We live in a season of apocalypse. No, not in the sense of a literal end times, though it does seem that we are living into an end, which is always also a beginning.
The original meaning of apocalypse was an unveiling or uncovering. An apocalyptic season is one in which the truth is revealed plainly for all to see. What had been hidden to some is now undeniable reality.
I’ve written before on the wounded but not broken body of Christ. As painful as Christ’s wounds are, as painful as Jesus’s death is, neither the wounds nor the death were insurmountable. The resurrection reveals to us the true nature of death, which is that it is overcome by love. The presence of wounds on the post-resurrection body reveal that hurts may linger on, but they are not the defining feature of what comes next.
I continue to take great hope from the fact that Jesus’s body remained intact. Bones were never broken. His body is hurt, but remains one body.
This is not a post about the physical body of Christ.
It’s about the living and present body of Christ — the Church. While we have been in a season of deep rupture, we are not fractured beyond repair. While we have wounded one another, we do not need to be divided. And as the veil continues to fall, this may be the most important moment to recognize that unity.
Across the country, I am seeing people post about their neighbors taking down flags and removing bumper stickers. I’m hearing about people reaching out in small ways — an uncertain wave from across the driveway, a comment about the weather from a colleague who hasn’t spoken since 2016. Small gestures that begin the turn to relationship, perhaps to sanity. I hope a turn towards democracy.
These gestures should be taken for what they are: Deeply pained recognition of wrong. For those of us who voted against the current administration, there is such a strong temptation to gloat, to “hold accountable,” to demand that they state “Yes, I was duped, I was blind, I was stupid, I regret my vote, I was sexist and racist in my vote, I supported an abuser.”
But if we do that: We are no better than Trump, and no better than the Christian Nationalists who claim to follow Jesus and use language of “accountability” to shame, gain power, and feel superior. If those behaviors repel you on others, why would you replicate them on yourself?
Transforming the Way We Engage
The problem is: the sentence of lamentation and regret requires an immense amount of deprogramming and even more relational trust. Our self-righteousness will never help others to break the hold that Christian Nationalism has on them. We must help them find their way out of the dark not by exposing them to the full harshness of truths, not by punishing them with blindness, but by extending the smallest bits of light and grace as they are able to tolerate.
Our shared challenge in US America: There is no government task force to de-program people. Unification is against this administration’s aims. Just as denazification programs didn’t begin until after the war ended, reunification efforts won’t begin in any formal for some years yet.
It’s on us to transform the way we engage with one another.
We must be the de-programmers. Each and every one of us. We must each believe in others’ capacity to return to relationship, to reclaim dignity, to reconnect with a shared reality — and a shared hope for the future. We must commit to loving our neighbor.
Just like Christ’s body, Christianity in America — hell, all of civil life in America — is deeply wounded, but it is not irreparably broken.
I often wonder why God made the disciples wait for the resurrection. Why not bring Jesus back the next morning? It would have been no less miraculous. Why let them grieve and wander, lost for direction in their lives, before revealing that love remains even after death?
The best conclusion I’ve come to is that for God, grief is not to be avoided. Sometimes, grief might even be necessary in order to form and transform us — in order to give us eyes to see. Even in the resurrection reality, wounds are not healed or hidden; they are a part of what shapes us, and a way we draw closer to others.
Grief, lament, honest conversation are not signs of weakness. They are the soil in which resilience, reconciliation, and resurrection take root.
Start with Resilience
If your heart is a furnace of rage, I get it. I have those moments (erm, seasons) too. Here are some practices to turn that energy away from retribution and towards your higher aims of reconciliation.
Lament journaling
Set aside time to name what hurts: your grief, your outrage, your betrayal. Your journal can be an extended letter to God, who is big enough to hold your biggest feelings.
Grounding through breath and body
There is so much propaganda around. Even if we manage to avoid the infinite doomscroll and news notifications on our devices, just a walk down the street can expose us to so much hatred. When you feel activated, focus on your senses. Notice your feet, your breath. Aim to be still enough that you can feel your heart’s beat in your chest, perhaps even feel the push of the pulse in your wrists. This gives us space to calm our initial reactivity impulses and choose how we want to be in the world.
Imaginative empathy
As a contemplative exercise, picture a day in your neighbor’s life. What loss haunts them? What desires drive them? Who in their world believes differently from them — are they bound to their viewpoints because it’s the only way they have to belong in community? Give the most compassionate and generous interpretation you can as you attempt to see the humanity behind the beliefs.
Prayer or compassionate meditation
Invoke the God who resurrected with visible wounds. “God of wounds, give me the faith of Thomas, to enter the wounds of another. Give the humility to ask, the courage to listen, and the grace to forgive.”
In compassion meditation, we remember the feeling of someone who loved us unconditionally. Then, we extend that same feeling of unconditional love to someone we like. Return to the feeling of being loved, then extend it to another person about whom we feel neutral. Return to the warmth of being loved, and extend that feeling to someone we really struggle with, perhaps even hate. When you can think of your enemy and say “May you be free of suffering,” you are healing yourself and our fractured society.
Move towards Reconciliation
Have you ever had to admit that you were wrong about something important? One of my most shameful experiences was having stayed in an abusive relationship for too long — by years. Each time I lost another friend, I felt I had to double down my commitment to the relationship, because who else did I have? By the time I finally left, it was a domestic violence situation. A close relative refused to help me, saying that they wouldn’t help now because I hadn’t left sooner. So I did it alone, with very little help. Obviously, that made it much more difficult.
When someone has to admit that they’ve been duped, they are already experiencing so much shame. It was hard to admit to myself that I had gotten myself into an abusive situation, and it was even harder to admit it to others. Especially those who had tried to warn me.
Piling on shame doesn’t help. They already know. And when shame is piled on, it makes them more likely to retreat to the safe lines established by hatred, to retreat into the “us and them” mentality.
On the positive side, the reverse is also true: every small kindness is savored. You don’t have to affirm their choices; it’s probably best to not even talk about them until they’re ready. But return the wave, say ‘good morning,’ drop your annual Christmas card in their mailbox. Every act of inclusion is a gesture towards reconciliation.
Reject one-liners
It’s tempting to respond with “You were warned” or “See, I told you so.” But searing someone with moral superiority doesn’t lead to grace — it just breeds more resentment. God says that they desire “mercy, not sacrifice.” If our aim is mercy, we must resist the impulse to sacrifice our enemies on the altar of our own righteousness.
Maintain your boundaries
If someone in your life wants to talk with you about their experiences of politics in the recent season, you have options. You can say no: I value our relationship, and am not ready to risk the connection we have by talking about politics yet. You can also say yes with conditions: I am interested in hearing about your experience, but I don’t want to debate. Then commit to only asking questions, and to asking to transition to a different topic when you need to.
Stay steadfast with positive relationships
De-programming does not happen in a sermon or a short spring. It is relational work grounded in persistent presence. The good news: You don’t have to sacrifice yourself for someone else’s work. Or for anything; God already did that.
Related: Beyond Self Care, Building Sustainable Practices Worksheet
Keep up with your positive relationships. For every interaction you have with the aim of reconciliation across cultural divides, try to have at least one interaction with someone who is already a positive presence in your life. Invite your relationships to sustain you.
Resurrection Imagination
In her piece “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future,” Octavia Butler recounts a student asking her for the answer to the wicked problems facing the world. She responds, “There isn’t one. […] There’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers–at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”
The obvious follow up question: How do we become a solution? My best answer is that we form ourselves in the ways humanity has always formed one another: through story.
Look to the past
Butler recommends this as a way to foresee the challenges that we are slipping into — the same challenges tend to occur on repeat, as we are seeing now with fascism (a cycle that Butler herself saw coming as early as the 1980s). I’d add that we can also learn from the response to problems. Currently, I find myself looking into denazification programs and researching how Europe was shaped after the fall of the Roman Empire. I return to reading The Great Halifax Explosion, a historical account of an accidental bomb that goes off in the city’s harbor, and the community that showed the best of the human spirit in the wake of the crisis. Biographies are also great – the more particular we can see how an intervention is lived, the easier it is to apply those values and stances to our context and our individual lives.
Consider a better possible future
Another science fiction author: Kim Stanley Robinson has built his career on imagining the most optimistic outcomes to real challenges, while staying grounded in the reality of those problems. His most famous work is The Ministry for the Future, which imagines humanity solving climate change and ecosystem over the next six decades. Another novel, New York 2140, imagines everyday life in New York City following its adaptation to sea level rise.
I love these books. They make me less afraid of the future we face, and more able to imagine working towards the solutions that will allow the human spirit to flourish in its best aspects as a result of those challenges.
Practice radical hospitality
Of course, the scriptures are among our most revisited stories, and therefore the most formative. One that feels especially relevant to forming my hope around reconciliation is in the gospel of Luke. Jesus tells a story about a great banquet in which the host invites the wealthy, who don’t come. He then invites the poor, the crippled, and the diseased. It’s an illustration of God’s radical hospitality, an imagination for the future in which everyone is invited.
The complexity of the parable invites a simple response: be in spaces with those different from yourself. Perhaps that is your own dinner table, as in the parable. But perhaps it’s simpler: regularly spending time in a neighborhood coffee shop, or repeatedly attending a worship service and staying for the social hour. It could even be attending an event once, like Make America Dinner Again.
Practice systems reform
Leaders in the climate change movement insist that the solution isn’t for every single person to work in green energy; there are other activities the world needs. Rather, they invite every single person to consider the ways that they can use their current role, in their current workplace, to create a sustainable future.
At this point, I think both sides of the political divide agree that we need systems reform — in our government, in business practices, in just about every sector of society. Imagine the future you’d like to live in; picture yourself walking around your city. What would it take to get there? What would your role look like in that world? What can you do to close the gap between where we are now and where we hope to be? We can invite the Kin-dom of God into your present life. We can live the reality of its presence until it becomes a reality for everyone.
Why This Matters
Wounds are the site of resurrection. Messy moments are the site of transformation. And as a country, as a society, we find ourselves in a mess.
Our common life has been wounded. Deeply. But it is not broken.
This is the moment to mend. Not to fix and control, but to enter into the mess with compassion and grace. This is the moment to form our imaginations for the future we hope for — and to choose that future with every gesture, every word, and every invitation.
May we have the faith to learn from our ancestors, the hope to see the Kin-dom in our midst, and the love to invite our neighbor to join us there.
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field.
I’ll meet you there.”
– Rumi
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