Month: September 2022

They’re building a new neighborhood next door.
My morning prayers on the porch are often accompanied
by rumbling and beeping and crashing and dust.
I pray anyway.
My morning walk now begins in a ruin
of scraped earth, mangled roots and machine tracks
before I reach the woods.
I walk anyway.
We’re always having to learn to be at peace amid chaos,
to be kind and patient when others are mean,
to be grateful amid disaster, to pray in the mess.
And the Divine One is always there.
In the destroyed meadow,
among the shattered stones and bulldozer treads
I find the tracks of birds.

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

           What woman having ten silver coins,
           if she loses one of them,
           does not light a lamp, sweep the house,
           and search carefully until she finds it?
                           —Luke 15.8


What is lost in you?
Silenced, ignored, abandoned,
repressed, forgotten, hidden?
God is looking for it.

A peasant woman’s ten silver coins
is surely her dowry: a symbol of worth,
assurance of security, a promise of marriage.
So precious are you to God.

Where is there hidden in you
a coin of your belovedness,
a treasured future,
the gleam of divine fidelity?

She will find it,
and she will rejoice.

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

           Which one of you, having a hundred sheep
           and losing one of them,
           does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness
           and go after the one that is lost until they find it?
                           —Luke 15.4

None of us, of course.
Which makes God’s love all the more radical.
God will find you no matter how lost you are.

But wait. This is not about you.
(How readily we center ourselves
in Jesus’ stories, make them about us,
and make them comforting…) But.
Jesus is talking to us privileged insiders,
describing God’s joy in finding truly lost sheep—
“those people”—others—not us.
You are not the lost sheep. They are.
The kid entangled in gangs, drugs and violence.
The junkie glazed in the street.
The MAGA nut paranoid about bogeymen.
The CEO who couldn’t care less about people.
The person who just can’t believe. Nope. No way.
God is more delighted in the love
of people who are truly lost
than in those who already have it right.

Find yourself in that.

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

A friend is dying and I am sweeping the garage.
I am repairing the upper rack in the dishwasher
and he’s being detached from life support.
I am shopping, in the produce section,
looking for good organic baby spinach
and remembering to get shallots
and his family are gathered around
in that strange camaraderie of abysmal love and loneliness.
I am strangely here.
Life goes on, he has died, life is going on.

Loss is not an object we encounter, but a landscape.
The presence of an absence that haunts without leaving.
Grief is not a thing we have,
like a stone in your pocket, or a boil;
it’s music deep within us and around us,
music of love in the key of longing,
and sometimes we can’t help but sing along,
full throated, heads tipped back,
because it’s all we hear, and at times
we just hum the tune while we go on with life.
But the music doesn’t stop, beautiful and sad and grateful,
and it makes us dance, even if wee just sway a bit—
and always, just beyond our hearing,
God singing with us.

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

           Just like the clay in the potter’s hand,
           so are you in my hand.
                           —Jeremiah 18.6

There are those who hope to get through life unaffected,
untouched.
But I say: life, affect me. God, touch me.
Let this life and all its pains and beauties shape me.
For whatever genius you place
in the wrenching hands of fate and all that befalls me,
you also work your art in me;
and it is only in the dance between hand and clay
that the masterpiece is born.
I’d rather be shaped by life than by my own little self.
So, yes, I will let beauty shape gratitude and wonder in me,
and suffering shape patience and gentleness,
and failure shape humility and perseverance,
and pain shape sensitivity to the heart,
and even loss, oh, the firm hand of loss pressing on the clay,
shape love and more loveliness, and attention to this day.
I will be shaped, molded and remade a thousand times,
because all the Artist ever means is to perfect me,
I who have always been, ever from the beginning,
dust of the earth you have gathered up,
shaped with loving hands, and breathed your life into.
Shape me, God, create me again, and keep breathing new life into me.

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

Everflowing Love,
Infinite Compassion and Delight,
rain on me.
Sheets of water, roll, Jordan, roll.
Wash me clean and new.
Rinse away what rinses away.
Rain deep into me.
Rain gently and long.
Soak in,
so my deep roots are bathed in you,
so my little streams run with clear, fresh love
and rivulets of joy.
Let all my creatures rejoice
and find delight in the waters of your grace.
Let your grace sink in deep
and turn things green,
living things thriving, flowering, bearing fruit.
Let me be your verdant garden,
your teeming forest
whose deep roots know how to hold your water
long after the rain is gone.
Rain on me, loving God,
rain down, rain down.

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