themselves fully to the moment, freely pouring out what they know, utterly forgetful of all other concerns.

As a boy, I recall adults in my life counseling me or someone else not to get too carried away with what we were saying or doing. All things in moderation seemed to be their message. Certainly, there is some wisdom in this.

But the life to which Jesus invites us, the life that he gives us is all about being carried away in the flow of a great love, carried away by beauty, carried away by the surge of joy that fills us when we fall upon that which God fashioned us to be and do.

It takes years, really decades, to discover what Pacino found on his eight-grade stage, and then only if you are awake, careful to notice when and where the love that you are, the love that lives at your core, begins to flow and render everything else … irrelevant.

David L. Miller

If only

A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus (tired from his journey) said to her, ‘Give me a drink’.  ^… The Samaritan woman said to him, ‘How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’  … Jesus answered her, ‘If you only knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, “Give me a drink,” you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.’ (John 4:7, 9-10)

‘If you only knew,’ how does Jesus say this? How does he sound?

Is it a weary sigh of resignation, Jesus, moist with sweat, collapsing at the village well after a hard walk in the mid-day sun? Hearing the woman, is his voice but a mumble, ‘if only,’ trailing off, all the while knowing she doesn’t know and likely will never know? ‘If only’ … hanging heavy with the regret of graces unknown, beauty untasted and love lost.

Or shall we hear him a different way?

If you only knew, perhaps Jesus’ words tug the corners of his mouth into the faintest grin, a small tired smile, a sideways glance, knowing what is his to give, knowing she soon will know, soon will wake and feel something she has never known, the love who sees the jagged ruins of her life, of marriages and lovers found and lost, the condemnations of self and community, knowing she may yet know herself in the circle of a loving light that makes everything but itself … irrelevant.

If you only knew, a low chuckle plays at his throat, the gladness of giving, finding joy in the woman’s surprise soon to come as she finds herself found, finally, by a love who wakes a spring of joy, wetting her long-parched heart, flowing from a depth of soul she’d long since forgotten, having lost who she truly is.

It’s a mystery to me how this happens, how living water first trickles among the cracked earth of sadness, cynicism and despondency, how it moistens the soil of our discontent, rising to crack the hard shell around our hearts and wash away the bondage of dark moods and desolating disappointments with ourselves and others.

It doesn’t happen quickly enough, as far as I’m concerned, not when the heart is dry, dark moods prevail and I can’t find my way to sunlight. I understand the woman at the well all too well. ‘Give me this water, so I will never be thirsty again,’ she asks.

But how? And where? Ignatius Loyola counsels that in times of desolation we should avoid being alone with our darkness, tell someone else and go to places of consolation. He sang Basque folk songs, gazed into the wonder of the night sky, felt the warm sun on his back and prayed his sadness, remembering and savoring moments of Jesus’ loving nearness, when grace and love awakened tears of gratitude for the gift of being alive.

Just so, I listen as the music swells from the stereo, Tchaikovsky, today, then turn my sideways glance toward Jesus’ face, weary at the well. ‘If you only knew,’ he says, gladness tugging at the corners of his mouth, a knowing smile, knowing, as he does, that the time of my knowing will come with joy and tears as living water finds and flows into the parched places of my heart.

Somehow, seeing his ‘if only’ smile is enough. It cuts through the sadness. I feel his humor, his playfulness, the gladness of his giving … and know that I am known. Drinking in his smile, there is no ‘if only,’ for I am with him.

David L. Miller

The center holds

 ‘If any of you put a stumbling-block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell. (Mark 9:42-43)

At first blush, there is no good reason Jesus’ words should move spiritual consolation in anyone’s heart, let alone mine. A cold wave of nausea churns at the hollow of my gut as I imagine his image. Surely, it is intended for me.

I have caused little and not-so-little ones to stumble, my words, attitudes and actions falling far short of faithfulness any number of times. I doubt I’ll ever stop carrying the moment I extended my hand to a parishioner as the congregation passed the peace during worship.  ‘I’m ashamed to know you,’ he said, refusing my hand. ‘No kind of leadership at all.’

He spoke for himself, but I’ve no doubt others share his judgment, and some for better reasons than he had. I pray they will find ways to release those judgments, not for my sake but for their own peace and spiritual health.

Ironically, or not, my consolation is found exactly in the words that would condemn me. Re-reading Jesus’ words, tears spring to my eyes as a wave of love rises and swamps my soul, filling me with love for everything he is. For Jesus speaks in great love, calling me from all peripheral concerns to the center of life, to its purpose and goal—eternal life.

This is what most matters, entering, knowing and living intimately with God whose love shines in the face of Jesus. Even his dire warnings speak his great love as he calls us to throw away everything and anything that would keep us from the fulfillment of our existence, which is to live, heart-to-heart, now and forever, with the Love who is the Source of all life.

‘Everything and anything’ include the judgments of others and those we exact on ourselves for the sins and failures that haunt us. There is one cure. All of them evaporate like morning mist in the warm rays of the Love who keeps calling us to life’s true center, the love of the One who showers mercy on his failing friends and forgives even his persecutors.

There is no end to the number of times we need to remind ourselves of this, lest something other than God’s love rules at the center of our hearts. Perhaps we need to be like my old friend, Bob. I held his hand and prayed with him in his final weeks. ‘Tell me that verse again,’ he’d ask on every visit. ‘You know the one. I need to remember.’

‘Yea, Bob, I remember,’ I’d say. ‘There is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus.’

Bob would exhale, long and deep, and lie back in his bed feeling something that looked a lot like peace. And I fell silent. There was nothing more needing to be said. We rested in life’s true center. Nothing else mattered.

David L Miller

Old souls, needed now

But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace. (James 3:17-18)

The goal of my life is to become … or increasingly become … an old soul.

I’ve known my share of them through the years, men and women, no two quite alike. But each stirred a desire to be like them … in one way or another.

Every one of them was more patient that I am and not as angry. There was an oasis of peace around them that invited you to drop your guard and just … be. They never seemed to hurry as if there was somewhere more important to be or someone more important to see.

They breathed contentment with their lives, a warm acceptance of what is … even though nearly every one of them had suffered loses and pain which they carried to the end of their days.

What I appreciated most was that they were gentle, gentle with themselves, gentle with the world around them and gentle with me.

They made a deep impression on me, especially when I was very young. For reasons buried deeply in my nature, I desperately wanted to be seen. I wanted to be accepted. I wanted to be loved. I wanted to find a few gentle voices where I knew I was safe because the world was filled with rigid rules and critical eyes, eager to judge.

Looking back, I am sometimes thankful for those harsh voices and the wounds they inflicted. They sensitized my heart to the presence and ways of love, which is to say the voice of God. They moved me to seek that love all the more, and because of them … I know God all the more.

But I am far more grateful for the old souls in whom the Soul of the Universe sought and found my heart, suffering, now, each day to awaken in me the gentle beauty the Holy One breathed in them.

Not only in me, of course. For this is the holy labor of God’s Spirit within every human heart, a labor in which we share through our prayer and by placing ourselves in tender places and with gracious faces where God finds and awakens the beauty of love deep within us.

The curation of love is our contemplative work in these days, not first loving … but letting ourselves be loved, bathing in Love’s holy sacraments that gentle our hearts and make us fit instruments to balm the bitter, divisive times in which we live.

The voices that dominate our social and political life are neither peaceable nor gentle. Rancorous party spirit, bitter divisions, character defamations, hatred and hypocrisy run rampant in a virulent battle for dominance, in which I want no part.

But to one extent or another, the conflicts of our age won’t leave us alone. They touch our families and relationships, our communities, churches and nation, poisoning hearts with the toxic venom of sarcasm, cynicism, contempt and despair.

The antidote, the only antidote, to the poison coursing through many hearts, is the Love who makes souls old and wise, gentle and peaceful, full of mercy … and hope.

Abide there.

David L. Miller

Something to see

He [Jesus] took a little child and had him stand among them. Taking him in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me. (Mark 9:36-37)

I’ve seen it six or seven times now, a photo inside a café, every table filled with diners. It appears in my Facebook feed always with the same text, telling me the diners are the people of Springfield, Ohio, flooding a Haitian restaurant in protest of the ugliness being hurled at their immigrant neighbors.

I hope the photo is real. I hope it is not AI generated or the photo of a café in California someone used to make a political statement, suggesting the picture is from Springfield when it is not. I, for one, would love to have final verification of its authenticity.

Here’s why. Long ago, reporting from a few of the world’s most brutal, deadly places, I learned something. Whenever you see hatred and death, brutality and the most callous disregard for human life you can imagine—no, beyond anything you can imagine, whenever that happens, where ever you see it, don’t stop looking. Don’t stop listening.

Pay attention because, exactly there, in the midst of hell on earth, sooner or later you will see the most beautiful, gracious, loving, merciful expressions of the human heart, sacrifices that will take your breath away.

You will see God, living in the spirit of human souls in ways that will bring tears of gratitude and longing to your eyes.

Longing? Yes, for those tears flow from the deepest well of the human soul, reaching out for a world not fully born, the kingdom of God, the reign of love. And you weep because you see God’s kingdom breaking forth with unspeakable beauty amid the world’s great ugliness, as human souls take the wounded into their embrace and do whatever they can.

It is through these eyes, tutored, I believe, by God’s own Spirit, and through these ears that, however faintly, have begun to hear, that I take in that photo, reading the meme and savoring the scene on my Facebook page.

I hear the clink of knives and forks, smell the aroma of coffee and eggs sizzling on clean white plates. I see the waitstaff hurrying to fill orders and clear tables. And amid the murmur voices and morning laughter, I feel and know the Love who labors in every time and place to draw us beyond ourselves to embrace the wounds of the world.

It’s really something to see, and once you catch a glimpse of it you want to see and feel it everywhere, which is why I am beyond thankful for those diners in Springfield, hoping that photo is as real as me sitting in this gray chair. For it is a scene of the coming kingdom if ever there was one, all of us gathered in one great love.

When I was a young man I was like Jesus’ disciples, dreaming great things for myself, most of which was compensation for feeling small, weak and insignificant, as if some accomplishment would prove to others (and myself) that they were wrong about me.

If you’re really blessed, sooner or later, the realities of living strips away self-aggrandizing illusions like this … so you can finally see the greatest thing you can ever do is to be like those diners in Springfield. Embrace what is right in front of you with as much love as you’ve got.

And pray, ‘thy kingdom come.’

It will, and you just may see it.

David L. Miller

Postcard from the kingdom of reality

Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, ‘The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, “Look, here it is!” or “There it is!” For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.’ (Luke 17:20-21)

There we were, four of us, walking a corridor in the kingdom of reality.

Truth be told, only three of us were walking. My mother rode in a wheel chair as I pushed, rolling across the skyway between St. Mary’s Hospital to the clinic just north. Dixie walked beside me as we followed a stoop-shouldered 80-something in sneakers, a blue sport coat and a white shirt open at the neck.

Our destination was an orthopedic surgeon’s office to see if my feisty 95-year-old mother could have one more back surgery to free her from pain, without the drugs she preferred not to take.

Entering the elevator, our guide turned and said, “I retired in 2012, but I couldn’t get this place out of me.” He’d been an anesthesiologist here for decades. Now, he keeps people like me from getting lost.

I suspect his smile reassured many anxious hearts in the surgical suite over the years, even as it heartened us as we stepped from the elevator toward the surgeon’s office to learn what the next chapter held for Mom.

She’d set up a challenging itinerary: Monday, going through her files and making sure her computer was working; Tuesday, the surgeon and whatever referral might be made; Wednesday, the bank, the lock box, the funeral home and an insurance agent, all to make final arrangements which she has no intention of needing for years if not another decade. Longevity is in her genes, iron in her will.

Emotional? Yes. Draining? You bet. Overwhelming, strangely, no.

At each step, questions and conversations interspersed with moments of checking out how we each were feeling and what we needed, revealing no great stress.

Each stop, each step followed the next and the next and the next as if ordered by a gentle hand bearing us forward in the flow of an abiding sense of ‘this is how it should be;’ all the while assuring us that this is what life is, and if you take it with honesty, humor and with good and gentle companions, you step into a great flow of … well, it certainly felt like love.

This love was not only within us but all around like the air, surrounding, enveloping and meeting us in the faces of those with whom we consulted about everything from aching backs, to bank accounts, to wills and trusts, to funeral caskets, vaults and insurance policies to pay for it all.

We were carried in a stream that required nothing more of me than to attend to the next thing with patience and care, fretting not about what might come after.

I knew … this is my place. This is where I was intended to be by the Mystery who made me. These are the people I was meant to know and love and trust, and by doing this—surrendering illusions about other lives I might have lived—I was releasing myself into the love that flows from eternity to eternity, beseeching me to let go and be one with this Love as it flows through my little moment of time.

It takes a long time, I think, (certainly for me) to tell your ego to shut the hell up, lay down your defenses and trust that Love. When you do it will tell you who you really are, what your heart truly needs and what you most need to do—like that retired anesthesiologist in his tennis shoes.

The place got into me, and I couldn’t get it out, he said of St. Mary’s Hospital. That’s one way to look at it. Another is, this is the place that Love’s eternal flow found him and set him free to be, well, the soul he was always intended to be.

Whenever this happens, wherever it happens, God smiles and welcomes us into the kingdom of reality.

David L. Miller

Wondering about pinwheels

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. (John 6:67-68)

Eternal Life? How dare anyone speak of it as if they understood … anything. Except, of course, there are moments, experiences that take us beyond ourselves, absorbing us in something much greater in which we are truly there but the boundaries between our own hearts and a much greater reality grow thin, then disappear, if only for mere moments as every fear, worry and anxious thought evaporates in an all-embracing love in which we share and of which we are a part.

That’s why I think of pinwheels. It been decades since I held on in my hands, but I remember playing with them as a child and fascinating my children a circus-colored pinwheel with stars and clouds, red and blue, white and green, blowing on it so that it spun faster and faster until the colors blended together into a whirl in which each individual color and blade shared its uniqueness, a twirling color wheel more beautiful and fascinating than any one of them individually.

Something like this happens in conversations and caring relationships when people share what is in their hearts, listening, laughing and letting the flow of the exchange carry them along without the need to steer its direction or determine its conclusion. Joined in a love, a care, an atmosphere larger than themselves, they become more truly themselves than anywhere else. Liberated from the need to protect egos and reputations, they inhale freedom and love in a unity of hearts with every breath.

I know it’s a leap, but … I wonder … is this why Peter answered Jesus, ‘You have the words of eternal life.’

I have no idea what was in his mind or exactly what may have moved him to speak as he did. But I wonder if he came to love what was happening in his heart as he felt himself being drawn ever more fully into the love that met people where they were and welcomed them as they are. Absorbed into the flow of this love, I wonder if the thought of being anywhere else but with Jesus felt like death and despair. I wonder if he felt a great love come alive inside himself so that he felt more alive … and more himself … than he’d ever been or ever imagined he would be.

I wonder if he wanted to let go of everything else and be caught up in the twirling pinwheel of the Love in which he finally knew himself … and the Love for which we are born.

I don’t know. But I wonder.

David L. Miller

The mystery of his presence

Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. … It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. (John 6:53, 63)

I could not sing the verse as I returned from receiving the Eucharistic elements today. Consoling tears would not allow it. A mystery far beyond my meager theological skills held me in its grasp as the cantor sang on, ‘The mystery of your presence Lord, no mortal tongue can tell.’ Mine certainly cannot, neither then, nor now … or ever.

But the heart perceives what the mind cannot. In bread and wine, the mystery of an infinite love fully and irrevocably given is received into human bodies. And in the receiving, the Love Who Is … and always will be … and we—the finite, mortal and uncomprehending—are one. Everything we are (the good, the bad and the ugly) is engulfed in the Loving Mystery who gave us birth, one with the One who is love and life.

In particularly graced moments, our souls are overwhelmed with the wonder of bearing Love Immortal, rendering speech, let alone song, impossible. If only the moment could last, enduring through the daily dullness of the ordinary.

The truly good news is that it does, if only we had eyes to see and ears to hear. For the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood is not a discrete discharge of grace into an ungraced world. It is the key that unlocks the sacramental mystery of existence. His physical givenness at the Lord’s Table reveals what is true everywhere and in everything.

The One who gives himself in bread and wine is he for whom, through whom and in whom the universe came to be. Everything was created by him and for him and through him. The universe comes to be through Christ, the materialization of divine love, pouring forth from the heart of the Holy Trinity.

‘The world and time are the dance of the Lord in the emptiness,’ wrote the twentieth-century contemplative, Thomas Merton. So, when I savor the red cardinal flashing through the locust trees I eat the flesh of Christ. I take the beauty of who he is into myself, and my soul is made alive and joyful. When I watch the gold finches flit and play in the morning sun I wake to his invitation to throw away my deadly seriousness and join in Love’s dance in time and space.

When I take my beloved’s face into my hands and her smile melts my heart one more time, I look into the very heart of eternity smiling at me, hoping I will finally wake to the central truth of my life. And when I receive the day … whatever it is … as a holy gift to be gratefully unwrapped and lovingly embraced I eat and drink the sacrament of the present moment.

The mystery of his presence at the Lord’s table cracks the code of creation. The Christ present at the table wakes our souls to believe and our senses to welcome his presence in everything and everyone, everywhere and in every moment, ever seeking to feed our souls with the love he is.

And if that is not wonder enough, then imagine that you, too, are part of the eternal outflowing of God’s presence, a sacrament of God’s triune love, your reality and vocation.

David L. Miller