Unfolding Light

      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 131.2

Holy One,
like a mother with her newborn infant,
you do not demand anything of me,
but purely love me, for my own sake.

I am born of you; I am like you,
made of your loving kindness.
Your unseen, immutable truth
is alive in me.

No matter what happens to me
I am in your arms.
No matter what I do
you are in me.

My soul is at peace.
I can become your love in the world.
I rest in your arms.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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          He was lifted up,
          and a cloud took him out of their sight.
                       —Acts 1.9

Now, standing on this godforsaken hillside
comes the real test:
to trust the God who absconds,
whose icon is empty air
with a light breeze.
The feeling that there once was more—
wasn’t there?—but not now;
once a simple certainty
that there was someone there,
but now that gray hollow in your guts,
the grief over your childhood faith,
the empty chair, the faint vale
in the other side of the bed.
And given that, to trust.

The Beloved has departed
the world of the senses
to be even more present,
a mystery for us, about us,
without us.
Not someone who is loving,
but love itself, loving.

Now we learn to be at home
in this peripheral God
who, like sleep, or the present moment,
in being perceived, disappears.

Now we learn a new faith,
to trust without feeling,
to breathe air we can’t see.

Above our wondering heads
birds migrate along their invisible paths.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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The sky slowly opens its great gentle eye,
leans over the earth to kiss it.

They lie close, face to face,
color like passion between them.

Earth and sky are inside each other,
full of one another’s light.

I sit in morning stillness, bathed.
Inside me you rise, you grow like a child.

All day long now I will not see things,
but only light unfolding.

My face, transfigured, will glow from within;
I will remember and smile.

Each moment this alone will be my eye:
opening to your great, gentle beauty.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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          He was lifted up,
          and a cloud took him out of their sight.
                                 —Acts 1.9

As we walk out of the city
(why are we leaving?)
the day feels fresh and open,
green blades springing up
(the sower knows not how),
songs of birds we hear but can’t see.
Thomas stops to blow
dandelion seeds into the breeze.
To our questions, the rabbi frames
his answers in more silence than usual.
The wind wraps its soft baby arms
around our necks, whispering.
We walk on grass;
behind us it springs back up.

Then words not of departure
but of sending. Dispersal.
Then he isn’t there.

Stunned, silent emptiness.
(The wondergrief. The traumajoy.
The un-knowing.)
Our cherished certainties
float away on the wind.
A space between us so real,
it seems full of something.

No one speaks.
On the way back
it does not surprise me
when Thomas, without asking,
reaches out,
takes my hand.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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Emerging from woods, between the oaks
and the reeds, I stop. A great blue heron
stalks her lunch at the edge of the pond.
I want with a hunger too like hers,
to come close, an intimate observer,
admitted to gaze upon her mystery,
her godly form, her elegant movements,
to absorb her aura of far lands and vast heavens,
to enter her peace, and that other world in her eyes.
That world closes up inside this one.
I know she sees me and is already choosing
to trust or to fly. I want to be trusted.
I know she will fly.
I step back into the woods, and circle around.
Sometimes faith means even letting go of faith.
On the far side of the pond I look back.
She gleams white and grey in the morning light.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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Doctor, something’s wrong with me.
I have a pain here, I think it’s my heart,
does it look sore to you,
this hope I have for the future?
My rib cage, people in cages, it hurts.
My eyes ache, seeing masked men
whisking children away. Do I need drops?
Doc, it hurts when I lie. Is that normal?
I’ve eaten fine, but I’m still hungry,
this nagging hunger, this little
child in Gaza. Can I take something for that?
There’s a ringing in my ears, a voice
at a microphone making up hateful slurs.
I think I have an infection, something
in my blood, hate and fear and dread.
Something like cement, or iron bars in my chest,
parts of me disappeared to a foreign country.
I mean, nobody’s died, so why this grief?
I ache from being tackled and thrown, well,
not me but the woman in the video, but I feel it.
This slate-heavy emptiness trembling in my gut—
what is that? There’s a fever in my planet.
Doc, I can’t breathe, and I’m dizzy, like vertigo,
standing on the edge of a cliff, falling
into some darkness generations long.
Is there a cure?

             Yes, with you,
             and within you all.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light www.unfoldinglight.net
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          I am in my Abba,
          and you in me, and I in you.
                       —John 14. 20

God is infinite;
there is nothing outside of God.
The entire universe is in God.
We are inside God.
Christ, the embodiment of God’s love,
is everywhere, suffuses everything,
and we exist within that love,
members of the body of God’s grace.
That embodied love lives in us,
breathes in us, loves in us.
Everything you do is an act of God
if you let it.

Breath prayer:
                         You in me . . . I in you

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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A child, I stood by a still lake
at night and gazed as the water
mirrored the sky, the stars spread
over the night and down into the lake,
and, I imagined, into me,
and like the lake my receiving their light
stretched up into the night and
I extended to the end of the universe
and for a moment I was infinite.
As I grew up I learned that the stars I saw
may have died eons ago,
having gone on happily without me,
and how foolish I was.
Now that I am old I see
I’ve never known anything truer.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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          If you love me,
          you will keep my commandments.
                       —John 14.15

God of love,
I want to keep your commandments,
not to be right, or to be rewarded,
but only because I love you,
as I honor marriage vows
not because I must
but because I love my spouse.
Help me keep your commandments
by forgetting your commandments
and remembering your love.
Let my love flourish
and my obedience blossom from it.
And when my love falters,
grant me the gift of obedience,
that it might reawaken my love.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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Let me be like this tree,
open faced to the gallery of sky,
to the many-fingered wind,
to the creatures who take advantage of it.
Its roots deepen their belonging in the dark mystery,
persevering, insistent without insisting.

Let me be like this river,
receiving and letting go,
flowing with all it’s given,
happily generous.

Let me be like this rock,
mountain-born, glacier-borne,
that one day will be sea sand,
but now stands, solid,
a thing of simple beauty.
Let my joy and my calling be that.

Let me be like this day,
open and ready
for what is next.

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

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