Daily Reflections and Worship Resources
Perfect silence, hold me still.
Forgiving grace, set me free.
Infinite mercy, fill me gently.
Courageous love, bear me over.
Ridiculous joy, let’s do this.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 0:39 — 910.7KB)
The Holy One is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
The Holy One is good to all,
and God’s compassion is over all that God has made.
—Psalm 145.8-9
This gospel is repeated over and over in scripture.
Some want to modify it, qualify it, compromise it,
or dilute it with some kind of divinely justified meanness.
But that’s not God; that’s just meanness.
There are two religions. One is the Religion of Being Right.
“Get it right,” God says, “or I’ll punish you.”
The other is the Religion of Being in Love.
“I love you,” God says. “Don’t you want to live like that?”
You can’t have both. If you follow all the rules,
sooner or later you’ll hurt somebody. If you love everybody,
sooner or later you’ll break a rule.
They’re both in the Bible. But see which one Jesus chooses,
over and over. “I desire mercy, not performing sacrifices.”
Even God’s judgment is not punishment, but love.
The greatest goal of our faith is to perfect our love,
that it be untainted by anger or self-righteousness.
This is not a discipline of trying harder, but of accepting
more deeply, more freely, the perfect love we are given.
Shed the anger, your own and God’s,
and let God be perfectly compassionate
so that you may be perfectly compassionate.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:05 — 2.9MB)
Let these leaves be in you, rich
in the loveliness of their renunciation.
Let the gracious confidence of trees be yours,
who offer without the smallest sense of loss.
This is simply the day it is, and the season.
There is no argument, no clinging
to leaves, or the need for leaves; no more
resistance to their falling than to their budding.
The trees do not protest, or even hope.
They calmly stand and sow their gentle
flecks of color in the woods.
What happens is perfectly all right.
Whatever departs from you will shine,
bathed in the light of your release.
Let these leaves be in you, who in the varied
radiance of their surrender say simply, “Yes.”
________________
Weather Report
Loss;
moderate winds of time,
increasing throughout the day,
will blow most everything away,
except the sunlight,
which remains stoutly unaffected.
Expect a warming trend,
and increasing humility.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:38 — 2.3MB)
Sometimes when I feel inadequate
I come here, where I have erected my monument.
A brass plaque declares
my accomplishments, my deserving.
It’s a tourist trap. An old castle, king long dead.
A deserted mall. A ghost town.
Nobody lives here.
I abandon these ruins.
I come home to you.
In the candle light
there is bread at the table,
and talk late into the night.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 0:42 — 980.5KB)
They asked: In the resurrection,
whose wife will the woman be?
—Luke 20.33
Jesus says: No one’s.
We are all children of the resurrection,
children of God—siblings.
What that means for us after we die,
we’ll have to see.
But even now: we are all siblings,
all one, which the final revealing will reveal.
In the Real Life, masked by this one,
we are not divided by families,
even marriage, but united:
married to everyone, to all Creation.
We are to love, honor and cherish
no one any less than our beloved spouse.
Stand among trees and say “We are kin.”
Go to a river and greet your sister.
Behold the crowd on the street
and declare “I am yours.”
Thus will you know a bit
of the mystery of resurrection.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:23 — 1.9MB)
Halloween seems scarier this year,
maybe because everything is scary,
monsters let loose,
masked people at the door
(not asking for candy),
people costumed, not what they appear,
women made pretty little things or witches.
The planet more and more
like a boiling cauldron.
A ruined House. A haunting.
A dusk of fear, a pall of dread.
Something actually bad is afoot.
Death walks the streets
all casual like it owns the place.
But all dressed up and happy, see,
so nobody really has to freak.
That’s what makes it scary, the lie.
But listen: it’s not the end, it’s only the Eve.
On the day after, come all the saints,
the kind and calm and steady,
the hopeful and courageous,
who have faced these monsters before,
who have “come through the great tribulation”
and know how to do this.
And we ourselves, having gotten
the heebie-jeebies out of our system,
join them in the long, hard march
right smack dab through the nightmare
to something peaceful and beautiful.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:50 — 2.5MB)
Can one be free of one’s ghosts?
Oh, believe in them: shadows of the past
unreleased, trailing their tatters,
still trying to be, unable to have been.
Look at us, bending over the stones,
always with such love and remorse.
To be free of them
you have to look. Touch and see.
Become permeable as a ghost,
the world seeping through you.
You have to become more real than ghost,
solid, touching, touched.
Run your heart’s fingers over the
smooth warm wood of this morning.
Notice the grain in the words
of the one speaking to you.
Let what is real consume
what is only suspected.
The shadow of a doubt
evaporates in light.
Its invisibility cloak disappears.
It finally dies, fading
from its belligerent shades
into the dark mass of real things,
the vanishment of regret forgiven,
the substance of beginning anew,
the heft of this day’s joy.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:32 — 2.1MB)
The little fairy princess whines at every door,
the little snot, and would just as soon whap you
with that wand as say anything nice. But she’s cute, huh?
You wouldn’t believe how seriously
the little astronaut actually does want
to escape the gravity of earth, his house, his life.
The fierce, roaring tyrannosaurus rex
will come home and share his candy
because he doesn’t like to see his little sister cry.
The scary witch says “Trick or treat” in her scariest voice
but it’s not as scary to her as her father.
The regal king, crown and everything,
hopes nobody from school sees him
because he knows they don’t like him.
For the little six year old girl Supreme Court justice,
it’s not a costume. She’s practicing.
The marauding pirate
doesn’t really want to be there;
he’s an extreme introvert.
He just does this to make Dad happy.
There’s plenty of candy at home.
The zombie with one eye will drop
his bloody axe and fall asleep
on his mommy’s lap tonight,
one gentle arm around her neck.
Dad, standing out in the shadows,
watches the monsters and superheroes
and thinks about the office,
how these kids are just pretending to pretend;
only when they grow up will they
get serious about it.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:54 — 2.6MB)
We think little lights shine
in the great darkness,
small stars in the deep night—
but what if it’s the other way?
Little shadows lurk
within the Great Light.
Even the deepest of them
is shot through with light,
surrounded by light, embedded in light,
light-bound, and so lightly held.
The universe is mostly love.
All its darkness is the negative space,
the little vacuums into which the light
continues to flow.
No matter the little bits of darkness,
we live in the light.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 0:58 — 1.3MB)
I’m thinking of a white guy
who’s felt boxed out,
losing the sense of ease he once had
(don’t you dare call it privilege),
trying to get ahead
in whatever way works for him,
so he ends up colluding
with the rich and powerful,
though it gouges his neighbors,
so guess how much they like him,
but still there’s something crumbling
about his life, not satisfied, still searching,
but nobody makes much of an opening for him,
which is why he finds himself up a tree
when Jesus passes by
and chooses him, of all people,
to have lunch with at his table,
where we all find ourselves,
thinking anew about what is given
and asked of us.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:02 — 1.4MB)