Unfolding Light

The cells in your body love what they do.
Nerve synapses adore each other, holding hands,
sharing secrets all the time.
Your glands, twinkle in their eye, distribute their gifts.
Your muscles don’t move from duty, but joy.
Your lungs, even when troubled, love the air
and love passing on its riches.
White blood cells sweep the streets
because they love everyone who lives there.
Ligaments and tendons hang on
and when severed long for each other.
See when you’re cut how skin reaches for skin,
tissues embrace like lovers.
The members of the body care for one another.
They gather at each other’s sickbeds.
When the village is not well all its citizens pitch in,
each doing their best for the whole,
because they love each other.
Beat by beat your heart speaks in you
—let it be your life—
                                   Oh Yes. Oh Yes. Oh Yes….

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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You may not believe in angels—
but one day you’re standing
on the subway, being lurched,
pole against your chest,
and you look down the car
and there’s a scrap of kid,

and suddenly some love, unbidden,
flames out from you, and in a fit of light
you see the wayward child
as a gift of God
and you shine with devotion.

Or you notice someone’s hand at the post office,
old and weathered as tree roots,
and for an instant it seems
the hand of wisdom,
or suffering redeemed,

and something like a wing
unfurls just a little from you,
something like radiance,
heaven hinted,
issues forth from your chest
and recedes, and is gone.

You don’t have to have an opinion about it,
but you felt it, and you know.

You don’t have to believe
in any more angels
than the one you are.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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I don’t have to save, but I can attend.
To protect the tender ones,
heal the wounded, vindicate the gentle,
or to disturb or make righteous noise,
I am able, with what I have.

My despair (how the Emperor counts on it!)
wants me to believe I lack the power.
But what I am given is enough.
As among daffodils that brighten the hillside
in late spring snow or freezing rain,
miraculous powers are already granted.

Busy as Martha or still as Mary,
even the smallest butterfly-wing muscle
of compassion is all I am called to use.

No one knows the power of small acts
or stillness,
the millions holding the world together
by the thread of their prayers.

This world is not aching for superheroes,
but roadside daffodils.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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They take the tender part of you,
                        in his T shirt and flip flops, confused.

That it’s not you,
                        shoved, with slurs, trying to stay standing.

The ligament between your hearts,
                        handcuffed among guns and face shields.

That little tearing sound as when puling a weed,
                     herded out into the street.

Irreversible loss, a death,
                        gazing into the cave of the van door.

Your hope, with those questioning eyes,
                        stuffed into the van.

That everything will be all right
                        off to a concentration camp somewhere.

Who, exactly, needs first
                        to stop what they’re doing?

Every time you are taken
                        you have less to lose.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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When everything falls apart around you,
do something kind.

When the weight of the world lies heavy on you,
do something kind.

When you doubt the reality of God,
do something kind.

When you feel without purpose,
do something kind.

You needn’t feel lovely about it,
just do it.

If it has no effect,
do something kind again.

As a kindness to yourself
reclaim your capacity for kindness.

Kindness is a match. Strike it.
It warms you, and the fire spreads.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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          The priest said, “Do not prophesy against Israel,
                        and do not preach against the house of Isaac.”
          But Amos answered,
                       “God said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people.’”
                                                  —from Amos 7.10-17


A mirror that doesn’t hide things.
A GPS that doesn’t please you
but shows you where you are.
A teller of truth
with mercy but not apology.

To stand, even alone,
to be true to what I know to be true.
Unswayed by what I feel others might feel
about who I am, what I mean.
Willing to sit with that anxiety.

Not insisting how others see.
Willing to be wrong.
Listening, accepting, open,
yet also faithful, steadfast, unflinching.
A plumb line, true
to the gravity of God’s grace.

Yes, and a whole community of gentle truth,
bearing witness, standing firm,
being the good news
we wish we could explain.
All of us, even our disagreements,
twined, one plumb line.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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God, we thank you for our deficiencies,
and the blessings of all we lack.
We praise you that none of us is complete,
that we are all in need.
For by this grace we reach out to each other,
dependent on one another, and open,
woven together, need to hand, gift to heart.
Each has what another lacks,
and no one is free of reliance on their neighbors.
By your mercy instill in us such gratitude
that we may never belittle the gifts we are given,
the treasures we have to offer,
and the harmony that arises
from our blessed giving and receiving.
For those in need, we offer our generosity;
and for our own incompleteness we humbly give thanks,
and open our hands to those who provide for us.
Bless those who sustain us in our need,
and support us in our weakness.
May we do so for them.
Amen.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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             Wanting to vindicate himself,
             he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
                                        —Luke 10.29

God is universally kind,
even, Jesus says, to the ungrateful and the wicked.

God asks us to love our neighbors.
Wanting to protect ourselves, we ask:
Who are our neighbors?
Meaning, of course: Who aren’t?

In Jesus’ parable the neighbor is the stranger, the outsider.
The Hebrew Bible says in one verse to love your neighbor—
and 36 times—36 times— it says to love the stranger.
Because you yourselves are strangers, not insiders.

Don’t look for “something to love” in one who is different.
Love them.
Love is not latching on to what we have in common,
or making us alike in some way,
but honoring one who is different.
Allowing them to stay different.
Honoring their being, not their condition.
Seeing God’s image in one who is unlike you.
Because they are God’s,
who is infinite,
and whose image in us is therefore of infinite variety,
and who loves us
who are so different from God,
who is “one of us,”
and also not.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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Out beyond Eden it was also garden.
Still is. And we are still here.
The tangled roots of the Tree of Life
hold us, have never let us go.
Fruit trees gladly share with us,
the grasses embrace us,
the ocean bows at our feet,
forests lift their arms in prayer.
Currents of air and ocean swirl
like Vincent’s starry skies—
too much paint! too much energy!
too much color! wild, unleashed!—
all speaking the language
of beauty and overabundance.
Every creature has its part,
receives its blessing, offers its gift.
The toad is not ridiculed for its looks.
The slug is not accused of being lazy.
The worm is not thought of as lowly.
The crab with its little tweezer hands,
the woodpecker whacking away,
the desert scrub, the barnacles
waving their silly little fronds,
all find their food.
Every great predator contributes.
The lions are subject to the fleas.
Vines grow in Chernobyl,
blossoms, every year, at Auschwitz.
There are dragonflies.

The great power each is given
is not to dominate, or even to survive,
but to belong.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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Beloved,
news of your sadness
will soon reach me
through the usual channels.
But I already know it.
I am the rain of your sorrow
before the clouds
even come to you.
My heart goes out to you
before I even hear your prayers.
Though you think me distant
I am right here,
in it.
I hold you and your grief
like my twin children.
In time I will bear you both
to a place of joy,
but now I am simply present,
though unseen, hidden
in your cries and questions,
in your silence.
My love, I am the emptiness
that holds you.

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