Category: Reflections

We love our desires,
worship our wants,
covet lush parks where we can hide,
a lovely garden with no way out,
where serpents wrap themselves around us.

In the wilderness,
empty land stripped of cover,
the bones of our hunger are exposed.
Not a lush place where everything is given,
but sparse land where everything is questioned.
We pick our way through the canyons of fear,
along the dry riverbeds of our attachments,
the large stones of our desires.
Our hunger erodes.

Only when we collapse with no other option
do we know we are fed
by a different bread.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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Not a box of chocolates
or spray of roses,
but ash smudged on your forehead:
a reminder, dust,
that you shall some day blow away.
Dirt in the shape of a heart,
dust in the form of a life—
now, this life:
given, but so briefly,
like a breath,
cherished, with such sweet hope.
A Valentine from God’s own longing heart,
both praise and plea:

Love you to death.
Won’t you be mine?

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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Doubting, or woeful, or just bored, perhaps,
she sits in the overheated chapel,
end of the pew, by the window,
staring at the ochre splash of sunlight
against the communion railing,
and beyond it the dark corner
obscured in shadow behind the ray of light.

The voices drone on
but what she hears is the echoes
of all those prayers she has said
and psalms she has recited,
maybe to no avail, she thinks,
those hopeful words she now doubts
but still hears echoing like shadows
behind the light of all her thoughts.

A dust mote drifts out of the black into the light,
and she stares at it: like her, just drifting,
without ground, without purpose,
without flock or herd or home.
She sort of loves it for that—

and then a too-warm ray of sun,
an ocean wave of light washes over her
to behold that like it
she is held, in light, radiant,
and seen,
such
loved
dust.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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The river calmly lends itself
to the the sea.

Earth lends itself to me,
a little slowly eroding hill

of nerves and tissues,
a potter’s work finished but not fired,

an earthling, luminous as the dragonfly.
Then I return the gift.

So you, Beloved,
lend yourself to me…

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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           Suddenly when they looked around,
           they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.
           As they were coming down the mountain,
           he ordered them to tell no one….
                                 —Mark 9.8-9

Oh, we saw it all right,
the light, the Elders, the Voice.
But explaining it… don’t even try.

When you’ve seen mystery
it vibrates inside you without words.
Don’t still it with them.

When you’ve seen glory,
don’t prove it, don’t brag.
Let it shine.

They’ll argue about whether
he’s the Son of God. Ignore it.
Look at the light in what he does.

When Moses came down
the mountain from God
people just knew.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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Here’s the great Treasure you seek
that the old Guide pointed out on the ancient maps,
that only the most intrepid explorers find,
who search unceasingly despite pelting rains
and the scorn of neighbors and strangers alike,
who read the stars and hear the songs
others do not hear, who follow the unexpected path
of the Guide who seems to wander but knows the way,
who forgo all comforts and endure great suffering
and kneel in the grotto hidden in plain sight
to lay their hands upon the gleaming treasure,
and bear it home tucked into their shirts,
the discovery that shines in the dark,
the Great Treasure the Guide has told us about,
that lies waiting for each of us,
the pearl of great price,
the wisdom that saves the world,
stunning in its simplicity and power.
The cynical miss it, the greedy overlook it,
the hopeless throw it away. But here it is.

It is this:
You are God’s Beloved.
Everyone is.

Behold.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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           Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John,
           and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves.
                         —Mark 9.2

What’s six days earlier is what this story is about:
Jesus pointing to the cross.

Six days is a bit short, not a full week yet, without a seventh day,
a darkness-and-light, radiance and shadow, a dying and rising.

Jesus accepted the cross; Peter objected.
But God says, “Listen to him.”

This is not just glory,
this is the light of Easter.

Lit by the light of resurrection,
go the way of the cross.

The Risen One
is ready to be crucified.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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It began as ordinarily
as a brilliant sunrise ought to:
huge, lazy salmon swam through the trees
flaming on the horizon,
the eyebrows of the eastern sky
raised as if it was about to say
something magnificent,
and then the flamboyant sun,
everything on fire with flushed cheeks,
everything a gleaming treasure,
you just wanted to take its face in your hands
and kiss it—
and then a cloud, and it went suddenly grey,
gold and peach drained
into shabby bits and shadows,
the poorly erased side of a barn,
the scumbled trunks of trees,
the colors of dead grass and sidewalks.
And that—that—was the miracle:
all that light pressed into dull things,
all that glory shrunk down
into ordinariness,
all of heaven hidden in earth,
something vast contained,
in what I now behold
moment by moment:
the hand, the table, the door,
the person at the door.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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A heavy snow has rendered the land
in black and white,
the woods in thick cloaks,
every tree and branch broken, bent or bowed,
the path obscured by snow-piled limbs,
trees down, landmarks smudged and wrong.
Overburdened branches crack and fall,
and sigh, and settle and return to silence.
I go over them, or around.

Hard going.
The world looms, its plunderings,
the way it has me turn aside,
its strange beauty, its knee-deep weight,
presses against me.
I would turn back, but this is the way.
This belabored path
takes me home.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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A snowflake lands
on this hemlock needle

Tree, needle, flake and I
with our own life spans

I behold them
flake and needle holding onto each other

with what must be something like
love.




–––––––––––––
Weather Report

Variable,
intermittent and passing,
until it becomes clear
that only love
and not its objects
remains forever.

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