From a mystical standpoint, resurrection isn't just about Jesus popping out of the grave like some kind of cosmic jack-in-the-box doling out free tickets to paradise. It's about an unflinching faith in the inevitability of radical renewal to make all things new.

Physical death (as in the end of life) is really the least common way we experience the finality of ending. Quitting a job, breaking up with a partner, selling a house, graduating school, letting go of a behavior pattern that no longer serves you - these are just a few examples of transitions in life that may require us to accept and grieve loss.

This is where a lot of people get stuck, because we aren't really taught the power of resurrection as a way of being. We get this passive "Jesus did this for you" that hyperfocuses on the afterlife and fails to root our healing and creative power in a radical hope that life and love will always triumph over the temporary nature of endings, no matter how final they seem.

If MAGA knew how to accept, let go, and grieve, they wouldn't be vulnerable to a weaponized nostalgia that promises to bring a dead and gone era back to life. Just like Jesus didn't rise as his old self but in his glory, neither will any other renewal look like it did. Your new job won't be the same, your new neighborhood will have different nearby stores, and whether your image of the past is real or imagined, the new era of humanity won't look like the 1950s - or the 1990s, for that matter.

Leaning into the radical strength that is possible in resurrection can help us understand that when technology makes new ways possible, old ways die. It can remind us that grieving is healthy, and help us pass through liminal times of uncertainty with relative grace, doing the inner work to prepare ourselves for a future that is irreversible changed - but contains the fertile seeds of our prior self, reborn in the power of our next self.

Six months ago it looked like the US was fully unraveling and might completely collapse. Now it seems we may limp through this and emerge with our systems damaged, but intact. Without getting into which of those is preferable, what we can say is that there has been a death of the US we knew before Trump. This is a signal that one way or another, resurrection is coming, for it always does.

To move through a resurrection is to get curious about what's possible, to gently steer ourselves through and beyond grief into hope, and strength, and a vision for our lives that understands the new is not just coming, it has arrived, and we get to discover / invent / pioneer our place in it.

We see this in the narrative which follows Easter in the text, as the disciples mourn the Jesus they thought would overthrow Rome, and discover the power of christ-consciousness in themselves. The risen Jesus comforts them with a vision of their role as advocates of neighbor-love, and the radical hope that their movement could spread far beyond their local communities to save the world around them. Then leaving them with this promise, he flies away to be with god, his worldly work finished, theirs just begun.

This is a conviction shared by anyone who believes in mutual aid and collaborative ways of being. And it is a hope and promise we can hold on to as the world we knew dies around us. I don't know if the US will finish collapsing or limp along for another century or two. But I know the America I grew up in is gone, and that grieving and letting go is the healthiest way to get ready for playing a role in what's to come.

I don't want my psyche vulnerable to the MAGA of the 2060's who promises to bring back the "greatness" of the 2010s. I don't want my spirit to drown in a sorrow so suffocating that it cannot imagine a path forward. I want a spirit of curiosity and hope, capable of articulating a vision for a path forward that makes democratic progress possible.

I want to stand in the risen power of eternal renewal, the inevitable truth that life always flourishes again in the aftermath of destruction, transformed, but vibrant and unstoppable. Life really does have the final say over death. We the people have the final say over MAGA.

The future is ours to write. It's not just coming, it is here.

Happy Easter, I love you all.

<3 Mikester