The beauty of the Lord

Though he was in the form of God, … [he] emptied himself, taking the form of a slave. (Philippians 2:6a,7a)

I’ve kept a curled, yellow news clipping on my desk for years. It’s an obituary for Kenneth Ignatius Neff. I never met him and know nothing more about him than what his obit says.

He had been a monk in Iowa but left the monastery to start his own monastic community in Illinois. Moving to Palestine, Texas, he lived as a hermit for 18 years, before pouring himself into volunteer work to protect children, abused women and hospital patients. He also worked in a crisis center and taught prison inmates in a rehab program.

He requested no funeral service, wanting only to be remembered as having ‘lived a simple life of reflection, prayer and service.’

I don’t wonder about his motives. They’re obvious. His heart was totally given, surrendered to the high and holy purpose of loving the world the way Christ Jesus loves the world.

I remember weeping when my eyes first fell upon his contented smile in the photo that accompanied his obit. It was like looking into the face of Jesus and feeling the love that you always wanted … and always wanted to be.

David L. Miller

Wounds of love

Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.’ Thomas answered him, ‘My Lord and my God!’ (John 20:26b-28)

The painting was impossible to miss. I had seen it before, but so have millions. Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Thomas loomed 15 feet across, projected on a screen, on the southeast side of the sanctuary, as I crossed myself and took my seat.

No more needed to be said as far as I was concerned. Virtually the totality of my faith was right there.

Jesus grasped Thomas’ right wrist in his left hand, guiding Thomas’ finger into the hole in his side, pierced by a Roman lance to ensure his death.

Jesus’s eyes are on his side, helping Thomas to touch him, to place his finger between the lips of flesh out of which blood and water flowed as life left him.

His head turned ever-so-slightly to the side, Thomas doesn’t look directly at the wound and certainly not up at Jesus, whose gaze is fixed on Thomas’ right hand, guiding it to his open flesh. No anger creases Jesus’ brow, no reproval purses his lips. His desire in singular. Please. Just touch … and see … the Love that hate cannot kill.

Wounds of love, I thought in the moment. Instantly, my mind traveled thousands of miles away to a moment of watching a mother walk to a feeding station run by an old Irish nun in Baidoa, Somalia. Thousands were dying of starvation and disease at the time, fleeing their homes with little food, dying along the way, burying the children and old ones where they fell, trying to get to a place like this where there was compassion and food—a place where nobody asked whose side you were on because they were on the side of life.

Like so many, this mother denied herself food on the journey, giving what little she had to the children. She was one of the lucky ones. Many more died on the way, pointing their children toward places like this when they could go no further, hoping against hope that their flesh and blood might live to know the grace of laughter once more. I heard their stories … told by their orphaned children.

Stories no different than this are being told across Gaza these days. We see the pictures, too, children cradling younger brothers and sisters while separated from parents, if they are still fortunate enough to have parents.

They bear deep wounds, wounds of love, the wounds of Jesus in present time, blessed incarnations of the Love human brutality cannot kill.

A local reporter interviewed me after that long ago reporting trip to Somalia and Sudan. He stammered and tripped over a question he thought impolitic to ask, wondering if seeing such suffering undermined my faith.

The opposite, I told him. Amid the worst that human beings can do to each other, I had seen Jesus. Yes, in the old nun and many others like her, like, say, those seven blessed souls killed last week while feeding people with World Central Kitchen. They are not only the best of humanity, as Jose Andres, WCK’s founder said. They are the hands of the risen Lord Jesus multiplying loaves and breaking bread.

But more, even more, I had seen the wounds of love in suffering hearts who surrendered life and hope that others might live: Not just survive, but live in the knowledge that there is a very great Love at work in the world, a Love death cannot kill and brutality cannot destroy, a Love who gives everything and holds back nothing, a Love who longs for us to touch and see, trust and know that—in spite of all the ugliness—we live in a world where Love lives and breathes and becomes flesh and blood in the wounded love of our humanity.

Every time I see it, every time I feel it, every time I witness the wounds of Love, I join Thomas, my brother, and together we cry to Jesus, ‘My Lord and my God.’

 David L. Miller

 

 

 

The fellowship of Easter brunch

 Jesus said to them, ‘Come and have breakfast.’ Now none of the disciples dared to ask him, ‘Who are you?’ because they knew it was the Lord. (John 21:12)

My friend, Kevin, sent the 7 a.m. squirrel report from the front porch of his rural home. Apparently, a drippy rain induced them to sleep late today. Here, 160 miles away, golden sun illumines the neighbor’s daffodils, heralding nature’s resurrection, soon to delight us with the renewal for which every heart hopes.

I, however, am still stewing on Kevin’s last note, telling me, with absolutely no rancor, why he and his beloved wife will not be in church on Easter … as they haven’t been regular for years.

It’s a familiar litany. I talk to God frequently, Kevin tells me, in gratitude for the day and to help him do the good that he wills.

But the hypocrisies of clashing egos among the supposedly faithful keep him from the church door, along with the rejection of a gay pastor, loved by some but not all, dividing the congregation, which moves Kevin to think of gay family members and clients he loves and serves.

Then, there is the PTSD (my words, not his) occasioned by hearing songs or words that transport them back to their 16-year-old son’s funeral, killed in a terrible car crash. And I get it. I’ve seen trauma do that before.

All of this moves me to love my friend more than ever because I feel a great and deep heart beating in his chest. But there’s one more thing: Part of me identifies with him because—after serving the church for more than 40 years as a pastor, journalist and spiritual director—I won’t be in church this week either.

It’s not that I have lost my faith. Far from it. I hold the faith of the church, the faith of Jesus the Christ, deep and dear in my heart where Christ lives and breathes in the great love I feel for him and all creation. I cherish and hunger for his divine presence more than ever in my life.

But when I participate in corporate worship, as I have a number of places since retirement, I find little space—and certainly no home (at least, not yet)—for my hunger to feel, know and share the joys and sorrows, the struggles, doubts, elation and mystery of being a vessel of Christ. I long to be among a people where reverence, praise and expression of God’s boundless love for everyone is central, trumping everything else.  

Years ago, one of my spiritual directees said he wanted to be a member of ‘the fellowship of the Sunday brunch.’ He spoke partly in jest, but mostly not.

His suggestion sparks the image of a few friends or fellow travelers gathering around a table to share food and talk about their lives. What gave them life or joy or hope that week? What are they reading or seeing that moved them to see differently or understand something anew? Who moved them to love or joy or anger or sadness? How is what is happening in the world affecting them?

The Spirit blows where it chooses, Jesus said. You hear the sound of it, but where it goes and why, well, that’s a mystery. I have no doubt, however, that the Spirit of Christ’s living love would be more than pleased to warm a few hearts and console wounded souls at the fellowship of the Sunday brunch.

And I know, absolutely know, I have felt the Spirit of the One who is Life and Love at cafe tables and sickbeds, in living rooms, my favorite Irish pub and a host of other places where human hearts cracked opened just enough to share a morsel of what is actually there, the heaven and hell of being human.

It's interesting to me, and telling, I think, that several of Jesus’ resurrection appearances happen over sharing food. Jesus breaks bread and eyes are opened to his presence. Or, he cooks fish on a rocky beach and invites his old friends to breakfast and nobody asks whether it is Jesus whom they are experiencing.

There is no need. They know … because they feel the loving life of the Spirit in the mystery of their own hearts.

All of this awakens a desire to join Kevin on his front porch to watch the squirrels … and talk. I have every reason to expect Easter can happen there … just as well as anywhere else.

David L. Miller

 

 

Simple truth

Jesus answered, ‘For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’ Pilate asked him, ‘What is truth?’ (John 18:37a-38)

My friend, Kevin, tells me he has become the archetypal old man. Every morning, he sits on his porch with a cup of coffee, lights a cigarette and watches the squirrels wake up, while thinking about the past.

I wonder what he sees there. Next time, I’ll ask. This morning, the question rebounds to me, and an answer springs to technicolor life in my mind’s eye, a familiar scene, decades old, telling my heart what I have lost and most want for the stretch of life that lies ahead.

One word: Simplicity. I hunger for the simplicity of heart that was mine when I was nine or 10 or 11, running across the elysian fields of the old fairgrounds near my childhood home.

Heaven was chasing my cocker spaniel across the emerald expanse, dandelions sprouting across the meadow, as Blondie ran, her toenails ripping through the grass, eluding my grasp at every turn.

And I laughed. I laughed at her joy, swept up in the rapture of running free alongside and far behind, unrestricted and unrestrained, feeling the exhilaration of being alive in a wide and open space where no one cared if I laughed or shouted or prayed or sang at the top of my voice, songs from the radio, others from church.

Those fields are the reason I love the stories of Jesus’ early ministry so much. I can see him as he walked through grassy fields with his friends, their palms running across the top of tall grasses, plucking the heads of wild oats and eating them, talking, asking questions, stopping on a hill to gaze at the waters of the Sea of Galilee, as the bluffs of Bashan paled to pink miles across the water in the late afternoon sun.

I see them as people brought their children, and Jesus held them in his arms, loving them, blessing them, as he raised his eyes to the heavens praising the Loving Mystery for the song of birds, the yellow of flowers and the tenderness of open hearts.

But that was then. Now, Holy Week is upon us; darkness settles in. The warm sun of open fields is lost behind thick clouds of threat and gloom. The joy of beginnings flees like a dream at the break of day, leaving only the nightmare. The air bristles with anger and intrigue. Jesus is no longer a free soul on the hills of Galilee. Sadness settles on his soul as furtive eyes surround him, waiting their time. He is but a political problem, a pawn passed from one authority to another, each seeking an expedience to be rid of him.

Night has come, and Jesus stands before his accusers, silent, but for this. ‘I came into the world to testify to the truth,’ he says.  And I ask the same question as Pontius Pilate, ‘What is truth?’

I don’t know whether he spoke with a sneer or with faint hope that Jesus might say a little more, wondering against all odds that there might be an answer to the question.

But Jesus just stands there, silent, for truth allows no words. Truth is what filled me on the fields of my childhood. Truth is what swept my heart to tears and songs and prayers and joy as love for life filled me from a Source that I did not then and never will comprehend.

Truth is the divine smile that delighted in my play and warmed me whole as I ran with my dog. Truth is the Love who filled me with graced awareness that this Love, this Great Mystery, is real and knowable, and that my laughter was the greatest praise I could ever return.

The simple truth is Jesus, the face of the Loving Mystery who forgives his enemies, blesses those who curse him, prays for those who kill him, and still has time to find young boys on the fields of their play. (Girls, too, I’m sure).

It may be that I was closer to God at 10 than any time since. My heart was simple then, and I knew … the truth that matters most.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Angels unaware

Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. (Hebrews 13:2)

I recognized the face immediately, older, certainly, and her hair was a different color. But the shape of her smile had endured years of crippling arthritis, transporting me to the high school classrooms we shared more than 50 years ago.

Her name was … is … Diane. I didn’t know her well. We were not friends, just pleasant acquaintances occupying the same spaces for a few short years in our little high school. Most classes were required and elective opportunities were few, so we saw the same people over-and-over from one hour to the next until the bell rang at 3:57 p.m., setting the prisoners free.

So, then, what is this flood of gratitude as she smiles at me from a Facebook obituary, recounting her death at 71 and naming family members who were blessed by the life she lived?

I know almost nothing of that life beyond a few brief moments we shared in the narthex of my childhood church while visiting my mother. The first time, I was surprised to see her there, since she was not part of the church when I was growing up.

Reading the names of her children and grandchildren, teary words of purest gratitude rise unbidden from the center of my soul, praise to God for a life with which I had but fleeting connection, long ago.

But why such praise and spontaneous emotion? Perhaps this: She was an unassuming presence, making no demands and offering no judgments at a time in my life when I felt insecure, uncertain and even more confused by life than I am now. It was enough for us to exchange greetings, comment on the class assignment or whatever rumors were buzzing through the hallways.

There is a certain grace in this, moments when it is enough just to be, free of expectations to be something or someone at a time when you weren’t sure of who you were … or are … or might or want to be.

I certainly wouldn’t name Diane as having much influence on the development of who I continue to become. But maybe I should.

There are far more channels of grace, unnoticed streams of Presence, than the obvious ones we can see and name. Our days are sprinkled with little moments—incidental, nothing-special, entirely forgotten encounters—that direct our paths, change our course and shape our hearts in incalculable ways beyond our awareness.

All of which is to say life is a greater mystery than we imagine, and God, which is to say the presence of Loving Grace, is woven more deeply among the twisted threads of our days than our blinkered eyes can see.

But moments come when the heart is grasped by an intuition, when it knows what the mind cannot teach, and tears offer their silent prayer, moved by Love’s Living Presence that was always there … unnoticed … in places and faces that were more important than you ever knew.

No one needs to tell you to be thankful at such a time. For a beatific presence well beyond you moves you to gratitude for the great mystery of your life and for the greater mystery of the Love who managed to find and bless you … even though you were clueless about it at the time.

But when, finally, your heart sees and knows, love flows as easily as your breath. Just so, Diane, beloved of God, I return the blessing.

May the angels lead you into paradise; may the martyrs greet you at your arrival and lead you into the holy city, Jerusalem. May the choir of angels greet you and, like Lazarus, who once was a poor man, may you have eternal rest.

David L. Miller

 

Nightlight

 And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself. (John 12:32)

Perhaps it was the setting, a hospital room when I couldn’t rest, sleep or find any comfort. Maybe at another time the image, the juxtaposition, would not have struck me, but lonely hours staring at the ceiling affects your vision … and opens your heart.

Three parents stared from a silent television screen, receiving hugs from supporters who visited them in solidarity with their grief and calls for justice. They will never get it, however. Justice would mean getting their children back, alive and well. But they are gone, slaughtered in an elementary school room in Uvalde, Texas, two years ago.

Justice, for them, lies far beyond human reach, in a realm more gracious than anything we might imagine let alone provide.

For the time being, there is grief, the consolation of tender hearts and the faint hope that public authorities will hear them and respond like it was their children who were cut off from their precious lives by a shooter and his soulless killing machine.

Who knows what beauty and joy would have graced their families and community through the irreplaceable lives of these children? For this, we should all grieve. The Holy One gave those lives not just to their parents, their families and to one Texas town …. but to every one of us.

But it was more than this, more than my frustration of another night tethered to heart monitors in a hospital bed that moved my tears. There was an image. Behind the faces on the TV screen, a crucifix hung on the wall over their shoulders.

My bleary eyes could not make out much detail on the cross. It looked to be plaster with little color that I could see in the darkness.

But it was just right, in exactly the right place … as if forces beyond us curated the scene, a juxtaposition of shattered hearts standing there as the Crucified, arms spread wide by the ugly brutality of this world, his arms, above and around them … and me in that cursed bed, all of us in need of healing.

And there he was … and is … and always will be, arms open, Love giving itself away, refusing to hate, lost in love for a world that hates far too much and all-too-often.

That’s who Jesus is, the crucified and risen one, Incarnation of the Love who embraces all that we are, all that we have suffered and celebrated, all that makes us laugh and cry, enfolding the worst and best of us in an overflowing triune Love that has neither beginning nor end.

I cannot explain it and am certain I will never have such wisdom, but I know there is healing in those arms. More than once or twice I have tasted it, many more. And I know … that plaster crucifix, on a wall somewhere in Uvalde, Texas, speaks to places in our hearts that only Love can reach, transforming sorrow into hope and death into life.

In the darkness of night, only a crucified savior will do. Nowhere is God any greater … than on that cross.

David L Miller

 

 

 

 A clean and open space

 Making a whip of cords, he (Jesus) drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, ‘Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a market-place!’ (John 2:15-16)

All in all, it’s not a very ‘sweet Jesus’ sort of thing to do. But I understand the impulse.

Walking into the temple precincts, Jesus twists together a whip of cords, upends the tables of the money changers; their coins ching and clatter across the pavement.

Swinging the whip above his head, he drives off the merchants with their birds and lambs and cattle and who knows what else, clearing out an empty space until all that remains is him, standing alone in the courtyard, catching his breath, looking around for who or what he has yet to chase off.

He wants the temple—the ‘Father’s house’—to be a meeting place where human hearts might know and feel the Great Heart who loves and longs for them, a space to pour out their loves and hurts that they might meet and enter the Love who is their home, their hearts enfolded in the divine heart.

I felt something of the same yesterday while visiting a church that was new to me. The choir stood at the director’s command, a flute from a hidden corner intoned an exquisite passage, inviting the heart to rest, wait and listen for the voices to breathe their harmonies over the gathered people.

A spiritual, deep and soulful washed over us, the congregation rapt, moved but unmoving in the pews around me, until it was over. The final note hung in the air a nanosecond as a moment of sweet, mystic communion was about to gather every heart into one love for the Holy God who inspires such beauty and devotion.

But it was not to be, the congregation broke into simultaneous applause, unable to leave a tender moment alone, as they did every time someone sang or played or spoke, shattering any opportunity for silent communion with each other in the Great Love who woke us from sleep and called us together.

There was no open space for the heart to breathe and pray and be.

I was not tempted to make a whip of cords and drive these good people out, but I certainly wanted to tie their hands that they might let Beauty’s presence wash over them and grace their hearts with whatever the Holy One might give them.

Just so, I think I understand Jesus as he stands out of breath in the middle of the courtyard.

He cleared an open space where the clamor of buying and selling, of work and worry is stilled, a space where human hearts are relieved of the compulsion to fill every single moment with sound and motion—all the things we do in our vain attempts to fill our life with meaning or to drown out the nagging doubt that our lives and all we do to fill them has any meaning at all, that the emptiness we sometimes (often?) feel has no cure.

But the heart does not lie. Our hearts know we are made for love, to be filled with affection and warmth, to find ourselves amid the mutuality of giving and receiving that makes us truly human and truly glad to be graced with the privilege of drawing breath on this wonderous little corner of the cosmos.

We need a clean, open space to feel what we feel and to speak our fears and needs and hopes from the hidden silence of our hearts. And there, exactly there, in that open space, we meet the one who is the face of the hunger within us.

He is not only the fire of our hunger but also the food and drink that satisfies the heart’s ancient longing, standing in the open space, ready to hear, ready to heal, ready to receive, ready to welcome us that we may be taken into the Heart he is. Heart-to-heart, we meet and know the Love who made us, the Love who ever awaits us, the Love who lies waiting to live and breathe through our holy and precious lives.

David L. Miller

 

 

If dreams there be …

You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven (Matthew 5:43-45a)

Songs and dreams tell us who we are, who we are meant to be, the soul who longs to live through the one precious life we are given. They alone unlock the hearts secret room, releasing desires over which reason has neither control nor arms to reach.

So it is, that on a single day, two moments come that have absolutely nothing to do with each other, except for the voice of soul speaking through both.

The song came first, a movie theme, Il Postino, decades old, but what does age matter? Beauty, love and wonder know no age. It began with the soft trill of a single flute, then a violin, a love theme, its melody gentle and flowing, filled with an insatiable ache to touch and know and be absorbed, lost in love’s embrace.

The heart is much quicker than the mind, and in an instant my heart prays silently then with words to be one, lost in the song, not to hear it with the ear but to be inside the ache of its melody, wounded and wanting, flowing in the stream of love and longing.

And for a moment, prayer has its answer; thought is dispersed, the mind falls silent as death and the heart is carried away in the wonder of beauty. I am in the song and the song is in me, and we are one. Lost in love’s melody, once more I know I am Love’s blessed image, beloved from all eternity, enclosed in the heart of the One who sings love songs in my soul.

Feeling this, there is neither need nor want for anything more than Love’s constant return that, however unlikely, I might become the Love who dwells in the inner mansion of this heart, instead of the imposter who so often wears my face.

Is this but a romantic dream? Well, there was a dream this same day. It left a lingering image, a memory, as sleep slipped away. A golden-haired girl, age 3, in a soft-green and white checkered dress. She wandered up the aisle of a crowded chapel, packed for a graduation ceremony. 

Slowly looking around, she passed the president of the seminary who was speaking at the lectern. Climbing a couple of steps, she walked among and around the knees of faculty in academic robes and full regalia seated there—looking for me. But she cannot find me because I am sitting far to the side, several rows deep among the graduates, barely able to see what was happening.

This wasn’t just a dream. It happened. And the moment lives in my heart, which is why, I suppose, it appeared in my dream. But in my dream, something happens that didn’t happen. I rise, scoop her up, enfold her in my arms, enclosing her in my heart so that the moment might live forever, shining with love’s beauty, revealing once and for all what human beings are made of and made for.

Savoring that image, I know that the love in which I hold her … is the Love who holds and encloses me in the divine heart, living still in this precious life with which I have been graced.

If dreams there be, and if dreams come true, may this one forever haunt my days and nights … until the Love who inspires them expands my heart to love all that God loves. Perhaps then, I shall truly sing the song that God never ceases to sing, lost in love’s melody.

David L. Miller

 

 

Only for the sick

 After this Jesus went out and saw a tax-collector named Levi, sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he got up, left everything, and followed him. (Luke 5:27-28)

Who doesn’t want a second chance? Or a third or fourth … or, Lord knows, how many is enough before we get it right? Life, that is.

But then we never do get it quite right … or even close.

And if I needed a reminder, the ash-smudged foreheads that greeted me along grocery store aisles came as an irksome spur, once again, to take a close look at my life—my patterns of living and speaking and acting through seven decades—and recognize, once again, that I have received a lot more in this life than I have given.

I have not become the soul of life and love and grace I might have, could have, should have (and wanted to) become. But strangely, I am still haunted by an unmistakable beauty that hungers to live … in and through … the one life I have been given. It won’t let me go.

Amid this comes the darkness of the wee hours when sleep slips away and you stare into the abyss of knowing it is later than you think: There are not nearly enough years left for you to live the fullness of the beauty that lies hidden in your heart.

If only, one thinks …. If only I could do it all over again, I would have been smarter, better, braver, bolder, kinder and more faithful. I would not have indulged my vanity or wounded anger or lust or greed or fear … or whatever bedevils your heart, striving as we all do to fill the emptiness and soothe wounds we may have carried for decades.

It is then, in the middle of the mess, amid the quagmire of could’ves, would’ves and should’ves, that Mercy comes to call. ‘Follow me. I want you.’

Such was Jesus’ invitation to Levi, a member of the most reviled occupation of the time, tax collectors. In Caravaggio’s painting of this scene, an astonished Levi, leaning over the day’s ill-gotten proceeds, points at himself as if to say, ‘Who, me?’

Yes, you … Levi, and we, too. For, Mercy comes to those who live amid the quagmire of unresolved feelings and regrets, sins of which we are ashamed and memories that make us wince. I do not come for those who have no need of a physician, Jesus says, but those who are sick.

So yes, I want you.

Rising from his chair, Levi followed, and in my mind, this day, I, too, rise and fall at Mercy’s feet, Jesus lifting me to his side, for a moment his arm around me before I disappear into him—and realize the truth.

I am, this life, with all the messes I have made, the hurts I have caused and, yes, the good and graces I have tried to share, all of it is enveloped in him, taken into the Love he is, Mercy enfolding all that I am so that all that I am (however haltingly) might become mercy and grace, love and beauty, no longer lost or alone but human and whole, at home in the Love who heals.

David L. Miller

As you see so shall you be

A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, ‘If you choose, you can make me clean.’ Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I do choose. Be made clean!’ (Mark 1:40-41)

I have reached the point in recent years where (on good days) I realize that getting the point is not the point.

Hard as it is to let go of wringing an idea or some takeaway from my morning meditation, it is refreshing, if a bit unsettling, to settle into a moment of awareness, realizing that what I seek is already in me … and I am in it.

The unsettling part is letting go of the need to make something of the time, to walk away with an idea I can share or write about, which, ironically, is exactly what I am doing.

But to write about what happened today, last night and several days running seems impossible because it is so nebulous—tangible, yes, and assuredly real, but elusive as the air of love I was breathing, or better, that was breathing through me.

The story is simple, a leper, an outcast in the grip of gross disfiguration physically, emotionally and socially. And then, an outstretched hand and Jesus’ voice: I choose. I choose you. I choose this moment to touch and heal and love and give you back your life.

The words are barely necessary. The hand is enough. If all I ever knew of Jesus was this moment, this outstretched hand, it would be enough for me to love him and want to be with him, just to feel him near.

But there’s more. For the superlative gift is not seeing him and knowing he is compassion, divine and real, human and present right there before my eyes. The greater gift is finding that same love alive and breathing from some secret source hidden in the depth of your being.

And greater still is silently knowing that the Love breathing in him and in you surrounds and envelopes us and everything we can imagine in an invisible ocean of Presence, Love’s boundless sea.

The non-point of all this is that we pray and meditate not (or surely less) to get something, find answers or reach an insight. We come and look at Jesus to savor Love’s truth until it awakens within us the Love we truly are, and in whom we live, though we knew it not.

We come to see and savor Love’s own soul, for as we see so shall we be.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 

Faces at the door

And the whole city was gathered around the door. And he cured many …. In the morning, when it was still dark, [Jesus] got up and went out to a deserted place …. When they found him, they said to him, ‘Everyone is searching for you.’ (Mark 1:33-37)

Faces. Just look at the faces. Forget your theology, your ideology, your politics and everything else that blinds or obscures or restricts your field of vision.

Just look and see, and you will know.

A black-haired girl with earnest eyes raises a crooked stick on which someone attached a ragged white flag ripped from a bed sheet. Around her lies the rubble of her life, a Gazan city of crumpled gray concrete broken in the bombardment, her punishment for having the bad judgment of being born at this time and place.

Miles away, in Jerusalem streets, weary faces walk in the torchlight wearing love’s worry for faces they fear they will never again see, hoping their shouts will bring their beloved home from captivity, while neighbors well-known to them mourn the slaughtered.

I don’t have to wonder at the expression of those who gathered at the Capernaum door of the house where Jesus was staying. I just watch the news and feel the ache of hearts longing for restoration, hoping to feel whole and safe, wrapped in love’s warmth, free from the fears that nag every moment of their waking existence and haunt their dreams so that there is no escape.

Nor need I wonder why Jesus’ friends panicked when they woke and didn’t see him sleeping across the room, his breathing keeping time with their own, reassuring them that the one essential soul in their life was not lost to them.

Faces, all of them, longing to feel seen and safe, whole and hopeful, hoping that the hidden soul within them might rest in the peace of Love’s presence.

‘Everyone is looking for you,’ Jesus’ friends breathed in anxious voice, upon finding him alone on a hillside.

Of course, we all are. The girl with the flag, the protestors in the street, the faces at Jesus’ door, you, me, the next guy who passes us on the street—all of us looking for a great love that can make us whole.

All of us, in one way or another, whether with flags or shouts, silent prayers or hidden longings we barely recognize within ourselves: We pray.

We pray because we are human and mortal and so very incomplete, yet still alive with the hope that there is One who can make us whole, One who completes us, One who is the longing of every human heart—One who is that very longing … living in the soul’s hidden depth.

And that One … begs to be seen in the eyes of that girl in Gaza, to be heard in the voices of those longing for their lost ones, and to be welcomed in the hidden corners of our hearts longing for Love’s healing touch.

We stand at the door, all of us, one great prayer, secretly bearing the Love who awakens our hope for Love’s completion.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

With Lo in the flow

Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?’ And they took offence at [Jesus]. (Mark 6:3)

I have no idea who Lo is, his background or how he came to work at a suburban Cosco. But he made my day.

He saw me, and for a moment I truly felt seen, welcome and received as we shared a moment. And laughter.

The laughter was directed at my head of white hair, revealing my age and releasing me from the idiocy of having to fumble through my wallet to produce my driver’s license or AARP card in order to purchase the bottle of wine amid the milk and butter, coffee and assorted items on this day’s grocery run.

I saw his name tag as we left the checkout, while trying, without success, to identify the origin of his accent. But it didn’t matter because something utterly ordinary and wonderfully transcendent passed between us in an instant.

What to call it? Flow, maybe?

The flow of kindness, mutual humanity, basic respect, gentle humor, yes, all this, but more, because it made us—or at least me—happier, more alive and hopeful, open and kind, whatever the day might bring.

There was one more thing: It also made me feel less alone.

Our aloneness in this increasingly anxious and impersonal age is killing us, literally, or so a growing number of medical studies tell us. Their bottom line: Loneliness has the same health effect as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.

But loneliness kills us spiritually well before we are ready for the undertaker. It makes us feel cut off from the flow of human kindness that would pull us into its stream, bathing our hearts in the awareness that we are seen and recognized, known and valued, respected and worthy of care.

There are sacraments of this kindness and care. Today, one of them was named Lo, and for a moment, an instant, I knew myself with Lo in the flow of goodness and gentle grace.

As a Christian, I have a name for this flow.

‘I am the bread of life,’ Jesus says, in the Gospel of John. ‘I am the Good Shepherd.’ ‘I am living water.’ The list goes on, and today I will add a couple more predicates to Jesus’ sentence.

I am the flow of life and love that illumines your heart. I am the joy that fills you when you feel seen and treasured. I am the kindness that lifts your heart and restores your joy. I am the elation that comes when Love’s living flow washes through your heart.

And I am also the sadness, the longing ache of feeling cut off, rejected and invisible. For, the Love that I am longs to flow through all that is, every moment, every conversation, every day.

The divine life and love that filled Jesus frustrated him thoroughly when the gift he offered was refused and denied, when he was dismissed as the boy from down the street, nothing special.

But the flow goes on—within, beneath, around and through all that is—finding its way despite the rocks and walls, hard heads and calcified hearts that would hold it back.

And sometimes, Lo and behold, we find ourselves right in the middle of it.

David L. Miller

So, this is life

Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’ (Mark 1:14b-15)

The kingdom of God is near. The kingdom of God is within you. The kingdom of God is among you. The kingdom of God is spread out on the earth and people do not see it.

I surely don’t know what went through the minds of those who first heard words like these from Jesus.

A kingdom? You mean, like Rome? Like the kings who rule and tax and run things, whom we avoid as much as possible so we can live our lives with little interference from the powerful who know little of our lives and couldn’t care less as long as their coffers are full?

No, another kingdom, make that a new reality, a new way of being awakened in the hearts of those who first heard Jesus.

Why did people come to him? And why did the first followers drop their nets and take up with him, having no idea what they might feel or see or suffer?

Or did they? Did they feel more alive in his presence for reasons they could not understand? Did they hang on his words because they felt more alive, more human, more hopeful and whole so that they wanted more of whatever it was that was in him—and whatever it was that was coming to life in them when he was near?

In other words, maybe they followed and stayed near him for exactly the same reason I get up every morning and read a story of Jesus, watching and waiting for whatever feelings and thoughts, questions and awareness bubbles up—because on most days I feel more alive, more free, more loved, more whole and able to love this crazy world and live with joyful gratitude for the life I have been given; every morning, the cold corners of my heart fill and warm making me glad to be alive because I catch a glimpse of this Jesus, feeling for the breadth of a breath the bottomless love that he is and knowing, this is life.

Salvation is one word for this, the life of God—which is to say Immortal and Impassable Love—claiming greater territory and rule in the rugged terrain of my tangled heart. And I am glad. For it’s a new day, the rule of God is more with and in me, opening my eyes to its beauty spread out on the earth in creation’s wonder and in the loveliness of gracious faces alive and shining, whether they know it or not, with the One who is always near, bringing the kingdom

David L. Miller