Daily Reflections and Worship Resources
Daily reflections by Steve Garnaas-Holmes.
Holy One,
you are the gentle water
that wears down the mountain of me.
You are the soft root hair
that splits the rock of me.
You are the worm
that digests me.
You are the mycelum
that weaves my soil.
You are the silence
that utters me.
You are the Oneness
to whom I belong.
With all of my being
I belong myself to you.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
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“No one comes to the Father except through me.”
—John 14.6
Jesus, I do not come to God through my prayers,
not my belief, or being good enough, or being a Christian.
I come through you, Jesus, the love of God made flesh.
You bring me, as you bring all people, no matter their religion.
It is your love, and not anything I do,
that is the way I become close to God.
Jesus, I do not need to “ask you into my heart.”
You are already here, loving me infinitely.
I only need to allow you.
I surrender my doubt that you love me,
and my pride that you should love me.
I surrender my resistance. I allow you to love me.
Christ, I do not come to God beside you, but through you.
You take me into yourself, and I come willingly.
You take me in, and I become part of you,
as I take in your bread and it becomes part of me.
I am part of the life of love,
the love that is the Way and the Truth and the Life.
Take me in, Beloved, that you may live and love through me,
and I may live and love through you.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:50 — 2.5MB)
I will come again and will take you to myself,
so that where I am, there you may be also.
—John 14.3
Forget, for a moment, the afterlife.
I am not speaking of death, but of love.
I am going to a place of radical love,
of total self-giving.
You can’t come because you can’t give me,
only I can.
But in my giving I make a place for you,
a place on the cross.
And then I will bring you with me in self-emptying,
so that where I am pouring out my life
you may be also pouring out your life,
pouring out my life through yours.
You won’t be alone. No matter where you are,
no matter what you choose or others choose for you,
what is forced upon you or is draining out of you,
I will have taken you into myself.
This is the way.
You do not go on the way. I take you.
I take you into myself, and I go the way.
As if I am with child, I carry you everywhere you go.
I am the way. I am life.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:49 — 2.5MB)
In our parents’ house there are many dwelling places.
—John 14.2
There’s room for you.
•
There’s room for everybody.
•
There are many ways to be at home in God.
•
Make yourself at home.
•
In God’s house you have many roommates.
•
God’s house is wherever God is.
•
God is infinite. Everywhere you ever are is a room in the house of God.
•
Take off your shoes.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:08 — 1.6MB)
It’s not just mud season,
but the season of sludge and slime,
the slippery slop at river’s edge
beneath the veil between the light and dark,
down underneath the hedge, among the roots
and warrens of the now undead,
where all that winter’s taken spring is taking further:
what once was frozen whole
is broken down in pools of brackish goop,
where grief is chewed and swallowed into hope.
Above the ground the thawing breezes, mendicant,
seek fragrance where it may be found,
and also reek of teeming fermentation in the soil.
Rebirth’s no lightning spark, a finger from above,
but deep below, a slow and smelly moil,
a churning of what’s lost—and it stays lost—
toward something fragile, rank, and new.
Once dead, now decomposing, death’s digested
by the worthy work of worm and rot and gut,
by grace’s blessed fungus, resurrection’s germ,
spurred on by longing, labor, and a kind of lust
where burrowings of bugs and beetles
make a womb where life is woven out of death,
and slowly seething, gravid earth gives forth,
gives joy, gives birth.
And you then, creature, will you wade
into the grave and puddle of this world
and venture into life‘s deep mud, and be remade?
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:56 — 2.7MB)
When you feel hollow and weak,
that you are a dry, brittle stick,
come walk with me;
when you feel strong and sure of yourself,
solid as stone, unshakable,
come walk with me:
come walk in these spring woods,
the branches flecked like a light snowfall
with little green specks,
tender and weak, tiny and tentative,
like babies’ wings, or the fingers of moths,
like the tendrils of hope curling through the soil
of your heart. Let these little leaflets be
this small today. Let them be this soft and thin,
their smallness nature’s startling ruse:
for soon enough they shall overwhelm
these woods and all that is in them,
irrepressible, astonishing, and downright
mighty. Their power is immeasurable because
it is from beyond them, pressed impossibly
into these delicate green buds like little hands,
like tiny suns, like atom bombs, like songs,
or—even when you are a dry stick, or a stone—
like you.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:28 — 2.0MB)
Standing on the rim of the hollow
this cool spring morning
I saw my breath in little grey puffs
glide smoothly into the green light
and disappear into the forest’s lungs.
We breathed in and out into each other:
each breathing in,
transforming the breath within us,
breathing out;
not artificial respiration,
but the real thing, lip to lip,
the woods and me.
On a street corner the breaths of your heart
glide smoothly in little invisible puffs
into the hearts of others.
We’re all breathing the same air,
inhaling the same spirit, sharing
the same miraculous lungs.
Be careful what you breathe in and out.
Fill the lungs of your heart with peace
and go, breathing, into this world.
______________________
Weather Report
Singularity of atmosphere,
gathering throughout the day
as the illusion of separateness
evaporates in the one air.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:04 — 1.5MB)
Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you,
I am the gate for the sheep.
Whoever enters by me will be saved,
and will come in and go out and find pasture.”
—John 10.7, 9
He says he’s a gate but we make him a wall.
An obstacle. A closure. A restriction
that limits access to God to the right people.
Baloney.
Jesus is here to let people in, not to keep them out.
He’s not a wall, but a door. Not a fence but a gateway.
An opening.
Jesus is for those who are searching for God,
sheep searching for good pasture,
who keep coming up against walls.
Fear is a wall.
Doubt and distrust is a wall.
People’s judgment and expectations are a wall.
Religion can be a wall.
But Jesus is an opening.
Through all the walls of right religion and being good enough
Jesus holds an opening. A gateway.
He says, “I am your opening.
Come in and go out, and find good pasture.
Let me love you. That is the gateway to everything.”
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:46 — 2.4MB)
The sheep follow the shepherd
because they know the shepherd’s voice.
—John 10.4
Many try to do a good impression of God
but they all fail.
Something in you knows the true voice,
resonates as to no other voice, vibrates
in the orchestra pit of your soul,
to the voice that in the beginning uttered the Word,
the voice of who you are, that calls you into being,
that calls you deeper into life, into the mystery.
You won’t hear it in the noise out there,
or even the noise within, but underneath that,
speaking out of silence, heard only by sensing beyond sense.
You follow in the dark purely by the sound of the voice.
The more keenly you listen,
the more you make listening your prayer,
the more you realize you are already following,
without even having set out.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:25 — 1.9MB)
The shepherd calls their own sheep by name
and leads them out.
—John 10.3
I bet God doesn’t call you Robert or Elizabeth.
The Beloved has a name for you
no one else has given you,
a name no one else has. No one.
Better than a nickname,
or even a heartfelt term of endearment.
The name of your soul,
declared to the universe in the language of mystery,
pronounceable only by God.
When you pray, it is for that name you are listening.
When God speaks your name
it is as when God says “Let there be light.”
It is the name of who you alone are created to be,
the name by which God knows you,
calls you into life.
Listen for the silence in which that name is spoken.
(It takes time; it’s a deep and wide silence.)
Listen for that name.
Let the one who alone calls you by name lead you out.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Listen to the audio recording:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:38 — 2.3MB)