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

Nothing days

 So you have pain now; but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you. On that day you will ask nothing of me. (John 16:22-23a)

I long for nothing days, days when I neither want nor need anything. I speak not of food, drink and shelter but of soul satisfaction, the holy contentment of sensibly dwelling in the atmosphere of love as ubiquitous and embracing as air, each breath a sacrament filling my lungs, expanding my heart and moistening my eyes with the joy only love can bring.

There may have been great saints and mystics who enjoyed such days, but most typically they speak of moments that come and fill everything in them before fleeing, leaving the memory of divine sweetness that spoke to them of another world, another time to which we all actually belong.

St. Teresa spoke of moments of union that lasted no more than the length of a single “Our Father … .” Ignatius Loyola often climbed to the roof of the Roman house where he lived his last two decades and looked into the starlit sky, whispering, ‘O Dios.’ Over and over again, ‘O Dios.’

Yes, O God, I would know you full and complete, but I am flesh and blood and mortal and everything my heart knows of you pales in comparison to what my soul wants and needs to arrive and know the wonder of what I was created to know and be. So it was for Ignatius and for me and for every human being still capable of feeling the hunger of their own soul.

We have pain now. The pain of living in a world where the Love God is seldom has its way—and never fully. The good suffer, the unjust prosper, sudden illness, outrageous fate and tragedy hover over our beloved.

Then, too, there is the inescapable pain of incompletion, as we feel the insufficiency of everything attainable. Always, we want more because we are created for the More God is, for Love’s holy completion in our own hearts and the heart of the world.

But we are seen, always, by the One who is Love, and times appear when the senses of our soul are quickened to feel and know the wonder of Love all-surrounding, moments of breathing this holiness into our lungs until it fills every last, lost corner of our being.

Let’s call them ‘nothing moments’ when there is nothing more to want or ask because we have the one thing our soul always needed.

Heaven’s door swings open affording a taste, a vision of the world to which we belong and for which we so often long. Even the most fleeting glance of this vision awakens boundless gratitude for the holy privilege of being a human soul, capable of knowing the great Love who sees us, always.

Grant, O Lord, this grace to us all.

David L. Miller

Into the We

As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. (John 15:9-10)

Dixie and I sometimes look at each other and speak a great truth, ‘We are we.’ We are not merely him and her together but something much more, a ‘We’ that is the love and history that binds us together, two as one, joined in a reality that is greater than the sum of individual parts, a unity in which there is rest and peace, forgiveness and mutual care.

It is to this unity of hearts that Jesus invites us. He beckons us through the ache in our hearts to join in a greater ‘We’ in which each of us basks in the river of love that flows from his heart into all the world. His longing is for us to know that his love is … for me—for each of us, personally—as if we were the only one in the world, the apple of his eye.

“If a [person] does not say in his [or her] heart, in the world there is only myself and God [that person] will not gain peace,’ so said Abba Alonius, one of the desert fathers of the early church.

We come to know peace and learn to love as Jesus loves only as we know ourselves as supremely and everlastingly loved, our identity founded on an eternal and unfailing love that knows the worst and weakness of who we are and delights in us still. For we each are a holy vessel, created to bear the Love who moves the sun and the stars.

The first commandment of Christ is not to love … but to know love, which is to know the One who is Love—and rest there a while. Abide, Jesus says. Let love have its way in your heart. It will awaken the beauty you are, light the lamp of joy in your eyes and fill you with gratitude for the gift of a full and free heart.

Just so, the first task of daily life is not to do but to rest in the place where Love finds you, the place where every last and lost corner of your heart fills with the joy of knowing, feeling and becoming the Love God is.

I don’t know where Love prefers to find and free you. Sitting on the front porch can be a good place. Back porches work, too, or conversation with a friend or your beloved. Music often moves me into Love’s embrace, so does being in nature.

But most basic of all is in sitting in silence and saying the words of the One who is Love’s own face. ‘Abide in my love,’ he says. Yes, abide, that we may be We.

David L. Miller

 

One great cosmic hug

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. (John 14:27)

The pond beckons today. Few come here even though it is only a few yards from the main trail. It’s not much, a low-lying wildwood pool fed by nothing I can see other than run-off from the surrounding woods. Nor is it big, less than 50 yards long and maybe 25 yards wide, tapering to just a few feet on the south end.

I doubt it is more than three feet deep in the middle, although I am not inclined to wade in and see. Broken boughs tilt at odd angles into the water, disappearing beneath the surface. Gray-bleached by the sun, some fell years ago, a few, I’m sure, from the tornado that scalped these woods two years back.

But the jumble of that tumult does not disturb as I stand at the water’s edge, nor does the turbulence of the daily news or the disorder of my own mind.

A greening ring of marsh grass frames the pond, punctuated by a few odd stones put there by no human hand. The scene is pristine, curated by summer and winter, spring and fall, wind and rain, bitter cold and summer’s blast, by thousands of years of photosynthesis, growth, death, decay and rebirth, through dozens of processes I neither understand or ever will.

Lord only knows the number of animals, insects and life forms find their subsistence here, far beyond the squirrels, racoons, coyotes and a host of bird species that even the most casual eye can capture on average days.

One thing that doesn’t live here is us, homo sapiens. There is no evidence that anyone ever lived in this stretch of woods on the outskirts of suburbia, other than Native Americans hundreds of years ago, who likely hunted these woods and took water from the stream to the east.

They had the good sense to let nature do its thing, as opposed to ‘improving it’ by making it into something it is not, for it already was … and is … something rare and beautiful, wild and free from the touch of human hands, its grace known by those who can stand still for a while.

And there is no one like that out here today, except me. Leaden skies, threatening rain, kept the walkers home. But I am here and home at the water’s edge, mud oozing around my boots as a frightened frog plops in the muddy water to my right while his cousins sing a song of spring from the other side.

Details brought me here, rain be damned, my head a muddle from a stack of small jobs mocking me from my desk, demanding attention, exhausting my patience as I felt the day slipping away until I slipped away to come here to find peace or something like it.

No importunate task demands my attention here. No news of the world intrudes imploring me to worry about things I can do nothing about. The marsh grass is indifferent to my approach, the water asks nothing of me, the dead limbs and greening trees, unchanged by my presence, go on decorating the earth with the mysteries of life and death. And the frogs sing a bass line for the treble of bird song above, pausing only for a moment to make sure I present no threat before calling and croaking and saying whatever it is that frogs say to each other.

Standing here, I am neither above or below it all, but a part of the drama of birth, growth, death, of sound and silence, that goes on here every day, my body throbbing with the same intimate processes that thrive among all that live in this place, quietly doing their work with every beat of my heart.

One, we are; all of us, all that I see and hear, including the earth worms at my feet so apparently delighted by the recent rains. All are part of one creation, one mystery of life, possessing being at the generous pleasure of the One who is Being itself—and whose joy it is to share.

Gifted we are, worms and all, sharing the life of the Life from whom all things flow like rain that falls and the warm rays of spring.

My peace I leave you; my own peace I give you, Jesus promised. Not just any peace, but his peace, which is his loving oneness with the Father, heart-to-heart, joined in a single love, loving everything that is.

Out here, I feel something like that, enfolded in one great cosmic hug.

 David L. Miller

The beauty of the Lord

Though he was in the form of God, … [he] emptied himself, taking the form of a slave. (Philippians 2:6a,7a)

I’ve kept a curled, yellow news clipping on my desk for years. It’s an obituary for Kenneth Ignatius Neff. I never met him and know nothing more about him than what his obit says.

He had been a monk in Iowa but left the monastery to start his own monastic community in Illinois. Moving to Palestine, Texas, he lived as a hermit for 18 years, before pouring himself into volunteer work to protect children, abused women and hospital patients. He also worked in a crisis center and taught prison inmates in a rehab program.

He requested no funeral service, wanting only to be remembered as having ‘lived a simple life of reflection, prayer and service.’

I don’t wonder about his motives. They’re obvious. His heart was totally given, surrendered to the high and holy purpose of loving the world the way Christ Jesus loves the world.

I remember weeping when my eyes first fell upon his contented smile in the photo that accompanied his obit. It was like looking into the face of Jesus and feeling the love that you always wanted … and always wanted to be.

David L. Miller

Wounds of love

Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.’ Thomas answered him, ‘My Lord and my God!’ (John 20:26b-28)

The painting was impossible to miss. I had seen it before, but so have millions. Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Thomas loomed 15 feet across, projected on a screen, on the southeast side of the sanctuary, as I crossed myself and took my seat.

No more needed to be said as far as I was concerned. Virtually the totality of my faith was right there.

Jesus grasped Thomas’ right wrist in his left hand, guiding Thomas’ finger into the hole in his side, pierced by a Roman lance to ensure his death.

Jesus’s eyes are on his side, helping Thomas to touch him, to place his finger between the lips of flesh out of which blood and water flowed as life left him.

His head turned ever-so-slightly to the side, Thomas doesn’t look directly at the wound and certainly not up at Jesus, whose gaze is fixed on Thomas’ right hand, guiding it to his open flesh. No anger creases Jesus’ brow, no reproval purses his lips. His desire in singular. Please. Just touch … and see … the Love that hate cannot kill.

Wounds of love, I thought in the moment. Instantly, my mind traveled thousands of miles away to a moment of watching a mother walk to a feeding station run by an old Irish nun in Baidoa, Somalia. Thousands were dying of starvation and disease at the time, fleeing their homes with little food, dying along the way, burying the children and old ones where they fell, trying to get to a place like this where there was compassion and food—a place where nobody asked whose side you were on because they were on the side of life.

Like so many, this mother denied herself food on the journey, giving what little she had to the children. She was one of the lucky ones. Many more died on the way, pointing their children toward places like this when they could go no further, hoping against hope that their flesh and blood might live to know the grace of laughter once more. I heard their stories … told by their orphaned children.

Stories no different than this are being told across Gaza these days. We see the pictures, too, children cradling younger brothers and sisters while separated from parents, if they are still fortunate enough to have parents.

They bear deep wounds, wounds of love, the wounds of Jesus in present time, blessed incarnations of the Love human brutality cannot kill.

A local reporter interviewed me after that long ago reporting trip to Somalia and Sudan. He stammered and tripped over a question he thought impolitic to ask, wondering if seeing such suffering undermined my faith.

The opposite, I told him. Amid the worst that human beings can do to each other, I had seen Jesus. Yes, in the old nun and many others like her, like, say, those seven blessed souls killed last week while feeding people with World Central Kitchen. They are not only the best of humanity, as Jose Andres, WCK’s founder said. They are the hands of the risen Lord Jesus multiplying loaves and breaking bread.

But more, even more, I had seen the wounds of love in suffering hearts who surrendered life and hope that others might live: Not just survive, but live in the knowledge that there is a very great Love at work in the world, a Love death cannot kill and brutality cannot destroy, a Love who gives everything and holds back nothing, a Love who longs for us to touch and see, trust and know that—in spite of all the ugliness—we live in a world where Love lives and breathes and becomes flesh and blood in the wounded love of our humanity.

Every time I see it, every time I feel it, every time I witness the wounds of Love, I join Thomas, my brother, and together we cry to Jesus, ‘My Lord and my God.’

 David L. Miller

 

 

 

The fellowship of Easter brunch

 Jesus said to them, ‘Come and have breakfast.’ Now none of the disciples dared to ask him, ‘Who are you?’ because they knew it was the Lord. (John 21:12)

My friend, Kevin, sent the 7 a.m. squirrel report from the front porch of his rural home. Apparently, a drippy rain induced them to sleep late today. Here, 160 miles away, golden sun illumines the neighbor’s daffodils, heralding nature’s resurrection, soon to delight us with the renewal for which every heart hopes.

I, however, am still stewing on Kevin’s last note, telling me, with absolutely no rancor, why he and his beloved wife will not be in church on Easter … as they haven’t been regular for years.

It’s a familiar litany. I talk to God frequently, Kevin tells me, in gratitude for the day and to help him do the good that he wills.

But the hypocrisies of clashing egos among the supposedly faithful keep him from the church door, along with the rejection of a gay pastor, loved by some but not all, dividing the congregation, which moves Kevin to think of gay family members and clients he loves and serves.

Then, there is the PTSD (my words, not his) occasioned by hearing songs or words that transport them back to their 16-year-old son’s funeral, killed in a terrible car crash. And I get it. I’ve seen trauma do that before.

All of this moves me to love my friend more than ever because I feel a great and deep heart beating in his chest. But there’s one more thing: Part of me identifies with him because—after serving the church for more than 40 years as a pastor, journalist and spiritual director—I won’t be in church this week either.

It’s not that I have lost my faith. Far from it. I hold the faith of the church, the faith of Jesus the Christ, deep and dear in my heart where Christ lives and breathes in the great love I feel for him and all creation. I cherish and hunger for his divine presence more than ever in my life.

But when I participate in corporate worship, as I have a number of places since retirement, I find little space—and certainly no home (at least, not yet)—for my hunger to feel, know and share the joys and sorrows, the struggles, doubts, elation and mystery of being a vessel of Christ. I long to be among a people where reverence, praise and expression of God’s boundless love for everyone is central, trumping everything else.  

Years ago, one of my spiritual directees said he wanted to be a member of ‘the fellowship of the Sunday brunch.’ He spoke partly in jest, but mostly not.

His suggestion sparks the image of a few friends or fellow travelers gathering around a table to share food and talk about their lives. What gave them life or joy or hope that week? What are they reading or seeing that moved them to see differently or understand something anew? Who moved them to love or joy or anger or sadness? How is what is happening in the world affecting them?

The Spirit blows where it chooses, Jesus said. You hear the sound of it, but where it goes and why, well, that’s a mystery. I have no doubt, however, that the Spirit of Christ’s living love would be more than pleased to warm a few hearts and console wounded souls at the fellowship of the Sunday brunch.

And I know, absolutely know, I have felt the Spirit of the One who is Life and Love at cafe tables and sickbeds, in living rooms, my favorite Irish pub and a host of other places where human hearts cracked opened just enough to share a morsel of what is actually there, the heaven and hell of being human.

It's interesting to me, and telling, I think, that several of Jesus’ resurrection appearances happen over sharing food. Jesus breaks bread and eyes are opened to his presence. Or, he cooks fish on a rocky beach and invites his old friends to breakfast and nobody asks whether it is Jesus whom they are experiencing.

There is no need. They know … because they feel the loving life of the Spirit in the mystery of their own hearts.

All of this awakens a desire to join Kevin on his front porch to watch the squirrels … and talk. I have every reason to expect Easter can happen there … just as well as anywhere else.

David L. Miller

 

 

Simple truth

Jesus answered, ‘For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’ Pilate asked him, ‘What is truth?’ (John 18:37a-38)

My friend, Kevin, tells me he has become the archetypal old man. Every morning, he sits on his porch with a cup of coffee, lights a cigarette and watches the squirrels wake up, while thinking about the past.

I wonder what he sees there. Next time, I’ll ask. This morning, the question rebounds to me, and an answer springs to technicolor life in my mind’s eye, a familiar scene, decades old, telling my heart what I have lost and most want for the stretch of life that lies ahead.

One word: Simplicity. I hunger for the simplicity of heart that was mine when I was nine or 10 or 11, running across the elysian fields of the old fairgrounds near my childhood home.

Heaven was chasing my cocker spaniel across the emerald expanse, dandelions sprouting across the meadow, as Blondie ran, her toenails ripping through the grass, eluding my grasp at every turn.

And I laughed. I laughed at her joy, swept up in the rapture of running free alongside and far behind, unrestricted and unrestrained, feeling the exhilaration of being alive in a wide and open space where no one cared if I laughed or shouted or prayed or sang at the top of my voice, songs from the radio, others from church.

Those fields are the reason I love the stories of Jesus’ early ministry so much. I can see him as he walked through grassy fields with his friends, their palms running across the top of tall grasses, plucking the heads of wild oats and eating them, talking, asking questions, stopping on a hill to gaze at the waters of the Sea of Galilee, as the bluffs of Bashan paled to pink miles across the water in the late afternoon sun.

I see them as people brought their children, and Jesus held them in his arms, loving them, blessing them, as he raised his eyes to the heavens praising the Loving Mystery for the song of birds, the yellow of flowers and the tenderness of open hearts.

But that was then. Now, Holy Week is upon us; darkness settles in. The warm sun of open fields is lost behind thick clouds of threat and gloom. The joy of beginnings flees like a dream at the break of day, leaving only the nightmare. The air bristles with anger and intrigue. Jesus is no longer a free soul on the hills of Galilee. Sadness settles on his soul as furtive eyes surround him, waiting their time. He is but a political problem, a pawn passed from one authority to another, each seeking an expedience to be rid of him.

Night has come, and Jesus stands before his accusers, silent, but for this. ‘I came into the world to testify to the truth,’ he says.  And I ask the same question as Pontius Pilate, ‘What is truth?’

I don’t know whether he spoke with a sneer or with faint hope that Jesus might say a little more, wondering against all odds that there might be an answer to the question.

But Jesus just stands there, silent, for truth allows no words. Truth is what filled me on the fields of my childhood. Truth is what swept my heart to tears and songs and prayers and joy as love for life filled me from a Source that I did not then and never will comprehend.

Truth is the divine smile that delighted in my play and warmed me whole as I ran with my dog. Truth is the Love who filled me with graced awareness that this Love, this Great Mystery, is real and knowable, and that my laughter was the greatest praise I could ever return.

The simple truth is Jesus, the face of the Loving Mystery who forgives his enemies, blesses those who curse him, prays for those who kill him, and still has time to find young boys on the fields of their play. (Girls, too, I’m sure).

It may be that I was closer to God at 10 than any time since. My heart was simple then, and I knew … the truth that matters most.

David L. Miller

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Angels unaware

Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. (Hebrews 13:2)

I recognized the face immediately, older, certainly, and her hair was a different color. But the shape of her smile had endured years of crippling arthritis, transporting me to the high school classrooms we shared more than 50 years ago.

Her name was … is … Diane. I didn’t know her well. We were not friends, just pleasant acquaintances occupying the same spaces for a few short years in our little high school. Most classes were required and elective opportunities were few, so we saw the same people over-and-over from one hour to the next until the bell rang at 3:57 p.m., setting the prisoners free.

So, then, what is this flood of gratitude as she smiles at me from a Facebook obituary, recounting her death at 71 and naming family members who were blessed by the life she lived?

I know almost nothing of that life beyond a few brief moments we shared in the narthex of my childhood church while visiting my mother. The first time, I was surprised to see her there, since she was not part of the church when I was growing up.

Reading the names of her children and grandchildren, teary words of purest gratitude rise unbidden from the center of my soul, praise to God for a life with which I had but fleeting connection, long ago.

But why such praise and spontaneous emotion? Perhaps this: She was an unassuming presence, making no demands and offering no judgments at a time in my life when I felt insecure, uncertain and even more confused by life than I am now. It was enough for us to exchange greetings, comment on the class assignment or whatever rumors were buzzing through the hallways.

There is a certain grace in this, moments when it is enough just to be, free of expectations to be something or someone at a time when you weren’t sure of who you were … or are … or might or want to be.

I certainly wouldn’t name Diane as having much influence on the development of who I continue to become. But maybe I should.

There are far more channels of grace, unnoticed streams of Presence, than the obvious ones we can see and name. Our days are sprinkled with little moments—incidental, nothing-special, entirely forgotten encounters—that direct our paths, change our course and shape our hearts in incalculable ways beyond our awareness.

All of which is to say life is a greater mystery than we imagine, and God, which is to say the presence of Loving Grace, is woven more deeply among the twisted threads of our days than our blinkered eyes can see.

But moments come when the heart is grasped by an intuition, when it knows what the mind cannot teach, and tears offer their silent prayer, moved by Love’s Living Presence that was always there … unnoticed … in places and faces that were more important than you ever knew.

No one needs to tell you to be thankful at such a time. For a beatific presence well beyond you moves you to gratitude for the great mystery of your life and for the greater mystery of the Love who managed to find and bless you … even though you were clueless about it at the time.

But when, finally, your heart sees and knows, love flows as easily as your breath. Just so, Diane, beloved of God, I return the blessing.

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

David L. Miller

 

Nightlight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David L Miller

 

 

 

 A clean and open space

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David L. Miller

 

 

If dreams there be …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David L. Miller

 

 

Only for the sick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So yes, I want you.

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

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

David L. Miller