Unfolding Light

For weeks these woods took off their leaves
is if it were too hot,
and now the land’s near naked,
like people lying on the beach,
with a bathing suit of snow,
revealing every dip and curve,
a string bikini tracing every branch and stone,
highlighting every breast and thigh
of hillside, every hip and rib exposed.
They rest under a pall of light,
their shoulders, legs, and bellies honestly laid bare.
Among the folded beach umbrellas of trees
the sun leans down and touches them,
these forms that lie as if asleep, that drift
out of time. The sunbathers think of nothing else,
not work or children or taxes,
or thawing spring, or that eventual day
when, finally, summoned by the sun,
they will, like all of us,
run down to the sea.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light www.unfoldinglight.net
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Jesus goes up a mountain
with his bros. Suddenly
Malcom and Martin join him,
talking about liberation,
where it goes for the freed,
how it ends for liberators.
The end isn’t till after
the end… but he’s already there—
even as clouds gather—
shining with light,
light of the world,
eternal dawn,
the sun of God.
Peter says, “Let me try
to get a handle on this.”
God says, “You don’t get
to do the talking. Listen.”
They look— it’s just Jesus,
plain old. Still, there’s
no stopping somebody
who’s been to the mountain top.

But Jesus says, “Don’t even
think you get this
till after you’ve suffered.”

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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Beloved,
salt of earth,
if there is anything of you
not right
it is not not a lack,
no shortcoming.
You need nothing new,
you need not be better, greater.
You have dressed up
your saltiness,
covered
your authentic soul,
needlessly burdened it,
because someone convinced you
it’s not right.
But it is right.
It is still there.
You needn’t improve.
Only return.
Reduce yourself
to the divine salt
of who you are.
Trust it.
It’s how I bless the earth.

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

My child,
I know you are wondering
how this will turn out.
I don’t know. Believe it or not,
I don’t control the future.
You have choices,
other people have choices,
that I will not overrule.
Bodies and germs and weather
and a host of hidden things
all will do what they do.
The future is wide open.
But I will be with you through it all,
and I will be holding every little part of this
with love and grace,
which changes things.
Like gravity, my love doesn’t interfere,
but affects everything.
Despite all your uncertainty
this is certain: I will hold you,
and be with you, and in you,
and in all you encounter.
My grace will endure.
And in the end, you will be whole,
and blessed,
and at home in me.
Be at peace,
and come with me
into the future.

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

             Is not this the fast that I choose:
                     to loose the bonds of injustice,
              to undo the straps of the yoke,
                    to let the oppressed go free,
                    and to break every yoke?
                                             —Isaiah 58.6

God doesn’t care how you worship.
God doesn’t care what you believe.
God cares how you treat people.

Spend your energy caring for the destitute,
advocating for the oppressed,
accompanying the persecuted.

That will be good worship. Then you will know
what to believe, as clearly as the trees know
to reach for the sun.

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

You don’t feel like it,
waterlogged hand reaching for the alarm,
zombie face in the mirror.
It’s not a thought that comes naturally,
driving to work, traffic the usual,
the day looking at you like a boss.
But what woke you this morning,
alarm or no, was a light rising,
a candle lit in you. What moves you
is not caffeine or deadlines,
but divine radiance.
Lark-song. Star-fire. Wind-breath.
Light without which you would not be you.
Your Maker formed you of love and grace,
a glowing plasma of glory and beauty
worked into your very being.
You don’t have to achieve it. Nor strut.
Mere gratitude will suffice, and wonder.
The challenge—no, the invitation
is to see it in everyone.
The work of faith is to remember,
there, standing in line,
and to trust, and let it shine.
The miracle is that sometimes
in that light people see their own,
and become a flame of the glory of God.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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We want to know the future so bad
we’ll even let a groundhog tell us.

The great irony, of course,
is that the groundhog doesn’t know.
In this part of the country,
under fourteen inches of snow,
he isn’t even up yet.
Today all he knows is sleep is good for now.

Spring is another side of the planet, slowly
walking toward us, unmoved by groundhogs.
The future is a monarch butterfly in Mexico
who will soon die, but whose grandchildren
will arrive here this summer, though now
it is not thinking of that, but feasting
on drops of nectar and water, each
a little globe, sparkled by the warm Mexican sun.

The snowflake does not dream of the sea. It lies still,
as long as its six-sided wonder will hold.
The oak and the birch know nothing of the future
but what they hold curled in their tiny hands.
The brook, under its sleep of ice,
is both spring and mouth, earth and ocean.
The goldfinch, the downy woodpecker,
the chickadee, even in the snow, eat enough
for one day at a time, given this day their daily bread.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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             God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom,
             and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.
                                        —1 Corinthians 1.25

Those who seek to dominate,
who vaunt self-interest,
who exercise power and strength,
think us weak and foolish
to practice the way of the cross.
They think we live in a blank universe
we can shape by force,
and we’re missing our chance.
But the universe is not neutral.
It hums, it vibrates, it throbs
with the love of God, with grace and mercy.
In humility and compassion,
we empty ourselves of all self-interest
in love for the whole.
Even in our fiercest resistance to evil
we do not project force,
but make allowance for grace,
the negative charge of love,
toward which all energy flows.
Through the weakness of God
we join in the mending of the world.

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

You are that tiny dark speck upon the shore.
The vast sky of ocean beneath, sea of clouds above.
You may feel anonymous, as wanderers often do,
standing beside the waves that speak
in a language all their own.
But the unknowing is only yours.
The sea cucumber, the narwhal,
the mantis shrimp angling across the sea floor,
the ocean knows them, knows
the humpback and its song, the skate’s grace, all
the crab knows of justice and the octopus of love.
The sea’s tentacles reach up every river,
drawing food into itself. It sees
the riverbanks, even the mountaintops.
It has been there. You can see for yourself.
The tree knows all its bugs and birds, its vast web
of roots and mycelia and all its neighbors, it knows.
And the earth you stand on, the stalks you bend,
they know you’re there.
Even every galaxy knows what it contains.

Dear tiny speck in the milky way of the sandy shore:
unseeing as you are, you are seen.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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Blessed are you who are vulnerable or undocumented,
        for you belong to God.

Blessed are you who are pepper-sprayed,
        for your eyes see most clearly.

Blessed are you who respond to brutality with kindness,
        for kindness alone will change the world.

Blessed are you who are neighborly amid terror,
        for you are at home with God.

Blessed are you who protest injustice,
        for this is God’s voice.

Blessed are you who shoot with cameras instead of guns,
        for so does God.

Blessed are you who are harassed and arrested,
        for you are most at peace, and most free.

Blessed are you who are shot or maimed,
        for so they treated the martyrs before you.
Blessed are you who are despised and deported,
        for so God’s beloved are always treated,
        yet you never leave God’s loving home.

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