Category: Reflections

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.

A great old tree has fallen
and taken a few more with it
in its tumble, swept trunks bare,
and left some leaning, bearing bodies.
The one armed pallbearers will stand
a hundred years without regret.
Beneath its jumbled heap of tragedy
great wounds of earth gape brown and fresh
where limbs have pierced and gouged.
The ferns look upward quietly.
A sapling, beech, bent over double,
turns a hand up to the sky.
What lives still in this mess will live,
rooted in these fertile ruins.
There is no surrender,
they are not coping,
but simply, as always,
reaching for the light.
Beetles have already taken notice,
and the ants begin.

Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

__________________

Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.

Last week they found the Higgs boson! For all you non-calculator-carrying mystical meditating un-geek poetry-reading hippie types, this is a really big deal.

When scientists came up with the math that explains how the physical universe holds together, they had a perfect equation, except for one thing. It explained a universe in which nothing had any mass—there was no substance. In order for things to have mass, there had to be one more factor, that they called the Higgs field, named for the guy who did the math. It’s a dimension of the physical universe that gives things mass when they interact with it. If it’s there, the math says, then there should be a tiny particle, called the Higgs boson. If they found that particle, it would prove almost everything. Trouble is, for 48 years, since it was predicted in 1964, nobody’s been able to find it. It’s been humorously called the “God particle”—not by scientists, but the popular media. In fact some scientists have suggested calling it—pardon the scientific jargon here—the Goddamn particle, for its elusiveness and the trouble and expense it has caused among those trying to find it. Until last week.

(Higgs Boson walks into a Catholic church. Priest says, “How dare you call yourself the God particle! Blasphemer! Get out!” Higgs Boson says: “Well, OK—but without me, you can’t have mass!”)

One thing I love about this whole thing is the “faith in something not seen” they had. Another is the sense of wonder. And another is the Higgs field. Present in all the universe, it gives things mass when they interact with it. Isn’t that sort of like God? God is present in all the universe, and when you interact with God, you are given substance. Nothing else gives you substance, not what happens to you, not what you do, not what others think of you. It’s God’s interaction with you. You aren’t responsible for the substance of your existence: it’s a gift from God. In a way you are a God particle, a tiny manifestation of the holy mystery that holds everything together.

So celebrate with the particle physicists. Like the Higgs boson, it turns out you’re more than just a figment of the world’s imagination. You’re proof of the existence of God.

Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

__________________

Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
         
         

I went on vacation for a week.

The world went on without me;
         Another bore it carefully,
         whose world it is, not mine.

I was purely who I am,
         proving nothing.
         earning nothing.

I was present for no end
         but to be present.

It was lovely.

This is the gift of Sabbath.

May it come to you again and again,
         like breathing, like a heartbeat,
         a Word from God.

Shalom.

         
         
Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

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

God of Sabbath, Master of infinite playfulness,
bless those who are on vacation.
Protect them from the worries of home.
Guide them, that they may become lost
in a new place, with no way but to wander.
Shepherd them to still places.
Watch over them, that they may not stumble
into work or obligation.
Grant them wonder, delight, renewal and release.
Run the world without them.
May their fireworks be grand, their campfires lovely,
their beaches uncrowded, their traffic at peace.
When they are renewed,
bring them home safe, whole and changed.
And may the savoring pace of their absence
stay with them, by your grace.
Amen.

•

I’m off. See you July 9.

Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

__________________

Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.

         
         

Your life is an open doorway
where God enters the world.
What you say and do,
what you notice,
what you hold and set down,
each is a portal.

The passage is best left open,
not filled.

Fully formed opinions
are of no use,
nor are collections
of little buttons,
things you’ve done right,

only the space
to let God by
and maybe a little
of the breeze
of heaven.

         
         

Deep Blessings,

Pastor Steve

__________________

Steve Garnaas-Holmes

Unfolding Light

www.unfoldinglight.net

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.

         “Daughter, your faith has made you well.”
                  —Mark 5.34

The sacred blood that flowed twelve perfect years
was never stanched—the healing was not such.
Drawn by the Heart most wounded, salved in tears,
still flowing and too sacred to be touched
she surged through calloused throngs; and stained his cloak
and heart with dark, unclotted faith, her true
blood sacrifice, her tithe of pain, that spoke
of life within her flowing, flowing through.
Heart pierced, he blessed his new blood-sister’s flow;
they both the holy mystery revealed
of wounds blood-sanctified, in which we know
that life is uncontained, and we are healed.
The cross thus washed in double flow of blood,
the curse thus hemorrhaged, life renewed its tide,
a welling up, a sea released, a flood
of life her tear-stained face could never hide.

Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

_______________________________
Copyright © Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
         
         
A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But Jesus was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”
                  — Mark 4.36-40

Storms will come, count on it.
Times may come when you feel God is asleep,
not taking care of you, protecting you.
“Don’t you care?” you will pray.
Of course God cares, but just isn’t worried. Not at all.

You see, you are perishing, my dear, bit by bit.
God won’t take that from you,
won’t come between you and the storm,
but will go through it with you.

Even as the waves of your fear
wrap their white knuckles around your boat
there he is, curled in the stern,
unworried, vulnerable, babylike, willing.
Do you think he’ll let it sink if he’s in it?

When Jesus, drenched with your life,
cries, “Peace, be still,”
who do you think he’s talking to?

The calm of a storm-free life
might indeed be, as the writer says,
a dead one.

And if this really is the last chapter of your life,
won’t you have had
exactly what both of you want the most—
to be together through it all?

Storms will come.
Peace, be still.

         
         
Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

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

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
         
         
Yesterday at 7:09 p.m. (Eastern time) the sun crossed over the equator. For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s now summer. But you folks in Australia and Sough Africa who are starting winter can keep us honest: for everything we experience, there’s another perspective!

In the summer the days will get hotter…but not longer. We’ve had the longest day of the year; they’ll get shorter from today on. The hot days of summer don’t come until after the sun has done its great strenuous work, and the days are already shrinking. In its waning season, the sun is most powerful. Even in these sunny days, the darkness is growing. Even in strength and power, there is still loss and diminishment. In the midst of life, there is death. Balancing the Northern Hemisphere is the Southern.

We long for the light, but God has so tempered the world that there is not pure light, but night and day, summer and winter. We can’t become attached to any one extreme. But we can be attentive to the shading of things, and to the peculiar mix that is in the present moment.

Having passed another birthday last week, I am aware of the linear nature of life: it proceeds in one direction, and will never come this way again. But the solstice reminds us that it is also cyclical. Maybe we move in a spiral. Maybe time is neither strictly circular nor linear, but cumulative, like rings of a tree. We don’t leave the past behind; we add to it. Life is past and future mingled in the present: life and death, attaining and losing, suffering and deliverance, summer and winter, each present, each passing. Therefore even death is not final. There is always more life. Always.

Even in the summer of your life, winter is working. Even as life is growing in you, so is death. Be mindful of both life and death. Honor them both, for they are both blessed. The darkness shines in the light, and the light cannot overcome it.
         
         
Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

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

Beloved,

Thanks for your kind thoughts. You’re right: sometimes it gets lonely.
But don’t worry about me; I know where to go for a good time.
And I’m not traveling alone. Everything I see reminds me of you.
Like the light on the water in this picture.
Funny: no matter where I am, the thought of you gives me joy.

Don’t forget to feed the little critters.

Love,

God

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.

God says, “At an acceptable time I have listened to you,
and on a day of salvation I have helped you.”
See, now is the acceptable time.
Look!— now is the day of salvation!
—2 Corinthians 6.2

         
         
Your salvation is not a possibility, but a reality,
not a reward but a gift,
not a final chapter after you die but the essence of your life,
not some happy ending when everything looks dire
but every moment’s worthiness, and yours.
It’s not that you’ve escaped your sentence
but that there is no condemnation.
It’s not that you are good enough, but that you are beloved,
no that you have attained some state or other,
but that the Holy One is perfectly happy with you.
Your salvation is that that’s all you need.
You are saved from your own self-definition
because God includes you.

Your salvation is the belonging that makes your life essential
no matter how it turns out;
it’s God’s regard that saves the deluded
from their self-importance and their self-unimportance,
the presence that saves the depressed
from being measured by their despair,
the deep peace that saves the enraged
from their self-consuming bitterness.
It’s the reverence that saves the doubting
from having to prove themselves,
and the prideful from thinking they could.
It’s the love that enfolds the wasted and deranged
and despotic in their various hells,
and you the same.

It’s the gutsy love of the One
for whom your every moment is precious,
the deep-throated cry of desire and delight
that makes even your failures and desolations a gift.
It is the Living One breathing in you,
right now, this breath.
It is the attentiveness of the Listening One hovering,
the ear just inches from you, ready for your whisper.
It is the outpouring presence of the Faithful Mystery
who loves you like a mother watching her sleeping child,
loving him no matter what he dreams,
no matter what.

This moment, from all that diminishes life,
by her loving presence,
you are being saved.

Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

__________________

Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net