When you give a banquet,
         invite those who cannot repay you…
                  —Luke 14.13

Make of your life a welcome home.
Make your heart a buffet of goodness.

Make yourself a front porch, wide,
two chairs, only one step up.

Think of yourself as a free sample,
a rocking chair, a bench by a lake.

People need a place to belong, to matter,
to receive without question.

Round up all your furniture of love and respect,
all your heirlooms of special treatment,

and put them out on the curb.
Go ahead and make a sign that says FREE.

It’s not about airing your laundry, “being yourself.”
It’s about letting them do that.

After all, you live in God’s house,
who has given you the run of the place.

         
         Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers,
         for by doing that some have entertained angels
         without knowing it.
                  —Hebrews 13.2

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

August 27, 2019

Of course the laughing brook is singing.
So are the stones, even the big ones, singing.

The ice in Antarctica, the ice slipping off Greenland,
the river entering the ocean is singing.

Mountains are singing, and not the great deep
sonorous dirges you expect, but little ditties.

Air has a song. Excuse the obvious, but it’s a lovely little air.
The rock beneath the soil has a tune it can’t get out of its head.

The bottom of the sea and the stars
are joined in intricate six-part harmony.

The man in the moon—look and you’ll see—
is a happy man singing a sad song.

Cities sing. Houses sing. Airplanes don’t sing but
the people in them sing, long songs streaking across the sky.

Everything is singing, singing. Liturgies and chants,
oldie goldies, sea chanteys, incantations,

wedding songs and elegies, rope-skipping tunes, hymns,
fight songs, and loves songs… oh, the love songs.

Your guts are singing all the time, singing.
Your bones are a song. Your skin. Your eyes.

I don’t know what this means, but God
is singing a little song in you right now. Always.

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

August 26, 2019

After the gash the reaching, the weaving,
tendrils of flesh finding each other.

After the flash, the flames, grey ash—
the greening, small prelude to the immense.

Children, wounded, homing, stand
at thresholds and step through.

Root hairs stitch with patience, grasses
fur volcanoes’ ribs, mosses home bare rock,

arctic birds find place in ice, species drift
and shift and shape. There will be life.

The very word that there be light
ripens the dark. Being seeks its fullness.

Battered souls still mend and seek to mend,
and even caved do it to save and to defend.

Whatever is broken, bent or incomplete,
an inner knowing whispers make it whole.

Even in the year your mouth
is full of ashes, bones of smoke,

something new will rise, already is.
Bind yourself to this, through flood and flame,

in you and every soul, this mending will, the heart
of what it is to be, moving, given, graced.

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

August 23, 2019

Today you will see someone bent.
You will be tempted to wonder
how they brought it on themselves.

You will hear an offer
of healing, a brave and generous hope
denied, belittled, deferred.

You will see a hand outgiven,
a meeting yielding to frailty,
touching what can’t be touched.

You will witness a tightening,
old fears and excuses,
a caging, an act of depressing,

and yet a remolding
to unbow you, stand you straight,
a loosening, a raising, if you dare.

Today you will notice someone bent
and see with awe, not pity
a daughter of Abraham,

and with eyes unbent
be set free and given power to heal
if you choose so to see.

         “And ought not this woman,
         a daughter of Abraham
         whom Satan bound for eighteen long years,
         be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?”
                  — Luke 13.16

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

August 22, 2019

Tourists we are, most of us,
even the locals,
who walk out to the sea
and maybe dip in up to our ankles,
let the mystery finger our little bones,
or maybe we dive deep
and let the unseen breathe us in,
or sail far, under the sound only
of wind and unknowing.
Still, what do we know
of this vastness that birthed us?
How can we begin to say a word
of the great undersea mountains
and rivers, the creatures there
larger and darker than our dreams,
how can we pretend, but only
bring home a shell, a little sand dollar,
hollow and curious,
barely whispering of the real life
whose actual skeleton it was,
little grey thing on the dresser?
Every prayer, every conversation
is a postcard from the real place,
a memory of the time
we dipped our feet
in the immense, murmuring water,
            the silence wave after wave
                         reaching out for us.

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

August 21, 2019

She comes, as always, eyes on the ground,
feet her frame, dust her distance.
The cause, surely, within her,
out of sight as sky.

He sees what is bent, what is caged,
sees what is tall and straight and strong in her.
Sees what is free in her,
what is noble and beautiful.
Abraham and Sarah.
Lays his hand on the lock,
sets it open.

Now: to see faces.
Heaven is eye to eye.
Horizon given. Distance possible.
To bear a load, to watch a bird,
to see more than one thing at a time.
What she stands for.
Once bent, now sent, she sings.

This is not a faith that wishes,
but that frees.

         And ought not this woman,
         a daughter of Abraham
         whom Satan bound for eighteen long years,
         be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?”
                  — Luke 13.16

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

August 20, 2019

A flock of birds, my questions rise,
a twisted path in a tangled jungle,
whispering may and might and not answers,
every tree a priest of my unknowing.

In the temple, fog.

Easy to resent this religion of obscurity,
the keen temptation of wisdom,
deification of the dumb.

But however vast the mountain view
it is partial, small in the universe.

This I know:
what I know is nothing, imagined.
When I know
I presume, and forget you.

Rather this cloud of honest mystery
shrouding me
standing
on this very real
mountain,

rather the longing,
given,
yours as much as mine,

this hand I hold
in the dark.

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

August 19, 2019

God, I thought: this is too hard.
I throw myself at it.
I drag myself through it.
It is more than I can do.
It is hard; I doubt I have what it takes.

And then you said,
no, it is not hard. It is impossible.
You cannot do it.
You don’t have that power.

But I do, and I give it to you.
I breathe my power through you.
You need not “dig deep” to find it.
It’s right there, flowing through you.
It’s there when you don’t feel it.
It’s there when you feel you’re a failure.

As long as you think it’s hard,
it will be hard.
But when you realize it’s impossible
then you know it’s not yours to do, but mine.
Stop trying to do it. Let me do the hard work.
You just come along.

I am doing the hard thing in your life.
Stay with me while I do it,
because without you, even for me,
it’s impossible.

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

August 16, 2019

         Some of our ancestors suffered mocking and flogging,
         and even chains and imprisonment….
         Yet all these, heroes of the faith, did not receive what was promised….
         Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses,
         …let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us,
         …looking to Jesus, who endured such hostility against himself from sinners,
         so that you may not grow weary or lose heart.
                  —from Hebrews 11.36 – 12.3

Like artisans building a cathedral,
we are engaged in work that outlives us.
The building of justice will take generations;
knowing this, we do not grow weary or lose heart.
Sustained by those who have come before,
who endured so that we may be brought this far,
we carry on, against all odds, against all opposition.
We are not intimidated by the thought
that we will not achieve our goal in our lifetime.
Of course not. This is not for us,
but for our children’s children’s children.
Our little triumphs and failures are ennobled,
not by our successes, but by the immense grace
of the work to which we devote ourselves.
Discouragement, despair and even death do not trouble us,
for our lives are insignificant in the shadow of this work,
which bestows its blessings to the ends of the earth,
and to generations far beyond us.
Friends, take courage. God is in this;
this is where, though you are small, you become immortal.

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

August 15, 2019

God, cleanse me.
There is so much fear, so much fear.
I don’t learn because I don’t look.
I don’t look because I’m afraid.
I don’t see who people are, hear what they’re saying,
and hear what they’re not saying.
Something like scales cover my eyes.
I want to see.
I want to see myself, God.
I want to notice my fears so I can face them
and allow them to be healed.
Help me to believe in this,
to believe in myself, to believe in your grace.
Give me courage to look, and wisdom to see.
With the eyes of my heart enlightened,
may I go slow enough to see clearly, eyes open, all day;
to pray always: to listen without ceasing.
Open my eyes, Beloved, to see you here.

Open my eyes…
Open my ears …
Open my heart…

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

August 14, 2019