Becoming

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

It is strange to be here, a graduate student at 43, re-starting a career, navigating the poverty that comes with that, and the health concerns that come with age and a lifetime of stress.

March was a flurry of activity for me: working two jobs, starting field research, continuing a certificate program, starting to offer spiritual direction.

April is opening slower. I made sure to keep my calendar open.

To use Holy Week and Easter as a time for silence and care.

To take space to mourn my mother, who died two years ago.

To remember where I have come from.

To allow space to become something new.

March was not only a flurry of activity for me, it was also a flurry of activity for the world—the launching of yet another American imperial war, the continued assault on trans rights, the continued impunity of the state of Israel in Gaza and Lebanon, as more and more people are made homeless, as people die slowly from neglect, as they are around the world.

This is an Easter of broken hearts.

My own and so many others.

I watched a protest today, one that takes place every week in Cork, full of Palestinian—and now Iranian—flags. I saw the pictures of No Kings day marches across the United States, with perhaps 8-9 million people around the country turning out.

Protests, of course, in themselves, might not fix much. But they do show us that people are restless, that we are ready for change, that we are hopeful for change. And that we are not alone.

For myself, I am retreating into silence over this weekend.

For grief.

For hope.

For learning and study.

It has been five years since I have celebrated a mass for Holy Week and for Easter. Four years since I left church leadership—and the church—altogether.

I think about those years, and the frenzy of activity, the honor and the grief of serving a community abandoned by empire.

In those five years since, I have settled into myself in ways that I never thought possible.

I have found a kind of peace and strength in myself I never thought possible.

And I have found the space to honor my grief in ways I never had time for.

And I feel like I am living on the edge of discovery.

The edge of becoming.

In my own soul.

And in the soul of the world.

Gramsci said that we are living in a time when a new world struggles to be born and I feel that.

He was not joking when he said it is a time of monsters. And sometimes, listening to the news, that is all we see and hear.

But it is a time of building ecological civilization too, from Indigenous nations to China.

It is a time of deep analysis of the crisis of our civilization and economic systems.

It is a time of the rise of previously subjugated nations throughout the so-called global south, even if the U.S. continuously opposes it.

And it is a time when U.S. power is crumbling—which may not be such a bad thing, if we can build something else instead.

I prefer to be a man of action, to be honest; this sense of waiting in between worlds feels irritating. This time of building strategy and learning makes me feel restless.

And so I am learning, this Holy Week, to sit in the unknowing.

To feel the divine or the sacred in the endless change of the world that is always becoming.

For me, no church; just holding all matter as sacred, all in relationship, all changing.

I have experienced change so profoundly in my own body, my own self, that it is easy now to see the universe as change.

So, in the broken hearts, in the loss, there is still a trust that all of us who have ever lived hold meaning and are connected.

That all that has been fought for will not be lost.

That in my days of flurried activity, and my times of slowness and rest, I am becoming with all other things.

The stardust that is millions of years old in my bones, the atoms in my body that have exchanged with every place I’ve ever stepped—they will keep moving, keep changing, keep becoming long after my body is gone.

None of this is an excuse for apathy in this time of great change, but it is a promise that change is inevitable and that the universe will always right itself.

I am trying to learn to trust in this becoming.