Category: Reflections

             They did not receive him
             because his face was set toward Jerusalem.
                        —Luke 9.53

The Samaritans are thinking:
He’s not one of us,
and we won’t treat him like he is.
We reject him for failing to reject the right people.

The disciples are thinking:
How could they not receive us?
Don’t we have a right?
Don’t we automatically belong?

Our egos are thinking:
How can I be “in” if there’s no “out?”
I’m better than somebody, right?
There must be some line between me and them.

Jesus is thinking:
Blessed are you who are excluded
for refusing to exclude,
for even God is spurned for this very reason.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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Before you despair give thanks.
For the miracle that you are here,
that your flesh has sustained you.
For all those who have loved you,
even poorly, along the way,
mostly unnoticed.
For all those who do not despair,
and the grace sustaining them.
For the people who were the words
of the Teacher written for you, and those
who were merely the blackboard.
For all the beauty in the world,
every bit—not just the sunset
but the earth, the sun, the eyes.
For your own forgiveness (it’s a fact,
don’t argue, write it down).
For all those little moments that showed
what you were hoping for:
the unexpected gift,
the healing of a wound,
the little wren that came close,
the child’s laughter that once
broke the balloon of your sorrow.
For Emily Dickinson and the color green
and thumbnails and that whales sing,
give thanks for each one—
don’t leave any out, list them all.
Perhaps your despair will forget
what it wanted to say.
But if it remembers, give thanks
for the grace to despair and carry on.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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To honor the Sabbath is not just to take the day,
but to honor the holiness of open time,
pausing, holding your hands empty of all but God.

Empty your time: give room for God to act,
for grace to enter, for wonder to surprise,
for what is becoming to become.

Vacate your importance. Sweep clean
the world’s dependence on you. Accomplish
nothing; make room for the infinite Unseen.

Even amid the cries of the world and the fireworks
of Pentecost, you can step aside and be still.
Others will sing while you take a breath.

The greatest sign of hope is to act for love;
the second greatest is to let God. Vacate,
take sabbath, and the emptiness will be divine.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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Pentecost gets us all fired up to speak…
but the world is aching for us to listen.
The miracle of Pentecost likely began
in the disciples listening to the heart-cries
of those gathered around them.

How many souls are silenced?
A story that’s never been told,
a song that’s never been heard all the way through.
A voice in so many languages, none of them words.

The cries from the crib of one’s soul, unheard,
can fester, become anger, become taunts.
But deep listening is good soul soil.
The cries of the oppressed are a powerful good:
they listen, and know their own song.

Neither correcting nor congratulating,
but purely listening, creating a nest
where another’s heart may shelter,
offering the gift of being tended to,
ties the thread the world is made of.

It may seem you are doing nothing,
but in your listening
the bright flame of Pentecost quietly burns.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light www.unfoldinglight.net
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             One who believes in me
             will also do the works that I do
             and, in fact, will do greater works than these.
                                      —John 14.12


Dear one, I have given you light.
It takes courage to hold the fire,
but courage I have also given you.

Do not be afraid.
I have given you an inextinguishable flame.
People can hurt you,
but they can’t harm the light.
Darkness is powerless against light;
it can’t help but welcome it.
Even in the deepest night love abides.

In the darkness it is me
you hold in your hands, radiant;
and I am also the darkness.
If you are beset, I am with you.
When you are alone, I am in you.
The mystery at the center of your soul
is an eternal flame.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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             And how is it that we hear, each of us,
             in our own native language?
                                      —Acts 2.8

I crave chocolate, but that doesn’t matter.
Years ago my wife craved carrots.
She ate so many her skin turned orange.
We found out it was because her body
really craved beta carotene
because she had cancer. (She lived.)

Sometimes we hear what we want to hear,
and un-hear or mis-hear the rest.
But maybe on Pentecost they heard
because it was something they knew they needed,
something their soul, not just their ego, craved.
Not just a treat, but life.

Sometimes we crave chocolate from God,
hoping to hear what we want.
But deeper, trickier, more silent,
sometimes even more foreign sounding,
is the real Word that we crave.
Your deepest craving is probably true.

Imagine that we are given
not just what people think they want,
but what their souls most deeply crave,
and we are give the power to share it,
so they hear, in their own language,
the grace of God.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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We were sitting around talking
about how he loved us,
when it flared up in us—not a memory,
but inward fire, the love itself,
like a mother’s love that drives her
into a burning house to save her children—
his love, this unbidden passion
for the world, flamed up in us
and drove us into the streets
to seek the stranger, to embrace
the foreigner, and to speak—
how to convey it?—this love
for all who’d been told
they were outsiders,
in languages not our own:
locked doors opened,
fruit placed in their mouths,
hands laid on their shoulders,
belonging nested in the crib
of their hearts. Homecoming.
That day there were no strangers.
We were all kin, all learning
how to listen together for the first time
to this mystery rising up to greet us
in each other, all of us losing
our tongues for the language of God.
Then we knew that fire Jesus had
had not been put out:
it was in us, now, spreading, yes, actually,
like wildfire.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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         “The glory that you have given me
         I have given them.”
                           —John 17.22

God has given you the same glory God gives Christ.
You are not created in error or failure, but in glory.
God’s glory shines in you. God is not served
when you dismiss God’s work, or dishonor the light.

Beneath the grime of our judgments, the slop
and crud of our feelings, invisible even
to the person themselves, is a great magnificence,
humble, often lonely, yearning to be seen.

God’s glory shines in everyone, in every child,
in the demented curmudgeon, the strung-out addict,
the convict and the executioner, and most of all
in the person you meet next. Do you see it?

Like an antique dealer looking past the dust,
a mother loving her child beneath the stains,
learn to see as God, with eyes for glory.
Seeing so will make your own eyes brighter.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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Yes, child, I hear you.
I know your suffering.
I know because I am in you, suffering.
And no, it is not fair.
But then, nothing is fair.
I did not create “fair.”
I did not create “deserving.”
You all did.
I created only being—
and, because it is mine, it is being Beloved.
You wonder if I’m here,
listening, responding.
Remember when you fell,
and your mommy held you?
Remember her love,
and how it comforted you
and made it better?
I don’t manage the world.
I don’t push things around,
not bullets or germs or people.
But I love you.
I won’t save you from life’s hurts,
even the awful ones.
But I am here, holding you.
With all my heart I want your wholeness,
and even now in ways you can’t see
healing is happening in your body and soul,
and in the world.
That is me. That is my love.
My dear one, I hear you.
I pray to you, to trust me.
I am holding you.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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Abandon your thoughts of thoughts or feelings,
the moods that come and go.

Hope is a practice, an act you can do
even as you mourn, or regret, or dread.

Hope is an act of trust, regardless
of what the future may hold,

trust in the gravity of grace,
the life that sings in all things:

the arctic tern facing an ocean
who lifts her wings, and goes,

the stream that unfurls through the woods,
the roots that reach and curl around stones,

the earth that circles around the sun
one more time, and one more again.

The child who turns to her mother.
The hand of the Healer on every torn thing.

Hope is not wishing but acting.
Birthing. Planting. Getting up.

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