The center holds

 ‘If any of you put a stumbling-block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell. (Mark 9:42-43)

At first blush, there is no good reason Jesus’ words should move spiritual consolation in anyone’s heart, let alone mine. A cold wave of nausea churns at the hollow of my gut as I imagine his image. Surely, it is intended for me.

I have caused little and not-so-little ones to stumble, my words, attitudes and actions falling far short of faithfulness any number of times. I doubt I’ll ever stop carrying the moment I extended my hand to a parishioner as the congregation passed the peace during worship.  ‘I’m ashamed to know you,’ he said, refusing my hand. ‘No kind of leadership at all.’

He spoke for himself, but I’ve no doubt others share his judgment, and some for better reasons than he had. I pray they will find ways to release those judgments, not for my sake but for their own peace and spiritual health.

Ironically, or not, my consolation is found exactly in the words that would condemn me. Re-reading Jesus’ words, tears spring to my eyes as a wave of love rises and swamps my soul, filling me with love for everything he is. For Jesus speaks in great love, calling me from all peripheral concerns to the center of life, to its purpose and goal—eternal life.

This is what most matters, entering, knowing and living intimately with God whose love shines in the face of Jesus. Even his dire warnings speak his great love as he calls us to throw away everything and anything that would keep us from the fulfillment of our existence, which is to live, heart-to-heart, now and forever, with the Love who is the Source of all life.

‘Everything and anything’ include the judgments of others and those we exact on ourselves for the sins and failures that haunt us. There is one cure. All of them evaporate like morning mist in the warm rays of the Love who keeps calling us to life’s true center, the love of the One who showers mercy on his failing friends and forgives even his persecutors.

There is no end to the number of times we need to remind ourselves of this, lest something other than God’s love rules at the center of our hearts. Perhaps we need to be like my old friend, Bob. I held his hand and prayed with him in his final weeks. ‘Tell me that verse again,’ he’d ask on every visit. ‘You know the one. I need to remember.’

‘Yea, Bob, I remember,’ I’d say. ‘There is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus.’

Bob would exhale, long and deep, and lie back in his bed feeling something that looked a lot like peace. And I fell silent. There was nothing more needing to be said. We rested in life’s true center. Nothing else mattered.

David L Miller

Old souls, needed now

But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace. (James 3:17-18)

The goal of my life is to become … or increasingly become … an old soul.

I’ve known my share of them through the years, men and women, no two quite alike. But each stirred a desire to be like them … in one way or another.

Every one of them was more patient that I am and not as angry. There was an oasis of peace around them that invited you to drop your guard and just … be. They never seemed to hurry as if there was somewhere more important to be or someone more important to see.

They breathed contentment with their lives, a warm acceptance of what is … even though nearly every one of them had suffered loses and pain which they carried to the end of their days.

What I appreciated most was that they were gentle, gentle with themselves, gentle with the world around them and gentle with me.

They made a deep impression on me, especially when I was very young. For reasons buried deeply in my nature, I desperately wanted to be seen. I wanted to be accepted. I wanted to be loved. I wanted to find a few gentle voices where I knew I was safe because the world was filled with rigid rules and critical eyes, eager to judge.

Looking back, I am sometimes thankful for those harsh voices and the wounds they inflicted. They sensitized my heart to the presence and ways of love, which is to say the voice of God. They moved me to seek that love all the more, and because of them … I know God all the more.

But I am far more grateful for the old souls in whom the Soul of the Universe sought and found my heart, suffering, now, each day to awaken in me the gentle beauty the Holy One breathed in them.

Not only in me, of course. For this is the holy labor of God’s Spirit within every human heart, a labor in which we share through our prayer and by placing ourselves in tender places and with gracious faces where God finds and awakens the beauty of love deep within us.

The curation of love is our contemplative work in these days, not first loving … but letting ourselves be loved, bathing in Love’s holy sacraments that gentle our hearts and make us fit instruments to balm the bitter, divisive times in which we live.

The voices that dominate our social and political life are neither peaceable nor gentle. Rancorous party spirit, bitter divisions, character defamations, hatred and hypocrisy run rampant in a virulent battle for dominance, in which I want no part.

But to one extent or another, the conflicts of our age won’t leave us alone. They touch our families and relationships, our communities, churches and nation, poisoning hearts with the toxic venom of sarcasm, cynicism, contempt and despair.

The antidote, the only antidote, to the poison coursing through many hearts, is the Love who makes souls old and wise, gentle and peaceful, full of mercy … and hope.

Abide there.

David L. Miller

Something to see

He [Jesus] took a little child and had him stand among them. Taking him in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me. (Mark 9:36-37)

I’ve seen it six or seven times now, a photo inside a café, every table filled with diners. It appears in my Facebook feed always with the same text, telling me the diners are the people of Springfield, Ohio, flooding a Haitian restaurant in protest of the ugliness being hurled at their immigrant neighbors.

I hope the photo is real. I hope it is not AI generated or the photo of a café in California someone used to make a political statement, suggesting the picture is from Springfield when it is not. I, for one, would love to have final verification of its authenticity.

Here’s why. Long ago, reporting from a few of the world’s most brutal, deadly places, I learned something. Whenever you see hatred and death, brutality and the most callous disregard for human life you can imagine—no, beyond anything you can imagine, whenever that happens, where ever you see it, don’t stop looking. Don’t stop listening.

Pay attention because, exactly there, in the midst of hell on earth, sooner or later you will see the most beautiful, gracious, loving, merciful expressions of the human heart, sacrifices that will take your breath away.

You will see God, living in the spirit of human souls in ways that will bring tears of gratitude and longing to your eyes.

Longing? Yes, for those tears flow from the deepest well of the human soul, reaching out for a world not fully born, the kingdom of God, the reign of love. And you weep because you see God’s kingdom breaking forth with unspeakable beauty amid the world’s great ugliness, as human souls take the wounded into their embrace and do whatever they can.

It is through these eyes, tutored, I believe, by God’s own Spirit, and through these ears that, however faintly, have begun to hear, that I take in that photo, reading the meme and savoring the scene on my Facebook page.

I hear the clink of knives and forks, smell the aroma of coffee and eggs sizzling on clean white plates. I see the waitstaff hurrying to fill orders and clear tables. And amid the murmur voices and morning laughter, I feel and know the Love who labors in every time and place to draw us beyond ourselves to embrace the wounds of the world.

It’s really something to see, and once you catch a glimpse of it you want to see and feel it everywhere, which is why I am beyond thankful for those diners in Springfield, hoping that photo is as real as me sitting in this gray chair. For it is a scene of the coming kingdom if ever there was one, all of us gathered in one great love.

When I was a young man I was like Jesus’ disciples, dreaming great things for myself, most of which was compensation for feeling small, weak and insignificant, as if some accomplishment would prove to others (and myself) that they were wrong about me.

If you’re really blessed, sooner or later, the realities of living strips away self-aggrandizing illusions like this … so you can finally see the greatest thing you can ever do is to be like those diners in Springfield. Embrace what is right in front of you with as much love as you’ve got.

And pray, ‘thy kingdom come.’

It will, and you just may see it.

David L. Miller

Postcard from the kingdom of reality

Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, ‘The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, “Look, here it is!” or “There it is!” For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.’ (Luke 17:20-21)

There we were, four of us, walking a corridor in the kingdom of reality.

Truth be told, only three of us were walking. My mother rode in a wheel chair as I pushed, rolling across the skyway between St. Mary’s Hospital to the clinic just north. Dixie walked beside me as we followed a stoop-shouldered 80-something in sneakers, a blue sport coat and a white shirt open at the neck.

Our destination was an orthopedic surgeon’s office to see if my feisty 95-year-old mother could have one more back surgery to free her from pain, without the drugs she preferred not to take.

Entering the elevator, our guide turned and said, “I retired in 2012, but I couldn’t get this place out of me.” He’d been an anesthesiologist here for decades. Now, he keeps people like me from getting lost.

I suspect his smile reassured many anxious hearts in the surgical suite over the years, even as it heartened us as we stepped from the elevator toward the surgeon’s office to learn what the next chapter held for Mom.

She’d set up a challenging itinerary: Monday, going through her files and making sure her computer was working; Tuesday, the surgeon and whatever referral might be made; Wednesday, the bank, the lock box, the funeral home and an insurance agent, all to make final arrangements which she has no intention of needing for years if not another decade. Longevity is in her genes, iron in her will.

Emotional? Yes. Draining? You bet. Overwhelming, strangely, no.

At each step, questions and conversations interspersed with moments of checking out how we each were feeling and what we needed, revealing no great stress.

Each stop, each step followed the next and the next and the next as if ordered by a gentle hand bearing us forward in the flow of an abiding sense of ‘this is how it should be;’ all the while assuring us that this is what life is, and if you take it with honesty, humor and with good and gentle companions, you step into a great flow of … well, it certainly felt like love.

This love was not only within us but all around like the air, surrounding, enveloping and meeting us in the faces of those with whom we consulted about everything from aching backs, to bank accounts, to wills and trusts, to funeral caskets, vaults and insurance policies to pay for it all.

We were carried in a stream that required nothing more of me than to attend to the next thing with patience and care, fretting not about what might come after.

I knew … this is my place. This is where I was intended to be by the Mystery who made me. These are the people I was meant to know and love and trust, and by doing this—surrendering illusions about other lives I might have lived—I was releasing myself into the love that flows from eternity to eternity, beseeching me to let go and be one with this Love as it flows through my little moment of time.

It takes a long time, I think, (certainly for me) to tell your ego to shut the hell up, lay down your defenses and trust that Love. When you do it will tell you who you really are, what your heart truly needs and what you most need to do—like that retired anesthesiologist in his tennis shoes.

The place got into me, and I couldn’t get it out, he said of St. Mary’s Hospital. That’s one way to look at it. Another is, this is the place that Love’s eternal flow found him and set him free to be, well, the soul he was always intended to be.

Whenever this happens, wherever it happens, God smiles and welcomes us into the kingdom of reality.

David L. Miller

Wondering about pinwheels

So Jesus asked the twelve, ‘Do you also wish to go away?’ Simon Peter answered him, ‘Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. (John 6:67-68)

Eternal Life? How dare anyone speak of it as if they understood … anything. Except, of course, there are moments, experiences that take us beyond ourselves, absorbing us in something much greater in which we are truly there but the boundaries between our own hearts and a much greater reality grow thin, then disappear, if only for mere moments as every fear, worry and anxious thought evaporates in an all-embracing love in which we share and of which we are a part.

That’s why I think of pinwheels. It been decades since I held on in my hands, but I remember playing with them as a child and fascinating my children a circus-colored pinwheel with stars and clouds, red and blue, white and green, blowing on it so that it spun faster and faster until the colors blended together into a whirl in which each individual color and blade shared its uniqueness, a twirling color wheel more beautiful and fascinating than any one of them individually.

Something like this happens in conversations and caring relationships when people share what is in their hearts, listening, laughing and letting the flow of the exchange carry them along without the need to steer its direction or determine its conclusion. Joined in a love, a care, an atmosphere larger than themselves, they become more truly themselves than anywhere else. Liberated from the need to protect egos and reputations, they inhale freedom and love in a unity of hearts with every breath.

I know it’s a leap, but … I wonder … is this why Peter answered Jesus, ‘You have the words of eternal life.’

I have no idea what was in his mind or exactly what may have moved him to speak as he did. But I wonder if he came to love what was happening in his heart as he felt himself being drawn ever more fully into the love that met people where they were and welcomed them as they are. Absorbed into the flow of this love, I wonder if the thought of being anywhere else but with Jesus felt like death and despair. I wonder if he felt a great love come alive inside himself so that he felt more alive … and more himself … than he’d ever been or ever imagined he would be.

I wonder if he wanted to let go of everything else and be caught up in the twirling pinwheel of the Love in which he finally knew himself … and the Love for which we are born.

I don’t know. But I wonder.

David L. Miller

The mystery of his presence

Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. … It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. (John 6:53, 63)

I could not sing the verse as I returned from receiving the Eucharistic elements today. Consoling tears would not allow it. A mystery far beyond my meager theological skills held me in its grasp as the cantor sang on, ‘The mystery of your presence Lord, no mortal tongue can tell.’ Mine certainly cannot, neither then, nor now … or ever.

But the heart perceives what the mind cannot. In bread and wine, the mystery of an infinite love fully and irrevocably given is received into human bodies. And in the receiving, the Love Who Is … and always will be … and we—the finite, mortal and uncomprehending—are one. Everything we are (the good, the bad and the ugly) is engulfed in the Loving Mystery who gave us birth, one with the One who is love and life.

In particularly graced moments, our souls are overwhelmed with the wonder of bearing Love Immortal, rendering speech, let alone song, impossible. If only the moment could last, enduring through the daily dullness of the ordinary.

The truly good news is that it does, if only we had eyes to see and ears to hear. For the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood is not a discrete discharge of grace into an ungraced world. It is the key that unlocks the sacramental mystery of existence. His physical givenness at the Lord’s Table reveals what is true everywhere and in everything.

The One who gives himself in bread and wine is he for whom, through whom and in whom the universe came to be. Everything was created by him and for him and through him. The universe comes to be through Christ, the materialization of divine love, pouring forth from the heart of the Holy Trinity.

‘The world and time are the dance of the Lord in the emptiness,’ wrote the twentieth-century contemplative, Thomas Merton. So, when I savor the red cardinal flashing through the locust trees I eat the flesh of Christ. I take the beauty of who he is into myself, and my soul is made alive and joyful. When I watch the gold finches flit and play in the morning sun I wake to his invitation to throw away my deadly seriousness and join in Love’s dance in time and space.

When I take my beloved’s face into my hands and her smile melts my heart one more time, I look into the very heart of eternity smiling at me, hoping I will finally wake to the central truth of my life. And when I receive the day … whatever it is … as a holy gift to be gratefully unwrapped and lovingly embraced I eat and drink the sacrament of the present moment.

The mystery of his presence at the Lord’s table cracks the code of creation. The Christ present at the table wakes our souls to believe and our senses to welcome his presence in everything and everyone, everywhere and in every moment, ever seeking to feed our souls with the love he is.

And if that is not wonder enough, then imagine that you, too, are part of the eternal outflowing of God’s presence, a sacrament of God’s triune love, your reality and vocation.

David L. Miller

Just stop

I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. (John 6:51)

Stop. Please stop. I want to stand here for a moment … and just look at my empty hands. They tell me everything I need to know to live in a way my heart understands.

It happens most every Sunday morning. Filing forward, we near the Lord’s Table where stands a Eucharistic minister breaking bread and sharing the chalice of life’s own nectar. Most bow just before opening their hands to receive the host, as do I.

And then, I stand there, in this precious moment, my hands together, cupped and empty. And that’s what I want to see and feel, the grace of my emptiness, my hands eager to hold that which fills a place in my heart that nothing else can.

But before I do, I need to stop and look at the lines and creases, the little scars, the signs of age and wear from 72 years of living, the regrets of what was done and left undone, and feel the emptiness of my heart that has longed for this eternal love since I was a boy and first became aware that I was hungry for something to fill me, something I could not give myself or find anywhere else, except when I extended my emptiness to receive the fullness of what heaven and earth cannot contain.

Freely and fully given, the body and blood, the very flesh of Christ, completely surrendered, nothing held in reserve, right there extended in the hands of a gracious soul, for me, eternal love given, becoming part of my own flesh and blood, giving the fullness of life to me, the beloved of the Beloved.

Not just given, for Christ gives himself in joy that joy might fill every last corner of my oft-melancholy heart and bubble into tears of consolation that one such as I should be so loved, so wanted, so cherished. In her visions, Christ addressed the English mystic, Julian of Norwich, as she gazed on his Passion. ‘Are you well satisfied that I suffered for you,’ Christ asks. ‘If you are satisfied, I am satisfied. It is a joy and a bliss and an endless delight that ever I suffered my Passion for you.’

Yes, for you, for me, for every last blasted one of us. And the realization starts with empty hands, longing for life’s blessed fullness, known only when our emptiness is engulfed in the mystery of the Love who gives everything away.

A few years ago, a time came each Spring when I would gather communion ware from the sacristy, don my Indiana Jones fedora and head to a room crowded with eight-year-olds and their anxious parents—training for first communion.

The hat was needed because it was always an adventure that took unexpected and sometimes hilarious turns. The kids would ask questions their parents would never dare utter, and one or two would try to ‘stump the chump,’ i.e. me, which is not all that hard to do.

But there would come a quieter moment when I cupped my hands and asked them to circle around me and tell me everything they noticed about my hands. “What’s the most obvious thing you see,” I asked.

 

Answers flew: ‘They’re old. Lined. Wrinkled. Dry. Dirty.’ ‘No,’ I’d say. ‘The most obvious thing. What do you see?’ When silence settled, I’d speak the most human truth of all. ‘They’re empty.’

And so, aren’t we all? Everything we are, from the breath in our lungs to the next beat of your heart, is a holy and unrepeatable gift from the Giver whose joy it is to give the only thing God has to give, God’s own life, love unending, ever flowing from the Triune heart to we, empty vessels, intended for eternal fullness.

I don’t know if any of those eight-year-olds will remember our empty-hand exercise. But I hope some will. I hope one day they will look down and listen to their empty hands tell them everything they need to know about their deepest need  … and the heart of the One who joyfully fills it.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 

Tasting eternity

I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. (John 6:51)

It was a moment of eternity. But then, so is every moment, for Eternal Love is always present, though not always palpable. But this day, at least for a moment, eternity engulfed everything in its wake, washing over our little lives as we held each other not wanting to let go.

I started to step back from our goodbye hug when Ben pulled me again into his broad shoulders at the end of an afternoon together. He released his grip slightly only to pull me back a second time.

‘Thank you, Grandpa,’ he said, then kept repeating, ‘thank you, thank you, thank you.’ I lost track of how many times. Standing eye-to-eye, hands on each other’s shoulders, our eyes locked as he thanked me once more for the gift Dixie and I had given to help with his education.

And then, I knew, it was time for me to say something worthy of the moment, although almost nothing is. All one can do, if speech is possible, is stumble out whatever words you have, knowing they can never bear love’s infinite weight or endless longing.

Nor can they convey the joy of giving a gift, something of the substance—the flesh and blood—of your life, freely giving from your heart to one whose life will go on, I pray with hot tears, long after ours are done and this restless heart of mine rests, finally, in a Heart far greater than my own.

But in this moment, as eternity engulfed time, we were home, believing (as I do) the mystery that (however consciously—or not) we ate the bread of heaven. The Eternal Love who becomes flesh and blood in time and space became flesh and blood in us that we might taste … and, God help us, become the Love we most need … and crave, the Love our longing eyes expressed more fluently than any words can.

Love took us over, the Eternal Love incarnate in the flesh and blood of Jesus, breaking down walls, obliterating our separateness and awakening the sweet pain and pleasure of being truly human souls, tasting eternity yet aching for more of the Boundless Love who gives life to the world.

David L. Miller

 

My name … and yours

 There is … one God and Father of us all, who is above all and through all and in all. (Ephesians 4:6)

Tears sometimes surprise. All it takes is a word, a remembered face, a memory thought lost in the wash of time. Without notice, your eyes moisten, your voice cracks and something deeper than you could summon rises from hidden depths to tell you who you are.

So it was over coffee, remembering a colleague I once knew, though not well. From his widow, I learned he had died of a terrible disease seven years before. I’d not known of it since we lived thousands of miles apart.

What brought tears was not his death, but the way he must have suffered, a suffering in which death comes as grace. Imagining his last days kicked open the doors of my heart, unleashing an immense love and exquisite tears, which are the only language capable of expressing the soul’s deep truth.

And that truth … is Love, the Loving Mystery who is above all and through all and in all, including our own conflicted, contradictory selves.

At the core of the human person, in the heart’s inmost room, a sanctum so many never find or enter, dwells the Beloved, the Love who is beyond time and space and yet whose presence permeates and preserves all creation, a living, breathing, flowing current of life and love chanted by the birds who greet me every morning as I drink my coffee and wake to a new day.

Love is my name, the true name of every human being, created as we are as sacramental bearers of the Love for whom no name will do, yet all of us so marred and scarred by life and sin that we forget … or never discover … who we are and the glory for which we are made.

Our most exquisite moments appear when Love’s immensity floods every corner of our being. And for whatever time this lasts, we are truly ourselves, free from the narrow confines of ego, seeing, feeling and knowing as God sees and feels and knows.

Someday, St. Paul said, we will fully know as we are known. That day has not yet come, but sitting on the balcony, with tears in my eyes, I caught a glimpse.

David L. Miller

The way home

 Because your heart was penitent and you humbled yourself before God when you heard his words against this place and its inhabitants, and you have humbled yourself before me, and have torn your clothes and wept before me, I also have heard you, says the Lord (2 Chronicles 34:27)

On pilgrimage in Spain, I kept my wits about me watching for trail markers. Sometimes, the marker was no more than a smudge of faded orange paint on a rock or tree or fence post. Twice, I lost my way and turned back to find the right path.

This is an image for the spiritual life. Sometimes, we fail to pay attention and lose our way. We don’t stop to ask where our attitudes and actions are leading.

Whole nations do the same, which is what faced King Josiah, who inherited a mess from his predecessors. The people of Judah, led by dissolute kings, imported foreign gods and vile practices into the temple, polluting people’s faith and morals. One of Josiah’s predecessors ritually sacrificed his son.

The discovery of the book of God’s law—much of Deuteronomy—during temple renovations shattered Josiah’s heart. Hearing God’s word, Josiah humbled himself and led reforms to restore faith and justice to the nation.

But try as he might, the die was cast. The cancer was too advanced. Disastrous days and alien powers would soon crush the nation. They’d lost their way … and without humility … refused to turn around.

Humble our hearts, O Lord, that we may daily seek your face and walk your way.

 David L. Miller

On the ridge

The Lord is king, he is robed in majesty; the Lord is robed, he is girded with strength. … More majestic than the thunders of mighty waters, more majestic than the waves^[a] of the sea, majestic on high is the Lord! (Psalm 93:1, 4)

 An arboretum path near my home leads up a ridge, through a dense wood of oaks and maples, before opening into an expansive meadow sprinkled with wildflowers.

I love climbing the ridge and breaking into the sunlight surrounded by the profusion of yellow and white, gold and green where birds swoop for seeds and butterflies sample the sweet flora.

Standing there, arms spread wide, open to the sky, I praise God for what I see and feel and know in that moment. The Lord is king, and there is no other. God reigns, ever-ordering and restoring a world of wonder, grace and beauty amid the chaotic mess we humans tend to make of it.

It is a good walk, especially when the cacophony of voices in the news—and the restless voices inside my head—fracture my consciousness with the incessant discord of the world.

Somedays, it seems everything is coming apart, flaying off in disparate directions. And then, there is the reality that hurts happen and our hearts sometimes break. But on the ridge, I know what the Holy One wants us all to know.

Always good to know … when the days are difficult, the nights are long and tomorrow … so unknown.

 David L. Miller

Coming home

 Jesus answered him, ‘Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. (John 14:23)

Years ago, I ceased to call any place home. This, in part, is because my family made many moves that took us to unexpected places.

Amid our moves, home became … and is … not a place but a person, a relationship of love and care in which Dixie and I look at each other and say: You are my home.

It is something like this that Jesus extends to our needy hearts, only more and better. He lived in loving union—heart-to heart—with the all-loving One he called the Father.

And we who know him, who have tasted the love he is, are drawn into the unceasing flow of love between Jesus and the Father. We are enveloped inside their relationship, sharing in their union, just as our children and grandchildren share in the love flowing between Dixie and me.

As human souls, our home is not a place but this flow in which we are bathed in the Love who smiles on our existence, who forgives and showers mercy on our messy lives and breathes the Spirit of love into our hearts.

Just so, you wake me again, Holy One, that … once more … I may pray to you, hoping only to rest in my heart’s true home. Grant me your peace.

David L. Miller

The voice

[Jesus] was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, ‘Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?’ He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Peace! Be still!’ Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them, ‘Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?’ (Mark 4:38-40)

I visited my old home church last Sunday. I love the place, especially the mural behind the pulpit where Jesus ascends into heaven, his hands raised in blessing, which blessed me many times when I was a boy.

Settling in, I was eager not just to see that mural, but to hear … the voice. The preacher delivered what, for some, I’m sure, was a perfectly acceptable sermon. His sentences were well-crafted, the logic was clear, point followed point, and there was biblical warrant for all he said.

But something was missing. I ached to hear Jesus, not the author of the most recent book the preacher had read or his experience at Culver’s when no one looked up from their cell phone to receive his greeting.

I felt like that group of Greeks who once approached Jesus’ disciples, asking, ‘We want to see Jesus.’ I wanted to hear him. A word or two would have been enough, something I could whisper when frustration or anger, anxiety or impatience floods my heart, something to remind me to whom I belong when I forget.

Something like, ‘Peace, be still.’ Okay, that’s three words, but who doesn’t need to hear them from time to time … or every day?

Or how about his rebuke of the disciples, scared spitless as their boat rolled and pitched in the waves, ‘Have you still no faith?’

That sounds harsh, judgmental, but not really. It’s an invitation to trust that there is One—there is always One—who sees our fear, knows our need and envelops our every moment in deathless love, One who longs for us to cast aside our sadness and doubtful fears and delight in the Love who holds us.

Or how about, ‘Why are you afraid?’ Those would have been good words, too, not only because a tornado demolished a nearby church the night before but because everybody in that room harbored fears they fear to share, everybody there exists in a country roiled by anger and distrust, eroding once stable institutions and relationships, making many loathe to talk to friends or family members on the ‘other side.’

Then, there was the woman, sitting to my right, in the early stages of figuring out how to live without the love of her life, who now rests in the cemetery a mile west of the church. Others likely looked around at the mostly-empty church, wondering if the place that blessed them will be there for another generation—and whether that generation will care.

All this made everyone in that room … average, typical, needing the same thing I needed: the voice who says, ‘Peace be still;’ the voice who asks, ‘Why are you afraid?’ the voice who challenges, ‘Have you no faith’ … and winks, knowing we do, but it flickers in the wind sometimes.

I whisper his words to my heart, but I also need someone to speak the words so I hear the voice … and know I am not alone.

David L. Miller

Apophatic wonder ... or why I want to share a beer with Aquinas

I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven … and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat. (2 Corinthians 12:1, 4)

‘The end of my labors has come. All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.’

These words—and their source—should make me stop in my tracks, shut down my computer and never write another word. They were uttered nearly 750 years ago by Thomas Aquinas, perhaps the greatest mind of his or almost any age.

He had written commentaries on Scripture, Aristotle and other philosophers, produced his own philosophical works, addressed a host of disputed theological subjects and was deep in the process of producing his Summa Theologiae, his great work of systematic theology, writing at a furious pace.

But he never finished it. He stopped, December 6, 1273, put his pens in a drawer and never took them out again.

And why? Because at mass he had seen or felt or experienced something so great, so transcendent that he looked upon the 100 or so works he’d produced and judged them as so much straw, worthy of being cast in the fire, even though his works influence Christian theological thought in significant ways to this day.

I have no idea what … exactly … he saw, nor do I understand most of what he wrote. He is beyond me. But I do not for a moment imagine that his experience is different in kind, only in degree, from the apophatic wonder that graces the souls of millions who have known the immensity of a great love filling them with the Wonder who transcends all thought, language and human capacity for understanding.

Apophatic wonder is a knowing that goes beyond all thought and sensation, beyond light and limits, beyond darkness and brilliance, beyond sight and seeing, yet as real as the tears in your eyes and the fullness of Being within your own being.

I had not thought about Aquinas in years until this past week while viewing Facebook videos sent to me from several sources. I watched what I could stomach from several well-known speakers, men who have sold millions of books to Christians around the country and the world.

But I soon stopped because I was struck by the nauseating marriage of arrogance and self-congratulatory narcissism that characterized the speakers, so terribly pleased with themselves as they blithely dismissed the ‘benighted’ positions of other Christians whose understandings differed from their own. It was the kind of preening display that makes those outside the church rightly recoil in disgust.

Entirely missing was any shred of humility about themselves and the human incapacity to grasp divine mystery. I could discern nothing of the grace that touched Aquinas on that December day, to say nothing of poorer souls and weaker minds like mine, who have seen and felt and known the Wonder whom language cannot capture and before whom all thought falters and falls silent into a truer worship.

St. Paul said he considered everything else in his life as crap (I am cleaning up Paul’s actual word), compared to knowing Christ. His accomplishments, his reputation, his learning—all of this was mere waste, he wrote, compared with deep, mystical knowledge of God in Christ.

He had no words for what happened to him when he was caught up in the ‘third heaven.’ All he really knew was that he had known God revealed in the depth of his own being. After that, nothing else much mattered except knowing this One, this Wonder, this Love who strips away all our pride and presumption and fills us with gratitude for life and love and every good gift of God’s own giving that graces our existence.

And lest you imagine this is all beyond you, really, who has not been knocked out of their apathy by the beauty of creation, the wonder of loving and being loved, the grace and gift of waking up alive in this world and wondering, how is it that I am, that I am alive, here and now? Who has not had the experience of feeling thankful, not for any particular reason but … just because?

Apophatic wonder, a holy gift, a knowing beyond all knowing of the Love who is beyond everything we can imagine, yet right here and now, making every word of mine feel like ‘so much straw.’

But I take joy in my failed attempts to name the Unnameable and look forward to sharing a beer with Aquinas. We have things to talk about.

David L. Miller

In search of home

Looking at those who sat around him, Jesus said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.’ (Mark 3:35)

I think I want to start a house church … or participate in one that would have me.

It’s not just that I am no longer at home in church life as I have known it, nor that I sometimes despair of ever finding it again. I am moved by something I see in Jesus’ eyes.

I imagine his expression as he speaks, the tone of his voice, the tilt of his head, the glint in his eyes, and I meet a man, a soul I know, however poorly or in part, and I fall in love as when, as a boy, he touched me again and again with a love I knew nowhere else.

These days, or at least this day, I feel his hunger, an unrequited longing like the yearning that unsettles my heart, especially as Sunday morning approaches and I have no place I truly want to go.

What I’d like to do is gather around a cup and a loaf of bread in someone’s living room or at a picnic table in a park. We’d sing or at least croak out a song that opens our hearts, pray a psalm and listen to a story of Jesus. Then, talk. Just talk about what we see and feel as we watch him and listen to his voice, sharing whatever hopes or pains, joys or sorrows he stirs in us.

Perhaps we’d share where we have truly loved during the week and where that seemed impossible for us, knowing that each time we have loved or struggled to do so we have known him, his Spirit, awake in our mortal bodies. Then, we’d break bread and share the cup the way he told us to do.

All this is to say that I want what Jesus wanted for himself.

His longing is obvious as he surveyed the sea of faces pressing near to see and touch him. So often misunderstood, reviled and rejected, he looked into their eyes; he felt the hunger of their hearts, and he knew: Here are my brothers and sisters, my mothers and fathers. These are my people, heart of my heart.

Repeating his words, feeling their texture on my tongue, I cannot miss the love he felt for these searching souls, who hungered to know the One from whom all good and graces flow like rays from the morning sun.

When he was with them, he was truly home, and that’s what I want.

I want to gather around a loaf and a cup and look into the eyes of souls who want to know the love of Jesus. I want to be with hearts who know that living this love, however poorly, partially and with myriad failures, is still the very best occupation of life. I want to be with brothers and sisters who are just as restless and just as needy for this Love as I am.

Then, I’ll be home.

David L Miller

 

 

In praise of flesh

For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. (Mark 12:25)

Tell me, Lord, what is the first sacramental moment of the morning? Is it when I inhale my first conscious breath of the day? Or maybe when I see the pale, gray light of predawn through the sheers on the bedroom window?

Perhaps it is when my feet feel the coolness of the floor as I stumble to the kitchen to make coffee, or when I open the balcony door and the sweet breath of a new day embraces my face and wakes my heart.

Or, just maybe, it is when I hear Dixie open the bedroom door and shuffle down the hall, half awake, eyes mere slits, not yet ready for the light of day. Meeting her half way, I take her face in my hands, one on each cheek, as she looks up and wearily smiles, our silent eyes joined in a love for which I will never find words.

For a moment, we stand there, kiss, and she folds herself into my arms, body-to-body, flesh-to-flesh, knowing this is the only way we ever want to start the day, vaguely aware of what we cannot stomach to say, knowing …  this is not forever despite our fondest desires.

Love, yearning, loss, joy and wonder in an unspoken moment starts the day once more, our souls aligned with a current of love that precedes us not by light years but eternity.

All this—the breeze, the morning light, love’s embrace—all if it is ours through the wonder of being flesh, bodies, through which something more than physical sensation touches our souls, stirring awareness that knowing and being this love is the very thing for which we are made.

We are children of the Love who is and was and will always be, even though we won’t be, at least not in this bodily state. Beyond this life? I have no crystal ball, no mystic vision except of the Love for whom all my attempts at naming are but an infant’s babble.

But I think, no, I’m sure, Christ smiles on my babbling, not with indulgence but delight, which is why I still keep trying, however vainly, to put words to what the heart feels and knows beyond knowing. I think God is amused, which, all in all, is a pretty good reason to keep writing, keep trying.

But I wonder about Jesus’ words concerning those who rise from the dead. I’m not sure I want to be like an angel in heaven when my time here is done. I like being a body and feeling all those things that speak love to my heart, all those moments that awaken a love beyond any I thought I’d ever feel. They fill me with the assurance of love’s holy eternity.

Putting the best construction on Jesus’ words, maybe the angels live in rapture, feeling everywhere, in everything and every moment what I know when I hold my beloved’s face in my hands. Maybe their angelic bodies feel this love not just for this one or that, but for everyone and every blessed thing God has made.

If that’s what Jesus has in mind, I guess that’s okay with me, but I never want to lose the soul-to-soul connection that happens in the hallway every morning. Body-to body, flesh-to-flesh, it’s an intimation of eternity.

David L. Miller

 

 

Broken open

While they were eating, he took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to them, and said, ‘Take; this is my body.’ (Mark 14:26)

Sunday morning dawns and longing stirs my soul, an emptiness and desire to do the thing I most miss about being a parish pastor: the soul-satisfying sweetness of breaking a piece of bread from a loaf and placing it in the empty hands of people I knew and for whom I greatly cared.

The script for this was written long ago. ‘The body of Christ,’ I would say. Over and over again, ‘The body of Christ broken for you,’ repeating the words until the last person in line was fed and the remnants of the loaf returned to the table.

Some looked me in the eye as I spoke; others looked at the floor or their empty hands, avoiding the intimacy others craved. All were fed, and I … most of all (or so my heart seemed to say). For, I was privileged to speak the words of the Heart whose greatest joy is to be broken open and given away to the likes of us—no matter who we are, what we have done, how far we have fallen or how our lives are going.

I was giving away the Love who doesn’t ask those questions. God only knows, we all need it. And I felt immense joy because the words opened my heart.

Even on days when my heart felt dry and emotions failed to flow, even when I was putting the bread in the hands of someone I knew didn’t much like me, just saying the words and breaking bread opened my heart to love in spite of myself. All of us together were sharing a great and holy mystery that is true whether you happen to believe in it or not.

The mystery? Just this: Like Jesus whose joy it is to give himself away, our joy and fulfillment of heart is found (or finds us) exactly when our hearts are broken open and we love without asking questions—loving the person across the breakfast table, loving the hurting souls we see on the evening news, loving the hum of a billion cicadas serenading our every waking hour, loving the lives we are given and even the lives of those we don’t like.

In recent days, my heart has felt dry, my morning prayer distracted, my meditation empty and my petitions half-hearted. God has seemed far off and my soul devoid of warmth and consolation.

It happens. It happens to great saints and mystics and to relative lowlifes, like me. And every time it does, our distressed hearts, hungry to feel one, enclosed in the heart of Jesus, begin to doubt or even despair of knowing the love we crave, the consolation that allows our hearts to breathe free and sing.

But we need not despair. Consolation returns. We need only to stay open, to let life touch and move us.

Over morning coffee, I told my beloved, Dixie, about a digital message I’d received from someone I met once, nearly 25 years ago, while leading a retreat. I described what she was doing, nearly 80 now, but still riding her bike and getting pledges to fund a world hunger ministry.

Before I knew it, tears of joy were in my eyes, my heart broken open because I loved telling the story about the Love who lives in her heart for hungry people. Telling the story, that same Love cracked the hard crust around my heart so I could feel, once more, the Mystery of the One who loves and lives in us.

My heart awakened, I felt again what it means to be truly alive, one with the joy of Jesus.

David L. Miller

The view from here

Then [Jesus] took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, ‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.’ (Mark 9:36-37)

I see her almost every morning. I think she is five, maybe six. Today, she wears a bright gold jumper over a navy-blue blouse and black leggings. Her dark, Pakistani hair is tied atop her head and wrapped in a scarf a little lighter than the blue of her blouse.

Hand-in-hand with her mother, she crosses Chase Avenue toward the corner to meet the school bus. But she doesn’t walk. She skips and jumps and floats and bounces. And day-to-day, I sit here on the balcony with my coffee and stop my reading or prayer or whatever I am doing … to watch her.

It’s a pretty good way to start the day … because I fall in love with every skip, bounce and jump.

How can I not? She loves life. She loves holding her mother’s hand and waiting until the bus ferries her away to school. She loves what awaits her there, and her every move sings a love song for the life into which she has been born.

Seeing such joy could awaken wistful longing for the innocence and joyful expectation one loses along life’s way. But I feel none of that. Nor do I wish to return to the age which she now enjoys.

An immense wave of love and gratitude washes over me as I witness the love of life that is in her. Touched by love’s presence in this most mundane of moments, my old heart is liberated to embrace the day, even as she does.

Once more, I am reminded that the world is a very sacramental place. For, the Love Who Is … joyfully takes myriad forms (like the smiles of children) to break open our hearts that we might feel the heart of God within ourselves. It is right then, amid joy and perhaps tears, our imperfect little lives glisten with Love’s own beauty, eternal life filling our hearts, freeing us to be who we really are.

I suppose this is enough to glean from one common moment, but there is yet another sense, an awareness that the love in this precious child, and the love awakened in me, and the love of her mother who walks her across the street are one great love, and we are all in it. And every once in a blessed while, for reasons we don’t understand, we are awakened just enough to see and feel and taste heaven’s sweetness.

The Apostle Paul suggested that no eye has seen nor ear heard nor heart conceived what God has prepared for those who love him. But sitting here on my balcony, I have a pretty good idea.

David L. Miller

An (almost) old man’s dream

“In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. (Acts 2:17)

I don’t know if I am old; 71 pushing 72, is that old? I don’t think so. Hiking in the woods, my heart doesn’t feel old at all. Sometimes I run, not terribly fast—or far, but filled with elation nonetheless, especially when the trail narrows and greenery surrounds, a lush, leafy canopy filtering the sun and water squishing beneath my boots from recent rains. I feel more like 12 or 13 … or maybe 9 or 10, filled with the joy of simply being, my heart singing a wordless song born of the angels at Eden’s dawn.

Walking there, the Spirit breathes through every leaf on every tree and bush as spring greens everything around, including me. And I am glad just to be. This joy may be the best prayer we ever know on this side of forever.

I wonder, O Lord, was something like this your great dream when, through myriad eons and millions of multifarious processes, you brought forth life on this tiny blue-green ball?

Is this what you wanted for every Adam and every Eve who would ever be, each graced with the privilege of drawing sweet breath and knowing the splendor of human touch, flesh-on-flesh, our bodies able to see and taste and smell, tracing the textures of forest and flower, finch’s flights and cardinal calls, all of which are there, waiting for me, just outside the window where I write?

It's a good dream, Lord. I like it, and on good days I feel it. And on my best days, I pray that your holy dream may come true … for everything everywhere … that the shroud of hate and death that covers the world and its peoples may evaporate like the morning mist under the embracing warmth of a love which has neither beginning nor end, the Love you are.

That’s my dream, which is not mine at all, but yours, except you draw me into it and allow me to share it with you. A pretty good gift, I think.

Sometimes, it makes me cry a little because I feel it so deeply in this heart you have given me, a heart that is either old or young, depending upon the day and hour. And sometimes I am depressed because your dream seems impossible, a far-off fantasy for frightened minds unable to admit that the world will go on and on as it always has, in all its confounded cussedness—egos clashing, powers colliding and crushing the weak and vulnerable, them that’s got getting more and them that’s not never knowing the graces for which you created them.

Still, the dream never dies. It lives in me as it lives in you. Accept these tears as my prayer of thanks, assuring me that you refuse to let my heart grow cynical, cold and hard.

Just keep breathing into us, Holy One. Let us feel your holy dream of all becoming one, joined in one great love. And to whatever extent our words and lives can make your dream come true, for heaven’s sake, help us do it.

And Lord, for our sake, too.

David L. Miller