Dear Substack Community: I see every email when people subscribe and every email when people unsubscribe. I am grateful for this ability to witness the folks who are coming to this Substack and who are leaving. These moments are clarifying for me, as I enter into another fold of my becoming.
As I begin the journey of coming home to myself, I am gaining clarity on my purpose. Tomorrow will be the 10 year anniversary of me finishing my PhD and I never imagined myself here in rural America. I also didn’t have a vision beyond my PhD. I knew I wanted to write, but / and I didn’t know where I’d be writing, for whom, or in what language! I just knew I wanted to write.
Today, I find myself on Holy Saturday wondering what resurrection might look like tomorrow.
Will there be resurrection?
What will it feel like for me to wake up and know that I am 10 years out from finishing my PhD and am now a pastor practicing the ways of Jesus in everything I do.
THIS is what Dr. Nancy Elizabeth Bedford was trying to tell me when she said I needed to have a job where I could wear my t-shirt and jeans! She could see me in a way I could not see myself. All I could hear is “education is your way out,” which my Mexican mother told me over and over, again.
Today is my Holy Saturday. Tomorrow, will I rise to put myself back together, again, so that I can repair the world and be in right relationship with those with whom I’m in relationship? Do I have the courage to be the person I am called to be in the face of the acceleration of harm and bad theology?
Tomorrow, I will get up and preach a sermon titled Still Rising, because the waiting today just doesn’t end on resurrection Sunday. We live life in between waiting and rising. We sometimes feel we might run out of time, but maybe you are right on time to continue to wait and rise!
I am taking to writing these days. I am breaking out of the mold and returning to the art of poetry in everything I do. It has been inspiring meeting Kate and Harris III that has reminded me that I long for awe and wonder. I love the I continue to get to work with and learn from Michael McRay. Erin and I are going on a Learning Journey with him this summer to Northern Ireland, and we cannot wait to learn about the history of conflict and peace and ways that story can shape us into the people we long to be!
My free write today includes an invitation for you to write, also! When we return to a practice with ourselves, we can better nurture shared practices with each other.
My motto these days is:
No Religion—Just Community.
My slow intentional revolution of togetherness is being footprint each time I hear from y’all that you are gathering with purpose, reaching out beyond the isolationisms of today, and checking in on your neighbors; I am endeavoring to practice what I preach. From Berlin to Rural America, we are learning the dance of a lifetime as we nurture another possible world.
Paz, —RCE+
Welcome to the day of waiting and wondering, will there be new life? What might resurrection look like, feel like, taste like?
🌒 Opening Movement: The Silence of the Day After
Holy Saturday is the day God is silent.
The tomb is closed.
The betrayal has been carried out.
The empire has done what empire always does—
it has crucified what it could not control.
And now, we wait.
Not with clarity.
Not with closure.
But with a kind of trembling fidelity.
Today is the day when fugitivity begins—not with running, but with staying.
Staying in the dark.
Staying with the ache.
Staying in the gap between what has been destroyed and what has not yet been revealed.
🕯️ Middle Movement: Love as Fugitive Practice
Fugitivity, in the tradition of Black radical thought, is not mere escape.
It is a creative refusal.
A way of living when the sanctioned paths only lead to death.
On Holy Saturday, love becomes a fugitive act.
There is no visible promise of resurrection yet.
And still, the women gather spices.
Still, the friends stay close to memory.
Still, the body is honored even in absence.
This is care as disruption.
This is love without guarantee.
This is what it means to hold vigil in a culture of violence and forgetting.
🧡 Third Movement: Composting Empire, Growing Tomorrow
Waiting is not passive.
Waiting, in the wisdom economy, is composting.
It is the sacred process of allowing what has died to transform into something that feeds the future.
On Holy Saturday, the soil is not yet broken open,
but the roots are stirring.
Something is moving beneath the surface—
unseen, unmarketed, uncontrollable.
This is radical disruption at its most holy.
It is not spectacle.
It is not campaign.
It is quiet, microbial, embodied faith.
🌱 Closing Movement: Becoming the Resurrection We Long For
We are not called to rush past this day.
We are not called to skip to the hallelujahs.
We are called to live in the pause.
To re-member what it means to care for one another
when the systems are still intact
and the stone is still heavy.
We are invited to become
the kind of people who can recognize resurrection when it does arrive—
because we’ve already practiced it
in the way we’ve waited,
in the way we’ve held each other,
in the way we’ve refused to give death the final word.
🔓 Writing Prompt for You (if freewriting):
What kind of love lives underground, beneath the tomb, outside the reach of empire?
What does your care look like when the future is not promised?
Where have you felt the ache of waiting become the soil of becoming?
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