Month: April 2012

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
         
         
Resurrection does not mean everything turns out OK. It does not save us from suffering, evil or death. It means that God’s one pure will is to give life and bless, and to set us free. This is what God does. Always. And no matter what else happens, what God does triumphs.

God is as present and active as gravity in every moment of our lives, including the hurt that we receive and the hurt that we cause. Everything belongs to God, and everything, no matter how awful, is gathered up in the final victory of God’s life-giving grace.  Usually we can only see the triumph afterward, and from a wider perspective. But we can learn to trust the grace, even in the most difficult times. We can learn to trust that the Present One is within us. We can learn to trust the Resurrecting One even amidst evil, injustice and suffering. Even when we do not know, we can trust. Grace will happen. Despite the gravest evil, grace will happen.
         
         
Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

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

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
         
         
         Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you.
         As the Father 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. 21-22

Jesus, your Beloved, is dead,
no longer present, no longer able
to give those gifts, to heal and bless,
no longer able to love,
and it has laid you low,
and in the locked room of your loss
suddenly he breathes his spirit into you
—this is all he came to do,—
fills your blood with his pulsing love,
his passionate nevertheless,

and the one who is miraculously alive after all
is you.

         
         
Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

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

 

              “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

Oh, Thomas was no doubter.
The least naive, he trusted in the dark
the promise of our rising,
the open door of death.
He was the one, when Jesus stood
to go to Lazarus’ tomb in Bethany,
where enemies awaited him
with threats of death, who said,
“Then let us go and die with him.”

Oh, more, not less than all the rest,
Thomas believed in love, and how it bled.
He sought not proof of Jesus’ life,
but marks of what he suffered and forgave,
the scars of Thomas’ own betrayal,
to know that he had risen
not from bed, but from the depths
of hell, where Thomas needed him
to have gone, and been, and left transformed.

He didn’t ask to see his smiling face,
has famous, radiant eyes;
he didn’t hope to see him break the bread
the way he always did.
No, he asked to see his wounds,
the marks of love, the wounds of one
who weeps with those who weep,
who has walked with us through the valley
of the shadow of death.

Oh, Thomas, I’m with you:
I would not follow the safe and happy one,
the well-dressed Christ from a catalogue;
I will follow only the wounded one,
the one with most to forgive
and least reason to expect his hope.
I will follow the loving one with steady eyes,
who knows how much his love will cost.
I will follow the gentle man
with holes in his hands.

 

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
         
         

Breathe deeply.

A voice comes to you
through the garden.
Why go back
into the cave of death?
You don’t need your spices.

Are you ready to be taken away?

Be free now.
Your lover
comes for you.

         
         

Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

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

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
         
         

You were created to love.
It is your nature, and your purpose.

Your fears and desires get in the way:
your self-centeredness, your desire for control,
your fear of loss or diminishment,
your weakness and your wounds,
your attachment to things
that subvert love and drain life from you,
all prevent you from loving perfectly.

But their power is an illusion.
We flung them all at Jesus—
even death, and the wort suffering.
And they did not stop him;
they could not stop love.

God has defeated them,
buried them in the grave with him,
and he has come to us now without them.
He has risen, and has overcome them all.

You are free to love.
When you love you die to that world of fear,
and you are raised to a new life.
When you love you enter into God,
into what is divine and infinite and eternal.
When you love, even at great cost,
and even if you fail,
even if you have no effect at all,
you have won the victory.

         
         
Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

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

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
         
         

Loving One,
you are present,
unbound by anything.

Dawning One,
you are in this moment,
not entombed in the past.

Forgiving One,
you are in the freedom of my soul,
not the stones of my surroundings,
not the grave of my deeds.

You whose glory it is to set us free,
deliver me
into the present moment.

You who give life
where there is none,
I live not by surviving
but by being raised
each moment,

with each breath
to have died,
with each breath
to be risen.

         
         
Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

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

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
         
         

         

The halls of heaven ring empty.
The sapphire, carnelian and amethyst gleam for no one.
The great mountain, the holy throne sit untouched.
You won’t find the All-Merciful at this remove,
nor the storehouse of the powers that raise the dead.
The Glorious One is not here,
but far outside the fortress,
favoring the tents of the forgotten.
The Loving One has gone out into the silence
of those who have been cut off,
into the darkness of those who cannot know,
into the cries of the abandoned.
The All-Loving does not visit her forlorn
in their solitary confinement,
but passionately embraces them from within.
The All-Knowing knows better than we
even the desolation they know
as the absence of God.
The Unsayable Presence has left the sure palace
and gone wholly to be in the abyss
of the deepest terror of the God-forsaken.
You can hear him there, calling out.
         
         

         

Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve
______________________
Copyright © Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
         
         

That in love
he was free
of their anger,
that his tenderness
was impervious
to their brutality,
that he had become
from a world
they could not breach,
that aflame with love
he was not consumed,
that he had given himself to them
more wholly than they could either
fully receive or prevent
was already
resurrection.
         

         

         
         
Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

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

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.

         

         

         The high priest asked, “Have you no answer?
         What is it that they testify against you?”
         But he was silent and did not answer.
         …
         Jesus made no further reply,
         so that Pilate was amazed.
                  —Mark 14.60-61, 15.5

         

God says nothing.

Our insistence
on answers and explanations
is not prayer.
The Judge interrogates,
and quivers in anger.
But God is still,
offering gently what cannot be said.
(Only by a long listening
without demand
can we begin to see.)

God is silenced.
Our official language
does not admit his voice,
or those of his Beloved.
(Only without judgment
can we begin to hear.)

The innocent are as silent as God.
They have no words;
their goodness is beyond them.
(Only in silence
without knowing
can we begin to know.)

This is God’s fair warning,
that she will not defend herself from us.

         

         

Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

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

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
         
         

         Then they laid hands on him and arrested him

Jesus in an orange jumpsuit.  That look on his face.
Detained without charges at Guantanamo.
Immigration police taker her in the night to deport her.

         The chief priests accused him of many things

The Messiah, bullied on the playground. Bullied in church.
Pepper sprayed.
Solitary confinement.
Afraid of her husband.

         After flogging Jesus, he handed him over

Christ, waterboarded.
Convinced by fear that her only way is working the street.
Gang raped by soldiers.
Homeless, arrested for trespassing.

         They twisted some thorns into a crown and put it on him
         They struck his head with a reed and spat upon him

The Son of God unemployed on the Reservation,
his language forgotten, his history buried.
Arranged at 14 in a marriage to a 45 year old.
Kept out of view in an asylum.

         Then they led him out to crucify him.

A rape victim murdered for shaming her family.
Onlookers gather to watch Jesus receive the lethal injection.
Silenced, even her grief taken from her.

         The centurion said, “Truly this man was God’s Son!”

         
         
Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

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