Many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.
                         —Mark 10.31

Which means, of course, a circle.
First, the Great Upheaval:
“the powerful brought down from their thrones,
and the lowly lifted up;
the hungry filled with good things,
and the rich sent away empty,”
and then the Great Circling:
all of us together, each one first and last,
each a part of one whole,
held in one another’s hands,
all of us facing each other,
with all our differences and disagreements,
our strange and varied languages and values and traditions,
all of us in the circle, belonging, cherished, honored.
None are above or beneath, ahead or behind.
We are all here.
And our hereness, our oneness, our encirclement,
the last-being-first-and-the-first-being-last,
is divine.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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When the flood waters scrape it all away
we recoil at the knives
of what once was, or should have been,
that is not,
the jagged edge of what we wanted
and still want
but can no longer.

And yet all of that (yes, so dear,
which is why the rich man went away grieving)
is the camel that couldn’t pass through the needle’s eye.

But you have.
Maybe shoved, but you have come through,
yes, with sorrow and trauma, but through
the needle’s eye of loss,
into this world.

You, whole and alive, are here,
along with so many
who have also been drawn
through that same needle’s eye,
drawn on the thread of grief,
by the hand of love.

For love has also come through. Love is unburdened,
and passes through any needle’s eye,
through any wall, through any grave.

Let yourself be stitched, then,
with all the others, in life’s fabric.
The whole wounded world needs your love,
the torn fabric needs the thread of your grace.
That is why you are here.
Amidst the mourning, the picking up of pieces,
the starting again,
keep loving.
In the end, it is all that survives disaster,
and all that redeems it.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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             “If I go forward, God is not there;
             or backward, I cannot perceive God.
             I look to the left, God is hidden;
             I turn to the right— nothing. Nothing.”
                         — Job 23. 8-9

It’s true: the God we’re seeking isn’t there—
you know, The Big Guy, that Huge Person,
the cartoon God, who does what we want,
who intervenes now and then but not always,
a God we can see and hear and touch,
or at least imagine.
Nope. There’s no such thing.

God is not a spirit but Spirit itself:
Love itself, Divine Wholeness,
Gracious Life Force,
the Delight in which everything is One,
Womb of life, blessing, and grace.

Is that too spacey, too woo-woo?
Yes. That’s the point.
(How badly we want God to be smaller—finite!—
knowable, and a whole lot like us.
How often we want the feeling
more than we want God!)
But God is beyond our sensing or knowing,
beyond our labeling—infinite, unsearchable—
and yet present, like gravity,
affecting everything, blessing everything.

You will rarely if ever “feel God’s presence”
any more than you feel the rotation of the earth
or the gifts of your DNA.
But let yourself love someone. There.
Or hold still and let a bug crawl across your wrist.
You both partake of Life.
Feel the bug, and your oneness.
Let yourself care about the bug.
There.

Trust grace and be kind,
and in that experience you will know God,
the One, Holy, present in every simple thing.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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             “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own…”
                         —Mark 10.21

What you lack is lack.
You have so much, you don’t need eternal life,
don’t need God.

To receive eternal life you have to be empty enough.
You have to sell everything, give it all away.
You have to live in radical trust.
Sometimes trust is deepest when it’s all there is.

Be mindful of what you cling to,
and what you would gladly spend to find blessing,
what you would drop to be free.
And drop it.

Practice trust and generosity.

Practice letting go and giving away.
When you’ve given away what you can,
what you’re left with is what can’t be taken from you:
infinite life.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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             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 living in the real world is hard work,
when its needs come begging and its wounds cry out,
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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