Category: Reflections

Eclipsed by your looming absence
you become strange, the light changed,
as if poured from a different vessel—
occasion for fears and fantasies.

And yet you are eclipsed
in every night of sleep,
and look, we have survived.

It is not your absence, or even your distance,
but what comes between that turns you strange,
that makes for unnerving incomprehension.

What we see and sense
is never the whole truth;
a radiance, more steady than our faith,
endures.

Why be afraid of the dark
when it shines so?

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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           “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands,
           and put my finger in the mark of the nails
           and my hand in his side,
           I will not believe.”
                        —John 20.25


Sometimes you are Thomas,
shattered, needing evidence
of the goodness of God, the power of grace,
and theories will not do. Stories are not enough.
Wounded, you need something you can see,
something you can touch and feel.
This is not doubt; this reaching out,
this wanting to connect: it’s faith. Bless it.

Sometimes you are Jesus
and around you are others, broken,
who need evidence of the goodness of God.
Stories will not do.
You will need to embody resurrection,
give flesh to forgiveness and the power of love over fear,
make real the grace that brings life out of death
and re-makes us when we have been ruined.
They will see it in your wounds.
They will touch it in your presence.
They will feel it in your life.
Their reaching out
is God coming near you.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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           Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you.
          As Abba God has sent me, so I send you.”
          When he had said this, he breathed on them
          and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
                          —John 20.21-22


This miracle, breath:
when air becomes flesh,
spirit becomes body.
Now we are the body,
and Christ our breath, our spirit.

Spirit of peace,
untroubled by the threats of the world.
Body of Christ,
sent in power to love and heal and forgive,
Christ breathing, eternally, in us.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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Well, the day has come and gone,
but I have not been thrust from the tomb.
Honestly, I am not much changed from Friday.
Like Thomas, for whom the miracle has occurred,
but not yet.
Like seeing the flash of a distant explosion
but the shock wave hasn’t hit me yet.
I have seen the light of a mystery
working within me, far beneath my senses,
my understanding, even my faith.
In that mystery I trust.
Every day is Easter, they say;
they should say: sometimes it is still before that dawn,
fear and guilt still echoing,
pain still real, death still clinging—
though the miracle I shall see fully only later
is unfolding already.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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           “The kingdom of the world
           has become the kingdom of our God and of God’s Messiah,
           and God will reign forever and ever.”

                        —Revelation 11.15

Easter is Judgment Day.
The great work of all our empires
of state and hearts are overturned;
our walls are broken down.
All our judgments are overruled.
All our cruelties rescinded.
Our sin revoked.
Our aloneness has been colonized
by God’s loving presence.
Even death has been dismembered, powerless.
Our fear is sentenced to life
locked up in hope and trust and joy.
Our death is taken from us,
and replaced by Life that is unassailable and infinite.
With the flaming sword of sunrise,
God has vanquished the shadows,
and even the darkness shines,
even the grave gives forth glory.

The Crucified One is risen.
Alleluia!

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light www.unfoldinglight.net
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           He said to them, “Do not be alarmed;
           you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified.
           He has been raised; he is not here.” …
           They went out and fled from the tomb,
           for terror and amazement had seized them;
           and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.
                                            —Mark 16.6, 8


Yes, Easter is the bedrock
(rolled away) of our faith,
but before we settle into that exultant groove,
pause and give a moment
simply to be startled, and maybe offended,
as if God has made death into an April Fools’ prank—
or to be afraid, even,
that God upends everything we thought we knew,
that neither we nor our beliefs are in control,
that God will act and we will be dumbfounded.
Even our glib Easter faith will be blown away.
Faith is not certainty, but astonishment.

Christ is risen!
Whaddya know?

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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           “Do not be alarmed;
           you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified.
           He has been raised; he is not here.”
                                            —Mark 16.6

God has done what God is free to do,
as with the first “Let there be light,”
what God has never done before,
what God is always doing:
dismantling and making anew the world
and all we thought possible.
The dominion of death,
and all its rulers and warriors,
have been defeated, forever.
What has transgressed is forgiven.
What has died is given new life.
The entire world, all of life and even death itself
is in the hands of God, the God of life.
The light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness cannot overcome it.

Christ is risen.
Alleluia.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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A day without purpose or liturgy,
vast in its cruel, silent emptiness.
Bereft, gutted, regrettable.

A day to sit with myself,
my failures, my sorrows,
wrap them around me like a shawl.

A day to sit with death,
amid life’s flock of losses,
feeding the pigeons of grief at my feet.

A day to sit with the world
and its shambles,
its unfailing choice to ruin itself.

Let the depth of the day deepen,
the sea of sorrow swell downward,
the dark deeps complete and useless.

Everything empties out.
Even grief and guilt are hollow.
Even the beating heart has nothing to say.

In the insistent blank
let there be no possibility, none:
an empty canvas for God.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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Embracing our most fearful,
returning again to our anguish,
the Gentle One shines so bright with patient love
to make the darkness a mirror:
in love, entering our wound,
Christ escapes our doom;
reduced to nothing, becomes infinite;
God going into our pain,
healing coming out of it;
our shadow pierced by light;
our worst, and our highest possibility,
God’s leastness, and greatness;
the cruelest of us, the kindest of God;
our most senseless
met by God’s most incomprehensible;
in our farthest abandonment
God’s most intimate presence;
the death of our death
writhing in the crucible of love;
the power of our evil to build empire
and the world-destroying power of grace
to make another.
God’s weakness, God’s might,
our confession, our hope.

The darkest paradox
is that we who draw near to the awfulness
might be made more kind;
that in the face of death
we might be given enough life to say,
Jesus, we are sorry for what we have done to you.
By your grace, undo us.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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Just before the cock crows,
the fading echo of my blasted words
obscures the other sound I don’t yet hear,
the sound of cloth tearing,
or roots coming up out of the ground,
when I pulled the weave of my heart
from yours.
I packed up my eyes and left.
With a dull knife of muteness
I cut my pain from yours
and discarded the rest.
The threads make no sound,
nerves squirming on the ground,
reaching like so many baby’s arms
into empty air.

As the cock crows, the jagged sound
covers the silence of you
carrying the wound that is secretly mine,
healing what I can’t yet see,
forgiving what I will eventually know,
walking toward the grave I needn’t fear.

And then, after, in the startled stillness
pounding in my head,
that great vast echoing hall of silence,
I barely hear, though still it resounds in me,
the quiet of stitching, tiny and steady.

I haven’t cut the thread after all, have I?

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:

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