A contrary creed

‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. (John 3:16)

Details matter, and English translations of this well-known, little-understood verse of scripture obscure a detail that matters profoundly.

The Gospel of John makes a frequent distinction between believing ‘in Jesus’ and believing ‘into Jesus.’ It is obvious in the Greek original but disappears in most English translations.

Believing in Jesus is easy. Anyone can believe in Jesus. He lived, he taught, he was rejected and crucified. You can even believe that his death somehow offers forgiveness and an entry pass into heaven.

You can believe all these things without it changing even one thing about how you think, speak or act. You can believe them while holding all kinds of hateful, bigoted attitudes and beliefs about people you don’t like, like, say, people whose politics you detest or immigrants or non-binary folk or, well, fill in the blank.

This kind of ‘believing’ is what gives the Christianity a bad name and sends sensitive souls running for the church exit to escape the hypocrisy of indifference to—and often, complicity in—injustice and human suffering.

The debasement of what constitutes ‘Christianity’ in our current cultural crisis is rife with examples of Christians justifying indifference to the poor and suffering at home and abroad.

For example, millions suffer malnutrition, starve and die of preventable diseases in places where our nation was once an embodiment of compassion, all because our leaders sold voters on the gospel of ‘America First,’ a strange and selfish gospel imbued with the moral logic of a preschooler protecting his toys.

The chant of ‘America first,’ like ‘me first,’ is a contrary creed, a willful contradiction of everything Jesus taught and lived.

But believing ‘into Jesus’—and that is how this verse in the Gospel of John actually reads—doesn’t leave any part of your life and heart untouched or unchallenged by divine love.

Believing into Jesus is the continual and unending opening of one’s heart to the invasion of the love of Jesus until it permeates every pore. It is daily prayer, turning again and again to him that we may abide in the love from which nothing needs be hidden.

It is the daily return, morning by morning, to seek his face and know his heart that his way might become our way.

And it is also is refusing to turn aside when his love, like a searchlight, illumines the dark corners of our hearts or when it stings our egos, tearing down our protective facades to reveal our narcissism and selfishness.

Believing into Jesus is a lifelong journey into the love who frees us from ourselves for the sake of the world.

David L. Miller

A many splendored glory

The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one. (John 17:22)

Green Valley in the early morning shimmers green and gold. A serpentine cinder path winds 100 yards or so along the east branch of the DuPage River. A Heintz 57 of grasses coats the marsh between the path and the stream to the east.

Old oaks line each side of the path, straining high to touch hands above in a cathedral arch, framing the way south. Sunlight streams through the canopy, dappling my way, playing touch and go on the petals of purple and white wildflowers randomly scattered among the grasses.

They enchant and stop me several times to take a closer look. ‘Do you know what these flowers are?’ I ask a lone hiker going the other way. He doesn’t know either, but it doesn’t matter.

Why should I want or need to know their name? Would it make them one iota more beautiful or more mesmerizing? Would it make me more grateful for their existence beside me on this Spring day?

No. My question is a feeble attempt at control, as if I could sum up a beauty for which no name is adequate. Naming them would only create a distance between myself and the truth of their splendor. It would pollute the purity of the gratitude, love, joy and thanks they awaken within me, a gratuitous, unsolicited gift from life’s lavish Source.

Walking on, two miles south, a dead tree, rises some 70 feet or so beside the river. Pale gray, stripped clean of bark by decades of wind and weather, a few shattered limbs twist high and lifeless, ending precipitously in dagger-stark points against the blue of the sky.

They make a fine perch for an eagle protecting a nest deeper in the trees, while looking for an unsuspecting fish in the stream unlucky enough to become lunch.

I go to see if he is still there, and he is, so high and confident of his place in the world that my presence is of no concern to him. But for me he is grace and beauty and assurance that being alive and being here is a marvelously wonderful thing for which I have no words, just the moisture in my eyes to express appreciation and praise. A good enough prayer.

It is hard to walk and pray, but I try, stopping where I must to refocus my wandering thoughts on one word that keeps drawing me … glory. Jesus’ words are the impetus for my reflection.

‘The glory you have given me I have given them.’ Jesus says, praying to the Father. Perhaps it is my surroundings, but an image comes to mind as I meditate on his glory.

I see him in near darkness, sitting on the ground by a fire, holding a piece of bread he has just broken from the loaf he handed to the person next to him. His smile wide and spontaneous, he looks across the flames at a friend with loving pleasure, filled with delight at the goodness of the bread, the warmth of the fire and for the love that fills him for this one moment with this one person, invisible to my eyes, whom he graces with that smile.

I don’t imagine it is me at whom he smiles. It could be anyone and is everyone. I just know I am irretrievably captivated and captured by the love conveyed in his smile without one word being spoken.

If glory is the shining forth of the love and power and beauty of God, I see and know it in this image, shimmering with the love present in all the other times and places the glory of God shined forth in Jesus, like when he touched and healed, or when he forgave his killers and then spoke peace to those who denied and ran away from him in the hour of his suffering.

Jesus is the glory—the power, beauty and love—of God. He is the glory I see and feel and know in my own flesh, awakened by his love on a May morning … sprung fresh from Gods own heart.

David L. Miller

I will not leave you

 

‘I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me … . On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. (John 14:18-20)

Too soon, comes the time to say goodbye and bless each other for journeys whose endings we cannot see.

Like last year and the year before and the year before and the year before, I will bless retreatants I have guided through the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises for 34 weeks. Wanting to hold on just a little bit longer, we will let go of our weekly conversations, hoping to hold fast to what our hearts have come to know and love more deeply than before.

One will return to his substance abuse work with fresh perspective, another to discover what it means to be an ordained deacon, and a third to living, loving and serving in the wake of the violent death of her children.

And I, like always, will grieve letting them go. Saying ‘goodbye’ will be hard, the way it has been hard other times I’ve had to say ‘goodbye’ to places and people I loved.

But what we have known in and among us will not be lost, neither to me nor to them. With them, listening to them, sharing with them, I have received a great gift, the greatest of all.

Preparing for our last time together, a love for each of them—a love beyond any I thought was in me—bubbled up from an internal depth over which I have no control, a living spring of life and joy, Christ within, loving them through me and carrying my will along for the ride.

Coursing through my heart, Christ filled and warmed me through, lifting me beyond all petty self-concern, wanting only to give the fullness of my heart away that the loving joy I felt might fill the hearts of those I have been privileged to serve, all of us joined in his joy.

Savoring this, it will be easier come Tuesday when we bless and send each other into our respective futures. Yes, there may be an occasional text or phone call, but our lives will go in different directions far spread across half the country.

But we will never travel alone. We go knowing the fulfillment of great promise. ‘I will come to you,’ Jesus said that long ago day as he prepared the hearts of those who most loved him for his departure, saying it also to us.

I will come to you and when I do you will know that I am in you and you are in me, encompassed in the fullness of grace and love that is the Father’s heart.

We don’t know the ways we may see and know Jesus any more than we knew how he’d appear in and among us when we first met and took this journey together through a 500-year-old set of spiritual exercises.

But the living Christ kept his promise within and among us in surprising ways, sometimes in spite of resistance to opening our hearts to reveal the hurts and hopes that brought us together in the first place.

I will not leave you, he says. Whatever comes and wherever the road takes us it will never lead beyond the reach of my promise.

David L. Miller

The place of knowing

‘Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me.’ (John 14:1)

There is nothing so practical, today, so needed and often missing within our hearts and churches, than a clear sense and deep awareness of the presence of Christ within our hearts.

Navigating the daily onslaught of conflict, anger, party spirit and rage that poisons the discourse of our nation requires careful tending of the place of knowing at the center of our souls.

We need an interior place to be, to rest, to return, a reserve of relative quiet and certainty unfazed by the contesting opinions and incessant bursts of ‘Breaking News’ that inundate our consciousness.

Unmoored and untethered to the deep truth of our being, our hearts and minds get swept away in the tsunami of information, opinions and memes pouring from every digital device we own, connecting us to everything under the sun, except ourselves.

But even these, my words, are more noise amid the din. What we need is to descend into the silent soul, there to feel the ache of searching love that is the presence of the Love who is searching for us, eager that we might shut off the noise, stop trying to keep up with everything and listen.

‘We need only to find a place where we can be alone and look upon Him present within us,’ St. Teresa of Avila counsels. Again and again, she encourages us to go within, to ‘represent Christ’ within us, holding and seeing an image of him within and resting there, present to one another in love.

For her, this often meant seeing him in Gethsemane or in his Passion, humbly speaking to him of whatever was on her heart.

For me, often as not, it is walking just behind him in the fields of Galilee or finding my way to the hillside where he sat in silence, watching as the faint light of a day newly born appeared over distant hills, his heart at rest in the Mysterious Love who indwelt his being.

Welcomed into that holy space, the noise of the world falls away, the troubles of yesterday disappear and the Love he is blossoms within, its warmth at once revealing who he is, the One with Whom he communed and the soul I truly am beneath the face I show to the world.

I wish I could live in this interior space always. I wish everything I said and did rose out of this place of knowing. I’d be a much better and kinder person. But all-too-often, the bitter conflicts and noise that roil our society floods my consciousness, and I lose myself, living far from the place of knowing.

And I must start again, just like so many other times, to find my way back to places I have known him and known myself as the place of his abiding, the two of us joined in one love.

The spiritual life is wonderful, Thomas Merton once mused, ‘if you are content to always be a beginner.’ Always starting anew. Knowing then not knowing; having then wanting; finding then losing.

Returning again and again to the place of knowing to hear his voice, ‘Don’t let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me.’

David L. Miller

The inner voice of love

[The shepherd of the sheep] goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers. (John 10:4b-5)

There is a voice of quiet amid the clamor, a prayer of peace beneath the cacophony and conflict that commands the daily news.

It is your voice, Jesus. I heard it on the lips of elders who spoke in ways I most needed to hear when I felt weak and unworthy, insignificant and insecure.

You spoke of love, of wanting me, of beauty and kindness and care, of compassion for a world of hurt. Your voice claimed a space, a room in my heart that was created especially for you, a place nothing else should ever occupy and nothing else can ever satisfy.

I sit and pray each day hoping to descend into that space, to enter that room where you so lovingly abide that I may hear your voice and feel my heart one with you.

Somedays, the door opens, tears moisten my eyes and I know what human hearts were fashioned to feel and know. Other times, the door is closed. I cannot enter, and I realize that entering is not something I can command but is your gift.

I can only ask, seek and knock, aching for the door to open that the miracle of oneness may wash away every hurt I have ever known, every sadness I have ever felt and every moment I have ever felt lost and alone. All of it swept away in love’s cleansing current.

This is your gift today. For reasons known only to your Spirit, the door opens, and I enter the place of hearing and knowing the Love that does not die and will never cast me out.

I see my life, the years and decades, the places and ways, so many more than I know or can name, where I heard the voice of your love calling me to stay near, telling me that all the voices that ever troubled me, including my own self-condemnation, were telling me lies.

And for all this, I praise you, for you are my only peace. You are my joy. You are my final and fondest hope. You are the Love I hear in every love and every beauty and every joy that frees me to live and love beyond the prison of ego and anxiety.

So, help me, Dearest Heart. Help me hear your voice amid the clamor, conflicts and cacophony that command the daily news. Help me hear you when my heart is cold and dark, when the nights are long and sleep won’t come. Help me hear you when memories taunt and accuse, and when I feel my life has too little mattered.

Help me hear the inner voice of love, from the place of your abiding, that like the faithful ones who blessed me, I may speak of love and beauty and kindness and compassion in these bitter times, when voices of hate demean the dignity of human beings you made for yourself.

Help the hurt and broken ones hear your voice and know the love you are so pleased to share, even with me, right here and right now.

David L. Miller

Against an infinite horizon

They said to each other, ‘Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?’ (Luke 24:32)

Final daylight swirling gold, purple and pink, colors fading, three gray shadows slog into the thickening darkness, insignificant against the horizon of an uncaring cosmos, insensible of their sorrow.

Silent, heads bent, they listen to the words of one who is always the stranger we long to meet along the way, the one whose heart knows what ours needs.

They’d just buried their hope, their dreams shattered by the implacable powers who ravage and rule the earth for their pleasure, crushing any who would dare imagine a world ruled not by the love of power but by the power of love. (Such are with us in every age. We know their names.)

Huddled together against the bitter chill of mortality, they mourn Jesus’ death … and their own, their shivered hearts shrinking in the bitter chill that it all means nothing: not their lives, their loves, their hopes that something truly alive and wonderful can blossom on earth and in their hearts—all of it empty because there is no truth, no life, no way that leads anywhere but to the silence of the tomb.

Their dearest hopes now buried and gone, sealed behind the cold, gray stone of Jesus’ tomb, they trudge home to salve their battered hearts.

And yet, and yet … there was something in the voice of the stranger who joined them along the Emmaus road, something that warmed the cold, dead embers of life and love and hope that had once burned in their hearts. Words, he spoke, of ancient promises and of the Gracious Wonder whose name is Love and whose gift is Life.

It was just a flicker at first, so small and frail they did not notice what was happening in their soul’s depth—not until the stranger blessed the bread, broke it and gave it to them as they sat at table.

In such familiar reverence, they noticed the warmth that had been building within them along the way. They realized they had met the stranger for whom every heart longs. They felt the Life he is alive in the places they felt most dead.

And they lifted their eyes to the once uncaring skies, there to see that we live against the horizon of an Infinite Love—stretching from eternity-to-eternity, enfolding every moment, walking many roads to meet us on the way, sometimes when we least expect.

David L. Miller

What the heart wants

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)

Knowledge is not experience, and experience is what the heart wants. It is what the heart requires to know what can be known no other way.

Easter comes with the proclamation of Christ’s resurrection, and email peppers me with books and articles offering proof or disproof of the holy miracle.

I spurn them all, although there was a time they held interest for me. That is long gone now, along with my painful straining to rationalize what neither I nor anyone else can prove … or for that matter, disprove.

I’m not interested. It’s all a striving after the wind.

I want what Thomas wanted … and got, the experience of seeing and feeling and hearing a great and final word of ‘peace’, spoken over my life with all its confusion and failures, sins and failed promise, wonderings and doubts and unanswered questions.

I want to touch the wounds of love that testify to the world that there really is a Love that does not break, a Love that never turns back, a Love for which there is no line it refuses to cross, no depth to which it will not go, no death it will not suffer, no depth of hell to which it will not descend to find the likes of me.

It is not the knowledge of many things that fills the heart. It is this, the experience of Love Uncontainable.

I come to the old stories, told again and again through the centuries …  and to me by hearts in whom that Love lived and lives still.

I come neither wanting nor seeking to know the meaning of it all. I speak the words, listening, waiting and watching for that which stirs my heart to love and long for the Loving Presence I have craved since early days.

Seeing Jesus’ shattered hands, the love I see wakes a great and surpassing love within. Amid tears and quiet joy, my heart awakens to the truth that I and the Love He Is are one, even on days when I am cold as stone and believing is hard.

But that’s not today.

Today, I see those ruined hands raised in peace, and my heart knows as only hearts can … that he is the Love Uncontainable who will haunt my heart until I am wholly his.

Who knows what tomorrow will bring? My heart may not be so acutely certain of Love’s living presence as today. But I will look and listen, attending to what I read and hear, to faces known and strangers who pass, eager for that which stirs my heart to love and longing, giving thanks that the Love Who Lives … lives everywhere.

David L. Miller

Easter in the bunker

Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. (John 20:6-7)

I would have picked up the grave cloths, held them in my hands, savored their texture, stroked my cheek with the fabric and breathed in the fragrance of the soul they’d held. Anything … just to feel his presence.

I can imagine it, but imagination quickly transports me 33 years into the past and a place thousands of miles away, a concrete bunker on the edge of a civil war.

In the back, squatting on the dirt floor, a mother fingered the dirty rags in which she’d wrapped her child, a little girl. The child was starving, dying, beyond help even if medical help had been near, which it wasn’t.

I think of her every year as imagine how tenderly Jesus’ friends wrapped him in death. I watch their hands and soon see this mother tugging at the filthy bands of cloth around her child, covering her, keeping watch, a death watch, which would end with the child laid beneath soil of a troubled land where this scene was playing out hundreds of times every day.

I know. The image is too sad for today, or so I was informed in no uncertain terms the one time I told the story on an Easter morning.

But each year, the hands of Jesus’ friends and the hands of this mother blend and merge in the sacred, unpredictable ways of memory where meaning is made and the Spirit does her best work.

Only now, this year, I imagine holding Jesus’ grave cloths to my cheek and am transported across 33 years to the back corner of that bunker, where I pick up the filthy strips of once-white cotton laying in the dirt, abandoned, cast off.

And at this, I know that for which I hope: to feel his risen presence, the presence I felt that decades old day when I prayed for that child through tears and marked her with the sign of the cross, hoping with all my might that the Resurrection is real for the whole suffering world … and especially for that little girl … and the mother who wrapped her in bands of love … the two of us, held in one hope.

No one needed to tell me ‘Christ is risen’ that day. He was right there.

David L. Miller

Of Mary and Pete Hegseth

 

There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. (John 12:2-3)

‘Where are you?’ An inner voice says. ‘What do you see?’

With that, I am invited into my senses, freed from my busy mind’s need to make meaning of words.

The scene comes alive not only in sight but in the aromatic oil of anointing, a healing fragrance rising, floating, drifting across the room, filling my senses.

For a moment, I am there in the splendid silence as Mary rises and brushes back her hair, perfumed now with precious nard, having wiped Jesus’ feet.

More fragrant, still, is the loving reverence that moved her blessed act, throwing aside all utilitarian concerns about how much it cost and how it could have sold and the money give to the poor.

Moved to her knees, all that mattered was loving the Love that unleashed love’s gracious flow from the depth of her heart, a fountain of life to which she gave no resistance, allowing herself to be carried away, as totally given to God’s loving purpose as the soul whom she anointed.

We should all be so free, for she is a portrait of human fulfillment, love’s completion in a human soul at least for this one moment. Seeing her, I witness what my soul most wants and surely needs.

Tragically, I also feel the discordant debasement of Christian faith and witness among those, such as our nation’s chest-thumping Secretary of War, who invoke the name of Jesus to bless the ‘lethality’ of violence upon ‘those who deserve no mercy.’

How, I wonder, again and again. How can anyone employ the name of Jesus to bless the very opposite of that which Jesus sought to awaken in every human heart? And how can those who worship and believe Jesus is the merciful heart of God for all people not shout their objections to such obvious sacrilege, the desecration of the name of Jesus?

I have no convincing answer, only an invitation to watch Mary shake out her hair as the fragrance of love fills the air.

David L. Miller

My brother’s heart

You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die … than to have the whole nation destroyed.’ … So from that day on they planned to put him to death. Jesus therefore no longer walked about openly … but went from there to a town called Ephraim in the region near the wilderness; and he remained there with the disciples. (John 11:51, 53-54)

Sometimes, it doesn’t take much to know the beauty of another’s heart; just a moment, a look, a glance, the touch of a hand can tell you everything you really need to know. And so it is here.

As cynical hearts conspire to kill him, Jesus retires to the countryside to be with friends.

Scripture doesn’t tell us what he did there, only that a few days later he returned to the place of danger to make his final witness to the Love which constituted his soul, the Love that consumed him and resulted in an excruciating death at the hands of his enemies.

I have long believed that we either know Jesus as a human being, a human soul, or we do not know him at all. His flesh and blood, his humanity, as weak and vulnerable as our own, is the vehicle of the divine heart in whom he abides and who abides in him.

Seeing and feeling his humanity moves me to fall in love with him again and again.

It happens every Holy Week. In Jesus’ words, in his bearing, I feel and know the beauty of a passionate, loving, sad and wounded heart, a truly human soul.

And I know him as my brother one more time.

I try to imagine what happened as he shared bread and table, wine and worry with his friends, away from the conspiracies that would congeal to destroy him.

There likely would have been anxious laughter and furrowed brows amid memories of all they’d shared along the dusty roads and tiny towns that welcomed or despised them.

Together, they had known the ecstasy of a joy beyond any they’d ever known, the grace of being with him. The beauty of his words and the wonder of his power awakened hopes for which they had no words.

Underneath all this, were their nagging doubts about whether they’d ever really understood him, little knowing that all the beauty they’d known and felt in him would soon be dashed to dust.

But there was one more thing. A current of love flowed in and through, among and under everything they heard and said and felt together.

No one would have asked to know the source of that living stream. For, they all knew. They all knew my brother’s heart, however little they understood him.

Who Jesus is, the heart of his humanity and the glory of his divinity, often appears most dramatically in contrast to the reactions he stirred in those who opposed him.

His opponents conspired to kill him because it was pragmatic, expedient, the best thing to do to eliminate a problem.

While they plotted, Jesus withdrew to be with friends he loved, loving them to the end, even as he prepared for his ultimate witness to the gracious heart of the Father.

One side plans a legal murder, while Jesus unveils the Love that cannot be defeated by hatred or destroyed by its enemies.

In the end, they killed him, never understanding or imagining the beauty of my brother’s heart. But of course, that wasn’t the end. The end is life. The end is love. The end is communion with the heart for whom we most long.

David L. Miller

Morning dove

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. (Philippians 4:4)

There is nothing we want and need more than joy amid the rampant cynicism and conflicts of our age. And there is no end to the ways human souls seek and fail to find it or that marketers try to sell it.

But it cannot be bought or earned. Nor do our successes guarantee it.

Joy can only be received as a gift. Fortunately, we live in the atmosphere of a Great Giver. Or so I find as I sit my weary self in the rocking chair by the window on this pale gray morning.

‘I hear you little bird,’ I say, as a dove coos outside the window. ‘Good morning. Let’s you and me enjoy the gift.’

The gift is this … one day … into which I and my friend in the locust tree have awakened. One more day neither of us created, requested or did anything to deserve. It just is, given, flowing from yesterday into tomorrow and the imponderable beyond, a river of life whose mysterious Source we cannot see or conceive.

Each of us has been granted a share of the life of the One who is Life, given our unique shape and form and way of being: me, a human soul straining to touch and name the Immaculate Generosity who has given us this day, while my friendly dove, much wiser, simply sits and sings the joy of the morning.

I should just sit and listen. I might learn something valuable about where joy is found.

But no, I turn from joy’s song, calling me home, to the weary news of the world where the wisdom of the dove is as lost to the accomplished and powerful as it is to me. There is no consolation there, no peace, just the noisy clamor of clashing wills.  

When will I ever, finally learn? Joy is right here, right now, as I wake, alive to the gift of life from life’s unimaginable, unspeakably generous Source.

It flows through my veins and courses through my heart. It surges in my hope as I study rose stems for fresh buds of spring. It shines in my eyes as I crane my neck to see geese and cranes plying the sky to their summer home. It sings in my laughter as I eat pizza with my beloved and wake to the goodness of loving and being loved.

In all of it, I feel and know Life is in me and I am in Life, which is to say I am in the Love God is—the Love who is endless generosity, the Love who seeks us every waking moment, the Love whose pleasure is giving life to me and the dove, hoping we just might learn to sing.

Knowing oneself in this Love is the joy for which the heart longs. And as the dove knows, when it comes to entering this joy, singing is much more effective than thinking.

David L. Miller

Found in him

I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him. (Philippians 3:8-9a)

The image is crude and old, perhaps even childish. I hesitate to describe it, since it exposes how simpleminded and unsophisticated I can be.

I intuit the image as much as see it. It first appeared in my mind’s eye as an icon, a vision (?) … decades ago. I see or sense Christ, the outline of his body. I cannot see his face or features, just his arms slightly spread, and I am inside the image, enveloped in him.

I can call it to mind and feel almost nothing. But times come, like today, when it appears or simply awakens, and I see and feel and know myself inside him, enclosed, surrounded, safe within, my whole being bathed in a love that dissolves every anger, every anxiety and every memory that assails my heart. And I have a lot of those.

‘You are my freedom,’ I pray, during the blessed time of awakening, ‘my only real freedom.’

For I cannot chase away the disparate memories that conspire and converge in the night to accuse me of all the ways I have failed to be the human soul I wanted to be, the soul I hoped and once imagined I might become.

My mind is too weak to fight them off, and my heart is too honest to pretend it doesn’t matter.

Funny, isn’t it, how countless wonderful things can happen to you, and thousands of gracious words can cross your lips to bless friends and family and even strangers in decades of living. Often as not, these get filed in the dusty, disordered bottom drawer of memory.

But miniscule details from decades old moments of foolishness and vanity appear in lurid detail—impulsive, stupid things I have done and said trying to look better than I am, thoughtless anger and selfishness, ancient slights and rejections, the feeling that I have never really fit in anywhere and have likely been unqualified for pretty much every job I ever had, although I eventually figured out most of them.

But perhaps this is only my experience. Perhaps there’s only a few of us whose hyperactive memories point an accusing finger when desolating clouds descend on the heart. But I don’t think so. I suspect I have a lot of company.

We cannot free ourselves from this bondage, nor can we will our way to freedom. Only Love casts out this demon. Only Love silences every other voice but its own.

And Love constantly beckons us to come home, to see and find ourselves enveloped within the body of Love he is. For Christ, his love is our home, and his body contains and holds all of us and all creation, all that is … is in him, held in him, encompassed, surrounded.

This is what I see when some experience of beauty or love or grace or joy or even a child’s smile awakens the image, and I see myself there, in Christ, along with everything else.

Would that we all might find ourselves in him, that loving freedom might come.

David L. Miller

For Rachel B

And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:7-8)

The phone rings, and we are immediately cast into the depths of ultimate mystery, the final passage from what we know to what is unknowable.

This time it is not our phone, but that of another family member whose step-mother lies in the shadowy suspension between life and death, which is neither, lingering over the threshold of forever, tethered by a slender thread.

For what shall we hope? And what to pray? Can life have another day? Or …?

Thrust back upon ourselves, human resources are insufficient companions in the waiting rooms of life and death. Our questions are not much help either.

We have no ultimate explanation for the undeniable fact of our existence at this time and place on this lone oasis of life in the cosmic darkness. Nor have we a solution to the woeful awareness that we each must die.

But perhaps the unfathomable reality of our living and dying is not a question to be answered or a problem to be solved. Perhaps it is a mystery best embraced with a companion who promises to meet us in the darkness of paths untrodden and perils unknown.

It is exactly this that Christ promises and invites us to trust.

Most often, we meet him … or he us … when we quit fighting what is and allow ourselves to descend into the midst of questions we cannot answer, problems we cannot solve and hurts we cannot heal.

Somewhere in the darkness of ourselves or in the compassion of a face known or unknown, we hear the silent whisper of the Voice who says, ‘even here, even this, even now.

‘There is nowhere I will not go for you, no depth to which I will not descend, no place my love will not find you, no depth of hell can keep you from me.’

Only this, only the One who has descended into death for Love’s own sake, allows us to lovingly embrace the mystery of our life and of our sadness, grieving and dying with hope.

For Christ has descended into the utmost depths of bitter suffering and death, embracing the glory and despair of human existence, taking all of it and all we are into himself, joining our mortality to his reality.

His triumphant love, risen, exalted from the lowest of the low to be Lord of heaven and earth, life and death, speaks the final word over our lives and all history.

And that word is love, the Love who says, ‘There is no place so dark, no death so final that my love will not find you and my life cannot fill you.’

So, do not fear. Lift up your head and be strong. You are not alone. We live, together, in a universe where Love holds sway.

David L. Miller

Love’s completion

 I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ. … And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight. (Philippians 1:6,9)

‘It’s early,’ I whisper into an unseasonably warm February sky.

The fluty trill of a Sandhill Crane is unmistakable. I expect them in these woods in mid-March, not now.

Standing still, I scan the sky and wait for an answering call that doesn’t come. He must be lonely, I think. They usually travel in flocks of hundreds and thousands.

Hiking on, a mile deeper into the woods, I hear the call again. Flying low against the crystal blue dome, two cranes make their way northwest toward nesting grounds a thousand miles hence or even more.

They will mate and birth the next generation, some of which I may see come fall when they make their way south once more, marking the seasons as they have for tens of thousands of years—and will, long after my face has faded into forgetfulness.

Grateful for their promise of Spring, their call is yet a wistful reminder that time marches on. There will be a season when my legs will no longer carry me to this blessed place to watch them, often as not through these tears of joy which come for reasons beyond my understanding.

Except for love, of course. For surely this is the reason I come out here, hoping to feel the irresistible surge of love the Holy One awakens in my heart, filling me whole until I cry the two most essential words of life.

Thank you.

And for the time of such awakening, I am almost as alive as the cranes. Almost.

In their flight, the Love Who Is wakes the joy and beauty of love lying within the secret depths of my (and every) soul, our truest identity. But this is just one of myriad sacramental moments the Loving Mystery employs to draw us a millimeter closer to Love’s completion. There seems to be nothing God will not use, even our faults, perhaps especially our faults.

I have miles to go on this walk. My legs will grow heavy before the 10 miles are done. But I keep on in the mud, knowing there is a smile waiting for me at home, a smile that stops shoppers in the produce section or the women’s department or at checkout counters because something about her radiates a kindness for which human hearts long.

One more sacrament of divine grace, working out Love’s completion, not just in my soul but in others, too.

Christ plays in ten thousand places and shines in so many more, most certainly in her smile.

But God help me, she, too, will pass into yesterday and the very thought of that kills me. After all these decades together, I cannot imagine a world where that smile is lost, an unspeakable tragedy, a poorer world, indeed.

But even this sobering awareness of our mortality moves gratitude for every moment shared, for every good gift received, for every gentle grace that ever awakened my heart to love the life I have been given.

And even more: To love the love God is … drawing us ever onward toward love’s completion.

David L. Miller

All in

 

All in

For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5:20)

There’s a kind of slavish righteousness that involves keeping the rules, dotting the ‘i’s and crossing the ‘t’s. Too often, this produces an odious self-righteousness for which legalistic religion is rightly denounced.

On the other hand, there is the ‘all in’ righteousness of Jesus, in which one’s head, heart and whole being are given to a just and loving purpose. Purity of heart is what he calls it in the Sermon on the Mount.

I don’t think this is something we can summon from the resources of our ever-wavering wills. It comes as a gift, a grace when love fills the heart and we desire only what love wants, which is to say what God wants and wills for us.

Such moments are fleeting because our wills, especially in this consumeristic culture, are always craving more of something we imagine will fulfill our hearts and still the nagging fear that we are missing out. We seek our fulfillment in a million places that do not and cannot satisfy the soul.

But moments of awareness come, like when I look at my beloved, my heart at rest and peace, knowing that no matter what the years will bring, sickness or health, comfort or hardship, I am ‘all in,’ we are ‘all in,’ totally given, not from a sense of obligation but because our hearts know that it is enough that we are together.

The loving awareness of being ‘all in,’ totally given for love’s own sake, is the fulfillment for which human hearts are shaped.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux, great apostle of love that he is, wrote of four stages or movements of love. We begin our lives loving ourselves for our own selfish sake. With time and prayer and maturation, we might come to love God for God’s gifts to us. But this is still a utilitarian love.

With years and the reception of many divine graces, we may begin to love God simply because God is God and God is love, no matter what good or evil comes to us. Finally, for a blessed few, I suppose, we come to love ourselves not for what we have accomplished or managed to avoid, but for the sake of the precious expression of divine love that we are, for the love living in our souls.

The righteousness of being ‘all in,’ loving for no other reason than for love’s own sake, is the exceeding righteousness Jesus awakens in our hearts as we contemplate the love he is for us and all creation.

We taste the sweetness of God’s kingdom and the blessed righteousness for which we are made, when love rises from our depths, filling us with the awareness that becoming this divine love is the one thing that truly matters.

David L. Miller

People of the light

‘Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.’ (Matthew 5:7)

They are people of the light, and there are tens of thousands of them. They are in the streets and classrooms and neighborhoods and behind store counters and a thousand other places.

We must see them, hear them and feel their hearts. For they can save our souls … and the soul of the nation.

Perhaps no single story, in the saga of MAGA vs. the State of Minnesota, reveals the beauty of these hearts as clearly or as poignantly as the plight of a little boy named, Liam, and the students and leaders at his school, Valley View Elementary.

After Liam was illegally carried off by immigration enforcement agents, clad in his bunny hat and Spiderman backpack, leaders at his school mobilized the most potent salvo yet in the battle for human decency amid the great indecency the Trump administration is exacting on the nation.

Their actions, like those of their fellow Minnesotans, have upended the administration’s devout conviction that virtue is rare, that people don’t really care about injustice or the struggle and suffering of their neighbors, just so long as they are comfortable.

In this case, the virtue in evidence is profoundly spiritual, certainly for Christians, Muslims and Jews. ‘Blessed are the merciful for they will receive mercy,’ many Christians read or heard on this Sunday in the season of Epiphany.

The merciful receive mercy because their hearts are already carried in the current of love that is God’s living presence in human hearts and amid human affairs, a living flow of mercy.

Any whose eyes and ears and hearts have not been shuttered by hate, apathy or political ideology can see the beauty of mercy at Valley View school, especially when viewed against the dark and brutal background of what ICE and Homeland Security are doing in their community.

It was unmistakable as a principal at Valley View Elementary, his voice wavering, walked a reporter through a school room to see Liam’s desk and his cubby, with a bin of school supplies, his water bottle and a stuffed, green dinosaur.

Leaving that room, bags of groceries and supplies lined the hallways for families too scared to come out of their homes. Twenty-five parents of Valley View students have been carried off by ICE, and now … two more students, a second and fifth grader.

Students have written letters to ICE and recorded them, sharing what they are seeing and the fear and sadness they are feeling. But there is also this letter from an African American girl, ‘I believe there are birds whose songs of love aren’t heard by people who need to care.’

A living mercy flows through the beautiful, young heart who gave voice to those words. They are a prayer, a hope that mercy and simple human kindness will soften stony hearts, evaporate apathy and carry us all away in the stream of mercy flowing through the halls of Valley View school.

For there are more children languishing in ICE gulags. There are more shattered families longing to touch and hold their beloved. There are thousands carried off for no reason beyond the nihilism of power for power’s sake … and many, many more living in fear.

But there are victories in the struggle. Liam and his father are home, and all because an army of light has appeared in the mercy of those who care … and in judges who know the difference between the darkness of lies and the light of truth.

They are people of the light, every last one of them.

David L. Miller

People of the lie

 

 

[T]he people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned. (Matthew 4:16)

It’s infuriating.

They stand, open their mouths and they lie. They lie again and again and again.

Their tone, authoritative. Their confidence, sure.  Their position, secure, ensconced in the trappings of officialdom we were taught to trust when we were naïve children.

But no longer. Now, we know.

They are lying about their brutality. They are lying about the people they arrest and abuse. They are lying about the justification for their actions. They are lying about the people who leave their homes in the bitter cold to protest—average, decent human beings who blow whistles to warn their neighbors, bear food to their doorsteps and ferry their children to school to protect them from illegal arrest and deportation.

And, now, they are lying about the people they shoot and kill in front of witnesses on city streets, calling them terrorists and assassins.

They lied in Portland and Chicago and Charlotte, et. al., and have reached new heights … or depths … of depraved mendacity, in Minneapolis.

We know their names: Noem, Bovino, Homan, Miller, Trump, and all who attempt to justify the fascistic machinations of this administration.

They are people of the lie, and they will keep on lying, day after day after day. Possessed by a malignant, narcissistic self-righteousness, they project their bitterness, hatred, imperfections and inadequacies onto those they despise and defame.

And we? We live with the disorienting dissonance between what our eyes see, our ears hear and what our hearts know …. and the world of lies they narrate, forcing us to deal with the dark and bitter world their lies create.

‘In our country the lie … has become a pillar of the state,’ wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about the murderous brutalities of Soviet Russia.  

‘We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, but they are still lying.’

His words apply to our situation today. But with apologies to the great Russian author, I wonder if those so deeply engaged in denying and dissembling lose their capacity to know they are lying. Have they called evil good for so long that they have lost their souls, unable to find their way back from the abyss of inhumanity.?

Blessedly, we are not left or consigned to live in their darkness. All we need do is to look around, especially in Minneapolis.

As a Christian, and I hope a contemplative Christian, the light of compassion I see in the eyes of my Lord Jesus shines in the life of Alex Pretti, well-known among friends and colleagues as a nurse who cared deeply for his patients at the VA hospital where he worked, a trusted and encouraging mentor to less experienced nurses.

He was no terrorist or would-be assassin, but a man committed to healing and care. His life gives the lie to people of the lie, unveiling the darkness of their hearts and illumining a way of life that truly is life.  

He died saying ‘no,’ to the brutality and inhumanity of immigration agents employing unchecked power to push a woman down in the street, attacking and shooting him in cold blood when he tried to help her up.  Our eyes do not lie.

He is not alone, of course. Tens of thousands have gone to the streets to magnify that ‘no.’ They say ‘no’ to the lie when they take food to their neighbors, ferry their kids to school, blow whistles to warn of danger and when they sing and pray and mourn, hoping their voices will move people in power, finally, to stand up and say ‘no.’

The light of truth and compassion shines in their hearts, and the darkness will not put it out.

David L. Miller

Who belongs?

And as [Jesus] reclined at table in his house, many tax collectors and sinners were reclining with Jesus and his disciples, for there were many who followed him. And the scribes of the Pharisees, when they saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, said to his disciples, “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?” (Mark 2:15-16)

I heard it long ago and many times since: ‘If you draw a circle to define who’s in and who’s out, be assured Jesus is on the outside looking back at you.’

It’s a cliché, a bit tired. But perhaps it fits today amid the brutal question roiling the soul of America: Who belongs? How big should the circle be? Differences of opinion are currently being played out on the streets of Minneapolis.

Christians have a dog in this fight. At the heart of a truly Christian consciousness, lies the love of Christ, who is constantly seeking to restore human community to a fullness of love and belonging, where graces are shared and every human soul knows its worth.

There is something in the Christian heart that hates walls that divide, a desire to welcome every willing soul into the respect and warmth of human community.

It is well accepted that nations need borders, and no nation can or should be expected to accommodate all who want to enter. But the faith of the church leans toward welcome, toward mercy, toward compassion, shaped as it is by Jesus, who so regularly stood outside circles of exclusion, erasing lines of division drawn by the privileged, the fearful and the self-righteous.

There’s nothing more telling in this regard than Jesus’ meal practice. Take the quote above.

Most translations have Jesus sitting at table with a group of outcasts and social disasters whose behavior has placed them well outside community acceptability. But he doesn’t sit. He reclines, along with everyone else enjoying the meal.

Lying on his left elbow, the typical practice of his time and place, he reaches with his right arm for bits of food or to take a cup. The picture is one of relaxation, familiarity, comfort, ease, savoring the pleasure of food, drink and human presence with people who were regularly reminded they didn’t belong, except here, with Jesus.

It is impossible to think of this without imagining a smile of satisfaction tugging at the corners of his mouth. Lord knows, I feel his joy as I imagine him there, creating his own circle of acceptance into which his critics would have been welcome had they been willing.

This after all was his purpose, to regather and restore the people of Israel to their true spiritual vocation of being ‘a light to the nations,’ where the Lord ‘will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines’—the fullness of human existence, as the prophet Isaiah proclaimed.

Something of this hope and vocation, ‘a light to the nations,’ is deeply embedded not only in the hearts of those who cherish the boundary-breaking joy of Jesus’ witness, but also in the American dream of many peoples becoming one for the good of all.

This dream and vocation are daily attacked on the streets of our nation by those who draw narrow, exclusive circles because they have replaced the vision of America with arrogant delusions of their superiority.

Even more troubling, many American Christians have lost or never knew and felt the gracious vision of Jesus reclining with his excluded friends. Seduced by the rhetoric of fear and falsehood, they fail to know the joyful mission to which they are called. But Jesus doesn’t forget. He is still there, inviting all of us to come home and share the feast of welcome.

Perhaps this is why I cherish the demonstrations of Christians singing in the streets of Minneapolis, so much more than the bitter vitriol (however understandable) that merely mimics the brutality of ICE. The singers seem to know Jesus.

David L. Miller