Month: May 2023

Father God, we say.
As if we know just exactly what we’re talking about.
The Ineffable, the Unsearchable, the Infinite—
made into a specific creature, a Thing.
A guy. Definitely male. X Chromosomes.
Old (but not too: 60, maybe, but buff.
Certainly not 120. No wrinkles.)
But white hair. (What color was it before?)
With a face and hands. Not flippers, not wings.
We’re pretty sure what The Invisible One looks like.
Silly, huh?

If God is infinite, God is not human. If God is Spirit
there is no such thing as what God “looks like.”
The image of God is love, not physical appearance.

The image of the Holy Trinity undermines all our images,
our cartoons of gender, age, ability and power.
If God is both parent and child, and neither,
then God is both male and female and neither,
both human and non-human and neither,
Supreme and also Crucified and also Newly Alive,
beyond all dualities, categories, distinctions.
Every little insistence is a lie.

The Trinity lets God be Not What You Think,
All Of The Above, and Other. All at once.
God says, “I am not this or that, I AM.”
Question your assumptions
about what God “has to” be like.

Silence. Word. Breath.
Mystery. Presence. Rebirth.
Mother, Son, Holy Spirit.

Infinite. Love. Spirit. Nothing else is absolute.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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You Who Are Present,
Beautiful Mystery,
Lovable One,

I surrender my knowing.
I do not even imagine you.
I simply let you be.

I adore you without words,
I trust you without comprehension,
I rejoice in you without fear.

Wholly Love,
Holy Thou,
I am yours.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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In my morning prayers I ring
a little summoning bell that is the world.

The bird rises up into the air
and the breeze carries it.

The sea beckons the rivers,
who come, and the sea receives them.

Into the hunger of your lungs
the air comes happily.

The lovemakers offer their desire
and receive one another’s pleasure.

In the woods you breathe deeply
and the trees in the woods breathe deeply.

The incense lifts the question
to which you are an answer.

All of the world is a crying out.
All of the world is a responding.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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           God declares,
           “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.”
                           —Acts 2.17

The Holy Spirit is not a ghost,
neither Casper-friendly nor haunting.
God is Spirit; the Holy Spirit is God,
the movement of God, the movingness of God,
like how light isn’t a thing, and isn’t anywhere,
but moves, like the movement of love, which is
not a thing but a reaching-out, a connecting,
a movement, a breathing, in and out,
never held for long, but shared,
which is how Spirit connects us, the only one Spir-
it breathing in and out of us all the time, God’s re-
spiration, breathing in us, which is our in-
spiration (until it no longer moves in us and we ex-
pire) and so we all breathe together
because there’s only one breath, in which we con-
spire with God (which is why we sing,
because it invites us to breathe together),
moving with the movement of God,

all one, breathing together in the great con-
spiracy that is life.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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On Pentecost the real miracle
was not the momentary wonder
of people speaking languages
they hadn’t been taught,
but the lasting miracle
of people making connections
despite all their separations,
discovering how they were alike
despite apparent differences,
knowing belonging
despite their being foreign.
They were one;
the boundaries did not exist.
They found a shared story,
tapped into the one Spirit
that breathed in them all.
Wonder at this: not that you could
speak some foreign language
but that you could love someone
who speaks a foreign language,
knowing by listening that
your hearts speak the same language,
you and they breathe the same Spirit,
one breath in all of us,
members of one body.
Something divine is going on,
partly in your heart and partly in theirs.
Only together will you behold the miracle.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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           “And how is it that…
          in our own languages we hear them
          speaking about God’s deeds of power?”
                           —Acts 2.8, 11

At Pentecost we’re pretty sure
we did the miraculous talking,
“speaking in tongues.”
But what if in fact the miracle was that
those people from every nation
heard in tongues?
What if they had the God-given gift
to listen deeply enough to know
the work of God when they heard it,
even in a foreign language?

We think we have so much to say.
Maybe we have something to hear.
Maybe the true Pentecostal gift
isn’t speaking at all, but listening:
listening in tongues,
letting the Spirit listen through us,
listening in new ways
for what we haven’t heard,
listening deeply enough to hear God,
even in the life of someone not like us.

What miracles emerge, when we listen deeply!

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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Grounding One,
O Divine Flourishing,

with the plow of your grace
till me, soften me, aerate me.

Uproot my prickly vines
of fear and want.

Let the seeds of you
be buried in me,

break
open

in me.
Sprout mightily,

little green fingers, so strong,
feel your way through me

toward light,
toward fruit.

Let the great flourishing
begin.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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A girl in my high school that I never knew
but saw a lot used to go around every
corner in the hallway as if she’d never
been there before. She’d lean way out to the
side to look, almost on one foot,
the other stretched behind, as if to see it
for the first time, as if to check it out before
she committed to making the turn. But she
always made the turn. It wasn’t fearful, just
a pause, a moment of expectation. “Look,”
she told herself, “I’m turning a corner!” I loved
it. Whenever I saw her do it I’d walk into my
next classroom with a little bit of anticipation,
even under pretense, a little expectation that
I might be surprised. Or I might actually turn
a corner and actually do something
for the first time. And I often surprised
myself. I looked as if for the first time, and
often saw something for the first time. Or saw
somebody I’d seen a thousand times as if
for the first time. I still love her for it.

May the corner you turn next be an opening,
an adventure. Look! You’re turning a corner!
May even a thing you’ve done a thousand times
be the first time you’ve ever done it, a surprise.
And if it is truly a new thing, imagine Jesus
leaning out around the corner on one leg, looking,
and looking back at you, smiling, then disappearing
around the corner.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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           While he was blessing them,
           he withdrew from them
           and was carried up into heaven.
                           —Luke 24.51


So where exactly did Jesus go?
Up into which sky, beyond which clouds?
Where is the body now?

There is no where. That’s the point.
There is no where where he is
more or less than any other where.

As Jesus rose from his grave,
he rose from his body—the one
body—to all bodies, all places.

He ascended to “heaven,”
which is where God is, which is
not distant but at the heart of all things.

The body of the risen Christ
is here, surrounding you.
You are in it; it is here in you.

Yes, you want more. Something
more real. That is faith: the urge
to make love real in this world.

That hankering for something felt, that
absence that only love can fill, that
tension, that strength, so real: that is the body.

Let that body’s motion move you.
Take that urge out into a world
hungry for the touch of love.

Given or received,
wherever there is love—there!:
the Word made flesh.

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