Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good?
             No one is good but God alone.”
                         —Mark 10.18

And also, everyone is good;
no one is any more so than another.

Why do we judge? Why must we rank
and compare and, inevitably, compete?

Everyone is a mix of “good” and “bad”—
and none of our judgments is real.

Yes, there is evil, and there are hurtful actions,
and none of us is entirely free of them.

And there is grace and goodness in all of us,
hidden even in the cruelest tyrant.

But our judgments are mixed,
clouded by our not-goodness;

the sinful fruit of the Tree was not knowing good and evil
but thinking we do.

Resist evil actions, and strive for goodness,
but know our discernment is never pure.

Act with kindness toward all;
and goodness will prevail.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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             “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God,
            and not receive the bad?”
                         —Job 2.10


God is not a card dealer.
God is not a guy who distributes weal or woe
according to some inscrutable scheme.

God is the Love at the heart of all existence,
who is present with grace and blessing
in every moment, everything that happens.

God does not “send” us our experiences;
God experiences them with us, with love,
the “’good” and the “bad.”

Our judgments of “good” and “bad” experiences
are mostly a reflection of our pleasure or pain.
They all contain both difficulties and blessings.

Divine grace is present in all of them.
The Beloved imbues even our triumphs with challenges,
and even our disasters with possibility.

In both the good and the bad,
what we receive “at the hand of God”
is neither weal nor woe, but the hand of God.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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             What God has joined together, let no one separate.
                         —Mark 10.9

Don’t pick this up as a club to beat divorcees.
It’s already caused enough harm.

Only men had the power to marry or divorce.
Jesus was protecting women from being used and discarded.

Jesus’ accusers want to know what is lawful;
but he always seeks what is life-giving.

Sometimes when a couple has married
it’s not God that has joined them.

What God has joined together is a whole person;
don’t let a bad marriage break them.

Sometimes what keeps the “bent over woman” down
is a marriage from which Jesus would set her free.

Sometimes the paralyzed need to get up and walk away first;
only then can the healing begin.

Sometimes when Jesus says “Follow me”
there are things he wants one to leave behind.

Always and ever Jesus invites us
not toward what is lawful but what is life-giving.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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When the news is bad,
when living in the real world is hard work,
contemplation may seem like an escape.

But it’s the way we breathe-in the whole world
so we become greater than it is, and contain it;
and breathe in God until we are wholly contained.

It’s how we let God hold our fears and our wishes,
and enter the world, even its pain,
with infinite grace.

It’s the bee crawling into the lily, way deep,
the cypress roots working their way down,
the still moment before the athlete runs for the high bar.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light www.unfoldinglight.net
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The mother octopus lays her hundreds of eggs
in a cavern, and guards them, to her death.

A great blue heron crosses open ocean
from New Brunswick to her favorite place in Cuba.

For all those beautiful sunsets you missed
there are the ones you didn’t.

The lone tree on the hillside
bears witness to a seed that has endured,
to an erupting sense of being,
not inevitable at all, but chosen.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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             “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them;
             for it is to such as these that the realm of God belongs.
             Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the realm of God
             as a little child will never enter it.”
                                      —Mark 10.14-15

The Divine inhabits the place of vulnerability.
Grace arises only in a time of dependence.
How precious you are is obscured
by how important you think you are.

The oblivious, easily bought and sold,
cheer only for their triumphant heroes.
The truly noble welcome the small,
the dependent, the trusting, and join them.

God will not come to you in power and might,
will not come.
The Beloved will come in weakness and need,
and you will welcome them, or miss them altogether.

Life comes as a gift, a parent’s love, unearned.
In control, your hands are too full; you lose it.
Faith is willingness to be carried,
a child, reaching for a mother’s arms.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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             Everyone will be salted with fire.
             Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it?
             Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.
                                      —Mark 9.49-50
Jesus doesn’t enjoin us to become salt;
as he says in a different sermon, we already are salt.

Salt is what it is, and can’t be made more salty;
it can only lose its saltiness by being diluted.

To keep your saltiness is to be true to who you are,
to stay faithful to your hopes, your heart, your soul.

To have salt is to speak the truth when it’s hard,
to know what you trust and trust it when it’s scary.

To be salted is to stay open to the Spirit that comes to us,
that breathes in us, that burns with fire in us,

the Spirit that lives in each other person as well,
that makes us all one, which is the root of our peace.

To have salt is not to erase or dominate others
but to bring out the best in them, especially when it’s hidden.

Everyone will be salted with fire, seasoned with love—
everyone—flavored with beauty, preserved by the Spirit.

Trust that,
and live that way.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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             If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off….
             And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off….
             And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out….
                         —Mark 9.43-47

Jesus is not just talking to individuals,
but to all of us, to the body politic:
Cut off the social structures
that cause us to hurt one another.

Root out the structures that cause us to stumble,
that give us excuses to demean and abuse people,
that make it easy to treat others
unlike how we would treat Christ.

Cut off the hand of greed and “getting ahead,”
the worship of profit and the enshrining of the rich,
the inviolability of large corporations,
the placing of our comfort over the well-being of others.

Cut off the foot of militarism, violence, and domination
that excuses our murder of children,
and the continual preparation to do so,
that harms others to keep us “safe.”

Tear out the eye of racism and sexism,
of xenophobia and the disparaging of the poor
that sees some people as less worthy,
so we may ignore, imprison, exploit, or eliminate them.

We don’t sin because we want to;
we sin because certain “body parts” of our society
make sin seem right and good.
We haven’t begun to repent until we tear them out.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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             If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off.
                         —Mark 9.43

I can feel bad about my sin,
promise and wish and hope to do better…
and likely sin again.

Or I can look deeper, at what leads me to sin.
What is the wound, the want, the fear,
that pushes me around?

I don’t need to split myself apart,
nor can I just get rid of any part of me:
fear and hurt don’t work like that.

But I can unplug its energy,
cut off its blood supply,
cut it off from access to my power.

I can name my fear and hurt, honor it,
and let it be, without letting it control me.
I can cut it off from guiding my choices.

I can let it be an urge, a response,
what I feel—but not who I am.
I can cut it off from defining me.

I know, I’m so used to it
it’ll feel like cutting off a part of myself
to disempower my anger, my greed—

but maybe getting free
from the grip of my fear and hurt
is just what it means to be whole.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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In early morning lamplight,
gazing out the window at the meadow
I see myself reflected,
face growing out of goldenrod and Joe Pye weed,
bearded with grasses, thinning forest of hair.
I go outside to see more clearly.
Yes, look at these hands, the knuckles of my roots,
my feet down among the mycelium.
The sun comes up, full of the whole ocean.
All day I see this, the meadow full of sky,
the house with generations in it, coming and going,
the city that is a thousand villages,
peasants squatting by steaming pots,
camel trains passing the bus stop,
sealskin kayaks along the rivers of street,
skyscrapers at the gas pump.
Each office window is a house,
every shop a ruin and a temple, thriving,
the subway a long dance of generations.
Every face I see is myself, varied.
I am ancestors, strangers, unknown languages, tribes,
histories in my feet and my hands.
I come home to a house that is earth,
near a river that is life.
I breathe the air that is God.
I sit under the tree with the mountain in it.

When they say “Just be yourself”
they have no idea what they’re including.

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