Month: May 2011

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
         
         
Along Main and Pleasant and Spring,
shoulder to shoulder through town
stand all these red brick buildings.
Brick by brick, a city is made.
Each brick was laid by hand,
with a trowel and a string, and an eye
for straight lines and plumb edges.
All of the walls, the straight ones,
the worn, painted ones,
the old and crumbling, leaning ones
are pages of an old book.
The arched windows,
the palladian windows,
the columns and corbels,
pediments and pilasters set in
at the rousing turn of the last century
by men in overalls and cardigans,
intent on creating a beautiful wall
and a fine city, are not like modern windows.
They say something.

Everything in this world,
every tangle of undergrowth,
every rumpled cloud,
every troubled tribe,
every sorry excuse for a soul
was laid by hand.

         
         
Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

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

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
         
         

May all your difficulties give you wisdom.
         May all your sorrows grant you grace.

When you are lost and on the wrong path,
         may flowers bloom at every step.

When the way is ugly and rough,
         may it lead you to the perfect place.

When you have gone the wrong way,
         may delightful strangers go with you.

When the path to your goal is narrow
         and the way is easy to lose,
may all the places you end up
         be just as interesting.

When there is no road,
         let your feet speak to you:
that God is the going,
         and you stumble from blessing to blessing.

         
         
Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

______________________
Copyright © Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
         
         

In the resurrection—that shedding
of our little crust of death—
Judas is lighthearted,
and Pilate contemplates eternal truths
and writes ecstatic hymns.
They always had it in them—
and finally they are free.

Listen: in this evil ugly world,
bugged as it is by the illusions of depravity,
there is only beauty and holiness.
Among all the mad and mangled people of earth
there are only saints and royalty.

In your ordinary life,
with its handbag of pain
and your few little coins of success,
an entire star burns with pure glory,
a field of wildflowers exults.
This is not good luck, or physics gone wild.
It’s God.

What can you do, you who are made of delight,
but fall defenselessly in love with everybody,
and give yourself away
until you are pure song?
What can you do but
shuck off your burlap clothing,
catch fire
and dance?

         
         
Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

______________________
Copyright © Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.

The spirit of Osama bin Laden is alive and well, among his followers who wish destruction and shout and wave guns and banners at us, and among his enemies, who wish destruction and shout and wave guns and flags at them. When in a fit of humanness we wish ill of terrorists, we become them. When we rejoice in their death, we join them in dividing the world. We project our fear and anger onto others. We think evil thoughts.

Fear is the root of all evil. More fear, even the fear of evil, even fear disguised as anger at evil, will not change things. According to scripture, it is only love that casts out fear.

The trouble with evil thoughts is not that they are bad for us, but that we are so mean to them. Like evil people, we judge them and despise them (that is, we fear them) and try to get rid of them. We think evil of them! But we are not responsible for the thoughts that leap into our minds. Nor do we have to identify with them and feed them. Just let them come and go. We can lovingly respect even our evil thoughts, as members of the heavenly host of our imaginations. In fact, our evil thoughts balance out our pious thoughts and maintain the ecosystem of our psyches. Evil thoughts are the flies and maggots of the mind. They’re disgusting, but they keep it clean.

Rather than being ashamed of our evil thoughts and trying to suppress them (which is a way of feeding them, focusing on them and remaining attached to them) we can accept them, confess them, surrender them to God, let go and move on. It’s not thinking evil, but letting go of evil, that sets us apart from terrorists.

Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

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

“Were not our hearts burning within us
while he was talking to us on the road?”
        —Luke 24.32

 

A song you didn’t hear,
ringing in your ears.

Anticipation of a kiss, its
memory, its warmth already fading.

Wakefulness that’s not your own.
A silent accompaniment.

A resonance vibrating in your chest
that makes you look around.

An answer, unprovoked,
a tendril reaching as if for light.

Something about “kingdom
among you,” ungrasped, firm.

An echo following the silence,
always just out of sight.

A sure, embracing presence
beyond the door, the sky, within.

The collapse of a stranger’s strangeness,
a tenderness, an urge to bow.

This impossible reverence rising in you,
belovedness passing through you like blood

as if Someone is here.

 

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
         
         
         

May you be given eyes to see
in all that is bare and ordinary in you
an extravagant blossoming.

May your presence be a blessing,
that others may feel with you
as if they have awakened
to a lovely spring day.

May your gifts suddenly bloom
in colors beyond your imagining.

May the swans of God’s grace
descend upon your pond
and build nests there,
and raise their young.

May your whole earth
inside and out
be made new.

         

         
         
Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

______________________
Copyright © Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
         
         
         
Christ arose
not into the air
(the air doesn’t need him)
but into people.

         
The bare trees on the hillside
meditate in the spring breeze,
calmly holding little
explosions in their hands.

         

Are you ready
to be so changed?
         

         
         
____________________
Weather Report

Becoming,
as completely as a spring day
is transformed from dreary to bright
by forces from beyond.

         
         
Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

______________________
Copyright © Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net