As we are seen

Lead me in your truth, and teach me. (Psalm 25 5a)

The locust tree whispers, autumn gilding its leaves. A maple across the lawn replies in red. Not a word is spoken, but my heart hears and fills with silent love for the beauty of it all.

They are my teachers today. They lead me into God’s own truth, which is not a list of beliefs or a moral code. It is to see through eyes of love, for God is love and only love sees the truth.

The truth will break your heart at the suffering of children, the brutalities of war or the death of a friend. But it will mend it again when the beauty of kindness takes your breath away.

If you want to know the truth, do something that awakens love deep within. Then, think of friends and enemies, the mess of the world, people who annoy you, a child or grandchild. Recall memories that make you wince because you were unkind, foolish, insecure or arrogant. Let the love you feel pour over every memory, every person, every pain.

Look back with love, and see ... as God sees.

David L. Miller

Disarmed

 Unless you ... become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 18:3)

Sonia caught my eye as I turned to share the peace during worship. Seven, I suppose, she stood close to her mother, shy eyes peering through a thick cascade of dark hair. I bent low and extended my right hand to share what the words say, “Peace.”

She smiled and took my hand, before holding a small stuffed animal out to me. “What’s her name?” I asked. “Tara,” she whispered, clutching it again to her chest.

With this, I was undone, my heart totally disarmed. Love surged through me for the preciousness of her heart, so totally open to receive and share a simple moment of grace and care.

I wanted to extend the gift of God’s peace to her, but she became a sacrament, awakening the great love God is flowing within and between us. My heart became as unguarded as hers, ready to receive and share the holy kindness of God. 

It was only a moment, soon past. But I will be looking for her again next Sunday. She helped me enter heaven’s kingdom.

David L. Miller

So good

 How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity! It is like the precious oil on the head ... . It is like the dew of Hermon, which falls on the mountains of Zion. For there the Lord ordained his blessing, life for evermore. (Psalm 133)

From one point of view it was an evening with friends. From another, it was water for the soul.

Eight of us gathered bearing food and drink to share. Talk led to eating and eating to longer conversations in twos and threes or fours until the night was full and our bodies tired. Gathering bowls of leftovers, hugs are shared as we linger at the door and go to our cars, our hearts lighter than when we came.

Sinking into the seat, there comes a sigh and oft repeated words. “I needed that. It was so good to be together.” I whisper the words of this Psalm every single time.

But it is better than good. It is a holy sacrament, the sweet savor of the everlasting life, the peace and mutual love the Holy One gives even now and will forever.

It is like the oil of anointing that freshens the fragrance of living. It is like water on the mountain side, flowing down into rivers to quench our parched hearts and make us glad again. A holy gift. Thanks be to God.

David L. Miller

A better world

‘For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard ... .’ (Matthew 20:1)

My middle grandson, Ben, sits across the room in my rocking chair, describing college visits as we brainstorm ideas for his application essay. He’s visited six public universities, all in the Midwestern United States, with two or three more to go.

“Every one of them says we want only the highest grade point averages, the tippy-top most ACT and SAT scores, every one of them,” Ben repeats, his arms spread wide, amplifying the meritocratic message driven home by admissions officers.

This message, I suspect, is exaggerated, both by Ben and by the universities themselves, which polish their image while fueling the anxiety of people like Ben, who do well but don’t have the highest grade point average or tippy top scores on entrance exams.

Frankly, Ben will grace, humanize and lift the level of conversation on whatever campus he appears next fall, not to mention the infusion of playful humor that is natural to him. But grace and thoughtfulness, humanity and humor are not quantifiable and do not much appear on entrance exams.

From where I sit, as the grandfather of a young man whom I love fiercely, college admissions looks like a deeply flawed, brutal, dehumanizing process where a precious few are wanted and vaunted and the rest—and most of us are, overwhelmingly, the rest—are “less than.”

Of course, this process is just a more obvious expression of deep culture forces that suggest our worth, value and truth are directly related to the score—in points, money, status or fame—that we or others assign to us. Allowing this poison to saturate your heart kills your soul and steals your joy, a truth I have too often lived and observed in others.

Perhaps this is why Jesus’ story of the landowner hits me hard. The story brings me to tears. It goes this way.

A landowner went into the marketplace at daybreak to hire workers. He went out again at nine, then at noon and three. By 5 p.m. people were still standing around, waiting to be hired. Perhaps they slept late or were lazy or not as hungry as those who woke early to be first in line. Didn’t matter. The landowner hired them, too.

He didn’t ask for resumes or test scores. He doesn’t weed them out and take only the best. He seeks all to participate in the goodness of creation, generously sharing the fullness of life. At the end of the day, they all receive the same pay. The early birds understandably grumble about the injustice of the boss’ generosity ... or stupidity.

But this misses the point. Jesus’ story startles our assumptions and upends our sense of justice to invite us into a different world, a world of grace.

Reading the story, I meet the reality of a Love, a Heart, who wants me ... and Ben ... and every last one of us. We meet the Love who doesn’t ask for resumes or test scores, but is moved only by an overwhelming generosity. We encounter an Embracing Heart eager for us to share its work and bask in the only reward Love has to offer, which is Love itself.

All in all, Jesus invites us into a better world, a much richer way of being ... where life is gift, giving is gain and gratitude graces our days.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

More than enough

I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:18-19)

It was our last conversation, 12:26 p.m., Central Daylight Time, April 15, 2021. Fifteen days later my friend, Grace Adolphsen Brame, passed into the Loving Mystery who had beguiled her heart and mind since childhood.

She had been and done so much in her 91 years, a choir director, opera singer, beloved spouse, good will ambassador, author, professor, retreat leader, and an expert on Evelyn Underhill and Christian mysticism.

But age and illness had exhausted her characteristic verve and exuberance, including Grace’s startling proclivity to break into an aria in the middle of one of her presentations.

“David,” she breathed when her aide handed her the phone, “there is not much of me left.” Her voice laden, syllables dragging through long seconds, I strained to hear, willing her to complete each ... labored ... breath.

She was right, of course. There wasn’t of her much left. But what remained was profound and beautiful, and she needed to give it away, one more time.

 “I love you,” she murmured. “Thank you for being my friend. You are God’s friend ... and mine.”

As blessings go, it is hard to imagine one much better. But her blessing didn’t end with these words. There was one more agonized sentence that drained the remainder of her energy. “You are the only one who understood me,” she mumbled.

The only one? A bit of exaggeration, I suspect. We had been friends since meeting at the back of a conference hall 31 years before. We rarely met after that but regularly spoke on the phone, telling stories, sharing insights and planning writing projects, two of which evolved into books.

Through it all, there was one central truth, one awareness that was present from that first conversation. Grace and I shared a deep desire to know the Love who is and was and always will be—and to share the Healing Mystery we knew, however obscurely, in the depth of our being.

She struggled throughout her professional life to share the gift of contemplative prayer and awareness with a resistant church that did not know what it was missing, a decades long frustration.

In her final words to me, she said I would receive a gift in her will. Use it, she said, to “carry out my mission.”

Softly, I asked if she had any specific suggestions, but she didn’t answer. She drew another heavy breath and said, “You know me.”

It was more than enough. I knew what to do.

 David L. Miller

Doors

 

Be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks. Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them. (Luke 12:36-37)

Jesus’ parables always give us something to see. Here, it is a man, a landowner, returning home from a wedding, filled with good food and fine wine, eager not to be served by his minions but to share the joy.

For me, the story awakens an image of Jesus hurrying home. Hungry to be with him, I throw open the door and our smiles meet with a tear of loving recognition.

For it is not just any wedding from which he returns. It is his wedding, the marriage of time and eternity, heaven and earth, mortal flesh and Eternal Love.  

He comes, eager for us to open the door to Love’s living appearance wherever and whenever we feel him nudging our hearts from slumber. Heaven and earth are wed, a union known in every moment of love and beauty, grace and hope, care and wonder.

Yes, ugliness endures, and hatreds rip the loveliness of life asunder. But the wedding has happened. Earth and heaven are joined to save us from ourselves and our cynicism.

Jesus approaches in every love and beauty, grace and care, hoping that we just might open the door and embrace him so the joy in him might infuse our souls with the Life who is Life.  

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock,” Jesus says in another place in Christian Scripture. Yes. Always.

Our task and hope is to watch, pay attention, like at Christmas or Thanksgiving, or when we are waiting for a certain car to enter the drive, listening for the scuff of shoes on the walk, the knock on the door and the arrival of a heart for whom our hearts long.

He comes every time your heart warms in love and gratitude, care and hope. He knocks in our longing for the beauty of heaven to shine amid this world’s troubles.

Open the door. Embrace the moment for all your worth. He’s inviting you to the feast.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 

In the field

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. (Matthew 13:47-48)

There are not many things but only one, or so it seems in the coffee shop.

An Indian woman, gold ring and chain in her left nostril, feverishly punches a long series of digits into the computer as Bianca, a young African American woman, offers a joke to occupy the delay as she waits to take my order.

Behind them, a pale girl with pink highlights shares the laugh as she shakes an iced latte and delivers it to a waiting customer, seamlessly moving onto the next order as she will to mine in a few moments.

No need to hurry this along. Everything here happens to plan. Movement and moment flow as one, each of us encompassed in this carefully choreographed dance of caffeinated fulfillment.

From my usual chair by the plate glass window, I take it all in. Not just the seven working here today, nor the dozen scattered about tables and chairs, drinking, reading, talking, peering into computer screens or off into space. No, much more.

I see all of us caught up in an all-embracing field of force that is drawing, drawing, drawing us toward a single far-off point shrouded in darkness. We move, each towed in a great sway of Love toward a common home whose presence we feel in this gentle moment of shared laughter and harmonious movement.

Love pulls us to the home Love is, to the final, omega point where the many are finally one and realize we always were though we seldom recognized it. We live and move in the field of Love, sometimes consenting, often resisting this gracious tide that envelops all of us and everything, including the olive-skinned youth who splits my field of vision, gathers his drink and hurries out the door.

Who knows where he is going? Well, Love does and lives there, too, pulling us toward its embrace regardless where we are or where we go.

Deep peace and consoling tears, quickly hidden, accompany this awareness. And why not? For in a single moment the wonder of your presence, the joy of your love and the beauty of your divine intention are clear enough.

We all live in you, in the field of the Love you are.  I know it now. But please remind me, won't you, when I forget.

David L. Miller

 

The pearl in the park

‘Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it. (Matthew 13:45-46)

A bench in McCollum Park invites my presence and awakens prayer: Dearest One, help me be open to you. Fill my thoughts with your pea ... ce.

Consolation and Presence washes through me before I finish the word, answering the prayer that is deepest in my heart and most often on my lips.

Peace: the presence of Love Unlimited, Love Uncreated, the Mystery who is the soul’s source and deepest center, always present, waiting ... for the mind and heart to open the door upon which this holiness knocks.

Today, I manage to find the handle. The door effortlessly swings open, for it is not I who open it but this Love whose longing to console my heart infinitely exceeds my own.

Questions that occasioned my retreat to the park recede then disappear, knots untied, my heart released from solving the mystery of myself, what I am to do and be as my seventh decade draws to a close.

The question of choosing this way or that remain. Shall I continue in a ministry which has long drawn me or let it go for another way of loving life in the name of the Love who won me long ago, playing with my heart, coaxing me close in the days I chased Blondie, my cocker spaniel, across the wide fields of the Warren fairgrounds? 

I think it was then that I first knew the Love who sets the heart free, even though I didn’t understand who this Love is or what was happening in me.

But then do we ever really know who this ever-greater Love is or understand the mysteries of our hearts? A bit, I think, especially in moments when we feel ourselves enveloped in the Love who invited me to this bench on a July afternoon.

After all, Love’s joy is revealing the wonder of Love Unlimited in the confines of our finite hearts, the pearl of great price at home in mortal measure. Who knew it could be so? Well, we do.

I came out here looking for a bit of peace, only to discover, again, that it is not peace I crave, but You. For You, Loving Mystery, are my peace, the Holy Presence who says, “Stay here awhile. I have something beyond all the world’s wealth to give you.”

David L. Miller

St. Vernon

At that time Jesus said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the people who are wise and smart. But you have shown them to those who are like little children. Yes, Father, this is what you really wanted. (Matthew 11:25-26)

The world’s a better place because Vernon Yung lived. I think of him every time I come upon these verses in Matthew 11. Vernon is one of the little ones—the natural, unpretentious, open-hearted souls—in whom Jesus delights.

But then so did I, and pretty much everyone who had the pleasure of being warmed by Vernon’s contagious joy.

It’s his smile I remember more than anything else. A gentle sweetness surrounded him, which some suggest is common among those with Down Syndrome. Maybe so; but that’s beyond my knowledge.

All I know is how glad I was to see him and he to see me on the occasions he brightened the door of Salem Lutheran, on those weekends he visited his parents on their farm near the sprawling metropolis of Guide Rock, Nebraska, population 220, give or take.

During the week, Vernon lived in a group home in Hastings, a little more than an hour away if you drove the speed limit, which almost nobody did. He worked in grocery there. I crossed paths with him one day as he was stocking a shelf with cans of something, totally absorbed in his task. It’s been 40 years, but the image sticks with me and warms my heart each time it comes to mind.

And each time I smile remembering his smile and the halting cadence of his voice as he spoke to me. Vernon loved laughing, a good meal and the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers, suffering and celebrating their fortunes during football season.

On Sundays, he took pride in serving as an usher, greeting people and handing out worship bulletins at First St. Paul Lutheran in Hastings. Envisioning his smile, it’s hard to imagine anyone better equipped for the job.

But when I imagine Vernon I tend to see him with the little clutch of people gathered around Jesus as he praises the Loving Mystery of God for the love and joy that shine in these unsuspecting souls who have no idea how much they bless the rest of us.

I have no idea if, in heaven’s eyes, my life has contributed half as much to this world’s good as Vernon’s 62 years, which ended in 2020. Such assessments are well beyond my paygrade.

Such comparisons are not the point, however. What’s important is the Love who shined in St. Vincent and still does. That Holy Mystery found him in a thousand ways through people who treasured him that he might shine with the light of the Love who would illumine all our hearts, given half a chance.

So, whatever else you do on these hot summer days, you might just give it that chance. Find a moment to sit and savor faces and places where the Love Who Is has found you. Stay there long enough to feel your heart warmed; then go embrace your life.

If you do, someone you least expect may bless God for having known you ... though you know nothing of it.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Made for joy

At that time Jesus said, ‘I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.’ (Matthew 11:25-26)

Watch. Do not ask what he means. Just watch Jesus. What does he do? What is his mood? What moves him? Whisper his words, and listen to his heart. “I thank you Lord of heaven and earth ... .”

He turns about to take in the clutch of human souls gathered around him. Raising his eyes into the Loving Mystery he calls Father, he gives thanks for the divine generosity that illumines the hearts of the small and simple with the light of Love Eternal.

Elation sweeps him into a current of joy and love for the simple and pushed aside, the no-counts and the forgotten whose eyes sparkle, aware of the wonder of God’s loving kingdom alive within them. They feel its presence in the healing love that flows from him, touching their broken places, assuring their anxious hearts that Love’s healing rule will by no means exclude them. They are the wanted, the sought, the found, blessed of God. As are we.

Their joy brings Jesus joy. He sees and knows they experience the living, loving Presence with whom his heart dwells in constant communion. Truest of friends, he wants to give them what he has, to share the fullness he enjoys that they may enter the intimacy that flows, an unending current of life, between his heart and the One who is Love.

This intimacy, this participation in Love is the home we have craved since our first breath and will until our last.

Jesus’ face, his joy unveils the Eternal Mystery, the Spirit of Life for whom our hearts long. Watching him, what he does, what brings him joy, moves his anger, elicits his tears, we see, we meet, we are enfloded in the Love who longs to give us everything it is that we may know the joy for which we were always intended ... even amid the mess of the moment.

David L. Miller

 

 

The Love who sees

 

 ‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.’ (Matthew 11:28-30)

To see anyone is to see their need, or at least to see they are every bit as needy as yourself. This is one of the more striking and attractive characteristics of Jesus in all four biblical portraits of his presence: He sees.

He sees human beings in their neediness. He sees that being human is not easy. He sees that human souls break down beneath the burdens life heaps upon them. He sees human hearts long for a gentle word, an understanding presence and a way of being that lightens their load.

He sees and welcomes the burdened to come as they are and rest in his presence, the presence of compassion where there is no need to be anything but whatever it is they are at the moment.

One doesn’t begin to understand this, not really, until you imagine him turning his face to glimpse the hidden need your eyes cannot deny and speaking directly to you, “Come ... and rest.”

Only then, do we begin to feel why human souls clamored near to him, hungry to feel whatever it was that made their hearts breathe and burn in his presence.

They came because he was ... and is ... the Love who sees. The Love who welcomes. The Love who whispers the truth that we are creatures of Love, created by Love to know the Love he is coursing through our lives and hearts, giving relief, release and purpose.

My burden is light, he says of that purpose. Maybe so, though I don’t always believe it. Bearing the weight of love, both the receiving and the giving, will break your heart and teach you just how weak and inadequate you really are.

But it is for this receiving and giving that we are born, and it is only this that fulfills and completes a human life. It is our chief beauty, however much we might fail in the endeavor. A single moment of truly knowing and truly loving sparkles with the brilliance of eternity.  

And even when we break down beneath the weight we carry, the divine voice continues to call, echoing through the centuries in search of our souls, a voice earnest and eager who beckons, “Come. Rest in the Love who knows you.”

David L. Miller

 

Drawn forward

 As you go, proclaim the good news, “’The kingdom of heaven has come near.’” (Matthew 10:7)

Thoughts and images flash into consciousness, one after another, often passing away as quickly as they appear. But some return and linger, seeming to bear a message we need to hear.

One moment, one image keeps drawing me back to a small, side chapel in a Spanish cathedral where I gazed at a black Jesus hanging on a knotted, wooden cross. His body twisted, tortured and lifeless, his humanity stripped away, the suffering and sadness the world inflicts and endures hangs there, emblemized in this one man.

Seeing it again, alive in my mind, a flood of images races through me even on these bright, summer days while walking Bailey, my daughter’s dog: Places I’ve been. Things I’ve said and done that cause me shame. People I have known whom I have blessed or disappointed. Places and moments of human suffering I will never forget.

And amid this flood of graces and joys I hardly deserve, and moments I’d erase if I could, there hangs this Jesus, suffering the worst the world can give, yet still loving, forgiving and blessing, even his torturers.

If there is anything truly divine in human history, truly transcendent, it is this moment ... and this tortured man whose love didn’t break, fail or dissolve into hatred when hatred poured its fury on his flesh.

This image, this Love draws me not into the past but ahead, into the future of what we each might become as we savor the moment of Love’s great victory over all that is not love, knowing this Love is for us, drawing us close to heal and transform us into its image for the sake of a broken world.

The kingdom of heaven is the wonder of Love transforming time. It is the transcendent Love in Jesus pulling us beyond what we are, beyond what has been, into the future of what Love will do.

Most of us are drawn into God’s future kicking and screaming, resisting Love’s holy gravity because of fear, ego, envy, pride, old angers and the conviction that loving is foolish and naïve, instead of the only thing that can save us from ourselves and each other.

But Love is patient and never ends, tugging at our hearts, restless in our souls, drawing us near to feel its transcendent power. It just keeps coming.

David L. Miller

The first word

 Whatever house you enter, first say, “Peace to this house!” And if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person; but if not, it will return to you. Remain in the same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide ... Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you; cure the sick who are there, and say to them, “The kingdom of God has come near to you.” (Luke 10:5-7a, 8b-9)

For decades, I have closed notes and emails with a single word, “Peace.” It always was and remains a prayer for myself and for what I want to prevail between myself and the person to whom I am writing. I sometimes use the grace of this blessing and hope as my parting word in conversation.

It’s a good final word, but perhaps an even better first word. It is the word Jesus placed in the minds of those he sent into a world every bit as conflicted, dangerous and cynical as our riven era.

“First, say peace,” he told them. Some will welcome you. Some will not. Don’t worry about them so much, he counseled. Stay and share blessings with those who welcome you, for the kingdom of God’s peace will appear around their tables.

And you will feel it. No, Jesus doesn’t explicitly say that, but I know it to be true.

I have known its truth around tables and while sharing meals sitting in the dust of every continent where I traveled and reported. I’ve felt it in the presence of souls so much more loving and alive than my own. And I know it to be true in common moments of human sharing, even an evening ago as my beloved, Dixie, and I sat at a table over wine and cheese with our friends from Germany. Their son fast asleep upstairs, we talked, just talked, sharing bits and pieces of what had happened during the three years an ocean separated us.

In the midst of conversation about families and children, DIY projects and pitfalls, the kingdom of God’s hospitality settled over us. We felt it, surely, knowing God’s presence as the Love who swept us into its flow, breathing life into our mortal flesh, lifting us into the peace of eternity as heaven came to earth and hovered around the Formica of a kitchen table, making us glad to be alive.

Who knew it could be so? Jesus knew. He sent his friends and followers into a frightening world filled with foreign dominators and injustice, giving them only a first word, a word to speak and be, Peace.

He knew what we can still discover by entering each moment, each encounter with a word of peace, a gesture of grace, knowing the kingdom of God’s love is closer and more wonderful than we imagine.

We don’t make it happen. We just open ourselves to the possibility with a single word, Peace. The rest is all gift, a gift God is breathlessly eager to give. 

David L. Miller

 

 

Wings

Jesus ... withdrew privately to a city called Bethsaida. When the crowds found out about it, they followed him; and he welcomed them, and spoke to them about the kingdom of God, and healed those who needed to be cured. (Luke 9:10b-11)

There is much to love here, much to see, to hear and feel. Crowds gather. They push close, his arms extend in welcome. Perhaps we, too, can lean near and catch the voice of welcome for which our wounded hearts ache.

Jesus sits, as ancient rabbis often did, to teach those who drew near. He speaks to them of the kingdom, which invites our imaginations. What did he tell them? How did he sound? I imagine a quiet voice, unhurried, earnest, speaking from a depth not of learning but of soul, words flowing from loving communion with the Mystery he knows within himself.

He speaks of a kingdom where the poor are blessed and the merciful find mercy, where peacemakers are honored and wounded hearts are consoled. It’s a kingdom planted in the earth like a seed that grows immeasurably large with innumerable branches, giving home and shelter to souls whose labors wear them weary.

Jesus tells them of a kingdom ruled by the Love he knows in the depth of his soul, the Love who possesses his heart and bids him speak.

His words lift them into a world being born, into a reality that is always present but never fully so, a world wonderfully alive in every mercy and care and in every decision to carry on when life is hard and hope elusive.

His words awaken their hearts. For in spite of everything that is ugly and wrong, we live in a world of grace that sweeps our hearts away in startling moments when sweet oneness with our gorgeous little planet fills us with joy and the Love who is mysteriously and unmistakable alive within us.

Jesus spoke to them about God’s kingdom, and in his presence the wonder of Love’s immensity came to them that they might know the deep hunger of their hearts is not an illusion but the savor of all God will do.

Little wonder that crowds gathered around him or that we, in faith or doubt, continue to be drawn, hoping to hear his voice that our souls might sprout wings and rise into the Love who makes all things new.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

Only there

But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well. (Matthew 5:39)

None of this is possible except in the presence of a great love.

There is no way to rationalize Jesus’ turn-the-other-cheek teaching and make it make sense. It’s utterly beyond anything we can produce, and maybe that is part of the point. It’s beyond us; it’s certainly beyond me.

There are few quicker than I when it comes to taking offense when criticized or slighted. It’s an old wound, a childhood scar sensitive to the slightest touch. My heart harbors old hurts; anger and defensiveness ever ready, a well-honed reflex well trained by long ago moments of feeling small and “less than.”

Most of this is well hidden, of course, like so many of the inner dramas we lock behind heavy doors in our hidden hearts, trying our best to deny what we know all-too-well.

However well hidden, old hurts and suspicions control many of our moods and immediate reactions to, well, pretty much everything. Unearthing and understanding old wounds and unfilled hungers affords a bit of freedom to choose our responses to people and events we encounter day-to-day, including those most troubling.

But only the experience of a great and impossible love allows us to release our hurts and let down our guard knowing our worth, our dignity, our beauty has nothing to do with the words and actions of others.

Only there, immersed in an all-encompassing love sensibly embracing everything about us—every thought and memory however they have wounded us, only there do we find freedom from what has long defined and bound our hearts. Only there are we released to live beyond our defensiveness, beyond the tit-for-tat way of the world.

Jesus’ impossible words invite us beyond what we are and into the Love he is, the Love who invites us to descend into our hearts and pray out whatever darkness we find. He waits there, smiling.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 

Little pieces of heaven

 Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. (Luke 24:50-51)

Heaven is on the veranda just outside the sliding glass door. But not just there.

Today, a familiar chair beckons as the breath of morning filters through the locust trees whose branches strain closer to the house each spring. The gentle coolness embraces arms and feet fresh from sleep and quiets the heart.

“Thank you for this little piece of heaven,” I whisper into the stillness, interrupted only by tires on Maple Avenue up the street.

Perhaps it is insensitive, utterly incongruous, to savor such consolation amid the great indecencies and anguish of our time. They are too many to number and too obvious to require naming. The slaughter of children from Ukraine to Uvalde, Texas, tops my list, all of them sacrificed to the bloody gods of ego, power and the worship of semi-automatic killing machines.

So different are the ancient words I come here to read. This day they speak of Jesus leaving his friends, carried to heaven, his hands raised in blessing. The image transports me miles and decades away to the sanctuary in which I sat from my earliest days of remembrance.

Jesus is there in a larger-than-life mural on the front wall. He rises lighter than air, surrounded by white clouds in a gilded sky, the image dripping with the sentimental romanticism of its age, yet speaking to generations of us who sat before it each week. I wonder how many of us remember it long after we left that place, even those who may have left their faith behind.

It’s his hands that most move me, raised in perpetual blessing, offering a peace that sometimes embraces the heart like a spring morning.

Every such moment is a gift of God’s own embrace, a little piece of heaven that can appear even when and where you least expect, like today, in a circle, several of them in fact, in parks and parking lots and churches in Uvalde, Texas, where grieving hearts join hands in prayer and great love, naming the One who is always there, hands still raised in blessing.

I guess he never really left.

David L. Miller

 

Fierce women

 

Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. (John 13:1)

It’s always the women, or so it seems; always the women who love most fiercely. It was on display again in a Texas classroom, as with a holy cohort of women whose silent witness reaches from their graves, again and again, to bless me with their beauty.

Irma Garcia died on the floor of Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, her arms embracing children whom she taught and loved until her final breath. She loved them and loved them to the end. If there is anything holier, I know not of it.

The image sears itself on the heart, and if the Spirit is gracious to us we shall never be able to remove it. For she reveals the Love with which we are loved, and the love to which every human soul is called on our lifelong project of becoming truly human.

Hers was the fierce love of those blessed to know nothing else fully satisfies or is truly worthy of our souls. Blessed is she.

And blessed, too, are so many others whose names I never knew but whom, I pray, greeted Ms. Garcia at heaven’s gate, welcoming her into that great cloud of witnesses who had absolutely no doubt of life’s truest purpose. These are fierce women of whom I heard and witnessed with my own eyes, women who denied themselves food amid civil war and massive starvation to save their families in places like Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan.

They carried their children out of harm’s way until they dropped on dirt paths unable to go any further, hoping, praying someone would pick up their posterity and lead their little ones to places where gentle hands would receive them.

Such souls are always closer than we imagine. “I love you both fiercely,” my precious daughter, Rachel, often texts at the close of her messages to her mother and me. I don’t doubt it. She has been ferocious since toddlerhood, and her passion for all her loves is known by any blessed to know her. And why not, she is the daughter of Dixie, who has managed to love me for more than five decades in spite of myself.

They are two of so many who live in our hearts, women whose love is like that of the women who stood by our Lord Jesus at the cross when others fled, women who were the first at the tomb to care for his broken body, women who were first to bear witness to the wonder that Love has an answer to every death we shall ever die, fierce women whose love incarnates the One who is Love Incarnate.

David L. Miller

God, save us all

As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. (John 15:9)

I have no desire to write today, but here I am. And I have no illusion that I have anything worth saying, but I come back here because something or someone within says, Write! So I do, hoping somewhere amid the writing I will find something within me—or something within will find me—and calm the restless sea of emotion that drags me into its depths.

I cannot escape the image of bullets tumbling and tearing through the bodies of nine and 10 year-olds in a Texas school because I have seen dead children killed in civil war and others simply left to die by the roadside. And I have looked into the vacant eyes of teens who saw schoolmates shot dead, realizing that they didn’t see me; their eyes were fixed on scenes they could not erase.

Nor can I escape the heaviness of hearing my own mother’s pain. Nearly 93, her body is worn down and wearing out so that there is little anyone can do to still the pain that some days chains her to her chair. The hunger to get-up-and-go, which drove her fast-forward all her life, torments and agitates her heart because she can no longer do what was once like breathing. Deep within, she feels not past 90 but someone much younger, someone who wants to tend her flowers, run the food pantry and be on every other committee at church.

My mother and the horror of a Texas grade school would seem to have nothing in common, except the obstinate reality of human suffering that sooner or later renders us mute and helpless, knowing there is nothing we can say or do that will make any difference.

Any attempt to make easy meaning of the suffering of aging—to say nothing of the unspeakable grief over the mutilated bodies of children—is sacrilege.  Our words cannot ease the pain, relieve the sadness or still the bitter wrongness of it all.

We are left to despair ... or to the faith that there is yet a Love that can redeem all that is not loving, all that is bitter and sad, mute and gray.

Confused, sad and angry, possessing neither answers nor any words to still my heart, I urge myself to cling to the Love I have known who knows me, who knows my mother, who knows those Texas children and even the tortured soul who ripped open the hearts of all who love them.

God save them all, I pray. Somehow. God save us all, especially from ourselves.

Days to come will bring thoughts and prayers, glib words and heartfelt sorrow. The futility of our tawdry politics will disgust and further divide the country. Hands will be wrung, ideologies will collide, and children will lay flowers at a school house door. Again.

But redemption, at least as much as human efforts afford, will be known only in the embrace of those undeterred by bitter tears, souls unafraid to step into the breach and stand speechless alongside inconsolable hearts.

Redemption comes the only way it ever can, by finding a way to translate suffering into love.

So we abide in love, or do our best trying, for that is where the One who is Love meets us ... and redemption begins.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

May day

I have given up all non-obligatory devotions and prayers and concentrate on being always in His holy presence; I keep myself in His presence by simple attentiveness and a loving gaze upon God which I call the actual presence of God ..., an habitual, silent and secret conversation of the soul with God .... (Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, 1614-1691)

It is not a sense of sin or wrongdoing that brings me to a Sunday pew. Forgiveness is always welcome and needed, of course. But this is not what I seek nor what I imagine those scattered around me truly desire.

I doubt our desires are different than those of the dog walkers who pass by with absolutely no intention of ever darkening the church door on Franklin Street.

I want to feel the smile of a spring day, the joy of warmth and light enfolding me and quieting my heart so that I am at peace, one with myself, with nature and with the mysterious Source of May mornings.

I doubt the dog walkers would put it that way, and those sitting around me would likely find better and clearer words than these. But our desire is the same: We hunger for loving union with the grace we see and feel as the earth warms and greens, bringing lilacs and lilies to bloom, enlarging our hearts to human size.

So why come out of the sun to sit a pew? I ask myself that on some days because some days little happens as I pray the prayers and listen to the words we speak.

But then come moments when ancient words and hopes, prayers and praises awaken wordless joy that leaks from my eyes so that I lose my place and trip over the words we are praying and singing together. Stories of Jesus awaken scenes in my mind so that I see him and feel his presence as he heals and touches and gazes over crowds with a compassion beyond anything I have known or felt elsewhere.

And amid it all, I feel and know the great smile of One I cannot see, a face whose warmth and light embraces me whole, shining across the scope of my existence, indulging my fumbling efforts to figure life out, taking joy in loving me, the dog walkers, the pew sitters and all the rest—pleased that I should bask, one, with the Light who shines through May days.

David L. Miller

 

Where it all began

For the kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. (Romans 14:17)

Sunlight cut through every contrary thought and emotion, inviting chilled bodies and spirits from their cocoons to bask (finally) in the sacrament of springtime. So it is on this Saturday morning.

But spring’s belated resurrection is a tiny fraction of the consolation that warms me. Sound does that, the discordant chintz of a toy piano playing on an IPad—and a voice of love, choked with tears, from across the living room.

“Is that where it all began?” Dixie asks. The question needs no further context. Two minds fly as one to the orange shag in her parents’ long-ago living room and a tow-headed boy joyfully pounding out painful chords and tuneless melodies on a miniature piano of plastic and particle board.

How old? Just two, I think, at least in the mental picture we jointly hold and which holds us in fast silence at the holy mystery of it all. Who’d have thought the making of a master musician began on orange shag carpet?

But that other voice, the one that never stays quiet for long, quickly corrects. No, it didn’t begin there but a little earlier.

It began in the depths of non-time when Love’s Source chose that there should be beauty; and if beauty, then souls whose joy is sharing in its creation; and if them, then other souls who partake of its wonder, lifted above the banal to consolation and joy, illumination and insight by the manifold colors and textures flowing through human imaginations from Love’s infinite store where it all began; often showing up where you least expect.

It all began in the boundless sea of Love from which our best tears flow, like these on a sun-kissed Saturday morning, when the awakened heart again discovers what an unlikely and mysterious journey life is.

Every moment is somehow carried in the flow of a Love beyond knowing, trying its best to carry us home to where it all began.

David L Miller