Month: June 2024

There’s a bug in the house.
I don’t squash bugs;
I take ’em outside.
This one’s a tricky bugger:
it hops and jumps, scoots fast,
hides in cracks.
I’m trying to be kind.
I wish it would just hold still;
but I get it: it’s protecting itself
from this Big Scary Thing.
I’m after it with my big clunky fingers,
trying not to smash it
or break its legs or feelers,
a Keystone Cops kind of caper,
chasing it around the kitchen
on my hands and knees.
I finally get it. Out we go,
the bug cupped in my hands.
I’m thinking of God trying
to get me where I belong,
and how much easier for both of us
it would be if I would just
allow myself to be caught.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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God, give me patience.
She is an annoyance.
She is an interruption.
She goes on and on.
She hogs my time, oblivious.
She drains my energy.
If you won’t distract her, or at least
give me a nice way to dismiss her,
then give me patience.

Give me more than patience.
Give me love.
Help me listen like Jesus would:
to humbly give of my time and attention,
to listen to the whole story,
to listen for pain that may be unspoken,
for unnamed loneliness,
for the hunger to be heard,
to be attended to, to be honored.

She is a child of God; beneath the flow
of words, life wants to flow,
but needs to be received.
Give me the grace to attend as lovingly
as I would to my own daughter.

Gentle God, you who never tire of listening,
give me the miraculous power of healing
hidden in listening.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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You walk out, early morning,
and the first rays slide under
the rosy cheeks of the clouds,
light slanting between the houses,
the shadows gleaming,
light leaning against the houses
casually, like a teenager,
as if the sky is about to say something,
but you realize it’s saying something now,
and the soft thickness of the light,
the light like a voice, the voice of a woman,
a woman who loves you, echoes
between the houses, echoes in you,
light somehow inside you, echoing
with the sky, with, go ahead and say it,
the heavens. Inside you,
in the morning light.

Then the magic passes, but
you stand a while between the houses,
still, looking up into the tumbling gray sky
at least long enough to make known
the gift has been received.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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            Now there was a woman who had been suffering
            from hemorrhages for twelve years.

Is there something in you that is meant to give life that is not well?
Something draining your creative energy?

            She had endured much under many physicians…
            and she was no better, but rather grew worse.

Sometimes the world around you pretends to have answers,
but they are not life-giving. It’s not your fault.
It’s OK to let go of what the world says.

            She had heard about Jesus, and thought,
            “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.”

You do not need deep understanding or profound faith.
You only need to open yourself and reach out.

            She came up behind him and touched his cloak.

The tassels of Jesus’ prayer shawl signify the power of his prayers.
Imagine that God is praying for you.

Where do you touch the presence of God—
not just lovely sunsets, but a sense of God’s concern for you?

            Immediately her hemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body
            that she was healed of her disease.

Most of our healing is neither immediate nor perceptible.
Where in you might God’s grace be restoring wholeness?
What is being healed that you know… and what might be that you don’t know?

            Jesus was immediately aware that power had gone forth from him.

The grace of God is not just an object that you may receive,
but a power, power from God, that flows through you.
Imagine it flowing, even now.

            Jesus turned about in the crowd and said,
            “Who touched my clothes?”

Despite the needs of 8 billion other people, you matter to God.
God is radically open to you.

            His disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing in on you;
            how can you say, ‘Who touched me?’”
            He looked all around to see who had done it.

Sometimes it seems you’re lost in the crowd.
How could God possibly attend to you?
Imagine: God’s attention is infinite.

            The woman, knowing what had happened to her,
            came in fear and trembling and fell down before him.

How have you been healed?
How has God’s grace made you whole and free?

            She told him the whole truth.

Jesus was on his way to an emergency, but stopped to listen,
maybe not just about the healing but the whole twelve years.
Imagine God wants to hear your whole story.

            He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well;
            go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”

Wonderful, how he calls her “daughter,”
how he establishes this loving, intimate relationship.

Her faith was not her doctrine, or her belief, but her trust.
It was her reaching out.
Reach out for grace, trusting it will be there.

            Breath prayer:
                                      Trusting … I reach for you

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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I knew his life had dealt him much suffering,
and that more than once he had shattered.
Yet his eyes shone with a deep peace.
Even through his latest crisis he showed
little sense of shame or disappointment.
I asked him about it. He took me to his garage.
There sat an old classic car, surrounded
by a mess of parts and pieces.
“This old thing,” he said, “in order to restore it,
I have to take it apart. It’s a lot of work.
But me, I don’t have to work so hard at that.
I just fall apart real natural.
And just as natural, I guess I trust
somebody’s working on me.”

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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             “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”
                            —Mark 4.38

But we are perishing.
That night on the lake they lived,
and later, as always, perished.

A living being perishes and falls
past death, and so past the fear of death,
to the peace of the forest floor,
where sunlight comes only a handful at a time,
the kingdom of the salamanders.
Worms and bugs and fungi reach up to the dead
and draw them down into the realm of life.
The teeth of transformation,
the gut of resurrection, have their way.
The choir of rakers and suckers and chewers
receive the offering, and the song of renewal goes on.

The memories you hold and those
you have created for others, all you have done,
fall to the sea bottom where the priests of transfiguration
take and bless and break the host
and distribute it to the congregation of the living.
We are not given to know
the memories of the perished that we bear,
but we bear them.

Stars know this, and rivers, and saints, and mushrooms:
that all is surrendered,
and all is gathered in beauty.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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              The boat was already being swamped.
              But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion.
                            —Mark 4.37-38

Despite the panic you do not panic.
In my anxiety you don’t engage, but are asleep,

not just calm, but out like a baby,
as if rocked.

As if even in turbulence you are rocked
in your mother’s arms,

secure in a greater peace,
trusting in a grace deeper than the sea.

Beloved, lay yourself down
in the little boat of my worries,

in my storms, with your peace,
your trust that all is in God,

the boat and the storm alike,
rocked by grace.

You are the boat of my confidence,
the cushion for my worried soul.

Even in the most frightening tempest
you are with me; my inward storm is calmed.

Salvation is more than merely ease or safety,
but to be with you, to go on with you or to drown with you.

Jesus, in your boat, together, storm or calm,
in you I am at peace.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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We tend to measure our freedom
by how we are treated—
how others allow us to be free.

But the measure of our truest freedom
is in how free we are
to allow others to be free.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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I stoop to greet you in the woods,
grateful that you didn’t hop away,
and for a while we gaze at each other—
like lovers, I wish, though it is not likely mutual.
I admire your greenness, your stillness, your body
that seems made of all elbows and knees,
yet full of grace. I ponder your being,
being here— the bugs that have fed you,
the fox and the great blue heron you have evaded,
the generations of ancestors who wintered over
in frozen mud for you to be here,
as if you were meant to be here.
I can neither name nor deny
the purpose of your being here
but simply that you are here.
You belong. The woods are yours,
yours is the color of this place,
the brook is yours, the sunlight all yours.
You are, without difficulty, being a frog,
without fear or shame or pride,
simply a frog, here in these dappled woods,
here in this passage of the music in which,
for a few measures, we are in harmony.
In this temple of green and yellow light,
my little yogi, you offer wisdom:
to allow oneself to be meant to be here,
to forsake endeavor, to let go
of having to find or accomplish,
and simply, purely, belong.
We share this cup of sunlight, this moment
that may be mistaken for a million years.
And then we go into our worlds,
bearers, both, of an infinite mystery.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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             A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat,
             so that the boat was already being swamped.…
             They said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”
                            —Mark 4.37-38

The howling winds of political angst scream in our ears,
and make it hard to hear each other, hard to steady the world’s rigging.
Our little paddles are nothing against the tide of greed and fear.
The staggering seas of a changed climate batter us.
Waves of fear of war and unrest, nuclear threat, microplastics,
species loss and forever chemicals swamp the boat of our future.
It’s not unreasonable to think of catastrophe, of collapse.
We are afraid we are perishing.

It is true, there is great urgency.
Jesus can’t make sane our politics or cool the earth,
vanquish pollution or banish all war.

And yet the Graceful One says, “Peace. Be still.”
We are not perishing.
We are in the boat with Jesus. God’s boat.
There is a greater goodness to which we belong—
not a scheme for saving us, but a mystery in which already
we are abiding with God forever,
sharing in God’s unfolding of life.

Even in trying times we act with both urgency and hope,
both boldness and peace.
We are not perishing. We are facing the storm
with the Guide of the Universe.



__________________
Weather Report

Severe storm warning.
Resist the temptation to shelter inside.
Go out into it,
and bring calm steadiness.
It will change the storm.

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