Nightlight

 And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself. (John 12:32)

Perhaps it was the setting, a hospital room when I couldn’t rest, sleep or find any comfort. Maybe at another time the image, the juxtaposition, would not have struck me, but lonely hours staring at the ceiling affects your vision … and opens your heart.

Three parents stared from a silent television screen, receiving hugs from supporters who visited them in solidarity with their grief and calls for justice. They will never get it, however. Justice would mean getting their children back, alive and well. But they are gone, slaughtered in an elementary school room in Uvalde, Texas, two years ago.

Justice, for them, lies far beyond human reach, in a realm more gracious than anything we might imagine let alone provide.

For the time being, there is grief, the consolation of tender hearts and the faint hope that public authorities will hear them and respond like it was their children who were cut off from their precious lives by a shooter and his soulless killing machine.

Who knows what beauty and joy would have graced their families and community through the irreplaceable lives of these children? For this, we should all grieve. The Holy One gave those lives not just to their parents, their families and to one Texas town …. but to every one of us.

But it was more than this, more than my frustration of another night tethered to heart monitors in a hospital bed that moved my tears. There was an image. Behind the faces on the TV screen, a crucifix hung on the wall over their shoulders.

My bleary eyes could not make out much detail on the cross. It looked to be plaster with little color that I could see in the darkness.

But it was just right, in exactly the right place … as if forces beyond us curated the scene, a juxtaposition of shattered hearts standing there as the Crucified, arms spread wide by the ugly brutality of this world, his arms, above and around them … and me in that cursed bed, all of us in need of healing.

And there he was … and is … and always will be, arms open, Love giving itself away, refusing to hate, lost in love for a world that hates far too much and all-too-often.

That’s who Jesus is, the crucified and risen one, Incarnation of the Love who embraces all that we are, all that we have suffered and celebrated, all that makes us laugh and cry, enfolding the worst and best of us in an overflowing triune Love that has neither beginning nor end.

I cannot explain it and am certain I will never have such wisdom, but I know there is healing in those arms. More than once or twice I have tasted it, many more. And I know … that plaster crucifix, on a wall somewhere in Uvalde, Texas, speaks to places in our hearts that only Love can reach, transforming sorrow into hope and death into life.

In the darkness of night, only a crucified savior will do. Nowhere is God any greater … than on that cross.

David L Miller

 

 

 

 A clean and open space

 Making a whip of cords, he (Jesus) drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, ‘Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a market-place!’ (John 2:15-16)

All in all, it’s not a very ‘sweet Jesus’ sort of thing to do. But I understand the impulse.

Walking into the temple precincts, Jesus twists together a whip of cords, upends the tables of the money changers; their coins ching and clatter across the pavement.

Swinging the whip above his head, he drives off the merchants with their birds and lambs and cattle and who knows what else, clearing out an empty space until all that remains is him, standing alone in the courtyard, catching his breath, looking around for who or what he has yet to chase off.

He wants the temple—the ‘Father’s house’—to be a meeting place where human hearts might know and feel the Great Heart who loves and longs for them, a space to pour out their loves and hurts that they might meet and enter the Love who is their home, their hearts enfolded in the divine heart.

I felt something of the same yesterday while visiting a church that was new to me. The choir stood at the director’s command, a flute from a hidden corner intoned an exquisite passage, inviting the heart to rest, wait and listen for the voices to breathe their harmonies over the gathered people.

A spiritual, deep and soulful washed over us, the congregation rapt, moved but unmoving in the pews around me, until it was over. The final note hung in the air a nanosecond as a moment of sweet, mystic communion was about to gather every heart into one love for the Holy God who inspires such beauty and devotion.

But it was not to be, the congregation broke into simultaneous applause, unable to leave a tender moment alone, as they did every time someone sang or played or spoke, shattering any opportunity for silent communion with each other in the Great Love who woke us from sleep and called us together.

There was no open space for the heart to breathe and pray and be.

I was not tempted to make a whip of cords and drive these good people out, but I certainly wanted to tie their hands that they might let Beauty’s presence wash over them and grace their hearts with whatever the Holy One might give them.

Just so, I think I understand Jesus as he stands out of breath in the middle of the courtyard.

He cleared an open space where the clamor of buying and selling, of work and worry is stilled, a space where human hearts are relieved of the compulsion to fill every single moment with sound and motion—all the things we do in our vain attempts to fill our life with meaning or to drown out the nagging doubt that our lives and all we do to fill them has any meaning at all, that the emptiness we sometimes (often?) feel has no cure.

But the heart does not lie. Our hearts know we are made for love, to be filled with affection and warmth, to find ourselves amid the mutuality of giving and receiving that makes us truly human and truly glad to be graced with the privilege of drawing breath on this wonderous little corner of the cosmos.

We need a clean, open space to feel what we feel and to speak our fears and needs and hopes from the hidden silence of our hearts. And there, exactly there, in that open space, we meet the one who is the face of the hunger within us.

He is not only the fire of our hunger but also the food and drink that satisfies the heart’s ancient longing, standing in the open space, ready to hear, ready to heal, ready to receive, ready to welcome us that we may be taken into the Heart he is. Heart-to-heart, we meet and know the Love who made us, the Love who ever awaits us, the Love who lies waiting to live and breathe through our holy and precious lives.

David L. Miller

 

 

If dreams there be …

You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven (Matthew 5:43-45a)

Songs and dreams tell us who we are, who we are meant to be, the soul who longs to live through the one precious life we are given. They alone unlock the hearts secret room, releasing desires over which reason has neither control nor arms to reach.

So it is, that on a single day, two moments come that have absolutely nothing to do with each other, except for the voice of soul speaking through both.

The song came first, a movie theme, Il Postino, decades old, but what does age matter? Beauty, love and wonder know no age. It began with the soft trill of a single flute, then a violin, a love theme, its melody gentle and flowing, filled with an insatiable ache to touch and know and be absorbed, lost in love’s embrace.

The heart is much quicker than the mind, and in an instant my heart prays silently then with words to be one, lost in the song, not to hear it with the ear but to be inside the ache of its melody, wounded and wanting, flowing in the stream of love and longing.

And for a moment, prayer has its answer; thought is dispersed, the mind falls silent as death and the heart is carried away in the wonder of beauty. I am in the song and the song is in me, and we are one. Lost in love’s melody, once more I know I am Love’s blessed image, beloved from all eternity, enclosed in the heart of the One who sings love songs in my soul.

Feeling this, there is neither need nor want for anything more than Love’s constant return that, however unlikely, I might become the Love who dwells in the inner mansion of this heart, instead of the imposter who so often wears my face.

Is this but a romantic dream? Well, there was a dream this same day. It left a lingering image, a memory, as sleep slipped away. A golden-haired girl, age 3, in a soft-green and white checkered dress. She wandered up the aisle of a crowded chapel, packed for a graduation ceremony. 

Slowly looking around, she passed the president of the seminary who was speaking at the lectern. Climbing a couple of steps, she walked among and around the knees of faculty in academic robes and full regalia seated there—looking for me. But she cannot find me because I am sitting far to the side, several rows deep among the graduates, barely able to see what was happening.

This wasn’t just a dream. It happened. And the moment lives in my heart, which is why, I suppose, it appeared in my dream. But in my dream, something happens that didn’t happen. I rise, scoop her up, enfold her in my arms, enclosing her in my heart so that the moment might live forever, shining with love’s beauty, revealing once and for all what human beings are made of and made for.

Savoring that image, I know that the love in which I hold her … is the Love who holds and encloses me in the divine heart, living still in this precious life with which I have been graced.

If dreams there be, and if dreams come true, may this one forever haunt my days and nights … until the Love who inspires them expands my heart to love all that God loves. Perhaps then, I shall truly sing the song that God never ceases to sing, lost in love’s melody.

David L. Miller

 

 

Only for the sick

 After this Jesus went out and saw a tax-collector named Levi, sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he got up, left everything, and followed him. (Luke 5:27-28)

Who doesn’t want a second chance? Or a third or fourth … or, Lord knows, how many is enough before we get it right? Life, that is.

But then we never do get it quite right … or even close.

And if I needed a reminder, the ash-smudged foreheads that greeted me along grocery store aisles came as an irksome spur, once again, to take a close look at my life—my patterns of living and speaking and acting through seven decades—and recognize, once again, that I have received a lot more in this life than I have given.

I have not become the soul of life and love and grace I might have, could have, should have (and wanted to) become. But strangely, I am still haunted by an unmistakable beauty that hungers to live … in and through … the one life I have been given. It won’t let me go.

Amid this comes the darkness of the wee hours when sleep slips away and you stare into the abyss of knowing it is later than you think: There are not nearly enough years left for you to live the fullness of the beauty that lies hidden in your heart.

If only, one thinks …. If only I could do it all over again, I would have been smarter, better, braver, bolder, kinder and more faithful. I would not have indulged my vanity or wounded anger or lust or greed or fear … or whatever bedevils your heart, striving as we all do to fill the emptiness and soothe wounds we may have carried for decades.

It is then, in the middle of the mess, amid the quagmire of could’ves, would’ves and should’ves, that Mercy comes to call. ‘Follow me. I want you.’

Such was Jesus’ invitation to Levi, a member of the most reviled occupation of the time, tax collectors. In Caravaggio’s painting of this scene, an astonished Levi, leaning over the day’s ill-gotten proceeds, points at himself as if to say, ‘Who, me?’

Yes, you … Levi, and we, too. For, Mercy comes to those who live amid the quagmire of unresolved feelings and regrets, sins of which we are ashamed and memories that make us wince. I do not come for those who have no need of a physician, Jesus says, but those who are sick.

So yes, I want you.

Rising from his chair, Levi followed, and in my mind, this day, I, too, rise and fall at Mercy’s feet, Jesus lifting me to his side, for a moment his arm around me before I disappear into him—and realize the truth.

I am, this life, with all the messes I have made, the hurts I have caused and, yes, the good and graces I have tried to share, all of it is enveloped in him, taken into the Love he is, Mercy enfolding all that I am so that all that I am (however haltingly) might become mercy and grace, love and beauty, no longer lost or alone but human and whole, at home in the Love who heals.

David L. Miller

As you see so shall you be

A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, ‘If you choose, you can make me clean.’ Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I do choose. Be made clean!’ (Mark 1:40-41)

I have reached the point in recent years where (on good days) I realize that getting the point is not the point.

Hard as it is to let go of wringing an idea or some takeaway from my morning meditation, it is refreshing, if a bit unsettling, to settle into a moment of awareness, realizing that what I seek is already in me … and I am in it.

The unsettling part is letting go of the need to make something of the time, to walk away with an idea I can share or write about, which, ironically, is exactly what I am doing.

But to write about what happened today, last night and several days running seems impossible because it is so nebulous—tangible, yes, and assuredly real, but elusive as the air of love I was breathing, or better, that was breathing through me.

The story is simple, a leper, an outcast in the grip of gross disfiguration physically, emotionally and socially. And then, an outstretched hand and Jesus’ voice: I choose. I choose you. I choose this moment to touch and heal and love and give you back your life.

The words are barely necessary. The hand is enough. If all I ever knew of Jesus was this moment, this outstretched hand, it would be enough for me to love him and want to be with him, just to feel him near.

But there’s more. For the superlative gift is not seeing him and knowing he is compassion, divine and real, human and present right there before my eyes. The greater gift is finding that same love alive and breathing from some secret source hidden in the depth of your being.

And greater still is silently knowing that the Love breathing in him and in you surrounds and envelopes us and everything we can imagine in an invisible ocean of Presence, Love’s boundless sea.

The non-point of all this is that we pray and meditate not (or surely less) to get something, find answers or reach an insight. We come and look at Jesus to savor Love’s truth until it awakens within us the Love we truly are, and in whom we live, though we knew it not.

We come to see and savor Love’s own soul, for as we see so shall we be.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 

Faces at the door

And the whole city was gathered around the door. And he cured many …. In the morning, when it was still dark, [Jesus] got up and went out to a deserted place …. When they found him, they said to him, ‘Everyone is searching for you.’ (Mark 1:33-37)

Faces. Just look at the faces. Forget your theology, your ideology, your politics and everything else that blinds or obscures or restricts your field of vision.

Just look and see, and you will know.

A black-haired girl with earnest eyes raises a crooked stick on which someone attached a ragged white flag ripped from a bed sheet. Around her lies the rubble of her life, a Gazan city of crumpled gray concrete broken in the bombardment, her punishment for having the bad judgment of being born at this time and place.

Miles away, in Jerusalem streets, weary faces walk in the torchlight wearing love’s worry for faces they fear they will never again see, hoping their shouts will bring their beloved home from captivity, while neighbors well-known to them mourn the slaughtered.

I don’t have to wonder at the expression of those who gathered at the Capernaum door of the house where Jesus was staying. I just watch the news and feel the ache of hearts longing for restoration, hoping to feel whole and safe, wrapped in love’s warmth, free from the fears that nag every moment of their waking existence and haunt their dreams so that there is no escape.

Nor need I wonder why Jesus’ friends panicked when they woke and didn’t see him sleeping across the room, his breathing keeping time with their own, reassuring them that the one essential soul in their life was not lost to them.

Faces, all of them, longing to feel seen and safe, whole and hopeful, hoping that the hidden soul within them might rest in the peace of Love’s presence.

‘Everyone is looking for you,’ Jesus’ friends breathed in anxious voice, upon finding him alone on a hillside.

Of course, we all are. The girl with the flag, the protestors in the street, the faces at Jesus’ door, you, me, the next guy who passes us on the street—all of us looking for a great love that can make us whole.

All of us, in one way or another, whether with flags or shouts, silent prayers or hidden longings we barely recognize within ourselves: We pray.

We pray because we are human and mortal and so very incomplete, yet still alive with the hope that there is One who can make us whole, One who completes us, One who is the longing of every human heart—One who is that very longing … living in the soul’s hidden depth.

And that One … begs to be seen in the eyes of that girl in Gaza, to be heard in the voices of those longing for their lost ones, and to be welcomed in the hidden corners of our hearts longing for Love’s healing touch.

We stand at the door, all of us, one great prayer, secretly bearing the Love who awakens our hope for Love’s completion.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

With Lo in the flow

Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?’ And they took offence at [Jesus]. (Mark 6:3)

I have no idea who Lo is, his background or how he came to work at a suburban Cosco. But he made my day.

He saw me, and for a moment I truly felt seen, welcome and received as we shared a moment. And laughter.

The laughter was directed at my head of white hair, revealing my age and releasing me from the idiocy of having to fumble through my wallet to produce my driver’s license or AARP card in order to purchase the bottle of wine amid the milk and butter, coffee and assorted items on this day’s grocery run.

I saw his name tag as we left the checkout, while trying, without success, to identify the origin of his accent. But it didn’t matter because something utterly ordinary and wonderfully transcendent passed between us in an instant.

What to call it? Flow, maybe?

The flow of kindness, mutual humanity, basic respect, gentle humor, yes, all this, but more, because it made us—or at least me—happier, more alive and hopeful, open and kind, whatever the day might bring.

There was one more thing: It also made me feel less alone.

Our aloneness in this increasingly anxious and impersonal age is killing us, literally, or so a growing number of medical studies tell us. Their bottom line: Loneliness has the same health effect as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.

But loneliness kills us spiritually well before we are ready for the undertaker. It makes us feel cut off from the flow of human kindness that would pull us into its stream, bathing our hearts in the awareness that we are seen and recognized, known and valued, respected and worthy of care.

There are sacraments of this kindness and care. Today, one of them was named Lo, and for a moment, an instant, I knew myself with Lo in the flow of goodness and gentle grace.

As a Christian, I have a name for this flow.

‘I am the bread of life,’ Jesus says, in the Gospel of John. ‘I am the Good Shepherd.’ ‘I am living water.’ The list goes on, and today I will add a couple more predicates to Jesus’ sentence.

I am the flow of life and love that illumines your heart. I am the joy that fills you when you feel seen and treasured. I am the kindness that lifts your heart and restores your joy. I am the elation that comes when Love’s living flow washes through your heart.

And I am also the sadness, the longing ache of feeling cut off, rejected and invisible. For, the Love that I am longs to flow through all that is, every moment, every conversation, every day.

The divine life and love that filled Jesus frustrated him thoroughly when the gift he offered was refused and denied, when he was dismissed as the boy from down the street, nothing special.

But the flow goes on—within, beneath, around and through all that is—finding its way despite the rocks and walls, hard heads and calcified hearts that would hold it back.

And sometimes, Lo and behold, we find ourselves right in the middle of it.

David L. Miller

So, this is life

Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’ (Mark 1:14b-15)

The kingdom of God is near. The kingdom of God is within you. The kingdom of God is among you. The kingdom of God is spread out on the earth and people do not see it.

I surely don’t know what went through the minds of those who first heard words like these from Jesus.

A kingdom? You mean, like Rome? Like the kings who rule and tax and run things, whom we avoid as much as possible so we can live our lives with little interference from the powerful who know little of our lives and couldn’t care less as long as their coffers are full?

No, another kingdom, make that a new reality, a new way of being awakened in the hearts of those who first heard Jesus.

Why did people come to him? And why did the first followers drop their nets and take up with him, having no idea what they might feel or see or suffer?

Or did they? Did they feel more alive in his presence for reasons they could not understand? Did they hang on his words because they felt more alive, more human, more hopeful and whole so that they wanted more of whatever it was that was in him—and whatever it was that was coming to life in them when he was near?

In other words, maybe they followed and stayed near him for exactly the same reason I get up every morning and read a story of Jesus, watching and waiting for whatever feelings and thoughts, questions and awareness bubbles up—because on most days I feel more alive, more free, more loved, more whole and able to love this crazy world and live with joyful gratitude for the life I have been given; every morning, the cold corners of my heart fill and warm making me glad to be alive because I catch a glimpse of this Jesus, feeling for the breadth of a breath the bottomless love that he is and knowing, this is life.

Salvation is one word for this, the life of God—which is to say Immortal and Impassable Love—claiming greater territory and rule in the rugged terrain of my tangled heart. And I am glad. For it’s a new day, the rule of God is more with and in me, opening my eyes to its beauty spread out on the earth in creation’s wonder and in the loveliness of gracious faces alive and shining, whether they know it or not, with the One who is always near, bringing the kingdom

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A light in Bethlehem

 There shall be no harm or ruin on all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11:9)

Ancient voices console me this Christmas Day. Their hearts reach across many centuries to find my heart, even as Bach’s celebration of ecstatic joy dances from the radio and lifts my heart from the sadness of these times. Thanks, Johann, I needed that.

Or maybe I shouldn’t thank you at all.

Perhaps this is just one more way, one moment in a lifetime of moments when the Word who is God becomes flesh … or at least waves of sound … to lift me out of myself. But it’s more. Out of myself, I enter the joy of communing with the Love ‘who comes from the great and everlasting day of eternity into our little moment of time.’ Thanks to St. Augustine for that phrase.

But much more, I give thanks for the One whose coming we celebrate this holy day. For, the Mystery he is comes in every moment, marrying divine love with created matter that we might see and feel and fall in love with the light and love he is.

‘Those who see light are in the light sharing its brilliance,’ according to Irenaeus, another ancient voice echoing in me 18 centuries after he left the scene.

Just so, our Christmas endeavor must be to see light in these sad times. Seeing saves us from ourselves when the worries and wars of the world make it nigh unto impossible to sing Joy to the World with the energy it deserves, to say nothing of the vigor our hearts desperately need.

If we can just see, we may yet become words of divine light and beauty ourselves, just as God intended. It’s difficult most days, but then ....

Well, then I see a Palestinian pastor lighting a candle beside a Jesus doll nestled among broken, jagged pieces of concrete in the chancel of Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem. That’s where we see Christ this Christmas, he says, buried in the rubble waiting for us to see and love him there.

Yes, but he might also look in a mirror, although I suspect he does little of that because his eyes are fixed on the sorrows of his place and time and people. But if he did, he might see himself aglimmer with the light of Christ’s own sorrow, born of the Love of whom Jesus is the face.

He says this time has challenged his faith like no other he has known. How, after all, can one sing, ‘glory to God in the highest,’ when your soul bears the weight of war and the deaths of children?

Yet, he fans my hope as he lights a votive in his little church in Bethlehem where Christ, the light of the world, first drew breath. For I feel his love, and the love I feel is not just his but the love of the One who is Love, and it fills the heart with joy and ecstasy, and sorrow and longing, and all the other emotions Christ yet feels for our lives and troubled orb.

And with this comes an ancient longing. ‘There shall be no harm or ruin on all my holy mountain,’ God promised in Isaiah’s prophecy, ‘for the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.’

I long for that day. It’s certainly not here yet. We’re still a long way off. But sometimes, in ancient voices and lit candles, glorious music and loving souls, I feel its beauty and taste its goodness and know: I am not alone.

David L. Miller

Tears of light

 The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. (John 1:9)

I’m told the sun converts four million tons of its substance into light every second of every day, giving life to this blue and green marble that is our home. But today, Old George Way receives little from the sun’s constant generosity.

Ashen rays filter through the leaden gloom of winter clouds, heavy with rain, hanging low on the bare oaks at the end of the street out my west window.

Dreary as Old George feels this morning, places too many to number languish and despair, bereft of the faintest glimmer of any light capable of lifting human hearts to believe that the life of joy and beauty for which they hunger can ever be theirs.

Darkness covers the earth and thick darkness the peoples; so wrote the prophet Isaiah, 2500 years ago, give or take. I’d have thought he’d just watched the evening news, sitting beside me on the couch.

Maybe that is why tears warm my eyes as these words cross my lips: ‘The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.’

I long for this light … and die when I feel its absence.

I want to feel the light of an eternal loving presence when the light of life grows dim and when the news is darker than gray December mornings.

I need to know there is a light that never dies, never fades, a light that was already present when this improbable universe exploded into existence in an unimaginable burst of splendor—so that the improbable reality of my own existence might be possible. I want to feel the miracle of this light (even more improbably) alive in my own confused and conflicted heart, making me glad to be alive, loving my loves and knowing theirs.

I need to see and feel this light so I can believe that the light who is Love is always shining, even when my heart is dim and my eyes do not see.

Knowing: Its goodness glimmers in great and common moments, in all that is good and just, beautiful and lovely, in all that is love and that delights the heart with gratitude for the joy of being alive and able to feel creation’s wonder touching the gentle senses of your flesh.

The One who is the true light, who enlightens everyone and everything, this Jesus, the Light made flesh, reveals the beauty of the divine face. Born amid the poverty of a dark time and place, we seek and look for his light in every time and place, knowing there is no darkness that he will not invade and bathe with the loving light of his presence.

Seeing his face, the light he is awakens the warmth of his beauty in the depth of our souls, and we discover exactly who we are and for what we are born.

And this, I suppose, is the meaning of my morning tears. The light I seek has found me … once more.

It never grows old.

David L. Miller

 

Journey in search of a soul

[John the Baptist] proclaimed, ‘The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.’ (Mark 1:7-8)

Tradition sometimes pictures John, the Baptist, as an angry, brazen fellow bellowing out in the desert wastes about sin and righteousness and the need to change … or run, because someone was coming who would burn the chaff in the fires of divine wrath.

There must have been a great hunger for personal reformation and a society more just and decent than their daily scramble to get by; otherwise, it is hard to imagine why John attracted any following at all, let alone the crowds that braved the desert heat and rugged journey to go see what all the commotion was about.

He was a curiosity, with his itchy camel hair tunic, gobbling locusts for nutrition and robbing bees of their honey to choke it all down. Perhaps, he reminded people of wild-eyed prophets of old, afire with a word of God burning in their bones they had to speak lest they risk losing their souls.

And it was likely the concern for their own souls that drew more than a few.

There’s something about our souls. They are ours, and yet not, a gift, an expression, even, yes, an incarnation of the Great Soul who is Love. We can lose track of our souls amid myriad voices shouting from one media or another, telling us what we should say, do, wear, watch, buy and care about, lest we miss the moment.

But that core, the apex of the soul, as medieval mystics called it, belongs only to God, for it is the life of God within our lives, hungry for home, crying to connect, for union with the Love who gives life to all that lives.

We can lose track of our souls and often do. They can get beaten down, shouted out and forgotten, but they do not die. The life of the soul is always there, reminding and even cajoling the heart, irritating our ease with the intuitive awareness that we are more … and are made for more … and will never feel at home in this world until our hearts are one, at rest in the Love for whom the soul within us longs.

I have no idea what I would have heard had I taken my journalist’s notebook and interviewed the pilgrims going out to John, trying to learn what on earth stirred them from comfortable homes to listen to a ragged voice telling them to repent of their misdirected lives.

I suspect most of them would have fumbled about unable to tell me. The real motivations that move the deepest things in us are necessarily deeper than our stumbling tongues can tell. Always were, always will be.

But at root, the reason is surely love, for love is the substance of the soul we lose and one hopes find again in this life. They went into the wild country hoping to find their souls to feel truly alive again, knowing the Great Soul who wouldn’t leave them satisfied with the lives they had.

They were intended for something more, something wild and free, wonderful and joyous, and the voice of soul within them, the Love who does not die, was still, blessedly audible in their restlessness. We should all be so blessed.

I understand these pilgrims. We all can. That restlessness for more, for the More that satisfies the heart, so common and real, is the breath of God’s being within our own.

I understand something about John, too. ‘I am not worthy to untie his sandals,’ he said, speaking of Jesus. But I suspect he would have been glad to do it, honored actually, to which, I say, ‘You take the left foot, John. I got the right.’

It seems a good place to find one’s soul.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 

The way of peace

As Jesus came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. (Luke 19:41-42)

Moments come that remind me why I love Jesus and want to live my life in close proximity to who he is, what he said and what he did, although I will always be a poor example of what it means to be one of his followers.

I see his face as he looks up at the walls of Jerusalem and weeps. Perhaps it is the violence of our times, but imagining his tears I know him as the heart whom I can trust with my own.

His love for human souls in all their lost, confused and self-destructive ways wets his cheeks with compassion for the world I see on the daily news, the world I live in whether I like it or not. There are plenty of days I want to shut the world out and let my heart rest because I think I cannot take much more.

But he doesn’t. He lets it all in, feeling the sorrowful ways of this tit-for-tat world to which nations sacrifice their children, century after century, in a doomed, determined desire to gain some measure of security that no amount of power can ever secure, typically doing little more than making the next bloody conflict inevitable.

There is no peace there. The way of peace is the way of this weeping man outside the walls of Jerusalem.

A few days later, Jesus hangs on a cross, the tool of the practical and powerful protectors of this world’s wisdom, convinced someone must die to make an example and maintain order, the infernal logic of ‘the way things are.’

But Jesus shows another way, a harder way that breaks the bloody chain of history. His lifeblood dripping away, he does not descend into hatred and bitterness. He refuses the siren call for revenge, retribution or some ‘proportional response.’ He transforms his pain into a peace offering, extended even to those who have no interest in understanding or accepting it.

This is the way of peace so seldom tried. ‘If only,’ he cried. ‘If only, you knew the things that make for peace.’ But we don’t. Or if we do, our hearts are too fearful to beat back our self-protective impulses long enough to see the need and humanity of those we imagine so different from ourselves, failing to see that there can be no peace for us unless there is peace for everyone.

Maybe we will never learn. Maybe the body count will never be high enough to move nations and their leaders to say ‘enough!’ And maybe it is asking too much of them to imagine ways of dealing with violence and hatred that don’t involve more hatred and violence. Maybe we are stuck forever in this ugly cycle. It’s just the way things are.

It is this that moved Jesus to tears as he surveyed the walls of Jerusalem. And it is this that makes me love and trust him as the one, the way, we most need to help us imagine another way.

I adore you, O Christ, and I bless you; by your holy cross you redeem the world.

David L. Miller

Are you still there, George? We need you.

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: “May they prosper who love you. Peace be within your walls, and security within your towers.” (Psalm 122:6-7)

There’s a Greek Orthodox church and school in Beit Sahour. The Palestinian town sits just east of Bethlehem and south of Jerusalem. Its name, Beit Sahour, means ‘house of the watchers,’ near Shepherd’s Field where a few sheep roamed a near hillside when I last visited, 18 years ago.

The scene has faded in my mind with the years, but two faces are as clear as the day I first met them, George Sa’adeh, the principal of the school, and his 12-year-old daughter, Kristina, whose dark eyes shimmered from a photo near his desk.

Amid the sickening bloodshed in Israel and Gaza, I wonder if George is still there and whether his heart is as true, as good, as holy … and as wounded … as the day I first met him.

I’ve heard it said that in love’s service only wounded soldiers can serve. If so, George is a general in that gracious force, or should be.

Two years before I met him, Israeli soldiers mistook his car for that of a terrorist and a command was given to shoot. Countless rounds riddled the vehicle, and George was shot nine times. His wife and oldest daughter were also shot multiple times and carry shrapnel in their bodies. But Kristina, shot in the head, is forever 12, shining in a more elevated sphere than we, the earth-bound, can yet imagine.

George’s qualification for love’s army is not, however, his grief, but what he and his wife did with the sorrow that lacerates their hearts and always will on this side of the veil. The bitterness of a soldier’s mistake, killing your daughter, is easily enough to fire a life of endless hatred.

But it didn’t. ‘My wife and I, with our faith in Christ, we managed to continue our life,’ George told me. ‘I have faith Kristina is in heaven with God. The pain, with love, we will make it something for others. We are against killing. If I create hate in myself, it will destroy me and others.’

After Kristina’s death, George and his wife began meeting regularly with a group of other parents, Palestinian and Israeli, all who have lost children in the internecine conflict that once again stains the land with the blood of the innocent and sentences human hearts to lives of interminable sorrow.

They talk, tell stories of their children and grieve … together. ‘It’s the only club in the world that doesn’t want new members,’ George told me on my first visit. And no one in those gatherings, I am willing to suggest, forgets the common humanity that joins them to every other soul in the room beyond the boundaries of race, language, faith and bitter history, for its as clear as the tear-stained cheeks and weary weight of interminable grief in the eyes of souls who might otherwise have never met.

I don’t know if George’s group managed to continue meeting through the years, or if it is even possible for groups like it to meet amid the seething anger and fear that seizes the souls of the peoples of that land.

But I hope they can. And if not now, soon, for a sense of our shared humanity teeters on the verge of extinction, if it has not already expired among Jews and Palestinians in the land we call holy.

And not only there, but here, in our cities’ streets, on college campuses, in neighborhoods where synagogues and mosques, Jews and Arabic peoples are threatened by benighted hearts who cannot see what George and those who meet with him know all too well: We all love our children and hunger for respect and want to be free from fear to seek the lives God so graciously gives us.

Sooner or later, the bombs will stop falling in Gaza, missiles will cease flying toward Tel Aviv and the fighting will quiet, at least for a time. In the lull, I pray bitter enemies may be able to look at each other across the littered landscape and, perhaps, for a moment, see at least a shadow of themselves in the fearful faces of each other.

George and his friends in Love’s tattered army can show us how it’s done. They, alone, know the way of peace.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 

 

 

Among the trees

 It was in those days that he went onto the mountain to pray, and he spent the entire night in prayer to God. Then, when it was daylight, he summoned his disciples and chose twelve of them, whom he designated as apostles. (Luke 6:12-13)

Yesterday, I shot my best photo waist high and straight down.

There were too many people, noisy people, on the main trails at Knoch Knolls, so I found little-walked paths, narrow and neglected, at times indiscernible from the floor of the forest surrounding them.

I fancy myself an adventurer, but that is a romantic illusion. These days my adventures are two-fold: First, finding forest trails few people walk on the edge of suburbia, and second, staring at this keyboard waiting for words that will wake the Love latent in my soul to satisfy my heart’s hunger for transcendence.

I go to the woods hoping to escape the unceasing noise of the world, including the sound of my own voice, the endless chatter of the mind trying to name everything as if to make it meaningful. Adam’s endless task grows more wearisome as I age and realize how little I have ever understood anything, despite the torrent of words that poured from my younger self as I attempted to reduce mystery into meaning and make sense of things.

Standing still, silent among the trees, seems a more authentic response to the indecipherable mystery of one’s existence.

Pushing deeper into the woods, the echoes of human presence faded until there was only the rattle of brittle leaves clinging to limbs and branches in the cool October breeze. Others surrendered to the season, falling like snowflakes, seesawing to-and-fro, slowly gliding to the soil beneath my boots where they will accomplish their final purpose of feeding the earth just as they have for countless millennia—and as they will, long after I am able to walk these trails, seeking my heart.

The least I can do is to stop and say, ‘thank you’ to the trees and the breeze, to the rustle of leaves and the kaleidoscope of color coating the ground, myriad maple leaves, millions and more, in yellow shades, golden hues and ruddy reds beyond any Crayola could ever produce.

Pulling my phone from my back pocket, I turned left and right, looking behind and before, to take a photo. It didn’t matter where I focused. A riot of color covered everything in an impressionist wash of wonder, maple leaves lapping over the dark toe of my boots as I shuffled. Holding the phone waist high, I shot straight down, one, two, three photos, then stopped, happy just to be there.

No words were needed. In the vast, yawning eons of time, creation and improbability, I was there, somehow chosen and appointed to witness this and bring witness to the wonder no tongue can tell, surely not mine.

One either believes that the cosmos and one’s surprising existence is the result of blind chance, signifying nothing. Or, one dares imagine that your life is chosen and purposeful, willed and wanted by a Great Mystery who desires your existence and longs for your presence.

And for this, I can only smile, believing my smile is a share in the much greater joy of the One who speaks of love in silent leaves, hoping we will notice.

Jesus prayed in silence on the mountain before choosing the 12 whom he would draw close and train to carry out his mission. I don’t know how the Loving Mystery spoke in his soul so that he knew who to choose. I don’t believe he heard an audible voice, any more than I heard a voice on this overcast Saturday afternoon.  

But I believe he communed heart-to-heart with the Great Love who smiled at me in the silence of Knoch Knolls. And I believe this Love filled him and opened his awareness of those who would welcome the joys and suffer the sorrows of being with him.

They were chosen to witness who Love is and what Love does, but then … so was I, among the trees.

David L. Miller

 

Amado, in Paradisum

‘No eye has seen, no ear has heard, nor has the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him.’ (1 Corinthians 2:9)

 

I had no words. Kneeling at the casket of my friend, Amado, words failed me.

Words usually come easily. Most often, I don’t have to fight to find them. Sometimes, they come and transport my earth-bound heart to a wondrous space where all that exists is the Love God is, and I am there, inside, enveloped by Love, and everything else melts into insignificance.

But not here, not on my knees, not as my hands rested on the dead-cold stiffness of ‘Mado’s thick hands, product of the mortician’s art and the inevitable inevitability that we all know is coming and are never ready to face.

I tried, but tripped over myself every time I tried to say the old words—words I know well, words that flowed like a fountain of life in other moments, no matter how extreme. I wanted to walk my friend to heaven’s door and let him go, knowing all is well even though nothing is right. But each time I tried, the syllables tumbled and stumbled over each other and fell to the floor, cold as death.

‘Rest eternal, grant him, O Lord’ 

‘May light perpetual shine upon him.’

‘Receive him into the fullness of your love with all the beloved who have gone before.’

Any of the old words would have been enough to quiet my soul. I have spoken them hundreds of times, and hundreds of times peace flooded my heart and soothed the souls of those being left behind. The words took me … and so many others … to a place where Love was undeniably real and filled with the promise beyond every other promise, the hope beyond every other hope, the life for which our souls long but barely taste on this side of the veil.

But there was no flow. No peace. No consolation. The old phrases tangled and twisted around each other in an amorphous mass, my heart cold as ‘Mado’s dead hands, once strong, both of us there, he in his casket and me on my knees, both of us clothed in our incapacity, arrayed in the nakedness of our undeniable humanity.

Amado 42 and me 71, our roles might well have been reversed, or so I whispered to him as I knelt, aching for the one thing I cannot live without—light, the light of eternity warming my soul with the assurance of the Love who is, and was, and always will be, the Love who is the living and the dead and the risen again, the Love who smiles on the death of the saints and draws them into the eternal embrace we know only in our most graced moments.

Wanting this, but feeling none of it, I let go of the words that have long consoled my heart, the words that failed me, or I them, as I knelt before the form of my friend who was no longer there.

The old words gone, I conjured the image that closes my morning prayer every day, without exception. “Keep calling to me,” I pray. ‘Keep calling until I stand with all the saints and angels and holy ones around your throne, chanting ‘yes’ to all you are and all you have done.’

At this, the image returns. A great crowd. Dad is there, so is Eilert and Magdalena, Fred and Max, who used to bring me vegetables and Bob who lived down the street when I was a boy. Grandma is there, Dixie’s grandma, too. And Rod, dear Rod, like ‘Mado leaving us so soon; 41 years, 42? What’s that? The blink of an eye. But they are there and others too many to name, and so many others whom I cannot name, all of them gathered before a great throne of love, consumed with joy and light wrapping them into the One who is Light.

And now, ‘Mado, I see you there, brother. Go on. Go ahead. Don’t look back. Walk into the Light for which we long. And greet my friends, won’t you? There are a few who may admit to knowing me. And tell them, thanks. And thank you, too, my friend. Just … thank you. Sorry words failed me the other day. I know it doesn’t much matter now, except to me because I didn’t get to say, didn’t know how to say what my heart needed to say.  But later, I thought of this. They are not my words, far more beautiful than any I can produce. Still, I give them to you now, and offer them to the Great Love who loved us from the beginning and always will.

May the angels lead you into paradise; may the martyrs greet you at your arrival and lead you into the holy city, Jerusalem. May the choir of angels greet you and, like Lazarus, who once was a poor man, may you have eternal rest.

 

David L. Miller