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‘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
