We’re in the midst of January, spring’s burst of buds and flowers are some way off, but when I went for a walk in the late afternoon alongside oaks bathed in yellow light and looked out across fields lit with a fluorescent green glow as if spread with peridot jewel, I couldn’t help but think about resurrection. Yes, it’s cold and the willows’ branches are bare. My backyard garden is bare now too—the peach, sour cherry, fig and apple all stand bereft of leaves. It’s winter. The layers of leaves have fallen away and we see the exposed structure of things. The dying back is necessary. But harbored beneath the soil and inside the roots and trunks of trees life is at work beneath surface of what looks dead, rebuilding what it needs to recreate spring.
Culturally speaking, the US is living through a harsh winter. There’s a lot of cold. The leaves have fallen away exposing a structure previously covered over. We see behind the curtain. In the streets of the US today, as Minnesota’s governor Tim Walz has described, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have gone door to door asking neighbors to tell which of their neighbors are immigrants and minorities. ICE agents have deported people without due process of law, have grabbed people, stuffed them in cars and taken them away, shot innocent people dead, wounded others. People in government positions mislead the public regarding events that occur and attempt to control others through intimidation, violence and fear. The media has likened ICE’s tactics to the Nazi gestapo in WW2. The Nazis, however, as Sarah Al-Arshani’s article in Business Insider learned from racist thought and tactics used in the America’s Jim Crow south. “Some Americans,” writes Al-Arshani, “including ones as prominent as Henry Ford, Helen Keller, and Alexander Graham Bell, began championing eugenics — a pseudoscientific ideology arguing that genetically “inferior” people should be sterilized to prevent offspring with undesirable traits…Historians said the eugenics preached in the US gave Nazis a blueprint of sorts.” Today, the US is looking and experiencing directly a resurfacing of perspectives left over from the country’s past that were never fully transformed into the country’s ideals of liberty and justice for all.
All growing things need tending. It’s important for our interior lives as well as the systems and structures we’ve created. This time of living through days of minimal light and meager foliage have me thinking how death and life are closely entwined, and how what looks like death can also be the beginning of a new life in the making.
A short time ago I attended an evening with vocal activist Melanie DeMore and the Joyful Noise choir leader Benjamin Mertz, musicians steeped in the tradition of African American spirituals. From the concert’s first moment DeMore brought the entire audience of several hundred people together in song, the whole place hummed with a life-filled felt presence. A sense of peace fell over the room. Something deeply restorative was at work in the music, as if collectively we had simultaneously come home to ourselves. Spirituals like “Wayfaring Stranger” and “Balm in Gilead” arose from the lives of people long oppressed who found a way to keep going despite grinding circumstances that otherwise might drive them to despair. The songs embody a sense of perseverance and determined focus to and be free, to rise up out of the quagmire of an environment that wanted to press them down, and to instead embrace the fire of hope for a new and better life. As the words in the spiritual sung by the Golden Gospel Singers “Oh Freedom!” state, “Oh, freedom, Oh, freedom / Oh freedom over me / And before I’d be a slave / I’d be buried in my grave / And go home to my Lord and be free.” Belief in an afterlife a world beyond the current bleak one is a hope that allows one’s spirit to press on in an austere world where comfort and ease are difficult to come by. That afterlife can be right here on earth in a new world we create together where each person has dignity and the world we live in actively works to support our wellbeing.
Winter’s cold months are the time to trim the grape and berry vines and thin the fruit trees’ branches so when spring arrives the plants get more light and can better hold the weight of the fruit that’s to come. What builds community, enables people to thrive, nurtures their spirit? What nurtures life-giving resources? In winter we can see more clearly where we might trim back the branches preventing us from viewing each other heart to soul. In the midst of winter, we can sing of resurrection, dream of what it would take to allow people to reconnect human to human. We can stand together with others in protest of ICE’s violence, share a dinner with new neighbors, vote for those in the next election that support our constitution and stand by the rule of law. There is life beyond the death we’ve seen. Now is the time to proclaim resurrection.
Continuously learning from our experiences, we are all students of life. The school I worked at in New Delhi, India holds the following statements as the community’s focus:
–nurturing the intellectual, physical, social, and emotional development of each student
–fostering each student’s potential to achieve and to make a difference.
–developing a service ethic and practice.
–protecting nature and the environment.
–improving student learning through research, reflection, and innovation.
–practicing transparent and collaborative decision-making while maintaining effective governance.
Aiming to live together by making the above statements foundational to our actions goes a long way toward enabling everyone in a community feel they belong and have something valuable to offer each other. They are values good to hold through all seasons and beyond days of formal schooling.
In the poem “Barn Dance With The Family” in my book Stories We Didn’t Tell, family members attend a barn dance. Day to day, they are quiet people focused on their labors. They haul hay, fix fences, do laundry, cook for ranchers, milk sheep. No matter the weather or physical challenges, sore muscles, arthritic joints or exhaustion, with resolve they carry out their tasks. But when there’s a barn dance, they show up for joy and for each other. As Avery, a character in the book who loves to dance describes at the end poem’s end,
The bass keeps rhythm as guitars strum in harmony
while the mouth harp whines and moans
and spoons keep beat. Banjo players’ fingers
fly like bird wings and I soar, my feet
slipping back and forth across the floor.
A fiddler’s bow races up the scale, transports
the crowd, spinning and sliding into a world
of dizzy motion. The guitarist strums out
“We Shall Rise.” Humming along, I find
an empty bench to stretch out on for a rest,
“On that resurrection morning when death’s
prison bars are broken, we shall rise,”
the last words I hear before drifting off to sleep.
Dancing, singing, gardening, taking time to share life and joy with those around us to build community–these, too, are resurrection activities. Dreaming and imagining are important. During the year’s dark days when hope for a different world seems far away, consider these words from Alberto Rios’s poem “We Are of a Tribe” to keep your hope of our resurrection into new life together alive,
We plant seeds in the ground
And dreams in the sky,
Hoping that, someday, the roots of one
Will meet the upstretched limbs of the other.
It has not happened yet.
We share the sky, all of us, the whole world:
Together, we are a tribe of eyes that look upward,
Even as we stand on uncertain ground.
…
The sky is our common home, the place we all live.
There we are in the world together.
The dream of sky requires no passport.
Blue will not be fenced. Blue will not be a crime.
…
Friends from my days of working there at the school in New Delhi, India recorded “We Shall Rise,” for me. I’m including it here.
“On that resurrection morning when death’s prison bars are broken, we shall rise.” Let’s set our vision on the world we wish to see.
Anna Citrino---Poetry, Place, Pilgrimage 