Unfolding Light

By a pond a dragonfly lands
near you, as if to greet you.
You might be enraptured
by its magical blue,
its perfect stained glass window wings,
the marvel of its many-globed eyes—
but instead, even as it pauses before you,
you are thinking about the laundry.

This is no different than those moments
when you are anxious about the world,
about the greed and injustice and evil
you know you must face,
and you forget the Spirit that lives in you,
its miraculous peace, its enveloping beauty,
its luminous, transparent wings,
its immeasurable power.

Be mindful what you’re mindful of.
Let the Spirit have your attention
and lead you to right action and mighty living
with courage and peace.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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When all is lost,
and all we have to hold onto is our grief,
when the jagged blade of cruelty has had its way,
and our powers are merely ashes in our hands,
when the vast emptiness closes in
and wraps itself around us like claws, like fog,
when the great No has spoken—then
rings out the Great But Yes.
What is surrendered into the hand of God
is given new life.
It’s as undeniable, and yet pure mystery, as the Big Bang—
life, not out of nothing, but out of the heart of God.
Now is revealed the light
to which all darkness succumbs,
the life that was always there, even in death.
All sorrow and failure, cruelty and injustice,
evil and death itself is consumed like food
for the body of grace, Word made flesh again.

Christ is risen.
Always.
Every act of love
is a seed sown.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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Resurrection emerges
after winter’s grave desolations:
holiness let loose like pollen in the air,
the scent of blossoming trees.

Oh, we still have to weed our little plot
of its evil and cruelty. Our chores still shriek
and open their little baby bird beaks.
Even death, our own, stands around waiting its turn.

But we’ve come through. We’ve seen the earth
crack wide and yield green living things,
whose roots have grown plentiful beneath us.
Every death’s made smaller by a hidden, greater life.

Some secret song compels this dance, some love
beyond our knowing, that we know, carries us,
like babies on her back, through death to something
new, whose light, beyond our seeing, is always dawning.



__________________
Weather Report

Widening.
As a no-pressure zone advances,
unimagined possibilities
condense into real life
while warmth evaporates the gloom
of guilt and loneliness.
Temperatures in the mid to high alleluias.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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             “I give you a new commandment,
             that you love one another
             just as I have loved you.”
                         —John 13.34

Look at the river.
It has no water of its own.

It receives from upstream,
and passes on what it receives.

You are not the spring,
but the riverbank.

You don’t have to have love,
you only have to pass it on.

Imagine loving as you have been loved,
rivering through your heart.

The only means to fuller love
is to receive more fully.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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The miracle is the absence.
The emptiness of the grave,
of our hands. The letting go.
Freedom from grasping.

Grief becomes openness.
The need no longer
for there to be the body
that we can still love.

An open door,
always, insistently open.
The empty space
that can’t be disproved.

The Presence that eludes
all containers, even the present,
that has escaped everything
into everything.

A dilation of this moment,
an aperture opening, letting in light,
a vacancy so pure
everything is clear and distinct.

The space left behind
when matter has turned to energy,
even death turned into love
needing nothing, even its own flesh.

After pure change
what once had to be is now missing,
Light splits open the darkness,
revealing its innards, transparent.

The substance of weakness and failure
evaporates into a vast generosity,
escaping the heaviness of necessity,
as light as light.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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             “I give them eternal life, and they will never perish.
             No one will snatch them out of my hand.”
                         —John 10.28

Because, dear one,
my hand is my heart,
sinew-bound you are,
flesh of my flesh,
not just in my hand but of it,
inseparable.
In your farthest removes
you are still held,
in your wildest temptation,
your awfullest sin,
your worst failure, you are mine.
In your worst sickness,
your deepest depression,
your toughest seizure,
your foulest addiction,
you belong to me,
and they have no grasp of you.
On the street, in handcuffs,
on the witness stand, or denied the stand,
in the torture prison,
detained, deported, disappeared—
you are here in my hand,
heart-held, heard, indivisible
from my deepest love.
In the face of hell itself
I’ve got you.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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             “I give them eternal life, and they will never perish.”
                                         —John 10.28

This doesn’t mean you’ll go on
for a long time after you die.
(It’s life that’s eternal, not you.)
It means right now you are part
of a mystery that is infinitely deep,
given life that can’t be taken from you.
You are part of the Body of God’s love
which can’t be killed.
Love doesn’t die; it evaporates,
still present in another form.

Love is the Word that was in the beginning
and ever shall be, that creates all things.
When you love you are part
of the original “Let there be light,”
that lives on even after the darkness is gone.
Even in failure, love accomplishes its purpose.

This promise is not only for comfort,
but for courage.
Love, then. Let nothing stop you.
It will matter forever.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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             “My sheep hear my voice.
             I know them, and they follow me.”
                                      —John 10.27

Beloved,
give me grace today
to listen for your voice,
to know the voice of mercy,
the call of delight,
and to distinguish it from the voice of fear,
the voice of resentment or reaction.
Help me listen for the voice that knows me,
the presence that honors my soul,
that delights in me, that magnifies me.
Give me grace to trust
the voice of love,
and to follow.

Breath prayer:
                         Listen … follow

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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         These are they who have come out of the great ordeal;
         they have washed their robes
         and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.
                                      —Revelation 7.14

In the shadowed valley
despite all cruelty
they have submitted
to a mighty kindness,

opened themselves
to a breath flowing
through them for others,

an eternal river
that will find its way,
even through death.

It has torn much away—
for some their very bodies—
but the life can’t be stopped,
this river that bears them in love.

They have been brought through.
They are changed.
There is nothing they cannot touch.
Though they seem to have lost everything,
and appear torn—dead, even—
the light is still in them,
and the breath, and the song,
singing.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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             “As a youngster you would put yourself together
             and go where you wanted.
             But as you mature you reach out.
             You let others work with you.
             You allow yourself to be led
             to places you wouldn’t have chosen.”
                                      —John 21.18 (my version)

It’s how you grow in faith.
It’s how you mature as a person.
It’s how you deal with getting old.

You get over thinking your life is about you.
You open yourself to the pull
of your belonging to a greater body.

You tend to relationships.
You let others be your center, your purpose.
Your goal is not having, but conveying.

You give up trying to be in control.
You allow yourself to be led.
You entrust yourself to grace.

You are willing to find yourself
in new places—scary, even—with courage.
Because you are guided. Accompanied. Held.

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