An empty chair

 Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. (Matthew 11:28).

It is just an empty chair, a gray and white rocker on the balcony. I wiped it down from the rains that soaked the earth for the third night running and folded a towel on the seat, ready for Dixie to join me.

That won’t be for a while. She is able to sleep later than my body allows, a grace of which I am jealous. But it gives me time to sing my morning songs of praise, awakening my heart so I can settle in and read of Jesus, listening for his voice in my heart.

‘Come to me,’ he says, and I immediately see St. Teresa’s vision and borrow it for my use. In the vision, I am walking through the interior castle of my soul, making my way through the outer rooms toward the center where Christ dwells, his light flowing outward to the more distanced regions where I make my way.

Seeing the great distance between the beauty of his heart and the reality of my own, there is no discouragement, only hope. The light of the all-penetrating love of Christ stretches out to encompass me where I am, always a beginner in this life, never as close to him as I long to be.

The pain of this longing is never far away, sometimes muted, sometimes acute, a thirst only he can quench.

But even in the distant places, far from the center where Christ dwells, the light of his love and the warmth of his delight draw me onward that my heart might be saturated, absorbed in his beauty, joy and love.

With Teresa’s vision in my own heart, I see and feel your smile, Jesus, as you watch me continue my way, encompassed in the rays of the light emanating from your face.

You beckon me, all of us, to come to you and rest from the burden of our exile, separated as we are from the Love who is our true and final home.

There are days the warmth of your love sweeps me away, stilling every other thought and emotion, a foretaste of the final rest that awaits the end of our journey.

But that is not today. Today, the empty chair across from me stirs longing for my beloved to come and share this holy space with me. It awakens an inner emptiness, a longing for love’s presence that echoes the great longing for love’s completion of all things—a hunger for love to fill the earth as the waters cover the sea.

I had only to wait. Soon enough, she came, her smile shimmering with the beauty of the loving heart grace has long wrought in her. ‘Christ plays in ten thousand places,’ G.M. Hopkins wrote, ‘lovely in eyes not his.’ And surely here, to lighten the burden of exile, as we journey home, together.

David L. Miller