Dear Mother Earth, gift of God, we thank you,
for you are our life, our breath and our blood.
You bear us in your arms and receive us at our death,
and will never refuse us.
The rolling sea in our heart, the mountains in our bones,
the wind in our lungs, the flowing rivers in our blood,
the many-splendored creatures living within us
all sing praise to God and remind us we are of you.

Dear Mother Earth, we confess:
though the forest and desert are our own flesh
we have wounded you,
we have treated you selfishly, as “the least of these.”
We have betrayed our oneness
with the grasses and the hawk, the beetle and the whale.
Even as we use you, we repent;
even as we torture you you forgive us.

Dear Mother of Life,
as you renew the earth in spring, restore our mercy;
return us to our place in the great circle of life;
give us the generosity of your fields,
the humility and wisdom of your small creatures.

Dear Mother God, hear our praise and our confession,
and renew in us the beauty of the earth,
for the sake of all life. Amen.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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           Were not our hearts burning within us
           while he was talking to us on the road?
                           —Luke 24.32

Our deepest grief
is not that we have lost what we loved
but that in our aloneness
our hearts burned within us
and we didn’t notice.

That as we walked
through the shadowed valleys
we were accompanied
and didn’t believe it.

That we were in the presence of the holy
and weren’t aware.

That we, too,
because we are so beloved, are holy,
and held in the umbilical arms of life
and raised from death
and don’t even realize it.

Our deepest grief
is the burning of our hearts,
not a hankering back
but a reaching forward,
the labor pain of a birth unbirthed,
a newness we haven’t embraced yet,
a resurrection we haven’t yet made real.

As our holiness blossoms within us
we allow ourselves to be led
by the burning of our hearts,
shedding what is expected of us—molting—
and becoming, always newly becoming
who were are created to be,
real-izing resurrection.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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           While they were talking and discussing,
           Jesus himself came near and went with them,
           but their eyes were kept from recognizing him.
                           —Luke 24.15-16

All those times you walked through loss,
wandered in disorientation,
trudged on an endless trek to nowhere…

and thought you were alone.

There is a kind of being held
that, if you let it hold you, holds you
through the deepest abyss, the bleakest ruin,
and never loses you.

But the Unseen One gives no clues,
you can’t detect your being held
any more than a fetus can.
Only afterward can the child
recognize the mother.

Even only now, late in the poem,
do you see:
someone has been reading with you
from the first word.

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

Oh, we remember the ovens.
The gas chambers, the piles of shoes.

What we don’t remember is the silence.
Our silence. We don’t remember the life as usual,

walking on shattered glass to the grocery store.
We don’t remember smelling something

in the air, feeling something and replacing it
with some other feeling.

We don’t remember the nothing we said
when the policies were instituted,

the nothing we did
when our neighbors disappeared.

We forget how we practiced
not seeing what we were seeing.

We pray not that we remember
but that we see.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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We gather in the name of the Mother-Father,
the companionship of Christ,
and the power of the Holy Spirit.

We join a journey that began before us,
that stretches back, and also onward.
The Unknown One joins us, and hears.
We tender our brokenness.
The Storyteller tells the old story in a new way
and we see in a new way. It is our story.
Our hearts burn within us.
Drawn together, we invite the Stranger to our table,
offering our gifts and hospitality.
We break bread,
and in the sharing we behold the Holy.
Our eyes are opened.
Wonder, reverence, awe and gratitude
swell in us, and raise us up
and send us out to tell others.
We go with haste, rejoicing.

The service is ended.
Go in peace and serve God with joy.
Amen.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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           If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them;
           if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.
                           —John 20.23


When you forgive
you unbind someone,
like Lazarus emerging from the tomb
of your judgment.
Forgiveness is healing.

Love is concern for the other,
not resentment and concern for self,
and “what I am owed.”
When you forgive you are free to love.
Forgiveness is freedom.

If you retain the sins of any
and cling to a judgment,
you stay in the past,
still suffering the offense.
The condemnation you intend for another
you bear yourself.
You are bound by the need you imagine
for something in the past to be corrected.
When you forgive you come into the present,
which is the only place life is.
You come out of the dead past into the living present
like Christ emerging from the tomb,
walking in newness of life.
Forgiveness is resurrection.

God is in the present moment, not the past;
God is love, not resentment.
Even when being wronged,
like Christ on the cross, forgiving,
God’s judgment is always mercy.
Forgiveness is union with God.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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           Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you.
           As God 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 returned not to prove a point,
not to give us something to profess centuries later,
but to give us his spirit,
to breathe his eternal, loving Life into us
so that we would be his new risen body,
raised not as one individual but as a community.
He returned from his grave to send us out of our graves,
send us into the world to love, to forgive, to bless,
to do justice, to labor with God for the mending of the world,
empowered not merely by optimism
but by the infinite Spirit that cannot be killed,
that endures tragedy and overpowers evil
and burrows through death to new life.
Breathe deeply of this mystery.
As God breathes into Eden’s dirt and it becomes a living being,
Jesus breathes into us and we are transformed;
we rise from the dust of our own graves,
and become living beings, risen, reborn, truly alive.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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When you let go of your life
and hold only to love
then your whole life is love,
which is infinite.

When you let the river
of compassion and forgiveness
flow through you
it bears you
through everything,
everything.

You are changed,
for your life is not merely your own
but divine.

A vessel of the eternal,
no matter what you suffer,
the light is still in you.

Wounded, you shine.
Defeated, you triumph.
Even in death you live.

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


I killed him, you see.
At the crucial moment I failed him. I ran away.
When they shouted for his death, did I defend him?
In my silence, in my vanishing into decency and decorum
it was I who hammered those nails into his hands.
It was I who died that day.
Peter, the drama major, had a scene.
Judas, always the extremist, got all the attention.
But did I feel better than they? No.
                                                              That death was mine.
So when you say he’s alive, don’t just give me a happy ending:
“Oh, it was nothing. I’m fine. And you?” No.
It’s not that I doubt he’s alive.
I just want to make sure he’s the one who was dead.
A nice recovery would please me, but not save me.
The one you say is risen,
did he rise from a real grave, or just an imagined one?
Did he overcome my sin, or just your disappointment?
I want to see the holes of the nails I put there.
I want to know that the one who’s living is the one I killed,
that my evil has been undone,
that my guilt has been forgiven.
If I touch his wounds maybe he will touch mine.
And in that touch, heal.
If the crucified one, not some eternally unhurt one,
but the wounded and dead and buried one is truly alive
then so am I, and I will kneel at the feet
of my Superior, my Savior, my God.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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The horror behind us has not vanished.
The stain on the wall hasn’t faded.
Your eyes are still red from weeping
at his sorrow, bearing yours.
How could you forget the burn of the nails
as he was hammered to your own heart,
and suffered for your selfishness?
Without doubt you felt the world collapse
as he breathed his last, the whole city shaken,
dust to dust, not one stone left upon another.
Surely you remember the travesty of his lifeless flesh,
the theft of your time with him.
Clearly, you saw the stone rolled onto the grave,
the granite weight of death so immovable.
This you know: that sin and sorrow killed him,
that the army that led him to his death
was quartered in your heart.

And yet he is alive. What do we make of this?
That there is a mercy more powerful than all that.
That all of this, the sin and sorrow, the guilt,
the stone hardness of death itself,
is no longer what it was.
What seemed absolute has become a mist,
changed by mystery, diluted with light,
confined by the certainty that despite all horror,
our graves, overpowered by love,
open like wings, and let go,
and we begin anew.

Now we know.

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