Unfolding Light

             “Those who love me will keep my word,
             and my Father will love them,
             and we will come to them
             and make our home with them.”
                         —John 14.23

There’s no throne room, but a kitchen,
a table we sit around that we all have scrubbed.
We share meals, and stories, and chores,
the small closeness of a family warmly knit.
The conversation over the bread and wine
is intimate, honest, easy. There are in-jokes,
plans and memories, things we noticed,
dreams, what we’ve gone through together,
thoughts about events of the day. And those looks
across the table, lovers’ gazes, or how parents
watch children they cherish, the wordless nearness
of siblings who love each other. Sometimes
it gets late and we don’t bother to turn on the lights,
we just keep talking in the dark, or sit, silent.
There are mistakes, of course, and arguments,
but always forgiveness. When we go to our rooms,
or out the next day into the world,
it seems we never really leave each other.
The home is inside us.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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             Peace I leave with you;
             my peace I give to you.
             I do not give to you as the world gives.
             Do not let your hearts be troubled,
             and do not let them be afraid.
                         —John 14.27

This is the peace of Christ
that will never be taken from you:

You are God’s Beloved.
God is at peace with you, always.

Christ accompanies you,
and will be kind to you. Always.

The Spirit is in you.
You are always free to choose kindness.

Go in peace,
and do not be afraid.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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             “Those who love me will keep my word,
             and my Father will love them,
             and we will come to them
             and make our home with them.
                                      —John 14.23

When I’ve hauled away the leftovers
of our making and buying and throwing,
pulled and carted off all the invasives,
plants that seemed easy and harmless,
cleared a space, open and blank,
and fed the soil with the riches
of its own forest floor, and planted
blueberries and milkweed
and other native species, then I wait.
Soon cardinals and monarchs come,
bluebirds and tanagers throng to my garden,
because they are native, and they know
they belong among plants like these.

When I clear my mind of my greed,
haul off all the shoulds and ought tos,
and just wait, pretty soon I notice
the Beloved making nests in me,
the whole divine family of God
moving in, because they belong here.
They have for thousands of years.
It turns out, in the heart of my soul
God is a native species.

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

There is no creed but this,
no sacrament, no other mark.

And there is no act of God,
no answered prayer, but this.

That I may love more fully,
I am loved.

For all my failure,
I am loved.

Only in imaginary worlds
are there other laws.

Only in my most deluded fears
would I hide from gravity itself.

That I may love as I have been loved
is my life-long ripening.

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