Unfolding Light

             “As a youngster you would put yourself together
             and go where you wanted.
             But as you mature you reach out.
             You let others work with you.
             You allow yourself to be led
             to places you wouldn’t have chosen.”
                                      —John 21.18 (my version)

It’s how you grow in faith.
It’s how you mature as a person.
It’s how you deal with getting old.

You get over thinking your life is about you.
You open yourself to the pull
of your belonging to a greater body.

You tend to relationships.
You let others be your center, your purpose.
Your goal is not having, but conveying.

You give up trying to be in control.
You allow yourself to be led.
You entrust yourself to grace.

You are willing to find yourself
in new places—scary, even—with courage.
Because you are guided. Accompanied. Held.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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             “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”
                         —Acts 9.4

Some call what happened to Saul
on the way to Damascus his conversion.
Something in him got changed,
even his religious outlook.
But really it was a call:
an awakening to a new purpose,
guided and empowered by the Spirit of love,
rooted in a sudden awareness
of God present in those who are persecuted,
awareness of the suffering of others,
and his own part in that.

We don’t need some dramatic experience
with light and voices (and no horse, please:
that’s in Caravaggio, not in Scripture).
Listen for the cries of the world,
and surrender yourself to its healing.
Listen for the beckoning of the Beloved,
and look inward.

Breath prayer:
                          Listen    …    look

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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              Jesus came and took the bread
             and gave it to them
             and did the same with the fish.
                                      —John 21.13

Jesus had a distinctive way of sharing bread:
taking, blessing, breaking, giving.

He did it at the Last Supper,
but it wasn’t the last.

He’d done it at the Everlasting Lunch,
feeding 5000.

And now he does it at the First Breakfast,
an Easter breaking of the fast of the cross.

Resurrection is escape from every confine,
even of time and space.

In every meal, every morsel,
Jesus is so present he’s edible.

The Beloved is here, now,
though we seldom dare ask, “Who are you?”

You don’t need to ask
if you taste.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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This vernal pool is all that still remains
of what was once a bank of snow piled deep,
but has been settled now by warmth and rains,
a season laid down to its final sleep.
Its only ornaments are tiny frogs
that soon will leave, and leaves along its floor.
It’s nothing grand among the forest bogs;
it’s not a pond: a puddle, and no more.
It won’t amount to much, as people think;
it won’t join in the river to the sea,
but sink among the roots where birches drink:
a humble life without a legacy—
and yet it won’t be gone, though now unseen:
no, look above, into the burgeoning green.

___________________
Weather Report

Vanishing,
as today’s ice becomes
a brook, which
becomes the sea,
which returns as snow,
clearing overnight.
Expect all in higher elevations
to fall, but growth to continue
well into the next eon.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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             Just after daybreak, Jesus stood on the beach,
             but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus.
             Jesus said to them, “Children, you have no fish, have you?”
                        —John 21. 4-5

After the bewildering overload
of horror and miracle,
the cross, the risen Jesus,

what could we do but return
to something safe—the sane,
the familiar, the predictable?

We went fishing. Something
we knew, what we were good at,
wise elders of the trade.

The reassuring rhythm of the boat,
the conversation of wood knocking on wood,
the friendly murmuring of the water,

the patient interval
as we circle the boat around the net,
then the satisfying pull—

but we could tell right away,
the disappointing ease
of hauling in empty nets.

Nothing. All night, through
the darkness of our certainty,
our confident expertise—nothing.

Near dawn a stranger called
from the shore, “Hey kids,
you got nothing, huh?”

Kids. Like we didn’t know
what we were doing.
Like we were beginners.

He told us where there were fish,
and he was right, and we were
caught up in a new net again,

still learning, at the feet of one
who said to enter the world of God
as children, that masters of resurrection

are always beginning again.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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             “We must obey God rather than any human authority.
             The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus…
             and we are witnesses to these things.”
                                      —from Acts 5.29-32

Who commands your heart?
Despite what pledges you may make,
whose voice do you obey?

The demon fear that haunts
your inward house but can’t create?
The shyster shame that sells you chains
for the price of what others think?
The Emperor, who outlaws awe and mercy,
who threatens fear and shame,
who promises, if you but obey,
a kingdom he doesn’t have?

They loom like shadows
but they aren’t real, they’re only shadows,
The Risen One, this love that burns in you,
this life that has been given you, is more present,
more powerful, more real, than they.

Obey the voice that calls you into life,
bear witness to this grace,
and let the others go.
Whatever pain they cause you
will be completely overcome
by the One who gives you, even out of death,
new life that can’t be harmed.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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We want to remember the Holocaust
like going to a horror movie,
watching evil through a telescope,

but really it’s a mirror,
an x-ray of what we’re capable of—
all of us, not just “them.”

We could not easily be the torturer
but we readily let it happen.
That’s us.

The train to Treblinka still runs
through Gaza, only now we take
the killing to them, the bombed

out villages, the mothers weeping,
the child picking through a pile of bricks.
We sigh, and scroll on. The trains run.

Bodies crammed on shelves like books
horrify us at Auschwitz, or a slave ship,
but not too much an El Salvadoran prison.

Well, it horrifies us, yes, but only
through our telescope. We don’t see it
in the mirror. Our own capacity.

Somebody else does that.
Not us. It’s not our mirror.
We’re just the ones who let it happen.

The Holocaust isn’t history. It’s who we are.
We can’t oppose evil without claiming our own.
Love your enemy as yourself.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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             “Unless I see the mark
             of the nails in his hands,
             and put my hand in his side…”
                         —John 20.25

Thomas, you are not doubting,
you are reaching

deep into Jesus’ pain,
pain you have caused,

into your own pain, your loss,
the wound of your own betrayals,

feeling the marks of the nails
in your own trembling hands.

Not till you’ve felt what you’ve done
can you know it forgiven.

A laying on of hands
for the wounded—both of you.

Reach, Thomas, stretch out your hand,
and feel the scars of your Beloved,

and of yourself, reach out, reach
deeper, lay your hand upon this broken world,

still wounded, yes, yet raised from death,
alive, forgiving, and made whole.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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You know of forests rising
and sinking into themselves.
You know of breaking yourself open
and letting the secret miracle
flow from within.
Your creatures pass through
the valley of shadows,
caterpillars that entomb themselves,
decay, and turn to mush
before emerging, changed,
rain and rivers that become seas,
seeds and tadpoles that become
something other that what they were.
The tree that surrenders its fruit
so that there may be trees.
You know of life falling like leaves
into death, to become life.
On your back you carry us
wrapped in streams and currents
of self-giving that breathe in and out.
You hold us with a gravity
that is something like love.
You know our demands, our cruelty,
the marks of the nails in your hands,
and yet you forgive, and give,
and give, that we may live.
O Earth, Word of God made flesh,
teach us of resurrection.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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That broken morning it was clear
all that talk about mercy went nowhere,
and God had lost out to the power of evil.
Crushed by how badly love had failed,
afraid for whatever came next, we went to the grave
to anoint him with oils and ourselves with tears.
But he wasn’t there.
                                      He wasn’t there.
Instead, an angel, who cocked her head at us.
“Why y’all weeping? Failure? Fear?
Hm. No such thing,” she said,
solemnly swinging incense around us
and our pitiful little handful of love,
as if over the holiest thing.
“Some things just don’t die.”
With the smile of a comforting mother
whose kid thinks she’s hurt worse than she is,
she said, “Honey child, you have no idea,”
and walked off, all casual, grinning, swinging incense
and swinging her hips like she knew something,
singing a little tune.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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