Unfolding Light

       Then their eyes were opened,
       and they recognized him,
       and he vanished from their sight. — Luke 24.31

Searching among the ruins of your failures,
the gravestones marking your losses,
preserving your sins,
you will not find your Beloved.
Among the sad stories carved in stone
of what you should have been,
you will not find the Holy One.
Trying to understand, you won’t be able to grasp.
Even in your brightest moments,
as with a falling star,
the light cannot be held.
Your Redeemer is not entombed in the past.
but here, in this beating moment.
And then not.
Not waiting for you to notice,
the One Who Is With You
is no longer in that moment just past,
but has gone into the next.

How we have to keep awakening
and awakening.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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          You have delivered my soul from death,
                   my eyes from tears,
                   my feet from stumbling.
                       —Psalm 116. 8

There were actually three disciples
on the way to Emmaus, but one stopped off
at a nearby village to visit her sister
so she never met the risen Jesus.
Had to hear about it afterwards.

At a church picnic once I watched
as a softball, a long foul ball,
traced its fateful arc right toward
the head of a three-year old who never saw
her dad reach out and casually catch it.

Our granddaughter, two months old,
is cared for through all kinds of weather
and infections and sleepless nights,
and will likely never hear of it.

I have been saved so many times,
delivered from death or at least stumbling,
and of most of them I am unaware.
Even without full knowledge I am learning
gratitude and wonder.

Some days my soul is like a three-year old
at a picnic being greeted with inexplicable joy
as if the subject of an amazing story.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:

      We had hoped that he was the one
      to redeem Israel.
                          — Luke 24.21

But that wasn’t hope. It was wishing.
It was too small, too maybe-maybe-not.

Married to peace but flirting with despair,
fooling around with wait and see.

Listen. God’s quiet presence is absolute.
Your sins can’t budge it. Death can’t touch it.

Beware the illusion that the Beloved has gone,
that you are alone, or doomed.

Even in tragedy, the collapse of everything,
the Beloved walks with you, toward grace.

Don’t be afraid to go into your sadness,
to walk that long dusty road of your shame.

Jesus took your despair with him to the grave,
the finality of disaster, the last possible dawn.

Now the stone has been rolled from the tomb.
Longing has been raised as true hope,

trust in the One who can’t be kept away from you.
Behold: both of you, eternally, are alive.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:

O Risen and Always Rising One,
when we walk in grief and despair
you walk with us.

When we question our faith,
you open our eyes to know more deeply.

When we seek nourishment and rest and family
you join us.

When we are bewildered,
when we don’t know what to do with our lives,
you take them, bless them, break them, and give them
to us, and to the world, in love.

Have not our hearts burned within us
as you have accompanied us all along?

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:

Resurrection is not so much a change
as a revealing, an undressing,
the clothes of this world stripped away
from the pure light that was always there,
and is there now, in you, walking around
with the Big Bang hidden inside you.

Trusting now what you’ll only see in the end,
you love wildly, forgive boldly,
stand courageously with the endangered,
and risk all for the sake of healing,
knowing even great suffering
is only a passing fashion.
Beneath, you are pure glory.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:

           “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands,
           and put my finger in the mark of the nails
           and my hand in his side,
           I will not believe.”
                                   —John 20.25

It was not enough for Thomas to be told.
He needed to experience resurrection embodied.
So it is for those around us now.
For many it’s a story that’s not true.
How then might it be true in our lives?
What might it be about our lives
that seeing them would make people believe
that Christ has indeed been raised?
Maybe to trust love. To care fearlessly.
To risk for the sake of justice and mercy.
To trust God’s presence in suffering and bewilderment.
Nothing heroic, just trusting
in God’s presence and power
in us and around and beneath and among us.
Maybe if some poor Thomas can sense
how the wounds of love have given us life,
how through our failures and powerlessness
mercy and justice are still alive in us,
how they themselves are embraced and forgiven,
in that moment, as if never before,
Christ would be raised from the dead.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:

          The doors were locked.
           Jesus came and stood among them
                and said, “Peace be with you….
                As God has sent me, so I send you.”
          When he had said this, he breathed on them
                and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
                       —John 20.19-22

What you have lost is replaced
by the weight of sorrow.
It sits in you like a boulder.
The terror of the regime’s violence
has left its claws in you,
the fear you can be taken,
the clarity of what it can cost
to proclaim what he proclaimed.
Of course your doors are locked.
You don’t want to talk about it,
except when it’s all you can talk about.

But suddenly here he is.
God’s astounding “And yet.”
All he is—his love, his tenderness,
his mercy, his very being—unkilled
by the State, by fear, even by death.
His “Peace” is no mere greeting:
it is the healing of your grief,
the forgiveness of your guilt,
the breath of your salvation.

He breathes himself into you,
his deep peace even in the face of evil,
the power of love, the courage and energy
that sends you out into a hurting world
like wind nothing can stop,
to fearlessly embody the resurrection
that so frightens those in power.
You are embraced. You are transformed.
You are inhabited. You are sent.
Now every breath you take
is his.

______________
Weather Report

Windy,
blowing from within,
rising throughout the day,
Expect even those weighed down
to be carried away.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:

Beloved,
I reach out for you.
I want to touch you,
to know your living presence.
I want to feel the flesh of your grace,
that the nails I helped pound have not held you,
that still you love, that you forgive and bless.
I want to touch your wounds,
your willingness to share our suffering,
your brokenness for the evils of the world
because you love us so deeply.
Give me the courage to see you
in the wounded of this world,
to see the wounds I have caused,
the evil I have cooperated with,
the ways I have abandoned you,
and to know your forgiveness.
I want to know
that out of your wounds flows love.

Beloved, every moment,
even when I am forgetting,
I am reaching for you.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:

He has lived long on his knees,
spent time among the lilies and the sparrows,
sowed seeds—many given over
to birds or weeds—
has bled from thorns,
and labored under the sun’s yoke of light.
He’s watched seeds fall, be buried,
and cease to be what they were,
become something glorious—
the blade, the ear, the grain.
He’s laid his hands, dirt-dyed,
on earth’s small wounds
and healed them with growth.
(He wipes his face
and leaves a smudge upon his brow.)
He has worked with struggling trees
and gifted them with the detritus of death
so they bore fruit.
A gentle, generous soul,
it seems he’s laid himself in earth
so many times that everything around him grows.
So deeply one with all of life,
he’s hard to single out,
even in this new dawn’s light,
fresh risen from the dead.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:

Christ is risen!
          This makes no sense. Only joy.

Christ is risen!
         There is no explanation. Only wonder.

Christ is risen!
         Don’t try to understand.
         Only be grateful.

Christ is risen!
         Some say it’s just a story.
         Let it be your story.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording: