The Threat of Resurrection

A downside-up Easter meditation for an upside-down world...

[PLEASE NOTE: This post draws on my experience with clinical depression. I’m not an expert on depression, and nothing I say here should be read as diagnostic or therapeutic advice for others. I’ve simply told part of my story as I understand it. If you suffer from depression, as so many do, please reach out and seek competent help. I did and it helped save my life. If you are walking alongside someone who’s suffering, you might find a few useful insights in Chapter IV of my book, Let Your Life Speak.]

Half a lifetime ago, during a hard passage in my life, I ran across a collection of poetry by Julia Esquivel (1930-2019), a theologian and peace activist from Guatemala, whose people have long suffered from murderous political violence. Titled Threatened with Resurrection, the book was published in 1982 after numerous threats against Esquivel’s life forced her into exile, where she continued her witness. Among her many “crimes,” she advocated tirelessly for the rights of indigenous Mayan peoples, 40,000 of whom were “disappeared” by the Guatemalan military regime between 1960 and 1996.

The hard personal passage I mentioned was a months-long bout with profound depression that hit me in my early forties—the closest I’ve come in my 86 years to a death-in-life experience. I’m not talking about feeling sad. Neither am I talking about feeling lost in the dark, where the difference between you and the darkness allows you to grope around for a door, a window, a crack in the wall, just a little light. I’m talking about the sense that you have become the dark, and there’s no opening to be found. The only voice you can hear is the voice of depression, which keeps saying, “You are worthless and anyone who says otherwise is lying. So do yourself and the world a favor and disappear.”

In depression, I lacked the focus required to make sense of any book, so day after day Threatened with Resurrection sat unopened on my bedside table. But I kept looking at the title, which allowed those three words to reach deep into what was left of me. By some inexplicable mercy, they penetrated the darkness I had become and gave me the jolt I needed to begin coming to terms with my bottomless misery. By upending the conventional notion that death is the great threat and resurrection the great hope, Julia Esquivel opened my mind and heart to a hard truth that eventually helped me return to health: figurative forms of death-in-life can give us a perverse sense of comfort—while resurrection, the hope of new life, can feel threatening.

At that time in my life, I felt defeated on every front, personally and professionally. I barely had what it took to keep putting one foot in front of the other. But depression, awful as it was, spared me from those challenges. As long as I was depressed, no one expected anything of me and I expected nothing of myself—and that gave me a twisted sense of relief. Did part of me want to get well? Yes, of course, desperately. But another part of me felt safer being half-dead than taking the risk of coming alive—and that part clung to the “comfort” of death-in-life. What I might be asked to do if I opened myself to resurrection-in-life?

This flash of insight into how I was collaborating in my own diminishment soon became woven into a larger healing process, one that involved talk therapy, short-term medication, and long walks in the woods. As my sense of self returned and the darkness retreated, I began to understand how often the threat of resurrection shows up in our private lives, as when we cling to unhealthy relationships, personal resentments, compulsive overactivity, and substance abuse.

At this point, Julia Esquivel invites us to dive deeper into the largeness of life, into “our complex and inexplicable caring for each other,” to quote Annie Dillard. As we come to terms with the fears that drive our personal lives, we are called to break free from the fears that drive our political lives. We are called to risk standing against all uses of power that are not informed by love, truth and justice, but that lead directly to cruelty and oppression. That’s what Esquivel would ask us to face into, especially during this Easter season in what was once known as the world’s greatest democracy.

On April 14, POTUS and the president of El Salvador—who calls himself “the world’s coolest dictator”—met at the White House and trash-talked the rule of law like two adolescents giving their civics teacher the finger. This, of course, is the same finger that POTUS has been giving to the ideals of democracy, anyone who offends him, the global economy, and our allies around the world. The twin tyrants scoffed at court orders to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia from his unwarranted imprisonment in El Salvador and give him due process, and floated a plan to send U.S. citizens with criminal convictions to foreign prisons, evoking an obsequious laugh from the “dignitaries” in the Oval Office.

Julia Esquivel would have been chilled by this callous reminder of the 40,000 “disappeared” in her native land. But she would have spoken up loudly and clearly, no matter the personal risk, insisting that the rights of all human beings be honored: that’s what it means politically to embrace the threat of resurrection. The death-in-life we should fear, Esquivel says, is the spiritual death that comes when we hide out and ignore atrocities that bend the arc of the moral universe away from justice.

MEMO to SELF: Make this Easter “Rise and Resist Day,” a day of liberation from all that constrains you from speaking truth to power. Make it a day when you practice embracing the threat of resurrection, liberating yourself from fear, and finding ways to push back on all that diminishes your life and the lives of your sisters and brothers. Isn’t that what Easter is supposed to be about?

The world’s great wisdom traditions make claims about mysteries I don't pretend to understand, including what happens after we die. But this I know for certain: as long as we’re alive, “choosing resurrection” is always worth the risk. Whatever your tradition may be, my Easter wish for all of us is the ability to say YES! to life, personally and politically. Even when life challenges us, it’s a gift beyond all measure.

[The painting of The Resplendent Quetzal is by Diana Sudyka, whose work is HERE. My 10 books are HERE and HERE. The Center for Courage & Renewal is HERE.]