This is the face of a writer who spent the weekend revising all 55,000+ words of my manuscript. My relief and joy were made possible by a village of beta readers, who read chapters and provided vital feedback, including a dear mentor who read the first 10 chapters and will be reading the last two on a roadtrip tomorrow. Grateful doesn’t begin to do justice to the feeling of being so well supported in this project.

That includes my gratitude for this community: you have been unbelievably patient with me as my writing deadline extended from 6 months, to 9, to nearly a year. Thank you for bearing with me as I wrote this book between school pick-ups, worship prep, interfaith events, community organizing, family trips and so much more.

I’m particularly astonished at how folks have continued to support me as paid subscribers, even as my production here has been much sparser than I’d originally hoped. I have taken that as a sign that you are not simply supporting this Substack for your own immediate consumption, but you are really patrons of my creative work. Thank you for sustaining me in this season. I’m looking forward to doing some very special sneak peaks and community gatherings just for you.

And to everyone who is new here: good things are on the way! It’s wild to me that new folks keep showing up, and it brings me immense encouragement that this book will land in a lot of hands that are eager to receive it. Thank you for being here.

Becoming Soulful Revolutionaries is slated for release in January 2028. I’m submitting the manuscript to my editor in a couple weeks. We will go through a period of revisions together, then it will go to a copy editor, and then it will be out of my hands as the Broadleaf team gets it ready to go to press! That’s when I’ll be reaching out to y’all to help me launch this project into the world.

But first things first, I thought I’d take a moment to share some reflection I’ve been doing on what I’ve learned about my creative process over the last year. I hope it will be helpful to you, whatever you may be laboring to bring into the world.

Here are three big lessons I’ve learned while writing a book:

1. Bring the train all the way into the station

When my friend and mentor the Rev. Dr. sent along her feedback about the first 10 chapters of the book, she gave me some vital advice, knowing I still had a couple chapters to write:

Bring the train all the way into the station before going back to revise.

Friends, believe me when I tell you this advice would have made all the difference in my process if I’d heard and internalized it a year ago! I realized why I had been spinning my wheels the first couple months after getting a book contract. At that time, I kept writing and rewriting the first couple chapters until I was absolutely sick of them.

Leah explained that it’s easier for the brain to revise than it is to create from scratch, so it will do anything it can to resist that work.

Understatement of the year.

Of course, the nature of life is that we can only receive advice when we are ready to receive it. This time, I was ready.

I powered through writing the last couple of chapters before giving my brain a chance to second guess what was happening.

That brings me to lesson number two:

2. Write the “shitty first draft”

Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird remains the most formative book I’ve read about writing since I read it as a junior in high school. Her straightforward advice to just write the “shitty first draft” is a mantra I have kept in mind throughout this process, and especially since receiving Leah’s wise counsel.

I tend toward perfectionism as a writer, as in life. This weakness is much less debilitating when writing a short form essay like this. It’s easier to revise in real time without worrying about totally flubbing your deadline (which in the case of this piece, is also made up). But when you are staring down a real deadline, with a 45,000-55,000 word count to meet, perfectionism becomes a problem. I would find myself spinning my wheels on a turn of phrase, a paragraph or a chapter, as the days, weeks or even months flew by.

Reminding myself to write shitty first drafts was helpful, because it freed me to get a manuscript done, and from there, to look at the project from 10,000 feet. Being a stickler about a sentence is not helpful when you need to do that exponentially. This weekend I was able to take my shitty first draft of the manuscript and revise it with the whole narrative arc in mind. I could think about how each chapter’s illustrations, research and reflections served the greater purpose. Often, that meant cutting stuff that initially I thought would be really good — and even portions that I had labored over.

If I had just written the shitty first draft in the first place, I probably would have gotten the whole thing done sooner. But of course this is also a life lesson — I’ve now done a shitty first draft of a book-writing process, and I know how I’ll do it differently next time!

3. Go Waste Time with God

Years ago, a seminary professor offered this dismissal to me and my classmates during a retreat, and it has stayed with me.

For several months, I have spent every other Friday at the Sacred Heart Jesuit Retreat House. It is a silent retreat center, and I have purposely never asked for the wifi password. I would spend weeks agonizing over a chapter in the nooks and crannies of daily life. Then, I would go to the retreat house and write a chapter in a matter of hours.

When I first decided to created this designated, expansive time to write, I told my friend, spiritual director . Ryan encouraged me to not simply work while there. “Go on walks,” he advised. Giving myself time to simply be, he explained, was as important to the creative process as the act of writing itself.

I know that he is right, though I have struggled mightily to make time for being.

However, a couple of weeks ago, I was at the retreat house to lead a confirmation retreat for my church. During the designated time of solitary reflection, I spent time in prayerful conversation with Jesus as I walked the Stations of the Cross. Later, I took a nap in a hammock. I wasn’t planning to write on that day at all, and was surprised to discover that out of this time flowed several journal pages that became one of my favorite sections of the book.

It has consistently been my experience that when I “waste time with God,” creativity is a far more natural outflow. It’s such a counterintuitive thing to do when facing a deadline. But ultimately, the time I spent moving my body, soaking in nature, praying, daydreaming, and quietly reflecting, proved much more fruitful than the hours I spent staring at a blinking cursor.

There’s a lot more to say about what I’m learning about myself in this process, but I won’t belabor it, as I need to bring this book all the way into the station!

Thank you for cheering me on, for reading along, and for being a Soulful Revolutionary in the world. This book is as much of you — and of all the incredible Soulful Revolutionaries who have taught me — as it is for you.

Gratefully,

Dear Soulful Revolutionary,

I hope AI is never able to do my dishes.

This is what I’ve been pondering as I wrap up the manuscript of my book, while noticing a strong urge to take pieces of it that I have found particularly troublesome, and to put it into ChatGPT for feedback.

Now, it’s in my contract with my publisher not to use AI to write. (Dear Broadleaf team, I promise that I haven’t done so!)

But are there times where the convenience calls to me? Where I’d like to shortcut the exhausting process of writing and rewriting and rewriting again? Oh, absolutely. And all the more so because over the last year, I have been using the technology more and more often for other work that I do: it assists me with grant-writing, curriculum-planning, budgeting, and more.

Yet I often wonder what I have given up of my humanity by embracing this technology — even as the twinge of guilt I feel when using ChatGPT has diminished over time, to the point of being generally indecipherable.

Does AI make us more or less human?

Over the last couple years, I’ve had a number of conversations with my friend the Rev. about what it means to be human in the age of AI (including this one we had about AI, Ethics and Empathy on his podcast last year). I periodically bug him with ethical issues I see with AI.

Peter, who has thought about AI a whole lot more than me (and is currently working on a book on the subject), always has a gracious and thoughtful response (though we don’t always agree). Peter tends to think that AI can make more room in users’ lives for creativity. That is, by giving robots the tasks we find uninspiring, humans have more bandwidth for those that energize and bring meaning to our lives.

It’s true that AI has made me more efficient, which has bought me time to do other things, like write my book. But I would contend it has had a net negative impact on my humanity.

Consider, for example, my complicity as an AI-user in the industry’s destruction of books — a grievous violation of my ethics. I am equally aggrieved by the data centers destroying local economies and ecosystems, including the one being built in my own county. And I am concerned about how the normalization of AI leads to the minimization of its spiritual, social, and ecological costs. Among these is an outsized emphasis being placed on productivity, over and above the slow, intentional work of daily living.

Meanwhile, any of the tasks I would like to delegate to an AI — the dishes, the laundry, and sweeping the floor of my kids’ cereal for the umpteenth time — are not ones that robots can do. This is known as Moravec’s Paradox: tasks that are hard for robots are easy for humans, and vice versa. (I learned about this phenomenon from technology journalist Joanna Stern in a fantastic interview with Hasan Minhaj titled “Why Is So Much AI Tech Useless?”). The kind of mundane tasks that most of us would quickly relinquish if given the chance are not going away any time soon. It’s primarily a form issue — our bodies are uniquely suited to do the work of daily life. (Turns out opposable thumbs are really difficult to engineer).

I wonder if being human in the age of AI looks less like figuring out how many tasks we can delegate to AI in order to preserve a modicum of creative energy, and more like the practice of seeking the sacred in the mundane.

The Sacred Mundane

Allow me to introduce an unlikely conversation partner.

Brother Lawrence was a 17th-Century French Catholic lay brother who primarily worked in the monastery’s kitchen.

A veteran of the 30 Years War, Lawrence had seen trauma and tragedy doled out by a society convinced that the latest in technology could be used to efficiently dominate and control others.

One winter day, Lawrence saw a bare tree, and was suddenly struck by the realization that while the tree looked dead, it had all the stuff within it for new life. It would, in short order, resurrect, bursting with the green of spring.

This spiritual revelation gave Lawrence hope for his own life, and through a series of events, he went from waging warfare to slicing onions and cleaning pots for an order of Carmelite brothers.

Rather than seeing spirituality as isolated within the monastery’s designated times of prayer, Brother Lawrence’s contemplative spirituality allowed him to embrace every simple act of service as one in which God could be found. His teachings, compiled after his death into a book called the Practice of the Presence of God, include insights like this:

And,

Brother Lawrence’s wisdom visits us four centuries later as an invitation to bring loving intention to our ordinary tasks. His joy inspires hope that we might also encounter the sacred as we do them.

When so much of my time as a priest, writer and community organizer is spent in front of a computer screen, I find enormous relief engaging in mundane tasks. While washing the dishes, my mind is freed up to reflect on my day. When I fold the laundry, I am able to breathe, thus regulating my overly stressed mind. When I cook, I find enormous joy in creating something delicious and beautiful (OK, not all the time – sometimes it is a drag. But cooking can be this for me). When I bring loving intention into the mundane — something I am admittedly challenged to do — I consistently discover that it abounds with sacredness.

The Sacred Mundane can be a space of joy, rest and encounter with the Divine.

It is also about justice.

I find it incredibly hard to believe that we’re all going to have copious free time thanks to AI. On the contrary, what seems much more likely is that a smaller and smaller class of people will be privileged to do creative and intellectual type work, while most humans will be expected to move at an increasingly breakneck pace to sustain their lives, doing more and more labor for less and less pay.

While AI gobbles up jobs and makes others less fiscally solvent, less of us will have the disposable income to delegate mundane physical tasks — cooking, cleaning, growing vegetables, caring for children — to other humans beings. We will need to do more of this work ourselves, not less.

As we are being told by technofascists that AI will help us escape our everyday lives, the vital work before us is to savor the mundane, seeing it, and all who engage in it, as sacred.

As AI crystallizes society into an increasingly extreme caste system, it is our job to reject the lie that mundane work is for “untouchables.”

The truth is that the Sacred Mundane is for all of us. It is the stuff that keeps us human. This work is sacred. We are sacred.

A sacramental imagination

This is why I believe the church of the future will be Sacramental. An emphasis on the way in which tangible stuff and physical interaction can draw us toward the Divine will be what pulls the church of today into tomorrow.

In my own Episcopal tradition, this looks like:

Bread, blessed and broken, that we receive in our hands and consume in community — a reminder that we belong to Christ and exist interdependently with one another.

Oil, smeared on foreheads, smelling sweetly amidst suffering.

Water with which we douse or submerge, a sign that all that tries to drown us is overcome by the life-giving love of God.

These simple things connect us to the Sacred: The things we grow. The nourishment we consume. The touch we share.

Good religion is characterized by that which can’t be delegated to machines.

I wonder, in your own tradition or spiritual practice: where is the Sacred Mundane? When do you find rest, joy, peace, belonging in the ordinary stuff of life?

A liberated future — what in my tradition we call “the kingdom of God” — doesn’t belong to those who can be most efficient. It’s not the domain of those who are most productive.

It belongs to those who see the holy in the mundane:

In onions to slice and pots to wash.

In bread, wine and water.

In our human selves.

Yesterday evening, at the invitation of the newly formed Colorado Clergy Alliance, I spoke at a multispiritual vigil for our immigrant neighbors being harmed by ICE, especially those detained at the Aurora GEO Group facility.

In the photo above, the window behind me is a cell, where abducted neighbors could hear us. While we prayed, chanted and sang for justice, a number of people inside are suffering from tuberculosis, and all 1000+ people are only eating protein once a week. 3 detainees were brought by bus while we were gathered. Meanwhile, in Hudson, Colorado, an $85 million contract signed by the city with GEO Group will be providing facility able to hold twice as many people.

The cruelty of this system is the point. Profiting off the suffering of human beings is the point.

It’s on all of us to cast out this fear-mongering system with our love.

We had the opportunity to hear from a directly impacted person whose loved one is locked up in the Aurora facility. Please consider giving to their GoFundMe to support the legal and practical needs of this family – precious members of our Denver community.

Here is my reflection:

The Apostle John writes:

“Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God… God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them… There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” (1 John 4:7, 16, 18, NRSV)

Out of love for our neighbors, our friends, and our family members who are being targeted by ICE, we stand together this evening embodying the reality that love casts out fear.

These are frightening times. And it is precisely when we are most afraid that we show up for one another in love. Because it is our love that casts out fear.

Fear hides.

Love bears witness.

Our community members are being taken away by agents who conceal their faces behind masks.

We are here, in the light of day, refusing to hide, refusing to look away, bearing witness to the truth that there is no fear in love.

Fear tears society apart at the seams.

It is only love that can make a community.

Love binds us to those behind these walls, love reaches those hiding in fear, love keeps us connected, even beyond death, with those whose lives have been taken by this institution.

So again and again and again, we choose love.

And by choosing love we remember that we belong to one another.

As Dr. Cornel West reminds us, “Justice is what love looks like in public.”

Love is the only way out of this mess: courageous love that calls out injustice; consistent love that keeps showing up, even when the fight feels hopeless.

Across our traditions, we are called to love in many ways.

In the Christian tradition, Jesus taught that the greatest commandment is to love God and love your neighbor as yourself.

“Do this,” Jesus said, “and you will live.” (Luke 10:27-28, NRSV)

Put simply, love leads to life.

Friends, when fear is in the driver’s seat, it leads to violence, and violence leads to death.

This administration governs through fear, and we have seen where this fear leads.

We remember Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, killed by ICE while on his way to work in construction to provide for his family.

We remember Joan Sebastián Guerrero, shot while his beloved three-year-old daughter and his wife helplessly looked on.

They should still be here, loving their families, contributing to their communities, part of the collective work of making the world more loving and more whole.

Out of love for them, for their families, and for all who have been harmed by ICE, we must measure every policy and every action of those in power with the question: Does it embody love?

When they say, “Enforcement is about public safety,” we say, “It’s not about love.”

When they say, “We need more funding for more agents,” we say, “It’s not about love.”

When they say, “We need a facility in Hudson to hold more people,” we say, “It’s not about love.”

Love tells the truth.

Love protects the vulnerable.

Love holds the powerful accountable.

There is no fear in love.

Because Love casts out fear.

Dear Soulful Revolutionary,

Last week, upon learning of the horrific death of Nolan Wells, I posted the following to Threads and to my Facebook page:

If you haven’t been keeping up with the news lately (God knows there are plenty of awful things to stay abreast of), the short story is this:

Nolan Wells, an 18-year-old Black young man, a football player, and a rising sophomore at a community college, was with a group of white male peers on a boat trip off the Mississippi coast during the July 4th weekend. Initial reports were that he was left behind by his friends on a sandbar island, and allegedly disappeared. His body was recovered in the water on July 6.

The white young men who were pictured with Nolan before his death all immediately secured legal representation (one of them has a mother who is a judge) and have refused to talk about what happened. Wells’s family is now represented by civil rights attorney Ben Crump. Because of Mississippi’s history of racism and reputation for covering up racist violence, the family transported Wells’s body to Washington, D.C. for an additional autopsy. The investigation is ongoing.

In response to my July 6th post, a Facebook friend — a self-identified Brown woman whom I have known my entire life — raised a question I felt compelled to respond to here, for the sake of others who may be asking similar questions.

Before I share what she asked, let me name two important things up front:

1. I am deeply aware of the immense grief and anger of the Black community as they face yet another tragic death that law enforcement and media initially described as accidental, and,

2. Some questions, however well-intentioned, add to this grief by minimizing the persistent pattern and power dynamics of white supremacist violence toward Black people.

I hope that this essay honors the grief of the Black community while serving as a gracious and effective corrective to the question posed.

The question and conclusion

My Facebook friend first named that she too is grieved. I appreciate that her question came from a place of lament, so I hold this intention in mind as I respond to the question she subsequently posed:

“(W)ould it be appropriate for me not to trust all black people because of the actions of some?”

She concluded that “teaching our children to distrust a certain class of people does not promote an attitude of healing & understanding.”

Here’s my response to this question and conclusion, in three parts:

1. White people as a group have consistently demonstrated themselves to be untrustworthy.

The question of whether it would be appropriate not to trust all Black people because of the actions of some starts from the faulty premise that we can extrapolate the behavior of a group based on the behavior of a few. This is a logical fallacy which the respondent rightly implies as problematic. We agree that doing this is wrong — in fact, it’s racist.

However, asserting that white people are not trustworthy is the opposite of this logical fallacy. This assertion does not start with the actions of a few bad actors, moving toward a generalization about an entire group. Rather, to conclude that it is prudent to exercise caution toward white people is to begin from the recognition of an established, centuries-long pattern of violent behavior by white people toward Black folks.

We are talking about a system here. We are talking about white supremacy culture.

• In white supremacy culture, a Black man can be found hanging in a tree and law enforcement rushes to dub his death a suicide (in spite of lynchings of Black people consistently taking place this way over generations).

• In white supremacy culture, the disappearance of white girls is consistently treated as a crisis worthy of sustained media attention, while the disappearance of Black children is described as “accidental.”

• In white supremacy culture, the entire structure of society is built to protect the reputation and safety of white people. Their trespasses are laundered, their crimes are pardoned. Meanwhile, Black folks face severe repercussions for comparatively smaller offenses, and frequently face false accusations and mistrials of justice. At every level of society, the harm Black people experience is minimized and ignored, from hospitals to schools to church.

For all these reasons and many more, Black people frequently face danger when they are the only one in a white group. At best, their safety is not taken as seriously as that of white peers. At worst, their safety is actively — even enthusiastically — jeopardized.

Nolan Wells’s death is not an isolated incident. It fits within an all-too-familiar pattern.

Over the last week, I have read dozens of personal stories on social media of Black people who have experienced harm in all-white groups (including these). I watched this video, which honors the stories of several Black folks who died in white groups. I was reminded that the acclaimed film Get Out was based upon this precise premise. And I’ve taken to heart the names of others who have died in such settings:

Daniel Erving. Tamla Horsford. Alonzo Brooks. Kendrick Johnson.

When many Black folks saw the photos of Nolan with a group of white men, they understandably had questions. Because they knew the pattern in their bones.

Dr. Stacey Patton put it this way:

This pattern simply does not exist in reverse. White people do not possess that same ancestral alarm, because society is structured to keep them safe.

So let’s be clear: I didn’t say each and every white person is untrustworthy. I’m not teaching my children, “Don’t trust your white teacher,” or, “Don’t trust your white neighbor,” or even, “Don’t trust me.” Rather, I am teaching them to be mindful of the demonstrable pattern that white people as a group are not trustworthy. I hope to equip them to be discerning of the safety of the people they spend time with — particularly groups of white people — because there is a culture that acts as a powerful undercurrent in these group settings.

I also hope my children will grow up questioning the ways in which white supremacy culture is operative in white people who love them and are doing their best to keep them safe, including me. The fact that as an adult I continue to learn the extent to which white supremacy harms the body and spirits of People of Color and Black people in particular is indicative of my blind spots.

It is on me to continue listening to and learning from those who have experienced the brunt of white supremacy culture in order to equip my children to not only survive it, but to be in antiracist solidarity with Black folks for the sake of a transformed society.

2. We can’t talk about healing and understanding without talking about power.

It’s easy to talk ask, “Why can’t we all just get along?”

But understanding without accountability is hollow. Healing can’t happen without justice. This country consistently fails to be accountable for its racist history, while allowing injustice to persist.

Once we understand the structural inequality foundational to US society, we can begin to practice accountability for it within our daily lives, by calling it out wherever we see it. We can begin to move toward healing by working for justice.

This requires us to reckon with power. We can do that in altogether ordinary ways.

For example, when my twins were three, we started having conversations about police. We talk about how there are no “good guys” and “bad guys.” I refuse to teach them to blindly trust in an institution built to serve white supremacy culture. I understand that one of modern policing’s primary lineages is that of Southern slave patrols. This is not an institution built on equity. The police force in the US serves the interests of white people (particularly that of wealthy white people and white men).

My children know that if they are approached by a police officer, they should say, “I need my mom and dad.” I do this because the data is clear that Brown and Black people are targeted and victimized by police, as well as disbelieved and ignored, at far higher rates than white people. My children are not going to be protected and served by the police in the way that white children would be. Black people in particular — including children — are often violently targeted by the very people whom white people see as ensuring their safety.

Healing is a nonstarter conversation if there isn’t basic safety for everyone. If we work toward accountability and justice, we are moving toward a longer term vision of healing and understanding.

This is why Nolan Wells’s parents secured the support of Civil Rights attorney Ben Crump. They know that white supremacy is a heavy thumb pressing down on the scale of justice, and that they need one of the country’s most powerful advocates if there is to be justice for their son.

3. Being in solidarity with Black people is as important as not trusting white people as a group.

White supremacy culture survives because many white people (as well as many non-Black People of Color), accept the dehumanization of Black people as a given in order to fit into whiteness. White people have been thoroughly trained by white supremacy culture to accept the uneven playing field where white people are insulated from accountability, while Black people are treated as expendable.

White supremacy culture doesn’t require all white people to be direct perpetrators of violence in order to flourish – it just needs a lot of them to be bystanders.

The willingness of Nolan’s friends to leave him behind and go silent after his disappearance is emblematic of this toxic passivity. Again, the pattern holds true: white people circle the wagons to protect their own. This is precisely what I was responding to with my comment about being “incensed” at them.

For white people (and, I would daresay, for non-Black People of Color), it is insufficient to not trust white people as a group. Resisting a culture of dehumanization and expendability requires courageous and consistent counteraction. We must embody the antiracist assertion that Black people deserve to grow old, to be safe, to know dignity, to experience joy. We have to practice solidarity.

When Black folks say, “I don’t trust that my child will be safe in an all-white group of children,” solidarity means believing that they know what they are talking about. Accountability looks like asking how we can build spaces of safety and belonging together. Justice looks like demanding that people who have not been safe be held to account.

For me, solidarity looks like checking in with my Black friends (especially after events like Wells’s death) to ask what they need. We talk about what safety looks like. I show up at rallies and vigils when there is anti-Black violence in my own community, and testify at local government meetings. Solidarity also simply looks like being a friend in a thousand ordinary ways, like going to our friends’ kids’ birthdays or inviting them to our home for a meal. We hang out, we laugh, we tell stories.

As a parent of young children in a largely white suburban context, I am teaching them about solidarity with Black people by intentionally reading books with Black characters and about Black history. We talk about using our bodies and voices to stand up for what is right even when we are scared. We talk about gentle touch and consent. We go to parks and swimming pools with their friends. Together, they laugh and play and tell stories.

I’m not trying to make myself out to be a hero here: I have messed up many times. I have hurt my friends. I have been passive in situations where I ought to have acted. Solidarity is a daily practice, and I am accountable to friends, mentors and community leaders who tell me the truth and help me correct my course.

They help me become more fully human.

It’s my work to help fellow white people – and others too – recognize and repent of the ways they participate in dehumanization, so that Black people can be safe.

I hope this helps.

First, a quick update on my book project: I am currently working on chapter 10 of 12 and at 46,000 words, I have already surpassed the word count minimum, and will absolutely be needing to make significant cuts to be within my editor’s acceptable window. This is a very good problem — it’s easier to cut than to create whole cloth — even as it is emotionally devastating. My journalist educator father used to call it “killing your babies,” which, while graphic, is emotionally apt. (I can’t bear to delete a lot of my writing, so it goes into a separate “fragments” document – I always love hearing what other writers call their edited but un-killable words, so please share in the comments!)

The manuscript will go to my editor at the end of the summer, and then I’ll be deep in revisions territory this fall. Thank you as always for your support of me in this space, and for your patience as I write less here so I can write Becoming Soulful Revolutionaries. I couldn’t do this work without you, and I carry you with me in my heart into every writing session, in hopes that my words will be useful to others. Thanks for being the realest.

Now for today’s essay:

On Sunday evening, my church, Holy Companion, hosted a picnic at a local park. Several new folks joined us, and I watched in awe as people who have been part of our church for a while – from a few months to a few years – deftly wove them into conversation and community. Children who call our church home showed new friends the ropes on the playground. It was an intergenerational, multiracial group made up of people with diverse abilities, cultures and religious backgrounds. A whole beautiful ecosystem of care and curiosty.

My heart was so full of gratitude when I got home as I reflected on how this community has grown over the last three years. This growth has taken place in slow, often invisible ways. But when I step back to see the bigger picture, it is clear that the seed of an idea that was planted in me a few years ago has blossomed into a full-fledged community, now bearing fruit in ways I could not have even imagined. Tending this garden now belongs to all of us.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in three years as a church planter is this:

True community-building takes time.

There is no magic formula (anyone who tells you otherwise is, obviously, selling something). This is because trust must be earned one relationship, one conversation, one story at a time.

All the community organizing strategies in the world are nothing if you don’t care about the human sitting across the table from you. People can smell a bait and switch a mile away. It’s hard to fake genuine care and curiosity.

So from the beginning, I chose to be vulnerable.

I didn’t show up with bold visions and a three-point plan. I told folks we were a funky little church plant trying to be a place of hospitality to people who have been hurt by church. I shared the ways in which I have been hurt by church and listened to others’ stories of their religious trauma. I didn’t promise that we’d be perfect. I said we would hold one another accountable— holding our relationships as sacred and telling the truth about power.

Our leadership decided early on that we didn’t want a flash-in-the pan community based on big ideas and little substance. We wanted to build at the speed of trust, working within the constraints of people’s actual lives, not burning out people or relationships for the sake of quick growth. That looked like only meeting once a month for the first year, twice a month for the second year, and now three or four times a month in our third year. It meant being honest about our capacities — energy, time, money and more — and doing our best to respect and honor them.

We wanted a durable community that could work through conflict together, based on a rigorous commitment to shared values. That meant we had to go through some hard stuff together, building on existing practices of repair while cultivating new ones. We created space regularly for people to name tensions that were coming up for them, and ways to work through together. When organic tensions and even conflict have arisen, we have done our best to attend to them promptly and courageously together.

Staying with the sacred work of listening, remaining in relationship through conflict, and building systems that serve people— not just themselves— are all part of the scaffolding that holds up a community.

And there’s no good way to do that quickly.

It takes faithfulness over the long haul — what church planter and writer Eugene Peterson famously called “a long obedience in the same direction” – to start something new, let alone something that will last.

I’m immensely grateful for the quiet voice of Spirit within me (echoed by the very best of mentors and friends), that has consistently reminded me to do the humble work of planting seeds of relationship, watering them, nurturing tender plants, all while trusting the outcome of the garden to Creator.

To put that in less explicitly spiritual terms: letting go of the outcome, and trusting that the work of relationship-building is good in and of itself, may well be the most important thing I ever learn to do.

I don’t know how long this community I have planted will exist in the form that it does. Growth and change are inherent to a healthy ecosystem. Trusting this transformational process includes a robust belief that the work of cultivating community is worthwhile for a particular season. However long that season proves to be, it is a gift to see a garden grow.

I wonder: What helps you stay the course of building community? What growth have you observed in the communities you are part of? What helped foster that growth?

Dear Soulful Revolutionary,

I wrote this poem last summer, and have recently been reflecting on the lesson at its heart: that those who truly love a place are altered by that place and thus take root in that place. This poem was inspired by an important teacher in my life, Mr. Richard Williams, who is an Oglala Lakota/Cheyenne elder. He has a special place in a chapter I'm working on right now – I can't wait to share more about him and what he has taught me with you. 

Until then, enjoy the poem. I'd love to hear from you: what are the places that you love, and how have they changed you? I would love to hear about them and why you love them so.

Stay rooted,

Lauren

I have been pondering what it means 
to fall in love with a place. 

To know the streets and hills, 
the trees and waterways, 
the local businesses with their eccentric keepers,
the playgrounds and parks, 
the libraries and watering holes,
to recognize the silhouette of the mountain range 
and the shadow it casts across the plains. 

And to know the names of the land — 
those conferred by the original peoples 
who cared for this place.

I am falling in love with Denver, 
this city I have called home for six years.

What does it take to love a place well?

I know an Oglala Lakota/Cheyenne elder
who teaches that the descendants of settlers
over many, many generations
can become indigenous to a place.
Enough time 
in respectful relationship 
with the lands and their peoples, 
can alter one’s DNA
and transform one’s soul.

Can you truly love someone 
without being properly introduced?
Without speaking their name
and feeling it in your mouth—
the taste of it, the texture of it, 
its rhythm and resonance,
the patterns of its provenance?

I would like to learn all the names 
of this place I love. 
I wish to speak the names 
of peaks and aspens and grasses and valleys, 
of muskrats and eagles and trout and bears.

I make a start with the name of my city,
this place where mountains meet plains, 
where downward-rushing rivers slow and pool.
In Lakota, this place is
ȟeská otȟúŋwahe 
which means
Rocky Mountain. 

A far more noble name 
than that of the settler governor,
whose name was imposed here.
(He visited once, disappointed
by the lack of a hero’s welcome).

I breathe a sigh of relief
to learn this name,
even as I’ve yet to learn
its proper pronunciation. 

I would like to speak it properly.
I will in time.

I am changing.
This place is changing me.
The mountains, the waters, the creatures, 
and the people of this place 
are all changing me. 

ȟeská otȟúŋwahe,
it is good to meet you. 

Dear Soulful Revolutionary,

I’m up to my neck in writing my book. Some days it feels like I’m managing to stay afloat, charting a course through the thoughts relentlessly crashing on the shore of my soul. Most of the time it feels like being immersed in ideas, terrified of drowning in this immense sea of so much to say and not enough time to get it all on paper in a way that might be understood.

On a fundamental level, I recognize this as a fundamentally human, existential panic: life is short and I want to do something worthwhile. Creating beauty, touching the hearts of others, making some kind of difference in the world, are all noble yet intangible, unquantifiable experiences. Who’s to say the work we’ve done is satisfactory, that it mattered, that it was worthy of the immense time and attention we poured into it? What does it look like to find satisfaction within ourselves? How do we assuage the inner critic?

I’m 40,000 words in, with three chapters to go in the next few week, and months of revisions ahead. It’s incredibly overwhelming. Gratitude to be doing this helps, a little. Remembering that it doesn’t have to be perfect — nor does such a thing exist— alleviates some of the weight that threatens to pull me into the undertow. Still, I’m not sure how I’m going to make it through.

You, dear Soulful Revolutionary, are my greatest motivation. When I can move outside of myself, remembering that this book of practices to sustain our spirits in the work of justice is a labor of love for YOU, that more than anything helps me keep going.

Thanks for bearing with me as I’ve been less present in this space. I hope that the devotion to this project proves worthy of the time and energy I’ve spent. I hope this book helps you find strength, courage, peace, and accompaniment.

And I hope you know that whatever good things you are striving to do today, I’m with you, cheering you on. I hope knowing that you are remembered and deeply appreciated helps you stay afloat, whatever the nature of the seas you are navigating.

With you in the beautiful struggle,

Lauren

I want to begin by telling you how grateful I am for you. Your readership, the support of paid subscribers, the kind words you share with me, all have been a tremendous source of encouragement to me as I work on my book manuscript. It is due to my beta readers (people of fortitude who have graciously committed to reading the entire thing and offering their feedback!) at the end of June, which is why you haven’t been hearing as much from me lately.

I’m so honored that and have shared guest pieces over the last couple of months. Big thanks also goes out to my podcast team, and Steph () for getting an episode out to you in this interim season – you can expect more from them soon. I am nothing if not rich in relationships – the Beatles had it right about getting “by with a little help from my friends.” Thank you all for bearing with me, for being my community, for believing in what I’m trying to do here, with this newsletter, and with my book. I cannot wait to share it with you.

OK, let’s get to what I have for you today!

The following sermon was largely inspired by a new song from my friend, artist and activist , called “Jim Crow.” He wrote it in the aftermath of the devastating Supreme Court decision to gut the Voting Rights Act — a move that will disenfranchise Black and Brown voters across the country, and especially across the South, where states are already gerrymandering the crap out of their electoral maps. (If you haven’t seen Black leaders in these states standing up against these blatantly racist policies, I commend this one from civil rights activist Gary Chambers and this one from Marshan Camese).

Andre sings:

Have you heard the news? 
Jim Crow’s on the prowl 
He done traded his hood 
He’s a masked man now 
Where’s John Brown?
Where is John Brown?

Indeed: where are the people who refuse to see anyone as disposable, who refuse to concede to the comfort of the powerful? Where are the people who take a politics of belonging so seriously that they will risk their own security for the sake of others’ dignity?

I saw a post from Gregory Jerome Bentley last week that said, “United States history in a nutshell: John Brown was hanged for treason, but Robert E. Lee was not.”

Our society will keep on killing the John Browns of the world (and the Jesuses too, as I mention in the sermon) – the people who have the courage to point out the absurd injustice of the systems we sustain with our labor and our very lives – until people with privilege put our bodies on the line for justice’s sake.

For white people, the call is to be a John Brown white person (relatedly, see one of my favorite bits from Hari Kondabolu). In other words, to be a race traitor – to use your privilege in ways that invite blowback from the system, revealing its rotten core, so that we can all get free.

7th Sunday of Easter, Year A, 2026

A Sermon for Holy Companion: “That they may be one”

John 17:1-11

When I was in my early 20s, I worked for a couple of years at Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, the biggest prison reentry and gang rehabilitation center in the world.

Over 10,000 formerly gang-involved and previously incarcerated men and women come through the doors of Homeboy every year for therapy, case management, tattoo removal and job training in one of the organization’s social enterprises. They are equipped and empowered to be contributing members of society within a community of kinship where they are seen – in many cases for the first time – as human beings, worthy of life, love, dignity, and belonging.

During my time at Homeboy, I saw countless people come in with their faces downcast, their eyes darting around furtively, afraid of the people around them, who within months, even weeks, were smiling, offering hugs, and laughing with people they had long been taught to see as their enemies on the streets and in prison.

Fr. Greg Boyle, the Jesuit priest who started the place, wrote a book called Tattoos on the Heart, where he invites readers into this way of seeing the world:

“We imagine, with God, this circle of compassion,” Boyle writes. “Then we imagine no one standing outside of that circle, moving ourselves closer to the margins so that the margins themselves will be erased.”

I read Fr. Greg’s words as an echo of the prayer we’ve just heard from Jesus, especially the part where Jesus prays for his friends:

“Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”

We participate in Jesus’ prayer when we make it our business to see that no one stands outside the circle of God’s love.

Everyone – absolutely everyone – belongs, particularly those who have been most marginalized, most hated, most thrown away.

And when it comes to those who have made it their business to tell others that they do not belong, these folks have lost touch with the divine reality that we belong to one another.

We counteract that exclusionary energy, those politics of division and violent disposal, by becoming people of radical welcome,

people who pay attention to those who are being excluded, those who are being oppressed, and making it our business to stand against all the forces of fear that would keep others out of community, that would deny anyone their dignity, or prevent them from exercising their human rights.

We follow in the way of Jesus when we disarm the fear of difference that exists within our hearts – which often is a fear of the ways we ourselves may be different, our fear that we may be thrown away, or unwelcome, or unloved.

Jesus’ prayer is part of an extensive goodbye speech. In it, Jesus warns his disciples that society’s reactions will be severe to people who are committed to living God’s dream of oneness by widening the circle. They will be expelled from their religious communities, he tells them. Some of them will be killed by people who claim to do this violence in God’s name. They will be widely misunderstood and abused.

But, he promises that for those who endure, their “joy will be complete,” because they dwell in the fulness of God’s love.

Friends, it turns out that the ultimate truth is not judgment, but belonging.

This is a timely reminder for us today, as some of us head from here to Douglas County PrideFest, where we will join other inclusive churches in affirming that LGBTQ people fully belong in our community, as sacred neighbors, with all the rights and dignity due to all God’s children.

Jesus’ prayer shines a light on any politics that cast people outside the circle of belonging. I have been grieving the devastation of the recent Supreme Court decision to absolutely gut the Voting Rights Act in a violent denial of Black Americans’ basic human dignity, and a shameful retaliation against those who fought for justice in the Civil Rights Movement. This discriminatory policy reversal flies in the face of Jesus’ desperate prayer for protection of those who seek to walk in the way of love, and for unity in the face of all the violence that seeks to tear us apart.

Now, I know that it feels totally overwhelming to face so many systematic attacks on human dignity. As forces conspire to tear us apart, it is urgently important that we remember that all of us belong to the God who loves us.

The small ways in which we do this remembering – not only in our minds, but in our bodies – really do matter. They sustain us, keeping us going through the struggle for justice.

Today we remember Christ’s message of belonging through scripture, through the prayers, and through sharing in the meal of Christ’s body and blood.

We will carry this message of God’s love poured out for the world from this gathering to our wider community, where we will serve as witnesses to the truth of belonging, to share the good news that – in spite of all the evidence that fear mongers seek to provide to the contrary – absolutely everyone belongs within the circle of God’s compassion.

God, who is love, longs to nourish a starving world with God’s very self.

The table is set, dear friends.

Come, and be fed by Love.

Amen.

NOTE: You may have noticed that Lauren is missing from this episode — she is deep in the manuscript of her forthcoming book, Becoming Soulful Revolutionaries, and we are so grateful for your patience and support as she heads into the home stretch! In her absence, Hannah is holding down the podcast with a mini season of conversations with people who have shaped her own journey.

In this episode, Hannah sits down with her long-time friend and former professor Rob — a Hebrew Bible scholar, Senior Pastor of McLean Baptist Church, and one of the most quietly radical people she knows — for a conversation that is equal parts theological lecture, personal testimony, and holy roast. They trace the through-line of a life shaped by curiosity and commitment (and a sense of humor, of course): from a classroom in Indiana to archaeological digs in Israel, a “flipped” university classroom, and finally to Wednesday night Bible studies that are, as Hannah says, “not what I would call a ‘Bible study’.” (*air quotes*)

Whether he’s forewarning us about the “dangerous prayer” that is the Lord’s Prayer (stay with us here), or talking about the interpretive framework that has distorted a century of evangelical thinking about Israel and Palestine, OR pointing out the deeply plural grammar of the Gospels…he does so with a characteristic warmth, precision, and wit that pushes us further in the impetus that we, as the body of Christ, are called to do this work together. He is a person who has made a career of saying “I love this, let me show you why”…and in this conversation, you will understand exactly why Hannah has kept going back to him for guidance for years.

As always, thank you for listening.

To watch the extended video version of this interview here, subscribe to this publication.

Subscribe now

About Rev. Dr. Robert Wallace

Robert considers Indiana home, though he has moved quite a bit in his life. He started taking classes in engineering at Purdue University, but he later found his calling in the study and teaching of Scripture. Robert spent over 20 years as Professor of Biblical Studies striving to bridge the gap between the academy and the church. While finishing his Ph.D. at Baylor University, he was ordained at First Baptist Church of Waco, Texas, and he maintained an active, ecumenical ministry of supply and interim preaching.

In 2018, Robert felt God calling him to on the other side of the bridge! He accepted the call to Mclean Baptist Church and has since tried to maintain an active role in teaching and writing. He has been an Advisory Group member for the Institute for Justice Formation, associated with the John Leland Center for Teaching and Theological Studies since 2020. In 2024 he was asked to be a contributing author to The Christian Citizen, and he regularly publishes articles there.

Robert has a deep love of the Psalms, and much of his academic research has focused on that area. In March of 2025, Robert published an introduction to the Old Testament with Smyth & Helwys books, titled, A Prism of Song: Seeing the Old Testament through the Psalms. It is his deepest conviction that the grace of God provides humanity the opportunity to live creatively and meaningfully in this world, and that this message is found throughout Scripture—from Genesis to Revelation.

Resources + Links

Rob’s Work & Writing

• McLean Baptist Church — Rob’s church in McLean, Virginia (Sunday worship live at 10am on YouTube, Facebook, and Vimeo)

• rwallace.net — Dr. Rob’s Website with contact, teaching resources, and CV

• Dr. Rob’s YouTube Channel — The “flipped” classroom he speaks of, making biblical scholarship accessible around the world.

• A Prism of Song: Seeing the Old Testament through the Psalms — Rob’s 2025 book, available from the publisher but also available on Amazon (also available in Spanish!)

• The Christian Citizen — where Rob regularly publishes articles on faith, justice, and culture

• Institute for Justice Formation — the justice formation organization Rob serves as an advisory group member and guest lecturer

Referenced in This Episode

• More on dispensationalism, Darby, and the Scofield Bible:

  • “Christian Zionism: Theology That Legitimates Oppression” — Sojourners — on the theological roots of Christian Zionism in Darby’s 19th-century dispensationalism, and its present-day consequences for Palestinian Christians

  • “Evangelicals and Israel: Theological Roots of a Political Alliance” — The Christian Century — a historically grounded look at how dispensationalism shaped Christian Zionist politics in America, from the Scofield Bible forward

• The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey — the 1970 bestseller Rob references as a popularizer of dispensational eschatology

• “Why did we stop using Thou?” Beating people is not a good way to enact grammatical change — This is Merriam-Webster’s history of how “you” replaced “thou,” relevant to Rob’s closing reflection on the plural pronouns of scripture and why “y’all” may be the most biblically faithful option

• Preaching During Covid-tide: Sermons of Hope to Empty Pews — Rob’s self-published collection of sermons from March–December 2020, available on Amazon

Robert considers Indiana home, though he has moved quite a bit in his life. He started taking classes in engineering at Purdue University, but he later found his calling in the study and teaching of Scripture. Robert spent over 20 years as Professor of Biblical Studies striving to bridge the gap between the academy and the c…

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It goes without saying that there are countless reasons to despair. Despair creeps up on us, slowly suffocating with sharpened claws. Cultivating hope, on the other hand, is sometimes a practice, in many ways an art, and sometimes, simply a small glimpse of life that startles us into a more expansive recognition of the beauty and possibility around us.

Today, I on a short walk to my favorite tea shop, where I am writing to you now, I began counting the reasons to hope.

This short poem (which you can hear me read, accompanied by videos I took, here) was the spontaneous overflow of my joy today. I offer it trusting that “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” as Emily Dickinson so lovingly insisted.

Perhaps it will perch in your soul and inspire your own love note to life. If it does, I would love to read it.

A love note to life

This place is so dear to me
From the sound of wind chimes to the crunch of gravel underfoot
From colorful prayer flags to the pink pop of blossoms bursting open,
From the Robin, crossing my path in greeting,
to the strangers exchanging warm hellos
as a cool breeze whispers past,
I love it here.
In this new corner of my neighborhood,
In my beloved city,
in this world where I am
Another creature on the move
Another part of the landscape,
Where I am at home.

Today I’m sharing my second. This one was in a much more subdued setting: An Easter Sunrise Eucharist. The service took place in a park in our neighborhood, which abuts the Rocky Mountain foothills, as the sun rose behind me and birds joined in joyful concert.

When the chaos of the world is loud and constant, a calm moment like Sunday morning is precious. I felt my whole body grow calm in the stillness of the morning, surrounded by community, engaging in familiar rituals. Such moments sustain me in the struggle. And so, I wonder for you, whatever your spiritual heritage: What life-affirming practices are keeping you going right now?

Here’s the sermon:

Easter Sunrise: John 20:1-18

May I speak to you in the name of the Risen Christ. Amen. +

Before dawn, in the stillness of the early morning hours, Easter quietly begins.

As the sun rises here in Colorado, we slowly wake up to the reality of resurrection, not unlike Mary and the disciples in first century Palestine, rubbing the sleep out of their eyes, wondering if what they saw was real.

The resurrection account we’ve just heard from Jesus’ Beloved Disciple, John, is gentle and gradual. Christ doesn’t rise in a blaze of glory, overpowering the senses of onlookers, but rather with the calm discipline to carefully fold his laundry before stepping out of the tomb for a peaceful walk in the garden.

Does anyone else feel astonished at how thoroughly ordinary it all seems to be for Jesus?! How quiet and unassuming he is as he chats with Mary in the garden?

After all of the violence done to him, Christ comes back! In spite of all of the harm humans do, God’s loving response is to return to us, overcoming death by death, lovingly speaking our names, and calling us to be people of faith, people of hope, people of love.

As far as Jesus is concerned, this is simply what God does.

Resurrection – something we can scarcely believe to be possible in our wildest imaginations – is all in a day’s work for God.

The writer GK Chesterton once wrote, “It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun.”

Resurrection is God’s daily delight.

Christ knows this – that God is simply doing what God does: Creating, redeeming, and sustaining the whole creation.

Resurrection is God’s joyful pleasure.

This doesn’t undercut the power of Christ’s Resurrection, but instead suggests it is more than a singular, historical event. Christ’s Resurrection reveals to us a divine pattern of being – a rhythm of resurrection at the heart of the universe.

Because God is in the resurrection business. And our sacred, daily, lifelong work is to recognize resurrection everywhere we encounter it in God’s world.

Each new blossom that opens, each leaf that unfurls, each new sunrise, fits within this Resurrection pattern, inviting us to participate in this reality.

In a world where getting out of bed in the morning is nothing short of miraculous, even the simple act of doing the laundry can be an act of resistance to all the forces that seek to kill our bodies and steal our souls.

Every time we choose life, we enter into the rhythm of the One who defeated death by death. Each act of kindness or compassion toward another being brings us back to life.

Christ’s resurrection calls us to be people who seek out signs of God’s renewing, life-giving presence everywhere we go, in the most ordinary of experiences, in the most unexpected of places, and in the most surprising of people.

Like Mary Magdalene – whom the Early Church called the “Apostle to the Apostles” – the question for us becomes: how will we testify to the resurrection?

Both to the story of the God who rose in love for us on the third day, as well as to the countless experiences of resurrection we have every day.

How will we share the good news of the God who declares, “See, I am making all things new”? (Rev. 21:5)

For this, we look to the pattern of Christ’s life, and join him in:

• Feeding the hungry.

• Welcoming the stranger.

• Proclaiming freedom for the oppressed.

• Comforting those who mourn.

We testify to resurrection when we stand with the abused and exploited, when we work for the well-being of all children, when we insist upon the dignity of every human being, and when we call to account those people and systems that cause harm, rather than ensuring the flourishing of life.

We testify to resurrection when we love as Christ loved – whatever the cost, until the very end.

On this Easter morning and always, may our love be a testimony to the life of the Risen Christ in us.

And may the love of Christ rise in our hearts and in the world as we practice resurrection.

Alleluia, Christ is Risen!

The Lord is Risen indeed, Alleluia!

Amen.

On Saturday night at the Great Easter Vigil, I told my congregation that joy is resistance, because when we come together in joy, we catch courage from one another. I’m still buzzing with the joyful energy of Easter, and wanted to share my sermons from this weekend with you. You’ll get one today and one tomorrow.

Whatever your spiritual or religious heritage, whatever you believe — or don’t — at this moment, I hope these words help you feel less alone, and quicken your heart to the many ways in which life — with all its grief — is still very much worth living.

Before the sermons, a bit of context:

The Great Easter Vigil is an ancient practice of telling the stories of Christian tradition, from the Creation story, through the Exodus, to the prophets, and culminating in the resurrection narrative. In Palestine, and in other parts of the world that trace their Christian heritage to the 1st century or not long after, the Vigil starts in the wee hours of Sunday morning, while it is still dark. The New Fire is lit, and its light is passed, candle-to-candle, to all who are gathered. We started at sunset, but the fire ritual was impactful neverthelesss — especially because I told the congregation we were lighting our fire while Palestinians have been barred from entry to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. We lit the fire for and with them, and with all who are experiencing anxiety, danger and grief.

I was swept up in the night’s storytelling and song, particularly a moving embodiment of the Creation story by a local Afro-Brazilian dance troupe and drummer. These ancient stories have a humbling way of carrying us as much as we carry them with us. They transport us into conversation with our ancestors in faith — who struggled with, who loved, who sought the Divine. They comfort with familiarity, while haunting with questions that clutch at the soul and refuse to let go.

I debuted a new chasuble, and these vibrant vestments were a sermon in themselves. Tatreez (traditional Palestinian embroidery) is used to transmit cultural heritage, traditional stories, and important information to people living under occupation. Made by a woman artisan in Jerusalem, this gorgeous, intricately stitched chasuble was a hand-me-down from a clergy colleague, who received them from a retired pastor who probably procured them around 1980 (based in part on the fact that the tag bears a fax number!)

Draped in this story, so rich in beauty and struggle and suffering, I felt the weight of responsibility to preach a true word of hope.

With this context in mind, I want to share with you the two, short Easter sermons I preached this weekend. The one I’m sharing today was at the aforementioned Easter Vigil:

“A Resurrection Faith: With Fear AND Great Joy:” An Easter Vigil sermon on Matthew 28:1-10

“Do not be afraid!”

This is the first message Mary Magdalene and the other Mary hear as they arrive at Jesus’ tomb. It’s the message they need to hear, and one we would do well to hear this Easter too.

On top of the trauma of Jesus’ death, the women have just experienced an earthquakes and met an angel – truly terrifying experiences.

And now they are in for the shock of their lives – the tomb is empty!

They set off running “with fear and great joy” when they suddenly meet the resurrected Jesus.

They throw themselves with joy at his feet as they find out that what the angel told them is true: Christ is risen!

Yet Jesus still feels need to tell them, “Do not be afraid.” Because of course they are still afraid!

They have been through a traumatic, terrifying few days, and seeing Jesus before them is a truly shocking experience.

I’m not ashamed to say: I would be terrified too!

The good news is that Jesus doesn’t demand a faith that pushes down fear. A resurrected faith does not require us to pretend we are not afraid. Rather, the Resurrected Christ meets us in the midst of our fear.

Archbishop Hosam Naoum – the Palestinian pastor who leads the Diocese of Jerusalem — the Episcopal Church’s sister church in the Middle East – put it this way in his Easter sermon:

“the Resurrection is not a movement from the tomb to life, but the declaration that life has become present within the tomb itself.”

If there is anyone who can speak authoritatively about life in the midst of death, it is a Palestinian pastor.

We are human – we fear so much. Of course we do.

Our world has so many leaders who prey upon our fear, building systems that profit from our fear.

If we keep our hearts soft to the suffering of others, then every day we will witness terrible things that will trouble and terrify us.

The story of God – which is the story of the love that courses through our veins, the love that orders the universe, the love embodied by Jesus in his life, death and resurrection – is the story of Divine presence with us in the places we dare not go; the places we fear Love cannot go.

Tonight we heard how in the beginning, God was present in a fearsome, deep, dark, cold, not-yet-made world, speaking order from the chaos; bringing forth life from a lifeless world.

From the chaos, our God makes beauty.

We heard about God freeing the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt. For this people, who had so much to fear as they fled their enslavers and wondered at how they would survive in the wilderness, God went before them, calling them into creative resistance, making a way out of no way, through the terrifying walls of sea towering on every side, and into the desert, where God would feed the people with manna from heaven and water from a rock.

Amidst oppression and injustice, and in the wildernesses of our lives, our God is wildly generous.

We listened to the words of the prophet Ezekiel, living in exile in Babylon. He speaks to the people’s fear that God had abandoned them, that their culture, identity and story would be forever lost, promising that God will bring their numb hearts back to life again, and they will have the opportunity to live in love.

When people despair of ever being whole again, our God heals.

And finally, we heard the resurrection account in which, by his death, Christ defeated death. Our siblings in the Eastern Christian tradition emphasize a Christus Victor theology, in which Jesus’ descent into the depths of the grave raises Adam and Eve and all who have died.Even the most fearful experience we can have as humans – death itself – is one where God is with us.

There is no place where God will not go to bring the joy of resurrection.

God has always been faithful in journeying with terrified people – in this way, we are no different from our frightened ancestors in faith.

Having experienced the most terrifying depths of the human experience, God will abide with us wherever we go, resurrecting our faith even as we are afraid.

We are not alone. Christ has gone before us.

It is because of Christ’s accompaniment, that, in the thick of a fearsome world, our resurrection life can be full of joy.

While we live in the tombs of a Holy Saturday world, Christ’s resurrection in the darkness of Easter morning is the promise of resurrection for us all.

Friends, I know that your faith may feel very fragile. You may have days where fear threatens to overcome you – I certainly do.

I hope you will hear this good news:

If you are afraid in this overwhelming world, yet creating beauty anyway, you are living with resurrection faith.

If you are afraid of not having enough to get by in this world, yet you are generously giving away what you have anyway, you are living with resurrection faith.

If you are afraid as you examine your own tender, hurting heart, yet seeking healing anyway, you are living with resurrection faith.

If you are afraid in this death-dealing world, yet choosing joy anyway, you are already living with resurrection faith.

Our loving God knows we are afraid, beloved.

And, God chooses to dwell in the places of death, in order to bring forth life, so that with Christ, even at the grave we might make our song, Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia! AMEN.

Tell me, where are you finding joy amidst fear right now? How is your spiritual or religious practice supporting this, if at all? How are justice and joy linked for you in this moment?

It’s Holy Week, so naturally I’ve gone down a theological rabbit hole while preparing my sermons for the coming days. Now I am reflecting on laundry in the Gospels while a growing pile of laundry stares me down. This piece is all in good fun — I didn’t take myself too seriously while writing it, and hope you won’t either!

I’m preparing to preach on Easter, and a new detail stood out to me this year in John’s resurrection account: the burial cloth that had been on Jesus’ head has been nicely rolled up and placed to the side when Peter enters the tomb.

Much has been made of this detail (namely that it indicates a lack of foul play by grave robbers).

But I’m just here to say:

I love how the resurrected Christ does his own laundry, and how this totally lends itself to feminist and genderqueer interpretations of the text, don’t you?

If Jesus can fold his own laundry post-crucifixion, patriarchal men have ZERO business telling women that there is some divinely ordained gender essentialism that constrains them to household duties.

If they take Jesus as literally as they claim to do, why don’t we see them doing all their household laundry, HMMM?!

This act of care also queers Jesus’ gender in such a delightful way, which is not unsurprising coming from John, whose Gospel also includes:

• Jesus’ robust theological dialogue with the Samaritan woman at the well,

• John’s depiction of himself tenderly reclining on Jesus and self-reference as “the Disciple whom Jesus loved.”

• and of course, right after folding his laundry, Jesus sending Mary Magdalene to be the first one to proclaim the resurrection message as the Apostle to the Apostles.

Relatedly, I have heard that the washing machine is considered the single most significant feminist invention, since reducing the time of laundering clothes was a massive timesaver for women, who were freed up to get jobs or even have *gasp* free time to pursue their passions.

Notably, however, white women have generally relied upon the labor of Black and Brown women to free them up from tasks like laundry. The burden is still overwhelmingly carried by women, while being further invisibilized from men by outsourcing it along racial and class lines.

What if domestic labor was seen as sacred for people of all genders? What if our society abandoned the deforming mythology of female domesticity and embraced the idea that this is holy work for whoever does it? That, rather than avoiding work we’ve been taught is somehow “below” us, we all should aspire to do even the most humble of tasks with care, in keeping with the example of Christ, who took the time to fold his laundry after being EXECUTED.

(PSA, this is not a sneaky way of getting my spouse to do his share of the laundry... we split this chore fairly evenly).

And what if this little detail in the scripture was taken as seriously, as, say, the decontextualized verses the Secretary of War has been invoking to justify killing children in Iran?

“Jesus folded his laundry, so I should too” is a MUCH more direct hermeneutical path than, “the Psalmist said some really angry, retributive things about killing the people who were pissing him off, and that gives me divine license to kill other people without regard for their being made in the Divine Image.”

It is such a small detail, and not necessarily one on which to construct a whole theology, but what I love about John’s attention to it is that clearly it evoked something in him. There was a recognition of the importance of small things, which absolutely characterized Jesus ministry.

Throughout the Gospels, Jesus teaches about the power of small things: seeds and salt, a few coins, a couple loaves and five fish.

He looks out for the “little ones:” children, widows, the sick, and the poor. He stands up to the powerful on behalf of the oppressed.

So it makes sense to me that the small act of folding a burial rag would stick out in John’s mind, and it certainly is something I’ll be pondering this Holy Week.

How about you? What small detail in your spirituality or faith tradition have you been turning over lately? I’d love to hear about what it is evoking in you.

Yesterday, my family and I attended a No Kings rally. Illustrated Ministry made these cool posters that connected Palm Sunday with No Kings. So we had these fillable signs that say Hosanna, Save Us from… and then space to add a word or phrase of something that we need to be saved from.

I asked my four year olds, who were excited to put down the scariest thing they could think of. Hence, their posters said:

Hosanna! Save Us from T-Rex!

and

Hosanna! Save us from Brontosaurus!

Complete with very scary pictures of dinosaurs drawn by my mom, their grandmother.

Together, we did chalk art and we had a dance party with our friends from Moms Demand Action. We stood up for our democracy and insisted on the dignity of every human being, as our baptismal covenant urges us to do. A lot of people honked in support, while a few people were mad, giving thumbs down, or revving their engines.

It was a hopeful energy not so different to how I imagine the first Palm Sunday: Resolute, community-oriented, and even joyful in the face of a violent empire.

You see, when Jesus enters the city of Jerusalem, he is engaging in a pointed protest of the Roman military procession happening on the other side of the city around the same time. In contrast to the flashing swords and mighty horses of Pontius Pilate’s army, which are meant to intimidate and frighten the Jewish people into submission to Caesar, Jesus shows up in a form of drag, riding on a baby donkey.

It’s a joke that reveals the Roman occupation as farcical – this kingdom will fall because it takes itself so darn seriously! They too will go extinct like the dinosaurs.

The children of Jerusalem clearly see Jesus as the true leader in this situation. It is they who lead the laying of palms on the roads in celebration, as they call out, “Hosanna!” which means “SAVE US!”

They see the moral leadership Jesus offers in this moment, they recognize that the way he moves through the world looks like the opposite of the Roman occupier.

He leads with divine mercy, humility, and justice, and they respond with awe, expressed with joyful wonder.

Jesus will go from this strange – even silly! – procession into the temple, where he engages in what one modern Palestinian has called an act of “economic terrorism,”1 angrily turning over the tables of the money changers.

There, the temple leaders are in awe of Jesus too.

But their awe quickly turns to indignation that he elicits a sense of God’s presence. They are angry that his passion disturbs their conscience.

And the power he has built through relationships of trust and healing is a threat to the power they have hoarded through fear and collusion with the colonizer.

Their jealous anger will drive them to work with the empire to have Jesus executed.

In response to these religious leaders, Jesus quotes a portion of Psalm 8, which says, “Out of the mouths of babes and infants you have founded a bulwark because of your foes, to silence the enemy and the avenger.”

Jesus knows that children see through the farce of any form of leadership that is not rooted in care for life. They can tell when the emperor has no clothes.

And when their moral clarity cuts through all the rhetorical gymnastics and fake news of empire, this is very dangerous indeed to the status quo.

The reaction of the religious elite, doubling down on securing their power in the face of Jesus having clearly captured the hearts of children and the crowds, resonates with events of this past week.

A 9-year-old boy named Deiver Henao Jimenez, who is being held at Dilley Detention center in Texas, made a video call from the concentration camp to children’s educational entertainer Ms. Rachel. On that call, he told Ms. Rachel that he misses his friends, and the food at Dilley makes his tummy hurt.

But what worries him most?

Before his family was taken, he won his school spelling bee and placed third at regionals, earning a spot at New Mexico’s state competition in May.

“Nothing is good here,” he said. “I want to leave and go to the spelling bee.”

In response, the Department of Homeland Security has restricted all video calls out of Dilley.

The moral clarity of our children is a danger to the status quo, and those in power are showing just how scared they are.

As we head into Holy Week, with all the violent state repression it includes, Palm Sunday invites us to return to a childlike posture of awe:

Awe at the love of God that exists in the world,
which can be found in spelling bees and sunsets,
puppies and popsicles,
the love of family and the joy of our friends.

And awe in the face of suffering,
which is to wonder at the gap between the love of God and the world we live in.
To question the violence of the status quo
and to bravely insist that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Together, this Holy Week, we cry:

Hosanna! Save us! –
From unkindness to ourselves and one another. 
From greedy leaders taking what is not theirs.
From our fears that there is not enough to go around.
From grownups who incarcerate, abuse and otherwise harm children.
From our lack of love.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, save us.

Amen.

First things first: it has been a while since I last wrote you. I want to begin by thanking you for bearing with me as I continue to work on the manuscript of my book. I am especially grateful for the recent contributions to this publication by and . What an honor to host these phenomenal writers and soulful revolutionaries in this space. I hope their wisdom and heart has blessed you as much as it has me.

I’m heading into the last three months of writing Becoming Soulful Revolutionaries, and I am eager to share more about my project on the other side of turning in the manuscript. Until then, you’ll continue to get occasional posts from me, along with some guest posts (if you are interested in writing, reach out!), as well as a mini season of the podcast from my co-host and our phenomenal producer Stephanie Whitehouse (aka ).

The book is saturated with stories of soulful revolutionaries. Though you’re not hearing as much from me right now, I want you to know that I’m thinking of this community every single day. You keep me inspired and encouraged. Thank you for being who you are in the world, dear courageous soul.

I hope you enjoy today’s essay.

Breath in. Sweet incense rises to meet my nostrils, instantly grounding my body and spirit in sacred space.

Breathe out. I feel my shoulders release tension, including any apprehension I had of being here.

Breathe in. The pungent spices of chicken biryani waft toward me, enveloping me in the familiar scent I know from my mother-in-law’s delicious cooking.

Breathe out: My heart warms at this sign of a table prepared with loving care for dear ones.

Holy hospitality was my first impression of my first-ever Iftar.

On Saturday, along with other members of the Interfaith Coalition I help lead, my family attended a Community Iftar. Our Muslim friends warmly welcomed us to this meal that breaks each day of their monthlong Ramadan fast. They laid a generous table, and laid their hearts open in prayer and conversation.

In preparation to attend, I had draped a scarf over my head in an act of respect. When I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I felt beautiful. When I saw my women friends from the mosque, and met new friends too — from Pakistan, India, and Palestine — my heart delighted in the kindness of their gaze.

My children entered the mosque shyly, but quickly grew comfortable thanks to the kindness of the Muslim children, and soon they were joining their new friends in singing from the top of a staircase!

One of our Interfaith Coalition board members, a member of the mosque, led the call to prayer. As the words swirled around me, Allahu Akbar — God is the greatest — I was awed by the privilege of being in this sacred space, surrounded by people committed to practicing their faith in a society that does not ever make it easy, and frequently makes it dangerous to do so.

In the days since, I have been reflecting with gratitude on the relationships of mutual respect and genuine care that made this experience of holy hospitality possible.

I have also been grieving what it has taken for me to get to this point — what it has taken so many of us to get to this point.

By this I mean, I just turned 35, and this was my first-ever Iftar. The issue was never a lack of invitation — so many communities fling open their hearts and their doors — it was that in my ignorance, I did not see the invitation as intended for me. I did not recognize my own need to learn and to be transformed in relationship with Muslim neighbors.

For so many years, I did not have close relationships with Muslim neighbors who might have invited me to break bread. Prior to the genocide in Gaza, I did not prioritize relationships with the Muslim community. I profoundly regret my lack of intention. It is only through the last few years of learning from Palestinians, advocating for a free Palestine, and proving myself trustworthy to the wider Muslim community by virtue of my solidarity with Christian and Muslim Palestinians, that I have developed close-knit relationships with Muslim friends.

Tragically, the path to holy hospitality that I enjoyed this Ramadan was paved by the pain of many, many people. The scale of suffering experienced by Palestinians, and by Muslims across West Asia, in the United States, and around the world, has been unfathomable. It should not have taken so much destruction and death for me to wake up to my responsibility to build trust with my Muslim neighbors. It should not have taken Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism rearing their ugly heads for me to decide to get involved in local organizing for religious freedom.

I know I am not alone in this, in waking up to discover that I am terribly late to the table — a table nevertheless laid with such care by those who express delight that I am here now.

Teachers of nonviolence like to talk about the subversive power of nonviolence to make repression backfire. In other words, when oppressors intending to suppress movements for justice use violence to meet their goals, the court of public opinion tends to swing toward the people being attacked, not the people doing the attacking, if those being attacked can maintain nonviolent discipline.

The theory sounds really compelling and clean-cut: if nonviolence is practiced, then victory follows. The data generally supports this rule of thumb.

But the embodied, emotional reality is far more messy and painful: an immensity of heartache is still the inheritance of those who choose not to react violently to those powerful forces that wield unremitting campaigns of war as their weapon of choice.

So yes, it is true that repression is backfiring. I am proof. The endless wars, the genocide in Palestine, the spike in Islamophobia all led me to move from mere passive dissent to actively contending for justice for Muslims, with Muslims.

Both anecdotal and quantitative evidence demonstrate that there are millions of us, changing our minds, transforming the Islamophobia we have internalized, making amends with Muslims and involving ourselves in the work for a world that is safe for all.

I loved this video of a young, queer, Jewish content creator, Matt Bernstein, attending an Iftar hosted by NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani:

We are witnessing the backfire of nearly 25 years of post-9/11 violence toward Muslims.

We are living through the backfire of all the violence toward Palestinians since the 1948 Nakba.

People are defecting en masse from the ideologies of white supremacy, Zionism, US imperialism and other beliefs that have made them complicit in mass violence.

Yet at scale, the backfire is still happening at much too slow a pace.

The repression of a blood-and-oil-thirsty empire continues to consume so many precious lives — just in the last two weeks, 160 Iranian girls were killed when the US bombed their school.

It is more clear than ever that making repression backfire is a matter of moral urgency.

Now is the time to take our transformed sentiments, and turn them into what my friend Sister Rida calls Good Action. We can do this in a thousand different ways, all of them rooted in getting to know our neighbors. All of them grounded in love.

We make repression backfire with our organized hospitality, generosity and tenderness.

A smile or a kind word to a hijabi sister. An offer to attend your neighborhood mosque for Friday prayers as an extra layer of safety, ensuring that the community can pray in peace. Verifying that the spaces you have authority over have safe places to pray. Speaking to your civic leaders about issues of Islamophobia in your local community. Advocating together with Muslim neighbors for policies that protect everyone’s right to worship as they choose.

And I won’t speak for your neighbors, but I would suspect: there is a place for you at a table yet unknown to you, as there was for me.

Ramadan Kareem to all Muslim beloveds as this holy month draws to a close.

With you in the sacred struggle,

In the eye of the storm: survival when the world is too much

By Robert Monson

I want to write this piece fully acknowledging the chaos that is the United States. I write this aware that my country has never been a safe space for all people(s). I write acknowledging that to belong here means something so narrow, so precise, that the “other” is representative of a whole lot of people. Words like “fascism” and “homophobia” and “racism” are normal words here. I write today as a Black man in the context of a place that can’t or won’t love me back. There won’t be any false platitudes or “just pray and this will all go away” here. Instead, I cling to the example that my ancestors and my contemporaries have offered to me in order that I might survive in a chaotic world. I offer a slice of the witness of those who have gone before me so that together we might muse a way forward out of *all this*. I hope this piece finds you and that it allows you to have the gift of space. A moment of refuge. I resist strongly the urge to frame everything in wild optimism. That won’t help us now. In these days.

And I start with the words of the Black national anthem. Some of the words that float to my spirit on my best days and often on my worst days. I utter them now:

“God of our weary years,

God of our silent tears,

Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;

Thou who has by Thy might

Led us into the light,

Keep us forever in the path, we pray.

Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee”

For years I have prayed these words. They have even made their way into many of my public lectures or personal writings. I have heard some of the most beautiful singers and preachers utter these words. In a uniquely BLACK setting??? They have ushered me into moments of love, determination, and renewed bravery. Every word of this portion of the song feels like a gentle hand upholding me. It is a reservoir that sustains me when I read the horrors that I find when I read the news. (No matter when you are reading this, I don’t even have to be prophetic to know that the headlines are a whole mess!) I am a contemplative bapticostal in my mind. (No, I won’t explain. If you know you know.) “Thou who has brought us thus far on the way.” is a sturdy floor beneath me as I pray. As I weep. As I wonder why oppression prospers. No answers. No Bible verses can reach me in this disillusioned place. And. I know that in this disillusioned place, I am free to be myself. To utter the words that I’ve been taught you don’t say to a holy God. Here, I reject the notion that doubt is the most offensive thing that must be sanitized. My doubt can exist parallel to, and intertwined with, my fragile faith that says there has to be more to life than what I’m experiencing. That there has to be some Divine good somewhere. I learned how to look for it because I saw my father get up every morning. A byproduct/child of the South, he witnessed hellish conditions much of his life. I saw him work two jobs as he exhausted himself to the bone to provide for us. I saw him sigh and put one foot in front of the other. I am not one of those who glamorizes suffering. Who believes there’s something giggly and redemptive about people’s pain. I toil in the day and in the night so that I can ease the suffering of humanity. I learned from my father how to endure. How to laugh in the face of unfair/oppressive circumstances. He taught me, in a roundabout way, how to center down inside myself because the world would never give me the peace that I was looking for.

“You your own best thing, Sethe. You are.”

― Toni Morrison, Beloved

We are in the eye of (a) storm these days. Do you feel it? There is no need to compare these days to other days in the attempt to “things have been worse.” I find that this is never really that helpful. I write to you today from the eye of the storm, acknowledging the winds. Acknowledging the pain. I also write knowing I come from a line of people that have been miraculous. Miraculous. In and of themselves…miraculous. Those who have “made a way out of no way” even when a country was determined to wipe them/us out. To break us down to the marrow. I take courage and rage and determination from those who went before me. My soul takes flight because I know that this is not the end. It can’t be. And perhaps that is naive of me. I embrace that word lovingly.

“Hard times require furious dancing. Each of us is the proof.” Alice Walker

Before I go, I want to share one more tool I’ve been using for years to remain steady: movement. I have chronic pain that hinders my life in more ways that I would care to admit. Because of how I present to the world, I appear to be perfectly fine most of the time. You would have to know me well to know the really bad days where my body aches from head to toe. On the worst days, and even on pain-free days I like to walk. I like the freedom of moving and enjoying sunshine on my face. And on my best days? I like to run. Run might be a bit of a mischaracterization of what I like to do, maybe slow plod is more accurate. At any rate, I put on my headphones and I allow my body to fall into a rhythm on the run. On these days, despite the windedness I experience, I feel free. For these moments I am disconnected from the chaos of life, and I am able to turn over things in my mind. Snippets of original poems usually come to my mind. Different ideas for essays. The squashing of jealousy or envy as I realize…I am my own best thing. On the run I feel like a child. Or rather, what I assume children feel like. I didn’t get much of a childhood. When I move, I feel that there is more living left in me. And on those days…I feel my ancestor’s smile.

Bless you all.

This essay first met me (Lauren) in a moment of discernment, in the midst of grant applications and funding conversations for an Interfaith Coalition I lead in Colorado, and the familiar tension of navigating proximity to wealth while remaining accountable to values, community, and truth. It names questions many of us carry quietly:

- How do we move toward resources without losing ourselves?
- What does integrity look like when survival, scale, and sustainability are all on the table?
- How do we examine, hold, and navigate the many “impossible contradictions” of work within the language / systems of philanthropy?
- What are the costs — visible and invisible — of the paths we’re told are “the only way forward”?

We’re honored to republish this piece with Tirrea’s permission, while shining a light on its original home.

Our hope is that it meets you wherever you are, whether that’s in your own funding conversations, institutional negotiations, or personal journey toward integrity in the work of liberation.

Navigating Proximity to Wealth in Justice Work

By Tirrea Billings

“I become so fluent in the language of philanthropy that I forget it’s borrowed language from power structures.”

When Jessyca Dudley, Founder and CEO of Bold Ventures, spoke with me about the challenges of being close to so much wealth while working in philanthropy, I began reflecting on my own role in this work. Acknowledging the source of foundation money is a topic I hadn’t discussed with anyone in the field. We talk about the impacts made, the campaigns won, the communities served, and the lives forever changed, but not why philanthropy exists in the first place. Jessyca is the first person I’ve met who clearly explains that philanthropy exists because of the extraction of labor and the concentration of wealth. It made me consider my own proximity to concentrated wealth and the privilege it provides.

It’s a double-edged sword. My ability to do this work, to have a career fighting for justice, stems from this extraction and inequality. I’m grappling with what that means for my role in all of this. Philanthropic foundations exist because some people hold resources that should have been distributed more fairly from the start. This is not a controversial statement among those of us doing justice work, yet it remains one of the sector’s most avoided truths.

Before my conversation with Jessyca, I hadn’t fully realized how working within this reality means I’m living with contradiction. I’ve attended conferences where the cost of attendance alone exceeds some organizers’ monthly salaries. I’ve worked at organizations fighting poverty, while the president/CEO earns four times what the people in the communities they serve earn. I’ve witnessed colleagues justify taking positions at institutions whose wealth comes from industries that actively cause harm. These are some of the negotiations I’ve seen while doing justice work within systems built on extraction.

Before I was laid off, removed from the echo chamber, and had time during unemployment to reflect, a part of me felt like I had normalized all of this, like a form of assimilation into spaces that don’t truly challenge the systems that created them. After nearly a decade of working in philanthropy and nonprofit spaces, I can navigate them effectively. I know how to craft stories for grant applications that highlight their fundability. I understand how to present work in ways that make funders comfortable without being too political or radical. These are essential skills; organizations need resources and funding to survive. But this also exposes my own ignorance I had going into this field, all because I’ve been told and taught that this is just “the nature of the work.”

What Jessyca mentioned in our conversation was the mental and emotional toll of this proximity. Doing work for the greater good and securing resources for communities? That part feels rewarding. However, philanthropy has turned achieving justice and collective liberation into a business model. This makes me feel like I’m constantly shifting between worlds based on vastly different values. I start to view movement work through the lens of what’s fundable rather than what’s truly necessary. I become so fluent in the language of philanthropy that I forget it’s a borrowed language from power structures, not the language of the communities I’m aiming to serve.

This is where the accountability that organizations owe to communities—and also the accountability that individuals like me, who operate at this intersection, must hold ourselves to—becomes crucial. To me, it requires constant awareness of who I’m becoming in these spaces and whether that person can still fulfill the work I initially committed to doing.

Since my conversation with Jessyca, I’ve been motivated to continue staying intentional about engaging in work that doesn’t require me to compromise my values. Launching philanthropy unfiltered has been especially important in this regard. It’s a space where I can openly acknowledge contradictions without watering them down, and confront and critique the systems I am navigating in real time. I’ve also found myself drawn back to more grassroots, hands-on work directly with communities, where the language doesn’t need translation and the priorities come from those most impacted.

Second, accountability means being honest about the compromises I make and why I make them. It involves not pretending I’m unaffected by wealth or false consciousness, but recognizing it. Yes, I’ve changed how I speak in certain spaces. Yes, I’ve made career choices influenced by financial stability. Yes, I’ve stayed quiet when I needed to preserve relationships. Acknowledging these realities doesn’t excuse me from them. It keeps me from fooling myself into thinking I operate outside the systems I criticize.

Third, it’s essential to consider whose interests my work benefits. When managing communications for an organization, am I emphasizing what communities need to hear? Am I acting as a genuine and holistic steward of someone’s lived experience? When planning campaigns, am I focusing on what would truly shift power? These questions don’t always have clear answers, and sometimes strategic and principled decisions may not align. Still, asking them regularly keeps me aware of who this work is really for.

What matters most is that I make intentional choices, not simply drifting into such proximity because it’s financially beneficial or convenient, and not automatically rejecting all engagement out of an attachment to righteousness that benefits my ego more than the work.

Proximity to wealth in philanthropy is not neutral. It influences me in ways I haven’t fully realized until I paused to reflect. It can distort my perspective and disconnect me from the communities and movements that originally inspired my commitment to justice work. However, it can also provide information, access, and leverage that, when used strategically, can redirect resources and shift power dynamics.

Ultimately, accountability for practitioners working within extraction-based systems means admitting I’m not unaffected by it all. I’m not saving the sector from itself through my presence. I’m not exempt from complicity just because I recognize or question it. I’m navigating impossible contradictions as carefully as I can, trying to redirect resources toward justice while acknowledging that the systems that produce those resources are fundamentally unjust.

Doing justice work within philanthropy requires me to hold multiple truths at once. Yes, resources are needed, and strategic engagement with funders can help reallocate them. And yes, philanthropy itself is part of the problem—a symptom of systems that concentrate wealth and power in ways that make justice work necessary. I can’t resolve this contradiction by pretending it doesn’t exist. I can only navigate it with as much integrity, awareness, and accountability as I can.

In the end, my integrity depends less on making perfect choices and more on my willingness to stay honest about what those choices cost. I know that proximity to wealth will influence me. My responsibility is to notice how, and to resist when that influence pulls me away from the work I’m driven to do.

To read more of Tirrea’s work, check out her Substack here.
Follow Tirrea on Instagram | LinkedIn | Substack

Dear Soulful Revolutionary,

Five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father Adrian were freed from a Texas concentration camp on Saturday because of a tremendous amount of people power. That’s very good news.

Millions of people were galvanized by deeply distressing photos of Liam — in his bunny hat and Spider Man backpack — being kidnapped by ICE and used as bait to capture his father. Because of public outcry, Texas Representative Joaquin Castro and Minneapolis Representative Ilhan Omar were allowed entry to the so-called “Dilley Immigration Processing Center” — oversight which congresspeople are supposed to be able to exercise, but which has been denied by the federal government in many other cases. Ultimately, US District Judge ruled that Liam and Adrian be set free.

It is very good news that Liam is home with his family.

But he couldn’t return to his beloved school on Monday — classes were canceled since the school experienced bomb threats after Liam’s classmates wrote letters to ICE asking for their friend to be treated with kindness and respect. ICE vehicles regularly drive past his house, threateningly.

Life is not back to normal because there was no baseline of normalcy to begin with. So many of our neighbors live in a constant state of vigilance, which has only increased under this administration.

And devastatingly, there are so many whose stories we don’t know. While Liam’s story received much publicity, two children from his school were subsequently kidnapped by ICE and their story has not gotten as much press. Hundreds of children and thousands of adults are still locked up in Dilley, where there is now a measles outbreak. Liam is also one of the few Black or Brown people to receive the same level of national attention that we’ve seen directed toward Renee Good and Alec Pretti after their murders. Yet, since January 2025, eight people have been directly killed by ICE or Border Patrol, while 35 have died in custody. With the exception of Good and Pretti, all of those killed have been People of the Global Majority.

It’s very good news that Liam is free. And, we have to be asking:

How do we create the same kind of public pressure campaign for all of those whose lives are being torn apart by this terrorizing regime?

It’s an incredibly overwhelming prospect.

So here is another way to frame what can understandably feel like a drop-in-the-ocean fight:

The more we know our neighbors, the more people whose stories we will know and amplify when they are taken, the more people will be free (or never taken in the first place, because we keep us safe).

When we know our neighbors, we organize to make their stories known. Personal stories help us connect to the suffering of the many. That’s a good and human thing. Our job is to continue to insist that every person has inherent rights and dignity, whether or not we know their story, and none of us are free til all of us are free.

Like communities across the country, my neighbors and I are organizing to keep us safe. From Minneapolis, we have learned the power of hyper-local rapid response. There, Signal groups are organized by neighborhood, in a disperse, decentralized mycelial network in which one neighborhood’s response to ICE presence sends out alerts to surrounding communities. Folks have created end-of street barricades with cones and trash cans to prevent ICE from entering their neighborhoods, while allowing neighbors through. People deliver groceries to neighbors who are scared to leave their homes. Parents organize patrols to keep schools safe for drop off and pickup.

All of this has been possible because, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, people in the streets protesting police brutality also organized to keep their communities safe. Many of the Signal groups in use today were formed that summer, as neighbors realized they had no one to depend upon for safety but themselves.

It is a much more difficult thing to keep your neighbors safe (or to trust that they will keep you safe), if you don’t know your neighbors. It is also very difficult — though certainly not impossible — to do the work of building community when the community is under direct attack.

For those of us not living in a place experiencing a full-out federal occupation, we need to be building rapid response networks now, built on the foundation of mutual aid and alternative economies.

• Engage in mutual aid: Keep knocking on your neighbors doors. Keep asking them what they need. Keep bringing them groceries. Keep carpooling to school and giving folks rides to work. Keep finding what you need via Buy Nothing groups and share what you have with others.

• Learn about and educate others on how to identify ICE and how to respond as part of a team if ICE is present. (Organizations like We Keep Us Safe here in Colorado do regular trainings on this, and you may be able to find in-person trainings in your area). Work with neighbors to build and share whistle kits. Teach folks about their rights, know what role you will play and have a plan for who you will call if ICE shows up.

• Create alternative economies: Invest in bail funds and legal support for detained people. Invest in spaces of spiritual care and well-being for those who are directly impacted and on the front lines of showing up. Invest in local businesses that are anti-authoritarian.

Building relationships, showing up for one another in crisis, and investing in our communities is a vital strategy for sustaining our movement for the long haul.

My friend recently made a video about the necessity of sustaining actions like a general strike beyond a single weekend. He notes that successful movements to achieve substantial change take a long time:

Kicking the British out of India took 17 years.

It took 13 months to desegregate buses in Birmingham.

And ousting the dictator of Serbia was a 10 year process.

What these movements had in common was a solid organizing foundation. People took care of each other while engaging in strategies that required significant sacrifices. Henry explains:

We were never going to beat fascism with a daylong strike. There are no shortcuts to freedom. It doesn’t matter how many people you mobilize if they don’t stay mobilized for long. Do we have the means to stay organized for as long as it takes? A general strike in the US may need to hold for weeks for the powers that shouldn’t be to feel it, and we won’t be able to carry out an action like that, until we are prepared to take care of each other for that long.

In the spirit of taking care of one another, Andre and I wrote a short book, Project Confrontation: How a Band of Black Churches Desegregated America’s Most Racist City to introduce readers to the organizing that undergirded the 1963 campaign to desegregate the city of Birmingham during the Civil Rights Movement.

We created this practical resource in 2025 to empower and equip ordinary people to learn from the struggles of the past in order to organize for a more just and liberated future. You’ll learn how to craft a compelling vision, build campaigns that win real change, and choose tactics that align with your values and goals.

It’s worth particularly highlighting during this Black History Month that we all have much to learn from Black organizers who have made immense sacrifices and taken incalculable risks to uplift entire communities. We owe them everything.

I hope you will find the book helpful as you organize in your community to keep one another safe. As always, please reach out if I can be supportive.

Together with you, building community in the struggle,

Dear Soulful Revolutionary,

I don't put a lot of stake in "hopefully."

I'm hearing a lot of folks say right now about authoritarian violence in the US, “Hopefully, this is the tipping point." Or, "Hopefully, they've realized they've gone too far.”

Sure, there have been some wins to celebrate in recent days — not least of which is the regime kicking the head of Border Patrol to the curb. But empire doesn’t cower in the face of “hopefully.” It blinks when we organize to threaten the sources of its power: organized people, and organized money.

The only hope I rest in is embodied, organized, skin-in-the-game hope. This is directly tied to my Christian faith in a God who loved in status-quo-defying, empire-threatening ways, to the point of state execution.

In both cases, real hope is fleshy and vulnerable. It’s substantive because it’s about bodies being in risky and subversive places, and by doing so, disrupting the gears of the machine that grinds us all down.

You can miss me with the empty optimism.

I find hope in Minnesotans resisting an occupation of their city with car horns and whistles to alert people to ICE presence, using leaf blowers to redirect teargas back to ICE agents, and burning trash cans to prevent tanks from driving into crowds of protestors.

I find hope in the actions of people like Alex Pretti, a VA ICU nurse who was helping a woman pushed to the ground by ICE, when eight agents jumped him and shot him. I find hope in the woman who recorded his execution at great risk to her own life, and subsequently gave an interview on CNN knowing that this would divulge her identity to people who will surely exploit it — including the federal government.

I find hope in the heart-wrenching footage of grown-ups and children at South Texas Residential Center in Dilley, Texas (including 5-year-old Liam Ramos, who was used as bait in Minneapolis), protesting their abduction and incarceration with signs reading “LIBERTAD!” (freedom) and chants of “LET US GO!”

My hope is bedraggled and beaten, yet still here, still moving me forward, because I see humanity persisting in spite of so much evil.

This is different than, “Hopefully it will all be better soon because it couldn’t possibly get worse.”

Oh, friend… it could get worse. Much worse. Failure to face this evil head on is how we ended up here. White people like me have been primed our whole lives to engage in wishful thinking in order to sustain our comfort. It’s a tendency of privileged people to spiritualize a crisis rather than reckon with the material realities of evil.

Of course, I get where these statements of hope come from – we are exhausted.

The evil is so big and so obvious. It seems absurd that this evil would continue to grow and morph and fester, precisely because evil is that absurd. We are wired for love, and those of us who strive to live in love find ourselves flabbergasted at the capacity of evil to keep being so damn evil all the time.

I want to urge you – take that impulse of wishing things would change, and channel it toward courageous material engagement with change.

If you are moved to action, let it be relational. When our flesh meets the flesh of other beings longing for hope, we find creative ways to embody hope. In communities of care, hope is catching. Where people gather to imagine new possibilities for life, and to enflesh those dreams together, hope becomes sturdy, strong, real.

And if you are moved to prayer, let your prayer be,

"Show me, O God, one thing I can change today.”

Ask, “What is one thing that I can do, to incline my soul, and the soul of the world, ever so slightly closer to goodness?”

Take your energy – your Holy, Soulful energy that longs to go somewhere good – and let it compel you toward what Rida Zafar, my Muslim sister in community organizing, calls "Good Action." That’s body and spirit, integrated in contending for just social change.

Embodied Hope leads us to Good Action. And Good Action takes us hopeful places, with hope-filled people.

Together with you, hoping through the struggle,