Daily Reflections and Worship Resources
The bird with the mangled foot
still sang sweetly.
God, I offer you my failures and limitations;
give me courage to be as I am,
trusting your grace,
and let the divine bird in me sing.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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From an old trunk mysteriously bequeathed to me
I received a strange instrument, archaic artifact
with strings and keys and cranks, or depending
on how you hold it, an ancient bone flute.
I wonder what part of me was meant to make it sing.
I fiddle with it, but I have no idea how to play it.
I tend it, keep the strings taut, keys dusted, mouthpiece clean.
Mornings I light a candle, sit for a while
and hold it in my lap. Silent.
Late some days,
not often,
I hear music.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 0:54 — 1.2MB)
The pond, merely pond,
yet precious,
rests for days and nights and days
as the geese, stretched out
in their ancient longing
find its horizon,
the place their ancestors knew,
and they descend lovingly toward it,
and in their gaze it becomes beautiful.
There is a tiny flower
on a rocky mountainside
that no one ever finds
but the little mountain bees,
and they love it.
A man
was taken from his mother
as an infant.
She has never stopped searching.
Happy or sad—if only he knew,
he is sought.
Sometimes you rest a long time
free of obligations
to allow yourself again to become
beloved.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:10 — 1.6MB)
There are days I hear the wheels
of this little ore car rolling on the rails
as we descend into the shaft,
deeper, darker, faster— no brakes.
I feel the ship listing,
and distrust the sketchy lifeboats.
I expect the web site gone,
the notice on the library doors,
the dark SUV outside the church,
the knock on the door.
So it matters
to give time to sit with the Silence,
where the world enlarges.
A kind of gravity that minds the whole
holds us all.
We deepen our trust. Earth will go on.
A vast storm front of wisdom
forms off our shore,
a tide that approaches.
A great octopus of kindness
in the deeps unfurls its eight
million arms around us.
It won’t go extinct.
A comet of pure light returns
again and again.
Hope threads its green cord
through us.
A volcano beneath us
makes new worlds.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:31 — 2.1MB)
…go and sit down at the lowest place…
—Luke 14.10
To live every moment
so as never to place yourself
above anyone.
To lift those
who’ve been put
in low places.
To do away
with places.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 0:31 — 736.9KB)
Memories and molecules
intermingle magically.
They are all here, present,
in your body.
Little bits of the four leggeds
and the winged ones
and the creeping and flitting ones
and the rooted ones
who have been here where you are
for ten thousand years
are still here, in your body.
The bodies lynched, crucified,
burned at stakes and starved
in prison cells are in your cells.
Enslaved bodies, whiplashed,
still erect, are in you.
The flesh of those who marched for freedom,
the strength of those who stood,
the breath of those who sang,
still live in you.
Don’t despair of your own strength.
The whole earth is alive in you.
When they hear your voice
they all stand up.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:04 — 1.5MB)
There appeared a woman
with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years.
She was bent over, unable to stand up straight.
—Luke 13.11
What is bent over in you?
A gift repressed… a feeling denied…
a story unheard… a strength decayed…
a hope, a hope, still hoping…?
Not everything, maybe, but something
is being healed,
standing up in you.
Don’t be the ruler who says “Not yet.”
Be the woman
who stands.
There may not be a final cure,
but sit still long enough
to feel a hand on your back.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:01 — 1.4MB)
Dearest,
Went to a funeral today. (Yeah, I know. I got to all of them….) Rough crowd, lots of leather and tattoos. Nobody had a problem coming up with black to wear. Lots of black. And lots of love. Real, not rehearsed. Awkward, understated, tearful & heartfelt. Lots of talk about loss and struggle and carrying on, getting free. They didn’t talk much about me. But I felt right at home. Funny, where I find myself sometimes.
Keep your heart open.
Love, God
_______________
Weather Report
High humanity,
increasing from one degree of glory to another.
The warm, moist atmosphere
of people being people
will rise and blow through your life
like a storm.
Participation 100%.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:04 — 1.5MB)
God’s desire is no political agenda, nor an economic vision.
It is simply kindness toward all,
a world that includes everybody, that offers beauty,
that gives life, free and abundant,
tendered in verdant hands,
that weaves us together in one living being,
one body, one life.
It is simply passion that the wanting child be fed:
for she is your own.
The “self-made” who disbelieve are the wounded
whom the Spirit sends us to heal;
the “successful” who cling to their food
are the oppressed who need to be set free.
Only the grateful are wise;
only the compassionate see clearly.
Only those who would suffer to free others
are truly free.
The divine in you is not the power to conquer wrong
but simply brave kindness.
It has its own power to open eyes, to set free.
The martyrs and prophets,
who have known glares and stones,
pogroms, marches and fire hoses,
each trail of tears the same Via Dolorosa, they know:
this is not a goal or agenda, a plan or a program;
it is not born of human will at all.
It is a gift of God, the life of the Spirit breathing in you,
the maker of worlds commanding, “Let there be light.”
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:46 — 2.4MB)
There appeared a woman
with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years.
She was bent over, unable to stand up straight.
—Luke 13.11
Jesus is always looking for where it hurts.
She is bent in a perpetual bow, eyes down.
He touches her, and she rises.
Of course the ruler objects. It’s the Sabbath.
Better to leave her suffering than disturb the order.
This, too, is where it hurts.
Grace lifts up; the ruler presses down.
He’s bent over his rules, unable to see.
Jesus opens his eyes: Sabbath is for setting free.
Always watching, the Beloved is,
for what hurts, and what keeps us hurt,
for where it hurts and also why.
Satan and his rulers tolerate only those healings
that don’t disturb the kingdom in which, sorry,
that’s the way it is, some people just have to suffer.
The Beloved contradicts. Not just his miracles,
all his ordinary acts are disruptive.
Sometimes the rule is where it hurts.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:32 — 2.1MB)
