Rejoice always, pray without ceasing,
             give thanks in all circumstances.
                                     —1 Thessalonians 5.16-18

Seriously? Even with all the crud in the world?
Yes. In the rock-paper-scissors of life
joy cuts sorrow, crushes despair and swallows crud.
Grieve first… and joy comes with the morning.

These are hard days. But joy is bigger than these days.
Joy is not happiness with present circumstances,
but harmony with the goodness of God
and the overflowing of God’s delight in us.
Joy includes the universe,
and all its beauty and sorrow.
Joy dances with gratitude.
Joy plays with hope, which is trust in the unseen.
Joy sings with love, which is self-giving for another,
who is the self—a return to wholeness. What joy!

Yes, people are suffering, and others don’t care.
But some do. Rejoice!
You can rejoice during a pandemic.
You can give thanks at a funeral.
You can be joyful in prison.
You can lament suffering and injustice, and rejoice.
For joy is the healing of broken hearts,
the breaking of chains, the opening of graves,
the coming of God.

Christ does not come to make us happy,
but to stand with us in the pain of life
until joy like a seed rises.

All is swallowed up in joy.

______________
Weather Report

Exuberant,
though in our smallness
we think of storms as menacing.
Skies will dance, winds sing,
and the seas play and clap their hands
with the joyful energy of the universe.

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

December 10, 2020

    We wait for new heavens and a new earth
—2 Peter 3.13

My knee hurts.
My nephew’s art studio burned down.
My friend Barbara died.
A pandemic kills a million people,
and it’s not abating. Racism…climate disaster…
Advent, the “little Lent,” rubs our face
in our smallness, our mortality, the limits of our powers.

Along comes John the Baptist.
Like God speaking to Job,
John puts our pain in perspective,
and re-frames our focus
from our troubles to the whole universe,
to God’s cosmic work of love.
We’re not just waiting for Santa,
but a new heaven and earth.
Everything, even our deepest suffering and trauma,
is gathered up in God’s redemption of all Creation.

Do we dare hope for such a miracle?
Or should we just settle for Santa?
Our hope is not in medicine, politics, even religion,
but in God’s eternal grace.
Though we can’t see, we can trust.
Our deaths and pains are swallowed up
in eternal love, in infinite grace.
The trauma is real. But the universe is wonderful.

Keep your eyes on the details of this world,
but your heart on the God of the cosmos,
whose only will is wholeness, freedom and beauty.

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

December 9, 2020

We wait for new heavens and a new earth.
—2 Peter 3.13

Tourists came, too,
to see John the Baptist
ranting in the wilderness.
They stood back, eating ice cream
and watching the crowds in their awe,
watching the scholars interrogate him.
They liked the fire in his words,
pretty sure it was meant for others.
They had no idea about
the “One” he was raving about.
They had no idea even then the fire
that sparks us all into being
was falling, already consuming
John, and the baptized, and the crowds,
and the tourists and their ice cream,
and Jerusalem, and the Empire,
and the heavens and the earth,
all of it consumed
in fire and ashes,
out of which a new world sprouts
eternally,
where we ourselves
are the smallest seedlings.
There are no onlookers to this fire.
If you yourself are not burning,
there is no flame.

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

December 8, 2020

       Those who go out weeping,
                bearing the seed for sowing,
        shall come home with shouts of joy,
                carrying their sheaves.
                                —Psalm 126.6

Your troubles, soul,
lament but do not regret.
They are your resurrection grave.

Only a broken heart is strong enough
to walk this path, for only a broken heart
is open enough to receive the light.

Your tears water the soil
of compassion and courage.
They are the flowing of God in you.

Your sorrow is Christ’s manger
where the Beloved lays
their tenderness for the world,

weeping in you, that love be made flesh,
the taking-in of this whole world
in loving delight,

born in pain and labor,
the opening of the heart like a womb,
born as joy.

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

December 7, 2020

        It is written in the prophet Isaiah:
        See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,
                who will prepare your way;
        the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
                “Prepare the way of the Holy One,
                make straight a path for God.”
                                                —Mark 1.2-3

God, how shall I prepare your way?
How might I announce your coming?
How might I live to make your coming plain?
How will I think, speak and act this day
as a messenger of grace
so those who yearn may hope,
and those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death
may rejoice?
How do you enable me to live this gospel?
What path are you making in my heart?

How are you preparing your way in me?
Let me see, and hear,
and trust,
and follow
Amen.

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

December 4, 2020

Look! the Holy One is coming!
God, you come—
to feed your flock like a shepherd,
to gather the lambs in your loving arms;
you will carry them in your bosom,
and gently lead the mother sheep.
—Isaiah 40.10-11

You come!
Into this hell of cruelty and oppression you come,
without a sword.
No power but gentleness,
no bulwark but the warmth of your bosom.
No weapon against suffering but the willingness to suffer
to hold us.
No shield against death but to die first
before it can stop you from loving us.
You lead us through the valley of the Shadow;
you fill it in with yourself leveling it.
These hands that feed us, that gather the lambs of us,
these hands,
there are holes in them,
aren’t there?

To that bosom that comes, we will come.
In the peace in those arms
we lose hell,
we find courage to resist it,
you undo it.

Hungry, weary and alone, we cry to you,
not in desperation but hopeful wonder,
in joy, even:
Shepherd of Miracles, come!

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

December 3, 2020

Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low.
—Isaiah 40.4

What I have mounded up, O God,
what I have heaped for keeping,
level out and shovel off to fill another’s need.

What I lack, O Graceful One,
the cracks and canyons, the crumbling arroyos
of my will, smooth out, to make passage.

What great heights I face, O Humble One,
the steeps and crags I can’t traverse,
bring low, and come near.

What emptiness I hide, O God,
the pits and cavities and swallowings
and ditches of my heart, fill in with your grace.

Of the power and riches I grasp, relieve me,
that I may know the glory of your grace.
­
The shame and poverty I bear, redeem,
that I may know the blessing of your presence.

Transform this world, O God.
Begin with me.

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

December 2, 2020

In the wilderness prepare the way of the Holy One,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
—Isaiah 40.3

Not that God can’t come ’till we get it right,
not that we have to hurry up and clean house
before the householder comes,
but that the Beloved is coming,
and asks us to trust.
Not that we need to get the work done,
but that the Beloved is already working,
and we are asked to prepare for the victory parade.

How can we be so bold,
when injustice haunts, when evil rides unchecked?
By trusting in the power of gentleness
and the victory of compassion,
and by doing justice, which opens our eyes.
Justice arises from people who have hope;
their hope arises when they do justice.

Prepare your way in me, O Holy One.

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

December 1, 2020

Comfort, O comfort my people,
says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem…
—Isaiah 40.1

My child,
comfort my people.
Even as you cry for justice,
let it lead to a peaceable life for all.
Even as you resist evil,
speak tenderly.
Be a voice of comfort, not blame,
a voice of hope, not doom.
Tell my people—show them:
I will be with you, one of you—
to see your struggles, to stumble with you.
I taste the cold mud, I feel the sharp wounds.
I know the fear that this cold fog will never lift.
Beloved, it will lift.
I will be with you
to manage the rough spots with you,
to carry you with tender delight.

My child, my people are hurting.
Speak tenderly to them.
Show them my hope and comfort,
and the words shall not be in vain.

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

November 30, 2020

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!
—Isaiah 64.1

This is the season we are arrested by our longing.
This is the season of the undressing of our hunger,
and a time to adopt our orphaned hopes.
Our spirits ache with the family not gathered for holidays, 
unfinished business of the heart, 
the pall of Things Gone Wrong. 
As the plague spreads out from the cities to the countryside,
mostly, cruelly, through happy means of games and weddings,
and the peasants grow hungrier,
and the Emperor has stomped off to his room,
our unease deepens.
How do we name our heartbreak, our lack?
This is the affliction that silts our veins:
that we do not know what we want, but we want it badly. 
Sandbags of darkness rise about us
and with the night, our wanting.
The door to the locked attic room in our hearts
that we have ignored for too long swings open,
and its great emptiness reaches for us.
This is the season we marry our longing.

Nothing will do now, but divine intervention,
yet not in the heavens, but somehow—
in a mystery the prophets have hinted at—
among us.
The empty place is the place of God.

Oh, humanity, set the table,
and keep the fire going.
But before you set out either to hope or to rectify,
your faithfulness now is to attend to the great, holy fullness
of the emptiness in your heart,
and be still.

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

November 27, 2020