Category: Reflections

          When some Midianite traders passed by,
         Joseph’s brothers drew him up, lifting him out of the pit,
         and sold him to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver.
                  —Genesis 37.28

Frost is mostly right that home is where,
when you have to go there, they have to take you.
Mostly. But what would Hagar say? Or Joseph?
Biblical families aren’t havens of belonging,
places of safety or unconditional acceptance.
Think of them. Every one. They struggle to be decent.
I can’t break it to you easy:
Loving or not, family is where your shit comes from.
Where your problems start. Where conflict is inevitable.
Where we treat loved ones as we would never treat strangers.
Home is where monsters live under our beds, and in our closets,
and maybe in our parents’ room.
The monster is who we are supposed to be, expected to be,
made to be. It swallows us.
Sooner or later we have to come home and reckon with family.
It’s the final frontier: the deepest wounds, the greatest fears,
the heaviest failures, the sneakiest neuroses
we have to wrestle with. Jacob and his angel.
Face to face or elsewhere, we have to go back into that house
and work things out. Engage in loving conflict.
Accept without yielding. Take what’s true and flush the rest.
Forgive them, and ourselves. Honor the child of us,
the one who protected and sustained us—
and thank that child, and say goodbye. Let them stay there
while we move on. It’s how we get free.
The Bible is right: family is where you work your stuff out.
I pray for your courage to go there.
I pray that, alive or dead, they will help you.
But remember nothing depends on them. It’s your work.
Do it, and even to those who sold you into slavery
you will be ready to act with grace and honor and generosity.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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           He became frightened,
           and beginning to sink, he cried out, “Boss, save me!”
           Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him.
                           —Matthew 14.30-31


On the sea within me
there is one who cries out
and one who responds.

Within me, one who commands
and one who asks to be commanded.

One who panics in the chaos
and, yes, within me, one who is steady.

One who is terrified at the waves
and one who finds footing there.

One clings to the known
and one strides in mystery.

They reach out to each other
on the beautiful stormy sea within me.

As long as they hold onto each other
I do not sink.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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           Peter got out of the boat,
                started walking on the water,
                       and came toward Jesus.
                                 —Matthew 14.29

Huge writhing sea
       tiny scared boat
              all you have to hang onto

You sense something
       Someone
              in the waves, or on them

Coming halfway to you
       beckoning you
              out of the safeboat

into the chaos
       dark swirling deep
              moving undulating errantly

(and beneath the green black water
           a vast stillness
                      a great dark emptiness)

but here disruption the pitch and heave
       no footing no handhold
              only the voice

with you a presence
       more solid
              than the waves

that calls you
        reaches out to you
                 holds you

Forever now
       everything you do
                is reaching for that voice

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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           “Boss, if it is you,
           command me to come to you on the water.”
                           —Matthew 14.28


You know you’re following the real Jesus,
not something made up,
if he calls you so strongly
that it’s actually you who’s doing the calling,
calling you out of where you are,
out of what’s familiar,
out of your safe place,
out of your religion.
All the way out,
with no wooden doctrine to steady you,
no religious flotation device.
No safety from ambiguity or mystery or doubt,
no protection from the impossible,
no certainty, just trust.
Just Jesus.
Just love that’s steady, untroubled,
even amid thrashing nightmares.
So you go.

Once you’ve been there
the boat is never the same.
Nor are you.

Passing by lepers,
you hear the voice again.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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Why nibble on the Bread of Life
when you can chow down?

Why only smell it, faintly,
when you can feast upon it,
every moment, every breath?

The Baker of the Universe
has made for you a special batch
of your favorite—
and it’s him!

All of his teaching, his healing, his love;
his passionate arms around you;
his insistent draw into the deep,
to the other side, into this crazy
trust and delight and brokenheartedness,
his terrifying stagger toward the cross,
his complete collapse into resurrection—
this is no time for moderation,
for politely picking at the crust.
Take the whole thing. Both hands.

Here, eat it slowly.
Close your eyes.
Let it fill you.

What use are right beliefs
about bread?
This is the work of God,
that you savor the Bread
God has given you.

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

       …The man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob….
                   —Genesis 32.25

Sometimes calling it “wrestling” is too dramatic:
all that masculine energy, all that huffing,
the moves and countermoves, the dust swirling.
Sometimes the fight stalls.
It’s not like wrestling,
it’s more like stuck.
Your shadow rises up and holds you down,
darkness so dense you can’t move in it. As if under sand.
The octopus of night, inescapable.
Nobody’s moving. Pinned.

Prayers stall. Your reach for God is paralyzed.
You’re not moody or depressed, just yearning.
You push against the silence.
It doesn’t push back, heavy and unmoving as rock.
It’s not a struggle. It’s nothing.
Even God means nothing.

What is hidden
is that the arms of this darkness
hold you with longing. Want you.
Know something. Hope something.
This deepest night
that wraps itself around you
so completely,
so still,
so tenderly,
as if a womb,
let it have you.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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         Jacob was left alone;
         and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.

                  —Genesis 32.24

We trust a shadowed God
who seizes us in lonely places,
who comes to us in travail,
who births us only in great labor.

There is no struggle in which
blessing is not enfolded in the mystery.
There is no tribulation in which
God is not reworking the clay.
There is no wound without the power of healing.

Therefore the prayer of the faithful
is not that our lives be easy,
but always and only this:
“I will not let go until you bless me.”

Of the struggles life thrusts upon you
do not let go
until you get from them a blessing,
and become—limping, perhaps—
a new person, with a new name.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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           Taking the five loaves and the two fish,
           he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves,
           and gave them to the disciples,
           and the disciples gave them to the crowds.
                           —Matthew 14.19

You will not have enough.
It will be taken from you.
It will be blessed by hands not your own.
It will be broken.
It will be given away.

And you, you will not be enough.
You will be taken.
You will be blessed by hands not your own.
You will be broken.
You will be given.

This is how miracles happen.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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           “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.”
                           —Matthew 14.17

God, I do not have enough.
Enough to save the world, even to help others,
sometimes even enough to manage myself.

Receive my inadequacy.
Let it be in your hands, not mine.
Let my lack be space for you.

Open my eyes to see in every failure,
in every shortcoming,
your grace.

Beloved, mindful not of what I lack
but what I have—that you have given me,
I offer you myself. By your grace it will be enough.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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You think it is an ordinary day,
dull even, the weariness familiar.

But then he reaches into that moment,
the ordinariness of it, so small,

five rolls and two sardines, whatever
you happen to have along,

takes away your little sack of inadequacy,
your confidence of your unworthiness,

whatever you cling to, your sustenance,
your tiny hoard, your lunch for one,

blesses it, calls it divine, and a gift,
as if what is of earth is enough,

breaks it up so that you could not possibly
have it or live with it it again,

and gives it away, all of it, no longer yours
but God’s, whose hands are a hungry world,

and you can’t limit the way it multiplies,
the people it feeds, the wonder it becomes,

as if all along he has known that it was not slight
but hiding a miracle, bearing unseen abundance.

It is not the bread that is transformed
but the little hard roll of your trust,

the two little fish of your thinking
that you’ve seen the bottom of it,

your sureness that miracles come out of nowhere
and not from right where you are.

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