Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
         

         Yom HaShoah
            Holocaust Remembrance Day

Children in a line
    disappear one by one
        through a sooty door.

Who remembers
    what they are leaving,
        who they used to be?

Our fear is the fuel
    for the furnace.
        There is always more.

Forgiveness comes,
    but first we are stripped
        of our forgetfulness,

standing naked in line,
    breathing the foul air.
        There is no demarcation

between any of us now.
    A pile of ragged things
        we once clung to.

Who remembers
    who we used to be?
        They go first; we may follow:

children in a line
    disappear one by one
        into the mercy of God.

         
         
Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

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

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
         
         

         “Look at my hands and my feet;
         see that it is I myself.
         Touch me and see;
         for a ghost does not have flesh and bones
         as you see that I have.”
                  —Luke 24.39

The Roman Imperium by its sword
tried to sever Jesus from his life,
to pry him from his own flesh;
and their minions ever since have sought
to separate the spiritual from the physical.
Death, they reasoned, ought to do it well.

How daft of them to think
The One who made all things,
who crafted earth and us from dust,
who fashioned smooth and rugged stones,
and lungs and lips and eyes and hands,
and bones that bear their burdens
with such elegance and grace,
and skin, its mounds and cups and curves
and plains and folds so eloquent,
alluring, and divine—
that the Creating One would by their force
forget pronouncing all things,
in their concrete thingness, good.
They didn’t know the one thing that God wants
is for all love to be made flesh.
So when they robbed poor Jesus of his breath
and blood, the one thing that God gave him, new
and holy, raising him from death, was this:
a body, flawed but breathing, flesh and bone.

Believer, show yourself your hands and side,
your trembling, lusting, spiritual mass,
your creaking, flabby, leaking, blessed flesh.
Look at your hands, that God has made. This is
the glory in which resurrection comes.

Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

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

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
         
         

Through the narrow slot
of the blinders of suffering or shame
we see only desolation.
At times we despair of this within,
unable to reach out of the black pit.
At times it is just as we wish,
filling the void with other people’s bodies.
But there in the darkness,
within the obscuring wound,
beneath the wailing silence,
from within the wrenched heart,
God sees glory,
honors the living soul,
and raises the Blessed One
to life that is eternal and victorious,
untouched by cruelty or grief,
given firm and radiant flesh.

Those with dead eyes
go on believing they are dead.
The living appear living
only to those who see with the eyes of God.

         
         
Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

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

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
         
         
Resurrection does not mean everything turns out OK. It does not save us from suffering, evil or death. It means that God’s one pure will is to give life and bless, and to set us free. This is what God does. Always. And no matter what else happens, what God does triumphs.

God is as present and active as gravity in every moment of our lives, including the hurt that we receive and the hurt that we cause. Everything belongs to God, and everything, no matter how awful, is gathered up in the final victory of God’s life-giving grace.  Usually we can only see the triumph afterward, and from a wider perspective. But we can learn to trust the grace, even in the most difficult times. We can learn to trust that the Present One is within us. We can learn to trust the Resurrecting One even amidst evil, injustice and suffering. Even when we do not know, we can trust. Grace will happen. Despite the gravest evil, grace will happen.
         
         
Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

_________________
Copyright © Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
         
         
         Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you.
         As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”
         When he had said this, he breathed on them
         and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
                  —John 20. 21-22

Jesus, your Beloved, is dead,
no longer present, no longer able
to give those gifts, to heal and bless,
no longer able to love,
and it has laid you low,
and in the locked room of your loss
suddenly he breathes his spirit into you
—this is all he came to do,—
fills your blood with his pulsing love,
his passionate nevertheless,

and the one who is miraculously alive after all
is you.

         
         
Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

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

 

              “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands,
              and put my finger in the mark of the nails
              and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”
                            —John 20.25

Oh, Thomas was no doubter.
The least naive, he trusted in the dark
the promise of our rising,
the open door of death.
He was the one, when Jesus stood
to go to Lazarus’ tomb in Bethany,
where enemies awaited him
with threats of death, who said,
“Then let us go and die with him.”

Oh, more, not less than all the rest,
Thomas believed in love, and how it bled.
He sought not proof of Jesus’ life,
but marks of what he suffered and forgave,
the scars of Thomas’ own betrayal,
to know that he had risen
not from bed, but from the depths
of hell, where Thomas needed him
to have gone, and been, and left transformed.

He didn’t ask to see his smiling face,
has famous, radiant eyes;
he didn’t hope to see him break the bread
the way he always did.
No, he asked to see his wounds,
the marks of love, the wounds of one
who weeps with those who weep,
who has walked with us through the valley
of the shadow of death.

Oh, Thomas, I’m with you:
I would not follow the safe and happy one,
the well-dressed Christ from a catalogue;
I will follow only the wounded one,
the one with most to forgive
and least reason to expect his hope.
I will follow the loving one with steady eyes,
who knows how much his love will cost.
I will follow the gentle man
with holes in his hands.

 

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
         
         

Breathe deeply.

A voice comes to you
through the garden.
Why go back
into the cave of death?
You don’t need your spices.

Are you ready to be taken away?

Be free now.
Your lover
comes for you.

         
         

Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

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

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
         
         

You were created to love.
It is your nature, and your purpose.

Your fears and desires get in the way:
your self-centeredness, your desire for control,
your fear of loss or diminishment,
your weakness and your wounds,
your attachment to things
that subvert love and drain life from you,
all prevent you from loving perfectly.

But their power is an illusion.
We flung them all at Jesus—
even death, and the wort suffering.
And they did not stop him;
they could not stop love.

God has defeated them,
buried them in the grave with him,
and he has come to us now without them.
He has risen, and has overcome them all.

You are free to love.
When you love you die to that world of fear,
and you are raised to a new life.
When you love you enter into God,
into what is divine and infinite and eternal.
When you love, even at great cost,
and even if you fail,
even if you have no effect at all,
you have won the victory.

         
         
Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

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

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
         
         

Loving One,
you are present,
unbound by anything.

Dawning One,
you are in this moment,
not entombed in the past.

Forgiving One,
you are in the freedom of my soul,
not the stones of my surroundings,
not the grave of my deeds.

You whose glory it is to set us free,
deliver me
into the present moment.

You who give life
where there is none,
I live not by surviving
but by being raised
each moment,

with each breath
to have died,
with each breath
to be risen.

         
         
Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

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

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
         
         

         

The halls of heaven ring empty.
The sapphire, carnelian and amethyst gleam for no one.
The great mountain, the holy throne sit untouched.
You won’t find the All-Merciful at this remove,
nor the storehouse of the powers that raise the dead.
The Glorious One is not here,
but far outside the fortress,
favoring the tents of the forgotten.
The Loving One has gone out into the silence
of those who have been cut off,
into the darkness of those who cannot know,
into the cries of the abandoned.
The All-Loving does not visit her forlorn
in their solitary confinement,
but passionately embraces them from within.
The All-Knowing knows better than we
even the desolation they know
as the absence of God.
The Unsayable Presence has left the sure palace
and gone wholly to be in the abyss
of the deepest terror of the God-forsaken.
You can hear him there, calling out.
         
         

         

Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve
______________________
Copyright © Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net