Unfolding Light – Daily Reflections and Worship Resources

Set it on fire

What if all you possess
is the love of God?

Pile up everything else—
your goods, your reputation,
your desires and opinions,
your control over things…
everything.

Set it on fire.

In love,
you can warm yourself by those flames
for a long time, and be guided by that light.

______________
Weather Report

Clearing,
as the occluded front of your desires
meets the low pressure zone
of God’s desire for you,
resulting in reorienting storms.
Warning: the Spirit’s wind will sweep much away.

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

Thimble full of flavor,
thumb print of grace,
humble berry offered
among sun and bumblebees,
your thorns draw blood,
love’s price, amid this blessed
giving and receiving.
Flesh of presence,
flavor flowing in self-giving,
the All of the Divine in our mouths,
the bread and wine of this afternoon,
we come not to observe but to join,
to savor, swallow, and be saved
by what ripens in our souls
until we hold the world
and say like a mother to her child,
“I love you so much
I could eat you.”

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

            Moses said to God:
            “If your presence will not go, do not bring us up from here.
            For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight,
            I and your people, unless you go with us?”
                                     —Exodus 33.15-16

A way to discern a path
when faced with a fork in the road,
maybe a tough choice, maybe just a moment’s attitude:
which way is God going?
Of course God will go with you either way,
but maybe on one path God comes along
with great sighing and rolling of eyes,
while God is happy to be on the other path.

Trust that whichever direction you go,
even the most mistaken,
God will find a way.
And in the direction God most favors,
even the most difficult or dangerous,
God has already made a way.

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

           Those who are well have no need of a physician,
           but those who are sick.
                           —Matthew 9.12

I won’t tell you how to live.
I won’t argue about what you believe.
When I say I’m following Jesus
I’m not comparing myself
or setting myself apart.
I’m not claiming anything more than
my life.
I’m not professing anything more than
the power mercy has over me.
I don’t expect preferential treatment
or even kindness.
I’m simply trying to find the light.
I’m just trying to reform my life.

It’s the question life asks of us:
what is your story of the universe
and how do you fit in it?

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:

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Not to Caesar

            Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s
            and to God what is God’s.
                         —Matthew 22.21

There is so much more to give to God
than to Caesar. So much more.

Not only Caesar, but Caesar’s world—
that throne and all its scaffolding,
its pomp, its might, its falsehood,
its marketplace, its language,
its map of the universe.

What I am tempted to misgive to Caesar,
to entrust to that greedy world,
I offer instead to God alone.

The power to tell me what I see.
Trust in the truth, and clarity of What Is.
The power to tell me who I am,
what I am worth.
What anything is worth.
The power to make me whole.
The power to guide my thought,
to lead my heart.
My pledge of allegiance, my loyalty.
Myself, an image of God,
love’s likeness stamped on me,
my whole, my all, my holy.

I give myself to you, my God,
to whom I already belong.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:

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Haunted house

People often say they wouldn’t want to live
in a house where someone had been murdered.
It would spook them too much.

Maybe one reason our nation seems so crazy
is that there’s hardly a square mile
that wasn’t once the home of a Native,
an individual or a community,
that was killed. Like right where you are.

Maybe our problem is that we live
in a haunted house, brooded over
by our murderous ancestors, haunted
by our murdered neighbors.

We probably don’t need to move.
But we do need to confront our own spirits,
the real skeletons in our closets.
We need to exorcise our demons.
We need grace.

And maybe we need to get to know the ghosts.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:

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Attention

The smallest thing—
a branch, a twig,
a child’s untranslated cry,
a bird in the ribs of a parking garage,
the weight of your body—
any small thing might be a burning bush,
a divine murmur, an open door
to stumble through, a barbed lure
cast slyly from heaven, an offer
to behold what you would overlook
in the thundering cataract of the senses,
an invitation to fall
into the gaze of the One who looks out
from you into this world.
The flame of a candle, or an unlit candle,
or a place where a candle could have been once
holds the Word on the tip of its tongue.
The world within awaits your attention
before flooding into this one.

You need only attend,
make space, be still, and ponder.

Shed the words,
and stay in the gaze of the bloom or the stone,
where you slip through the eye of the moment
into eternity, through the silence
into what the silence is telling you.

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

As you struggle

You’ve got it backwards, my friend.
You imagine trudging the lonely road,
past the houses of the great saints.
In their windows you can see them
bent over their meditations,
sharing warm stew with lepers,
conversing with the Son of God,
softly hovering above their prayer cushions.
Angels swarm their porches to hear them pray.
They look out their doors in the grey evening
but they don’t see you; they only see heaven
looming in front of their faces
while you stumble up the path.

No, dear, you have it backwards.
You are the one who sees little
as they struggle beside you along the path
they’ve walked a thousand times before
but have left their cottages and their ease
and have come back to do again this once,
winded and trembling, on ancient but hardy legs,
bearing more of your burden than you know,
and though you can’t feel it,
holding— so lightly— your hand.

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

A disciple of trees

Young trees are no less wise than old
to know their leaves, now green, now gold,
want wind and rain and light to feed
them, and no more than what they need,
and, owning nothing, trusting, know
to let it go, to let it go.

I walk within their shaded haunt
to learn simplicity: to want
what my soul wants and hungers for,
but not possess, and nothing more,
but by a will not mine to bless
this poverty, and nothing less.

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

A crack opens

A sob in the night
awakens us from dreams,

a crack opens in the wall
and in seeps the dark stream

with pieces of broken things in it,
and blood, and our own ragged edge,

and in seeps the light,
and the voice singing.

We want to pull the wall around us,
the sorrow pouring in,

but it is breached now,
it is only an illusion,

and we are out in the dangerous light,
the fragile street,

tender as everyone else,
ready to duck, ready to weep.

We are all refugees now,
foreigners, except to foreigners.

It’s the egg that is cracked,
the stone rolled away.

If there is a place for love,
for your own brave soul, this is it.

The cord in another’s heart
knotted in yours,

the hand reaching for you
you can reach out to.

Terror and the stillness,
and the voice singing.

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