You who live in trust of the One,
         who abide in the Holy Presence,
will say, “You are my refuge, my safety,
         my Beloved, to whom I belong.
You save me from those who would use me,
         from what would ruin my life.
You hold me in strong, gentle arms;
         in your company I find shelter;
         in your faithfulness I am home.”

You will not live in fear:
         bad news won’t disturb you,
         threats will not deter you.
Whatever troubles assail you
         your soul is still intact.
Evil will tear at those around you—
          you will feel its torrid breath—
          but it can’t touch your Belovedness.
Look and see with the eyes of your heart
         the agony of those who do evil.
But you trust the Beloved with your life,
         the One Who Holds This
                  with your very being.

Your struggles will not defeat you;
         your losses can’t destroy you.
The Gracious One surrounds you with love,
         companions you steadfastly,
shares your pain,
         keeps your hope alive,
with grace greater than your failings,
         healing deeper than your wounds.
You will stand up to ominous powers
         and resist devious schemes.

The Loving One says, “I am with you.
         I make of you more than you imagine.
Entrust yourself to me;
         I will carry you through this.
Let my love flow through you,
         and I will give you life,
         life that can’t be taken from you.”

         
         

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

To receive Unfolding Light as a daily e-mail,
write to me at unfoldinglight(at) gmail.com

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
         
         
First day of autumn,
season of diminishment.
Trees open the pages
of their psalms of lament,
their long slow humility.
Leaves mutter loss over and over.
Veined and wrinkled hands
like mine
let go.
The ground is a resting place
of brown and yellow bits of things,
seedfall and leafscatter,
rustle of death.

In my sixties
my days narrow now,
a passage of shedding.

And yet— in Australia this very day
is a first day of spring,
the other side of this passage,
this dying a rising
into something new, unburdened,
and alive.

         
         
Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

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

To receive Unfolding Light as a daily e-mail,
write to me at unfoldinglight(at) gmail.com

         
         There was a rich man…
                  and at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus…
                           —Luke 16.19, 20

God, I confess
the riches I take for granted,
the privilege that allows me
to not see the needy outside my gate,
obliterated in my drunken stupor
of “all lives matter.”
I confess the gate.

I confess I seek my own completeness
without them.
I prefer comfort to justice,
the sumptuous feast
to the bosom of Abraham.

I confess I see the poor as other than me,
myself as other than poor.
I confess I see them as other than you.

Lazarus God,
this is how you come to me.
This is your visitation.

Let me be poor in keeping
and rich in sharing.
Let me not be alone at my table.
I will let you in.

God, open my eyes,
open my heart, open my hands.
Open my gate.

         

         
         

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

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write to me at unfoldinglight(at) gmail.com

         
         
The woods around here drip and steam,
each leaf is licked and slicked and trimmed
with last night’s rain, and every breeze shakes loose
another rain of drops. A silvered field
of grasses shimmers in the sun. Dim puddles
pool beneath the fading ferns a while,
then disappear into the thirsty ground.
Mist floats in bunches over hills, their ghostly
tatters trailing in the trees. The air
is dim this morning, dense with sweat.

But it is dry in these woods, and not wet.
This rain that passed and dropped its hanky here
has not relieved this drought. The stream bed’s blank.
The lakes are down. The land is thirsty still.

So I can be: devoutly praying, calmed
by sounds of running fountains in my psalms,
and yet I never stay enough to let the rain
soak in, soak in, go deep, and flood my soul.
         

         
         

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

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write to me at unfoldinglight(at) gmail.com

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
      
         
                  
When the world seems tilted into darkness,
         rotting at the edges,
when large, hard beasts
         lumber up just behind the horizon,
when the great cathedral ceiling
         in my chest falls to dust,
and the knowing beneath my knowing
         shuts its mouth in horror
                  or shame,
when the hands of my heart tremble,

I may sit in candlelight
and watch the storm
from inside the window,
but eventually
I go out
into the darkness,
into the rain,
                           
the rain,

with its infinite
tender fingers.

__________________
Weather report

Massage
as a Source greater than our failures
floods us and sweeps away
our pockets of stationary air.
Expect bathing and rinsing
especially at lower instincts,
moved by water and the Spirit.
Surface anxiety will give way to trust,
possibly turning to hope later in the day.
         
         
Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

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

To receive Unfolding Light as a daily e-mail,
write to me at unfoldinglight(at)gmail.com

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
         
         
Walk among trees who do not judge you,
who travel seasons in perfect meekness.

Leave the drumbeat of blocks and apartments,
hours and trains, lines and squares,
and return to the rhythm of living things.

Observe beings who live the life they are given.

Go at a pace you won’t trip over roots
while looking up.

Listen to the conversation the sun has with the grasses,
watch its slow labor among the trees.

Let your life become as purposeful as any wild thing.

Stay long enough to shed the illusion
that you are superior, that you are separate,
that this is not also your flesh.

Let your breath, prairie wind, sea breeze,
—amazing gift, moment after moment!—
carry you through the day.

Your own organs, your hands, your eyes,
let them infest this day of work.

Earthling, be of this earth.
Let it have you.

         

         
         
Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

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

To receive Unfolding Light as a daily e-mail,
write to me at unfoldinglight(at) gmail.com

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
         
         

Let this be your religion:
to share in delight.

Let this be your doctrine:
infinite love and grace in all things.

Let this be your law:
the generosity of all being.

Let this be your Scripture:
the blessing hidden in each moment.

Let this be your faith:
kindness greater than all suffering.

Let this be your heaven:
love, for love alone yields joy.

Let this be your worship:
to trust the abundance of grace.

Let this be your practice:
to reach out with open hands.

Let this be your discipline:
trust and gratitude, trust and gratitude.

         
         
Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

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

To receive Unfolding Light as a daily e-mail,
write to me at unfoldinglight(at) gmail.com

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
         
         
A rich executive had a manager who was squandering his property. So he decided to fire him. The manager summoned his master’s debtors one by one. He asked one, “How much do you owe my master?” They answered, “A hundred jugs of olive oil.” He said, “Make it fifty.” He asked another, “How much do you owe?” They replied, “A hundred containers of wheat.” He said, “Make it eighty.” And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly.
                  —Adapted from Luke 16.1-8

The Torah prohibited the charging of interest (Ex. 22.25, Lev. 25.36-37) but in Jesus’ time wealthy business people designed an economic apparatus that got around that, and charged predatory interest rates. Jesus’ hearers may have been likely to assume the manager in this story was simply canceling the exorbitant interest and adjusting the debtors’ bills back to the actual amounts they originally owed. Maybe Jesus is critiquing economic injustice.

And maybe this: What if Christ is the dishonest manager, who is—isn’t it true?—really wasteful, squandering God’s love on us all? Christ runs around to everybody who thinks they owe God something and says to them, “You don’t owe God what the religious apparatus says you do.” And God approves of that.

That sounds like Jesus. Sure, you owe God your life. (Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.) But you have also prayed a thousand times, “Forgive our debts as we forgive our debtors.” (Yeah, in the Greek it actually is debts.) Even our debts to God are erased. Sins are forgiven, lepers are cleansed, debts are canceled, the lost are returned, the dead are raised. Jesus seems to be all about erasing the past and starting new.

Maybe Jesus wants to cut us some slack. Maybe you don’t owe God what you think you do. It’s all a gift—what you get from God, and what you give back. Take out your bill. What does it say? What do think you owe God? What do you need to atone for? Well, you don’t owe God anything. Try that on for a day. See if it helps you feel “welcomed into the eternal homes.”
     
         
Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

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

To receive Unfolding Light as a daily e-mail,
write to me at unfoldinglight(at) gmail.com

         
         No slave can serve two masters;
         for a slave will either hate the one and love the other,
         or be devoted to the one and despise the other.
         You cannot serve God and wealth.
                  —Luke 16.13

God in your mercy,
heal my desires.

I want you,
and I don’t want you.

I am torn between two lovers: you,
and what is not you:

the easy or familiar, the self-possessed,
the idol of my way, my control.

Yes, you are in everything. But let me see
when I desire something more than you.

I don’t need knowledge of all things,
just of when I am turning away from you.
         
In the beggar on the street, the career choice,
the morning light, let me turn toward you.

Work your grace in me:
transform my desires.

Set me to practice desiring you,
again and again to choose, to turn, to seek.

Let me hunger and thirst,
let me want you more than the next breath.
         
Teach me to want you.
Teach me desire.

         

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

To receive Unfolding Light as a daily e-mail,
write to me at unfoldinglight(at) gmail.com

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
         
         

Why do you love the baby
who spits up on you,
cries in the night
and poops with abandon,
who is wholly selfish,
accomplishes nothing,
and cannot justify their existence
or do better?

For the same reason of no reason,
God loves you,
with the same delight,
the same devotion,
the same tender care,
the same no reason.

         

         
         
Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

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

To receive Unfolding Light as a daily e-mail,
write to me at unfoldinglight(at) gmail.com