Month: April 2017

         
Christ, you have occupied our humanity
more deeply than we,
bearing our sin and sorrow,
receiving our shame, our despair.
You, the Human One,
have borne our whole burden,
our separateness, our death.
You poured yourself out
into us until there was nothing left but God.
When we have poured ourselves into you
until there is nothing in us but you,
in the darkness of the tomb,
you who are life and light
unfold and break even the bonds of death itself
and there is only light and life,
and everything is changed.

Death is weak.
A door easily swung open.
Love is our grave and our womb,
and the flowing of our lives,
always out of ourselves into you.

Christ has borne the love of God
even into hell,
and love, as always, has prevailed.
Christ is risen.
Christ is risen indeed.
        

 

Poor Holy Saturday,
hung out to dry between
Good Friday’s drama
and Easter’s miracle.
Not much going for it,
this empty day bereft of tradition,
just an in between time.
A day of waiting around,
a day of thinking we knew.

Welcome home.
This is the day we live most of our life in,
the wide space between tragedy and recovery,
the emptiness between the pain and the healing.

We don’t always know know we’re waiting
for something not in our hands,
that has already happened,
unknowingly included in a procession
toward someone who’s already here.
Only later, not on this day, do we know
we’re not waiting for a future;
we’re watching God unfold.

That is enough.
That is why this day,
drab and ordinary,
is holy.
 

            My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
                        Why are you so far from helping me,
                        from the words of my groaning?
                                       —Psalm 22.1

Jesus, fully human,
feels the anguish of God’s distance,
the bare landscape of abandonment.
Jesus, fully divine, feels that anguish, too,
the ripping ache of aloneness.
This is not the cry of someone deserted by God
but of one who knows God listens
when we feel that way.
This is the cry of God, brokenhearted for us.
God does not peer into our loneliness from above,
but lives there, suffers there.
The void is the silence of the soul of God,
the desert of our exile,
whose sandstone canyons echo with God’s own sobs.
This is the prayer of a lifeguard whose lungs cry for air
who has dived deep to rescue us from drowning.
This is the cry of a mother running into the flames
for her children.
This is the sigh of the Beloved
whose ear is pressed to the door of our hearts
from the inside.
This is the only voice of hope.

            My God, my God,
                        you have descended so deep into my suffering
                        that even I no longer see you.
 

    
I wove a wreath of thorns one day
for some poor, ruined prisoner
whose name I don’t recall and cannot say.
We got a laugh at him, all right,
who claimed, I guess, to be a king,
though he had never uttered such a thing,
but only spoke of love through bleeding lips.
He was a tramp, and not of royal birth,
so we would see just what his realm was worth.
I made a crown with kingly flowers entwined,
and thorns so sharp they lanced my hands,
and as I did I greeted all that pain,
for it contained the wounds and years of wounds
I’d borne and now could shove away,
and make another bear instead of me.
Oh, it was worth the pain to jeer
and jam it on his sorrowing head.
And as I crowned him with contempt,
my bleeding hands about his face,
thorns piercing me and him as one,
though mine sweet pain of causing pain,
and his the pain of suffering,
he looked me in the eye,
though trembling, tenderly,
as if I were the one now dying, or had died,
and reached with something, though his hands were tied,
and touched a place beyond that place,
and then it seemed that something drained away,
though what it was I could not say.

After we crowned that pitiful king,
and beat him some, to clarify some things,
we killed him, as we always do.
I took a rest and caught my breath,
and went home from that little hell
and met a different kind of death
that it would take me longer to endure,
the strangest thing: my hands were healed,
and something else as well.
 

 

            “Have you come out with swords and clubs
            to arrest me as though I were a bandit?”
                           —Matthew 26.55

I pray for you, Christ, arrested in the night.
I pray for you, held without bail.
I pray for you profiled, tasered, detained,
dragged out by force with my silent blessing.

I pray for you, Christ, tortured and beaten.
I pray for you Christ, held in my prisons,
my Correctional Facility, our Guantanamo.

And how many of you, Christ,
are in prisons without walls,
in cells of fear, of abuse, of shame?
How many innocent?
How many twisted not by your own choosing?

I pray for you, Curtis, and your children.
I pray for you, Juanita, and your baby.

You, too, are God’s Beloved.
You all are divine.
Christ, I pray for you all,
and whatever we do to the least of you,
in all of your shackles.

Today, we are with you, in paradise….
 

 

            Then he began to curse, and he swore an oath,
            “I do not know the man!”
            At that moment the cock crowed.
            Then Peter remembered what Jesus had said:
            “Before the cock crows, you will deny me three times.”
            And he went out and wept bitterly.
                           —Matthew 26.74-75

I deny you, Christ,
when I deny my own divinity.
I deny you when I deny
the divinity of those I condemn.
I deny you when I do not hear you
in the oppressed and rejected.
I deny you when I turn
from my glorious giftedness.
I deny you when I am afraid
to stand with those at risk.
I deny you when in my guilt
I doubt your love.
And still you love.

Let remembering’s bitterness awaken me.
Let my weeping be my wisdom.

To the frightening, to the infinite,
to the compassionate, to the holy,
help me say yes.

Let me die with yes on my lips.

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

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Cold and dark clamp down on us.
The Empire feeds itself,
human bodies as fuel,
boots tracking blood.
Rachel weeping for her children,
we’ve heard it before.
The man with the megaphone doesn’t care.
The emperor has spoken.
Only the most fragile voice
cries out for hope.
The gentle bear it,
weeping in our language.
Always the target,
amid the smoke and carnage,
the fallen stones,
the ruined toddlers,
the Beloved stands,
a little tree—
who planted you here?—
offering fruit to anyone,
blood-red and life giving,
arms outstretched,
quietly crying,
“Fear not;
it is I.”
 

 

Unless the seed dies

          Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies,
          it remains just a single grain;
          but if it dies, it bears much fruit.
                    — John 12. 24

What are you afraid of?
What are you holding onto?
What are you holding on for?

Let all things be,
let them be right there,
without having to hang onto them.

The last thing you let go of is your
self. This hard-shelled seed of who you are
you are trying so hard to build up

into something great and false.
Trying to build a fruit tree
out of sticks.

Let it go. Each moment, each breath,
surrender your favorite self.
Let it fall

into the earth of our being, the home
of our bones. All of our falling
is into God.

When at last the fist of your life
is opened, the grave of your heart
dug deep enough, and empty,

when you let the breathing darkness
and your unguarded nothingness
spill into each other

then something miraculous grows in you,
and out through every pore,
to the edge of the world:

a completely new and different life,
begotten, not made, that gives life,
that doesn’t look like a seed at all.

You don’t need to hang onto it.
It can’t be killed. Its roots
are in God.

 

 

            Could you not stay awake with me one hour?
            Stay awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial;
            the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.
                           —Matthew 26.40-41

I slip into forgetting sleep,
a deadness I seek,
a trance of avoidance,
distraction’s pleasant coma.
I am numb to your world, O Christ,
to your suffering, your love,
unconscious of you here.

Awaken me.
Breathe yourself into me
and rouse me
from my fearful distance.

Let even pain keep me awake,
attentive to your pain
in all who hurt,
your love keep me alert
to love in all your forms.

Grant me this simple gift,
all you ask:
that I may stay awake,
trusting I am not orphaned,
and pray with you,
so earnestly praying for me
and all the world.
just stay awake my little time
and pray with you.

Let all my waking hours
be wakeful hours.