St. Vernon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Made for joy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David L. Miller

 

 

The Love who sees

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David L. Miller

 

Drawn forward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David L. Miller

The first word

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David L. Miller

 

 

Wings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David L. Miller

 

 

 

Only there

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 

Little pieces of heaven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I guess he never really left.

David L. Miller

 

Fierce women

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David L. Miller

God, save us all

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David L. Miller

 

 

 

May day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David L. Miller

 

Where it all began

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David L Miller

 

Hope’s reason

 We ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. (Romans 8:23-24a

The groaning of the world is too loud and obvious to require elaboration. No one needs to be told. The news is more than enough. Nor need we be tutored about the groaning of our hearts for fulfillment and a peace that does not evaporate in the gloom of gray days when spring has been postponed.

Our all-too-human sighs are not reason for despair, however, but the breath of morning, the early fulfillment of our hearts’ constant craving.

For what, at deepest level, do we long? What, if not for the love that heals the heart and stills the awful thirst for status, glory or power that strains relationships, divides nations and stains the earth with the blood of innocents?

What do we most deeply need, if not for holy kindness to heal our world and engulf our hearts that we might finally become human?

The heart’s sigh for universal healing—our dissatisfaction with what is and who we are—is not a cry of absence, but the presence of the Love we crave within us, longing for fulfillment. Strange, it is, ironic, that the experience of wanting is simultaneously an experience of the Love we most need, Love’s longing to fill all things.

Imprinted on our souls, in the unreachable depths of our hearts, this Love is a gift granted in our creation by the One who is Love.

Our longings, our sighs over life as it is, are reason for highest hope, for it means Love has not died within, but lives in our mortal flesh; our hearts have not forgotten or been diverted from the glory of love for which all things are created.

Knowing this, feeling this, hope saves us from sinking into the despondency of gray days when the sun refuses to shine, warmed as we are by the Love who does not die.

David L. Miller

 

 

Simple as that

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me. (Psalm 131:1-2)

It is not the knowledge of great complexities that fills the heart, but simple words and common moments that inexplicably bear us into Love’s embrace.

Just so, thick books no long allure me as once they did, many of which I forced myself to read to satisfy my ego. I seek common words and familiar images that transport the heart into the Mystery who transcends them.

Lately, I hear Freida Frahm’s voice and see her frown. She returns from whatever corner of heaven she occupies to accuse me. “You make everything so hard,” she says, as on the long ago day when I, fresh from seminary, led a women’s Bible study. “Why do you make everything so hard?”

Why, Frieda, wasn’t it clear? I needed to complexify everything to show you how smart I was, always knowing my knowledge and skills were insufficient to achieve the goals I once held for myself.

And now, nearly 70, weary of straining for thoughts above my paygrade, I want what I always needed—not to grasp the great but to be bathed in the clarity of words and images that transport the heart into its blessed homeland where words and images fall away and the silent soul sinks into a sea of Love, beyond the need to understand who and what this Holy Mystery is.

(If you understand it, it is not God. Isn’t that what St. Augustine told us 16 centuries ago?)

Ancient images, praying the Psalms, bear us into this wonderland, which is more real than the illusions to which our minds and egos daily cling.

The Lord is my shepherd, Psalm 23 says, right before interpreting itself to say, well, no, maybe the Holy Mystery is more like a host who sets a great table and makes us the guests of honor.

Another Psalm, 139, ushers us further into the great hall of portraiture Scripture is. There, the Holy One is an all-enveloping, all-knowing Presence, cloaked in darkness, silent as light, who knows us whole, sensibly touching us with an affection more poignant than the tears of longing awakened as we stumble to speak our love for our dear ones who one day will carry on without us.

Or maybe, as in Psalm 131, this Loving Mystery is like a mother holding her weaned child, the two, at one, at rest, needing nothing but their presence, one with the other. Forget words; there are none for such beauty, just the simplicity and irreducibility of the holy gift love is, the presence of the One who was and is and always will be.

Simple as that, and just as mysterious. Sorry Frieda.

David L. Miller

Love’s song

Consider the ravens, for they neither sow nor reap, which have neither storehouse nor barn; and God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds? (Luke 12:240

It is easy enough to imagine Jesus saying these words. There are any number of meadows among the rolling hills of Galilee where he might have pointed to the birds, hoping his companions might hear the Incomprehensible Giver singing a love song.

But today I need not imagine faraway lands to enjoy the music. A red-breasted house finch perches at the extreme end of a branch nearest the window where I sit in my favorite chair.

Chattering on, he (she?) announces the morning as the sun works its way through a bank of clouds, suddenly filling the room with light, to say nothing of my heart.

He seems in no hurry, although I’m sure there’s a mate and nest nearby who require his care. For a few crystal moments my morning friend is content to sit there and call to me.

Watching him, I’m not so sure I am of greater worth than the birds, at least not this one, who awakens unexpected gratitude that I should be here, savoring the moment, a gift from the One who, through eons of time, fashions red-breasted finches, morning sun and this heart of mine, which may yet learn to rest in the grace of given moments.

Seek God’s kingdom, Jesus says, just after he directed his followers’ attention to the flowers and birds, hoping they would learn of God and life and themselves.

Perhaps this starts by simply paying attention, listening for Love’s song that it may awaken gratitude for life and light, for finch calls and the color red, and for the Love who sings outside my window.

David L. Miller

 

 

The Face behind

But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.
Do not fear, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you; I will say to the north, ‘Give them up,’ and to the south, ‘Do not withhold; bring my sons from far away and my daughters from the end of the earth. (Isaiah 43:1, 5-6)

There is a face behind the words, a Presence known only when the words fall away and you feel the warmth and light, the affection and desire of their Source.

Listen: Do not fear. You are mine. I call you by name. I speak to the four winds into which my beloved are scattered, and I order them to bring you home ... to me. For you are mine, and I long for your nearness.

That is what you say to me, to us, Living One, and our hearts cling to each gracious phrase hoping they will dissolve every last doubt and fear from our being. But this is not yet the gift you long to give.

Let go of the words; release your anxious grip on what they offer, and one begins to notice the Infinite Source behind the words, a Face we cannot see but know, alight with a great and impossible Love embracing everything we are.

The words on which we meditate matter: “You are mine. I call you by name.” They are real and true. We turn them over in our hearts and minds, grappling with all they might mean for us.

But their truest purpose is to carry us to the moment when we let the words fall away and commune with the Face who is Love ... and nothing else. No words needed.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 

Holy Thursday, Holy Desire

Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him. (John 13:3-5)

One ... more ... chance. What would you do if had one last chance to speak what is on your heart, to share your soul with someone you dearly love, husband, wife, children,  your mother or father, a friend whom you love like your own second self.

What do you want to give them? What do you ache for them to know? What do you yearn for them to carry with them as they carry on without you?

Think, what would you do? And listen ... to your heart. For your own confused, conflicted, complicated, heart will reveal to you the heart of Jesus. The yearning within you echoes God’s passionate desire to bathe you in the endless sea of Love Unlimited. And isn’t this what we want to give to those whom we love more than our words can say?

This desire burns in the heart of Jesus, striking home each year, as we watch Jesus washing his disciples’ feet. Watching him we feel—I feel—his desire, a human yet oh-so-holy longing, Love’s longing to be given away to his beloved.

Jesus has this moment to love them one more time, to teach them one more time, to show them the heart that is in him that they might know the heart of God.

He holds nothing back. Jesus takes a towel, wraps it around himself, pours water in a bowel and kneels at his disciple’s feet. He places each heel in his hand and pours water over it. He wraps each foot in a towel to dry them. He looks down at each foot, absorbed in the moment, one by one, flesh on flesh, washing away the dust of living that clings to body and soul.

Every single year, this scene awakens the image of a painting in my mind. Mary Cassatt, an American painter, working in France, painted intimate, domestic scenes from rural life, often mothers and children. One painting, The Bath, depicts a mother in a long, striped dress. A little girl, perhaps three, sits on her lap. Her feet dangle in a basin on the floor as her mother washes her feet. They don’t look at each other. They look down, on the mother’s hand caressing the girl’s right foot. You don’t see their eyes, but anyone with eyes to see feels the ocean of exquisite tenderness that surrounds them.

This ... is what we are invited to feel and know as the deepest truth of our existence. For as Jesus washes feet, we see into the incomprehensible depth of the Love who was, and who is and who always will be, the Love who is always for us ... for the whole confused, confounded, conflicted world, for shattered people in places like Ukraine, for the conniving dictator who seeks their lives and for everyone in-between, whether they choose to welcome it or not. After all, Jesus washed Judas’ feet, too.

He loves them, all of them, all of us, the whole mess, and he loves them to the end, giving himself even to those betray, deny and run away in his hour of greatest need. For he knows the time has come to return to the Loving Mystery from whom he came. The time has come for him to reveal the heart of that Mystery to all humanity.

So he washes them, and as we imagine his hands touching our dirty feet and troubled hearts, his love washes over us, rinsing away our regrets that our lives have never been as good as our intentions. 

He washes away the crushing weight of sin and guilt that we may take a deep breath of the sweet air of freedom.

He washes away our failures and the fears, lifting our hearts out of the doldrums into joy and expectation.

He washes away our denial and justifications of hurts we have caused that we may discover the startling truth that we are we are forgiven and beloved after all, everlastingly loved by an Everlasting Love.

He bathes us in the love that transforms bitter tears into the sweetness of consolation, knowing God’s love is greater than every death that ever was or will be.

He washes away our doubtful fear that we are alone, forgotten or forsaken, for we are carried in the current of an all-possessing Love.

This the love that moved Jesus to kneel at the feet of his disciples, the love which accepts the bitterness of the cross to reveal the Love who embraces even those who try to kill it.

Just so, we are blessed, for the Love who was and is and always will be comes to us in bread and wine, word and blessing. The Love Christ is comes in the flesh of those who greet us in peace and in every moment love awakens our hearts.

We are blessed every moment we welcome and allow this Love wash over us, for it is then that we know the heart of Jesus within our own hearts.

We are blessed. For knowing him we can give our hearts away in love, as our Lord Jesus gives himself to us. 

David L. Miller

 

Hearing voices

Then the temple police went back to the chief priests and Pharisees, who asked them, ‘Why did you not arrest him (Jesus)?’ The police answered, ‘Never has anyone spoken like this!’ (John 7:45-46)

Hearing voices

Call it a coincidence, but maybe there is no such thing. Maybe people, places events and memories co-incide because the Soul of the Universe is trying to tell you something you need to hear.

For no obvious reason, three voices from long past woke from sleep and spoke within me on successive days. The first is Evie. She phoned Craig, my internship supervisor, one Monday morning and offered to take us to lunch, but first we were instructed to meet her at her favorite nursery.

Under a gray Seattle sky, she led us among tables crammed with plants and flowers spilling over each other, raving about the colors and textures that delighted her senses, hoping we might catch or be caught by the joy that possessed her.

“There’s so much beauty in the world,” she gushed. “You got to stop and see it,” obviously convinced we were spending too much time wallowing in the darkness of our negativity. She was right.

Then, there’s Art who told the same groaner about my Datsun every time I visited him. He either repeatedly forgot he’d already told the joke, or he was so tickled by his cleverness that he had to revisit the painful punch line again.

Finally, there is Albert, dying of cancer, sitting in a worn lawn chair in the yard of his Nebraska home, watching his neighbors harvest the wheat he’d sown the previous fall, combines cutting wide swaths across a field he’d worked most of his life. He had to see it one last time—the beauty of the earth, the graciousness of its bounty and the kindness of his friends gathering it in before he was gathered in.

Disease stripped 50 or 60 pounds from his ample frame before it finally took him. Having lost his padding, he joked that the church should buy cushions for the pews with his memorial money because they were “so damn hard.” Which is exactly what his family did.

Three long ago voices, living deep within, speaking their truth, each moved tears of loving recognition and gratitude for having known them. And what do they say? At least this:

Seek beauty; it is the light of God. It will save you from your darkness.

Laugh at bad jokes told by those who want nothing more than for you to laugh with them. They are God’s angels telling you to lighten up.

Love the earth with its rhythms of winter and spring, seedtime and harvest—and love those who love it to the very end of their days. Gratitude will ignite freedom and joy within you, and you will become a flame of the Love who is stronger than every death you will ever die.

When the powers of the day sent the police to arrest Jesus his words arrested them. They couldn’t fulfill their assignment. “No one has ever spoken like this,” they were reported to have said. What they heard in him was the Love, the Presence who filled his being, not to mention the being of old voices who speak at unpredictable moments of Love’s living nearness.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 

 

Three-in-one love

Then he came again to Cana in Galilee where he had changed the water into wine. Now there was a royal official whose son lay ill in Capernaum. When he heard that Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee, he went and begged him to come down and heal his son, for he was at the point of death. Then Jesus said to him, ‘Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe.’ The official said to him, ‘Sir, come down before my little boy dies.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go; your son will live.’ The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him and started on his way. (John 4:46-50)

I’d never seen them before. Bald and 60, I suppose, fit and strong, his right hand firmly on shoulder of the young man a quarter step ahead of him, they walked as one bound together by the dirty-white service dog between them. Father and son, I thought, but thoughts were the least of it as they approached the priest at the head of the aisle.

The young man received the host and turned to the side, exposing a fleshy face, scraggly whiskers and a moustache. He made the sign of the cross, making it clear that there was no distance between him and all the rest of us in that room, whatever his disability might be.

We were all there needy as hell itself and all receiving the mercy heaven alone can give.

Days go by, and still I see his face, his father, the service dog, three joined as one ... and with my heart, too. The father, I’m sure, wanting the same thing for his son that we all want for our children and grandchildren, the same thing the father in this story wanted Jesus to give his son, healing, wholeness, joy, blessing.

The father’s ancient plea in this story oozed from the man in the church aisle as he guided his beloved to receive the bread of life, the Love who heals broken hearts and fans hope’s holy flame.

We could ask why the resurrected Lord Jesus has not healed the young man at Sunday Eucharist (or millions of others). Or we could look at the three-in-one love who walked up the aisle and realize great healing had already occurred and will continue, until final healing comes in the fullness of that same Love.

Jesus is right, of course. It’s easier to believe when signs and wonders walk up the aisle ... right beside you. All in all, I’ll take as many of them as I can get. Just give me eyes to see.

David L. Miller

With Mary

 In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, ‘Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.’ (Luke 1:26-28)

This is likely the second most painted scene in all of biblical story. It has excited and strained the imaginations of artists fine and crude through the centuries.

What did Mary see? A gaseous form? A person? A light? A winged creature? Was she sitting? Standing? Reading? Drawing water? What was her expression? Did she lean close or recoil from the mystery of what was happening to and in her? Did she bow? Were her eyes cast down or did she look into the heart of mystery? Did she seem to hear a voice from without or an awareness within?

A thousand questions challenge the artist and us, as we, centuries beyond, seek to see and feel the mystery of the moment and what, if any, meaning and grace it holds for us.

One of my favorite paintings of the scene has Mary and the Angel Gabriel standing a few feet apart, humbly bowing before each other, their eyes cast down knowing the one before them is so much greater than they, aware, too, that their lives have been swept up in the great mystery and beauty of a Love that far transcends them.

Another favorite shows Mary as an adolescent peasant girl in Middle Eastern garb, sitting among rumpled blankets at the head of her cot. Hands folded in her lap, head titled to one side, she gazes, a guarded glance into the vertical shaft of light standing at the foot of her bed, little knowing but wondering who or what this is.

I am drawn to these images, painted several centuries apart, for more and deeper reasons than I can say. That’s would good art does.

But I know this: Both paintings awaken love in my heart for Mary, whose life was as much a mystery to her as mine is to me. For I find that my life, as hers, is swept up in the mystery of Love’s love affair with this crazy, broken, glorious, confounding, bittersweet world in which we find ourselves, despite the fact that we had nothing to do with putting ourselves here.

With Mary, we look into the mystery of the light that shines into our lives, little knowing what it all means and what it wants from us, except, of course, to feel its rays on our confused faces and to know, like Mary, that we are favored, chosen and loved beyond our capacity to understand.

And if we are a tenth so gracious as she, we try as best we can to give birth to the Life who longs to live in us.

David L. Miller

 

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