Category: Reflections

           Keep awake therefore,
           for you do not know on what day
           the One is coming.
                           —Matthew 24.42

The Beloved waits just on the other side
of the thin curtain.
The emperor and his minions,
the billionaire and his servants
want you to sleep, to stay oblivious.
Don’t open your eyes to beauty,
the etchings of the frost on the pond.
Don’t see what’s going on,
don’t notice injustice,
don’t think of who suffers.
Just buy, and sleep.

But an awakening stirs in you,
an ocean tide you can’t defy.
The Teacher knows.
A hunger, the hopeful gnawing
at the cracks in the world.
Attentiveness to where it hurts.
The mystery, the migrating nudge,
the first birth pangs,
angels’ sharp desire.
“I know you’re there.”

Keep awake. Watch. Notice.
You don’t know when
the Beloved will appear,
when the world will shift—
the bird at the window,
the bum on the street,
the prison door.

The fearful court your coma,
and disparage the opening of your eyes.
Ignore them.
Stay woke.

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

I am all nightfulness,
not yet me,
smoke wafting up out of a dream.
I have not come to myself yet,
my arms beside me
like two warm animals,
and two legs crawling up out of blackness
to join me.
My mind has not come to me yet,
nor the room, or the light,
or the universe.
Before I think of thinking,
of troubling myself with thought

you love me.

This alone wakens me.

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

Hold this seed in your hand
its durable wisdom
knowing all it does

how to wait
how to endure
how to become

how to accept confining soil
winter’s abandonment
cruelty of all darkness.

Night and day
cold and thaw relentless
promising withholding.

In grip of ice or fire
time digestion and
whatever may be called suffering

nevertheless
holding within
its bare moment

(hold it in your hand
your mind
the deep soil of your Being)

what it has been given
furled infinite
irrepressible

a word    a world    a blessing
already
here

waiting

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

Thanksgiving

It does not take—although
it could—our breath away,
this warm November day
that should be dense and dark;
instead it gives.

The park is washed: a tide of light
leaves the day’s bright spine
exposed, the clear sun beached
upon the evening’s shore,
reposed where children each
reflect it, young and pure.
How is this day not old
and grey, but yet a bride,
lap full of wedding gifts,

all tied with gold, with light?
It lifts our hearts, too cold,
and too soon winterized,
to watch our children run
in ribbons through the gold,
the bright gift

wrapping strewn, untidy sheets of light,
across the afternoon,
not innocently laughing
jewels into our laps
until our arms collapse,
and we are warm. How can
this laying on of hands
of light, so late, be right?
What are we to remember
of this gilded not-november
miracle of days?
The oracle of praise
this day of Magi lays
abiding at our feet,
the reason given

for tidings of light,
light piled against the trees and benches,
against our legs and feet,
against our thoughts of sleet:
God has no oughts, but gifts.

This is our tithe: let light
be more than interlude,
life little more than this—
delight and gratitude.

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

           God has rescued us from the power of darkness
           and transferred us into the empire of God’s Beloved.
                           —Colossians 1.13

Why, really, do they call Jesus a king?
Christ is beyond our categories: not just a personal savior,
but the sovereign ruler of an empire—
a commonwealth in direct opposition to the Roman Empire
and all human empires of power and authority,
worldly systems of privilege and exclusion—
no, an empire of grace, in which the law of the land is love,
in which the Powers are those of healing and forgiveness.
The oblivious go on, unknowing. They cling to power,
trade pain for profit, but they are pretending.
Love reigns, as immutable as gravity.
Despite all appearances this is the realm
you have been delivered into—
not a state of mind, not a promise, a reward for the deserving,
but the real world. Here. Now.
Trust this mystery. You belong forever to the Beloved,
a citizen of the Empire of Love.
Make yourself at home.

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

Before dawn the dark clenches.
The cold’s brute hammer flattens everything.
The forest floor pulls its leafy grief-strewn grave clothes
up around itself, matted, muted, mattressed,
closes its eye.
Trees are unnaturally still
as if the frost has caught them playing
where they shouldn’t have.
The last garden flowers stand defeated,
heads bowed, blackened, silenced,
the color of regret. My lungs despair.

Then in the sun’s first glance
silver spreads across the frosted lawn,
a wing of diamonds opening.

How would it make me whole to choose
not to love this day
and seek in it always
new kinds of loveliness?

_________________

Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net

           “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!”
                           —Luke 23.37

Christians like to talk of being saved,
but destroy the meaning
when they talk about “getting saved,”
like it’s something you can do.
Listen. If you’re drowning, saving yourself isn’t getting saved;
it’s just swimming.
The definition of being saved is being rescued
by someone when you yourself couldn’t do it.
We are all saved, even Jesus:
given life we can’t create, given grace we can’t control,
given love that can’t be earned, forgiveness that is not deserved.
Even giving your life to Jesus doesn’t get you saved.
God saves you. Even when you can’t swim to Jesus.
God rescues us from our separation from God
by being one with us even when we separate ourselves.
God rescues us from our selfishness
by giving us the love we didn’t have.
God makes of our lives what we can’t on our own.
We are all saved. Rescued. Salvaged.

Jesus does not ask us to be saved.
Only to trust God and love our neighbors.
Not because we can get saved, but because we are saved.

The One who shows me that miracle
is indeed the one who rules my heart.

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

           “He saved others; let him save himself!”
                           —Luke 23.35

They meant it as a taunt,
but it is the emblem of love:
that one cares for others more than oneself.

It is Christ’s refutation of selfishness,
of violence, of capitalism,
of systems of privilege and exclusion.

Pray that the world may ridicule you
because you are
so loving.

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

           The people stood by, watching;
           but the leaders scoffed at him, saying,
           “He saved others; let him save himself
           if he is the Messiah of God, God’s chosen one!”
           The soldiers also mocked him,
           coming up and offering him sour wine,
           and saying, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!”
                           —Luke 23.35-37


No matter how imperious we are
in our judgments, how absolute in our violence,
we are wrong.
No matter how it is scorned,
love reigns supreme.
Despite how it is desecrated,
holiness endures.
Though it is maligned and violated,
the mercy of God prevails.
No matter how we object,
grace is the foundation of the world.
Regardless of how cruelly you are treated,
you, Beloved, are still the chief of our hearts.

We are still eating of the tree,
still convinced we know good and evil,
though we do not.

The cross and the empty grave
are when God calls bullshit
on all our judgments and violence.

No matter what we insist,
or how strongly,
only love is right.
Only love reigns supreme.

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

For those who have given of themselves
I give thanks, and pray that I too may be so giving.
For those who have risked I give thanks,
and pray that I too may be so courageous.
For those who have sacrificed I give thanks,
and pray that I to may live not for myself
but for others, not just for my own,
my family, my kind, my country—
but for all others, in gratitude for all—
strangers, all—who have given so much for me;
because we are all woven in one web of care,
one body, one life.

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