Actually an Artist

I love Easter. I love the movement through Lent, Holy Week, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, to Easter Joy. While listening to the sermon this morning, I started thinking about how tiny that first Easter Joy was. The women went to dress Jesus’s body, found him risen, and slowly the men began believing them and sending news. Well, I’m oversimplifying, but it wasn’t some trumpet, organ, and timpani announcement to the world that first Easter. We forget that hope began so small. It always begins so small. Jesus died at the hands of a cruel empire that cared nothing for human dignity. An empire that valued strength and power. Arrested him in the middle of the night and sentenced him to death without a trial. But even all the might of Rome couldn’t keep him dead, nor could it stop his message from spreading. I have to hold onto that these days because I look around at my country, fairly characterized as an empire, and the ways it is constantly devaluing human lives and dignity. We worship power, strength, whiteness, and money. I am not posting often because my energy is not there. I am constantly having to refocus on just carrying on in the day-to-day and doing what little things I can to make my influence more loving, softer, and anti-empire. Anticapitalist. Antiracist. Empathetic. It’s all so big that I cannot begin to name all the ways empire and oppression exist, but I can choose love and empathy every day.

This Easter, remember that you matter. Remember that your neighbor matters. The predominant voices in my country are currently arguing that other people don’t matter. RFK Jr. devalues disabled folks while playing roulette with children’s health. Trump orders shock deportations for no rhyme or reason except chaos and terror. Musk kills humanitarian programs while cashing a government per diem that would set any of the rest of us up for life. Over Lent, I (somewhat successfully) limited my social media and tried to instead turn my focus on books. I read Richard Rohr’s new book, The Tears of Things and Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, By America. Recently, I’ve started The Fix by Ian Cron. Each has offered some comfort for the assaults out there and each book has deeply unsettled me in a time when my nervous system is already overloaded and my grief ever-present. It is all helping me reorient and reorder my inner knowing to focus more on resistance, love, joy, and community in this new reality. Or new understanding of this reality. America has been this since it was founded. I have been blissfully unaware of all the ways empire has manifested, and still learning as I go.