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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
