Dearly Beloved, Grace and Peace to you.                    You withdrew all your wrath;                   you turned from your hot anger.          Restore us again, O God of our salvation,                   and put away your indignation toward us.          Will you be angry with us forever?                   Will you prolong your anger to all generations?                            —Psalm 85.3-5

The wrath of God is not like ours. When eros, love that is attraction, is frustrated, it turns to violence, a desire to destroy. When philios, love that is kinship, is frustrated, it turns to indifference and dismissal, a desire to separate. But when agape, love that is self-giving, is frustrated, it is still self-giving.

The wrath of God is born of love, made of love, and for the sake of love. God’s anger is anger at the disturbance of wholeness, so God responds not with the will toward brokenness?to destroy, condemn or expel? but with the will toward wholeness. Wrath born of agape is not anger at people, but anger at evil and injustice and the suffering it causes. It’s burning passion to heal things. God’s wrath is not punishment; it’s an invitation to feel. God holds our feet to the fire of our own making, allows us to feel the agony we cause, feel God’s own anguish for us. We experience it as an inner disturbance that makes us uneasy, a desire for justice that hurts until we act. Injustice endures because we don’t mind it.  God’s wrath is the rage that says “I do mind.  I can’t stand this, and I won’t: I will do something about it.” We feel the heat until we change.

The challenge is to channel that heat into love. Our natural tendency is to protect ourselves, so the temptation is to turn even righteous anger at injustice into mere anger, judgment or violence. But violence is not an act of love. Violence is an outburst of powerlessness. It only adds to the brokenness. And the anger still remains.  It still burns.  Holy rage is not against others, it is against evil– and I myself harbor evil.  God’s wrath is not mine to use to punish people I don’t like; it’s upon me to move me to do my part to heal the world, by making me hurt until I do something about it. 

In love, not self-protection, not self-justification, but self-giving, the wrath of God issues in love, in acts of healing and justice. To bear the cross is to rage against evil with love and gentleness. To rage against injustice without falling into judgment or violence is a hard calling. But because God’s wrath is loving, to bear that rage is to bear love, if we will open our hearts to it.

         My heart recoils within me;                   my compassion grows warm and tender.          I will not execute my fierce anger;                   I will not again destroy Ephraim;          for I am God and no mortal,                   the Holy One in your midst,                   and I will not come in wrath.                             –Hosea 11.8-9               Deep Blessings, Pastor Steve

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

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Our Mother, our Father, Source of our being, whose presence is heaven, all Creation sings of you, “Holy!” May your Realm unfold among us, your desire be fulfilled, this world blossoming out of your delight. Give us the breath of life, one breath at a time. Accept our brokenness; give us acceptance of others who are broken. Lead us beyond our desires and save us from the grip of evil. For the world is within you; all power is from you, and all glory is about you, in eternity, which is in the present moment. Amen.

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

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Dearly Beloved, Grace and Peace to you.                    Ask, and it will be given you;          search, and you will find;          knock, and the door will be opened for you.                             For everyone who asks receives,          and everyone who searches finds,          and for everyone who knocks,          the door will be opened.                                     —Luke 11.9-10

Faith is not having; it’s searching. Faith is not knowing; it’s asking. Faith is not having arrived;          it’s knocking on the door.

See how often the Teacher praises people’s faith knowing nothing of their beliefs or their attitudes, only that they are reaching out. Faith is reaching out.

Certainty doesn’t draw us near to God. The lived question does, the open hand, opening ourselves to what flows new each moment.

We are leaves turning toward the sun, lovers longing for our lovers, children calling for mommy, swimmers coming up for breath.

Trusting the Beloved’s generosity, deepen your pleading. Let everything you do, every moment, be an opening, a breathing in, an ardent search, a reaching out to God.

Look! The door is opening.                            Deep Blessings, Pastor Steve

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

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Dearly Beloved, Grace and Peace to you.                    

As deftly and finally as one pulls out a thread someone is weaving them, gracefully tying them, minute and irreversible.

In the towering sky, even under the fortress, root tendrils muscle in and bind ligaments through an abyss we had been told was absolute.

No enormity of terror can keep up with the steady, unseen healing.

Before the assault, the horrible wound, gaping and exposed, the stitching has already begun.

Even as we sigh in our own world, moving on, separate, we are being sewn in.

In the earthquake, the collapsing mountains, not a bit of rubble falls on the path from the temple.

If you could hold your immortal soul in your hands, you would hardly recognize it from one moment to the next.

Your grave is already empty.

          Deep Blessings, Pastor Steve

(2006) __________________ Steve Garnaas-Holmes Unfolding Light www.unfoldinglight.net

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Dearly Beloved, Grace and Peace to you.                    Martha, Martha, you are worried                   and distracted by many things;          there is need of only one thing.                            —Luke 10.41-42

No matter the results and outcomes,      the thousand possibilities,           you are here now.

Why even try to trace      what the beggar will do with your money?           Let your giving be the whole horizon.

Be lovingly present      and wars and stars and grief and cats alike           will be unable to trouble you.

At the center of the world and in each breath      this is the holy temple, the birthing moment:           giving and receiving love. That is all.

This is the sacred point,      the love in you           meeting the love in the world.

However broken or weary you are,      bring yourself here, in love,           now.

                             Deep Blessings, Pastor Steve

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

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Dearly Beloved, Grace and Peace to you.                    Mary sat at the Lord’s feet          and listened to what he was saying.                   —Luke 10.39

         Where your treasure is,          there your heart will be also.                   —Luke 12.34

What matters to us is what we pay attention to. When nobody pays attention to people, when they are not heard, they get the message that their life does not matter.

If their lives matter they must first matter to you. Today you will encounter someone who’s gotten the message their life doesn’t matter. You can show otherwise by listening to them. You can hear their story, hear their heart, listen to what they are saying.

And if it really matters to you, speak up for them that they may be heard, give them the microphone, that they may bear that treasure into the world.

Until they are heard their lives matter only to God.

             Deep Blessings, Pastor Steve

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

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Dearly Beloved, Grace and Peace to you.                     Some mornings I wake up a king, anointed, anticipated, shining.

Some mornings I wake up a pilgrim, on a journey yet unseen, but on a road laid out with adventures to be met.

Some mornings I wake up a mule. No power to wield, nowhere to go, just me, just here, dull and pointless.

Those days I must be most vigilant and ready, for my master is a good samaritan and I never know when I will be needed for something luminous.

Deep Blessings, Pastor Steve

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

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Dearly Beloved, Grace and Peace to you.                    Martha, Martha, you are worried                   and distracted by many things;          there is need of only one thing.                            —Luke 10.41-42

There will be the clutter and clatter of pans, the rumble and jumble of traffic and trains, the brambles of papers and lists and calls, the beaten paths, the errands, the chores.

You don’t have to rattle and run with them. You can do one thing at a time.

You can stop and sit at the feet of the moment, pay reverent attention to whatever it is, and listen to the silence beneath the hum, and simply be in the the presence of the presence.

In all your doing that you surely must do, you still can just be. And your being will become what you do.

In the stillness within the action sits the Beloved who is not distracted with many things, but only wants to sit awhile with you.

                           Deep Blessings, Pastor Steve

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

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Dearly Beloved, Grace and Peace to you.                     God grant you the eyes of heaven          to see each person’s divine belovedness                   and so find joy.

God grant you a listening heart          to hear the cries of the silenced,                   and so gain wisdom.

God grant you humility          that unburdened by yourself                   you may be free.

God grant you courage          to enter the world’s dark wounds,                   and so bring healing. 

God grant you patience,          to know the strength of the long journey,                   and so be given hope.

God grant you a heart of love,          to be moved to action,                   and so receive deep peace.  

God grant you God’s own spirit          to share in the healing of the world,                   and so know God’s deep delight.

                    Deep Blessings, Pastor Steve

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

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God of Love and Justice, I do not pray for peace. I pray for rage, rage at the ways of evil and injustice, rage that burns and transfigures this sick world. I do not pray for mercy, but wrath upon us who have power to speak and do not. I do not pray for comfort, but for disturbance that will not let us rest or wait, but make us work and witness until we are done. I do not pray for safety but fear, fear for the souls of all of us who shelter ourselves behind violence, whose prayer shawls are soaked with the tears of the oppressed. I do not pray that you save us from our evil. Let it burn in our hands until we renounce it. Let us who have exiled ourselves suffer our loneliness until we re-unite with those we have dismissed. Let us stand outside the gates of paradise until we enter the lives of those who suffer. O God, you are today no Good Shepherd but the Crucified Prisoner, God of love and Justice, for the sake of love and justice, disturb us.

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

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