Before we can forgive anything, we have to be honest about what actually happened without minimizing, over-spiritualizing, or skipping to a resolution. This week we slow down to affirm this first step in the process: naming the hurt with precision. As it turns out, telling the truth about your wound is the first act of healing.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Guided prompts:

Most of us remember show and tell from elementary school. You brought something from home — something that mattered to you — and you stood up in front of the class and you showed it and you told about it. Why it was special. Where it came from. What it meant.

It was a simple practice. But underneath it was something profound: the assumption that what you've experienced, what you've been given, what you've come to love — matters to other people. That your story is worth telling. That the room is changed when you share it.

That's the practice we're talking about today. Except the stakes are a little higher than a favorite baseball card.

The Viewmaster and the Commissioning

For the last month we've been using Easter stories the way you use a ViewMaster — holding them up to the light, letting the depth and color and detail get in us, and then setting them down changed by what we saw.

We're not here to relitigate what literally happened two thousand years ago. We're here to ask: what do these stories do to us when we really look at them? What wakes up in us?

And here's what's interesting: every single one of the writers of the four gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John… the life and times of Jesus…  ends their account of these resurrection stories with some version of the same moment, which doesn’t always happen.. Jesus gathers the people he's been walking with, and he says: go. In different words, with different emphases, but the same essential movement. “You've seen something. Now go and live like it.”

Four different writers, writing to four different communities, with four different angles on the same moment. And in every single account — the last thing he does is send them out.

The word for someone who is sent — the Greek word apostolos, where we get the word "apostle" — literally just means: one who is sent. It’s a word basically used in Christian spaces, so it often sounds like a religious status, but that’s it… someone who has been given something, and is sent to share it.

That's it. That's the commission.

You've been given something. Go share it.

So let's trace what we've been given over these five weeks — because I think it forms a single, cumulative movement, and I don't want us to miss it.

Week one: Mary at the tomb — waking up to being seen. You are known. You are named. You are not invisible. Even in your grief. Even when you can't see clearly. Someone calls you by name.

Week two: Breakfast on the beach — waking up to being fed. There is enough. More than enough. The fire was already burning before you got to shore. And the story of scarcity that tells you there isn't? That story is manufactured, and we don't have to live by it.

Week three: Thomas returning to the room — waking up to belonging. The wound is allowed in the room. You don't have to clean yourself up to come in. Saying the true thing is what keeps you connected, not what disqualifies you.

Week four: The road to Emmaus — waking up to beauty. The image was already there. The presence was walking beside them the whole time. Soften your gaze. Pay attention. What you've been looking for might be right in front of you.

And week five — this week: waking up to participation. You've been seen, fed, welcomed, and awakened to beauty. Now the stories ask: what are you going to do with that?

Here's where I want to say something plainly, because I think it matters:

Awakening is not a PRIVATE ACHIEVEMENT. It is a COMMUNAL RESPONSIBILITY.

There is a version of spiritual growth that becomes a kind of spiritual consumerism — where we collect insights, feel transformed in the room where transformation is happening, and then go back to our regular lives essentially unchanged. Where the ViewMaster stays pressed to our eyes and we never put it down and bring what we saw into the world.

The commissioning — in all four versions of its telling — pushes back hard against that.

Womanist (womanism: a social and intellectual framework and movement that centers the experiences, struggles, and contributions of Black women.) theologian Emilie Townes writes that authentic spiritual formation cannot be separated from public action. That the personal and communal are not separate tracks. They are the same track. Inner spirituality without an outward “show and tell”  is incomplete. And embodying an inner spirituality without community is unsustainable.

You cannot wake up alone and stay awake alone. We wake each other up. We keep each other awake. That's the whole design.

I think this perspective is pointing toward something that connects directly to what every version of the commissioning is saying. You bring what you have. You share it. And in the sharing, something happens that couldn't happen if you stayed home alone with it.

bell hooks takes this further in her writing on beloved community (a community in which everyone is cared for, absent of poverty, hunger, and hate). She writes: "Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world."

Beloved community is not uniformity. It's not everyone arriving at the same conclusions. It's not the erasure of what makes us different from each other. It's the opposite: each person showing up fully as who they are, with what they've been given, with the stories and wounds and gifts and cultural legacies they carry — and the community being made richer and more whole because of it.

That is show and tell. That is the commissioning. [[That is, in part, why Fabric exists.]]

Think of moments like this in your own life when somebody has a breakthrough moment in their life and brings you into it. Or, when you share honestly within your circles of influence about what's been shifting in you… that's the kind of show and tell we’re talking about. You're saying: Here’s something I’m waking up to, and it matters to me, and I think it might matter to you too.

We're living in a strange and charged moment. And part of what makes it strange is that the Jesus being used to justify the hoarding of power, the cruelty toward the vulnerable, even the villanization of empathy — that Jesus is not recognizable in any of the biblical stories about him.

The Jesus in the stories we’ve been holding up to the light throughout this series makes breakfast for exhausted people. Says someone's name when they can't see straight. Invites the one with the courage to share their doubts back into the room. Walks seven miles with grieving travelers and stays for dinner. And then — in every account — sends people out. Not to conquer, or exclude, or to try to pass a vaguely religious litmus test for the powerful… but to share what they'd been given, and to make the beloved community larger and more expansive.

So here is a commissioning for us — for Fabric — as we leave here today:

May it be so. Amen.

Two travelers walk miles with a stranger, their eyes somehow unable to recognize who he is… until suddenly, they do. Like a Magic Eye image, beauty and meaning are often already present; sometimes we just need to soften our gaze to recognize it.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Show Magic Eye… bring a couple ppl up to “race”... ask what their “trick” is…

Do you all know what this is? Maybe if you’re like me, you also know the particular frustration of standing in front of one of these and seeing absolutely nothing. Just noise. Just chaos. Everyone else around you is gasping and pointing — I see it, I see it — and you're standing there thinking: there is nothing there. This is a scam!

And then — maybe — something shifts. You relax your eyes. You soften your gaze. You stop trying so hard to find it. And suddenly, almost against your will: there it is. A dolphin. A spaceship. A whole three-dimensional world that was present the entire time, completely invisible until you stopped straining to see it.

The image was always there. You just needed a DIFFERENT WAY OF LOOKING.

That's the story we're sitting with today.

It's the same day as the resurrection. Two of the people who had been learning from Jesus are walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus — about seven miles away (from here to downtown Hopkins, or here to the State Fair). One is named Cleopas, and he’s traveling with another person the author of this book leaves out…

They are walking away. Away from the city where everything fell apart. Away from the site of the execution. Away from the tomb and the wild, confusing reports the women brought back that morning that nobody quite knew what to do with.

They're processing. Talking through the wreckage. And a stranger falls into step beside them along the road.

The stranger asks what they're talking about. And they stop — looking downcast — and say: are you the only person in Jerusalem who doesn't know what happened? There's something almost darkly funny about that. They proceed to explain the whole story to Jesus. He listens. Then he walks them through the scriptures, reframing everything.

They reach Emmaus as evening falls. The stranger acts as if he's continuing on — and they say: stay with us. It's getting late.

He stays. They sit down to eat. He takes the bread, blesses it, breaks it, gives it to them.

And their eyes were opened, and they recognized him.

And he vanished.

They turn to each other: weren't our hearts burning within us while he talked to us on the road?

They had been walking with him the whole time and couldn't see it. Until the bread broke, and their eyes softened, and there it was.

I want to sit with this story and look at it through the lens of liberation for a moment, because it matters who these people are and what they were carrying.

Cleopas says to the stranger: we had hoped he was the one who would redeem Israel. The Greek word there — lytrōo — means to liberate from an oppressive situation. To set free. These weren't abstract spiritual hopes. They were political hopes. They had hoped this was the one who would break the power of Rome, dismantle the systems of domination, set the occupied people free.

And instead he was executed, in an extremely public, humiliating way Rome had devised specifically to crush movements and make examples of leaders.

So they're walking away not just from grief, but from the particular grief of crushed political hope. The grief of people who believed change was possible and watched it get squashed.

That is not a distant or unfamiliar grief. Many of us carry some version of it. And the story doesn't say: get over it. Go back. Pretend it didn't happen. The story says: a stranger joins you in it. Listens to you talk through it. And eventually — in the act of sharing a meal with an unexpected guest — something you couldn't see before comes into focus.

Robin Wall Kimmerer (botanist, writer, member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation) has spent her life arguing that attention is not PASSIVE. It is an act. A PRACTICE. A form of reciprocity.

In her framework, drawn from Indigenous ways of knowing, the world is already speaking. Already offering gifts. The question is not whether beauty and meaning are present — they are. The question is whether we have learned, or been willing, to receive them. She writes that paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world — receiving its gifts with open eyes and open heart.

This is exactly what the Emmaus story is about. The beauty — the presence — was already there on the road. It had been there for seven miles. In this story, the disciples' eyes were, as Luke puts it, kept from recognizing him. Not because the presence was absent. Because something in their grief, their exhaustion, their framework kept them from seeing what was right in front of them.

The Magic Eye image was already there. Their gaze just hadn't softened yet.

And here's the liberationist move in Kimmerer's thinking that connects directly to this story: the practices that train us to notice beauty, to receive gifts, to recognize interconnection — those practices are not luxuries for people who have the time and leisure to be contemplative. They are, she argues, acts of resistance against systems that profit from our disconnection. A culture that keeps us distracted, anxious, consuming, competing — that culture depends on us not noticing the gifts that are already here. Not recognizing each other. Not seeing the fire that was already burning on the shore.

Defiant attention is a revolutionary act.

Notice where recognition happens in this story. Not during the stimulating conversation while they were on the road — though something was stirring (weren't our hearts burning?). Not through an argument or a proof. Not through a performance of power.

Recognition happens at a table. When food is distributed and shared. When a stranger is invited to stay and then becomes the host.

This is how the writer of Luke tells the entire story of Jesus. Over and over, the pivotal moments happen around food. The outcast is seen at a dinner party. The lost son is welcomed home with a feast. The thousands are fed with what seemed like not enough. And now: Jesus, once again in their presence, is recognized in the breaking of bread.

From a womanist perspective, [[every table can be a SACRED SPACE.]] It is where bodies gather. Where hunger is acknowledged. Where the work of sustaining life happens. Where people who might otherwise stay strangers become known to each other.

And in this story, it's a table in an ordinary house in an ordinary village, with two grieving, exhausted travelers who thought to offer hospitality to someone they didn't yet recognize. The beauty was in the ordinary. The coming back to life was in a meal. The recognition was in the distribution of food.

So what does it mean to live with a softened gaze — especially right now, in a world that gives us a thousand reasons every day to harden?

Here’s what I think: it doesn't mean ignoring the hard things. These disciples didn't ignore them. They talked about them for seven miles. They named the execution. They named the dashed hope. They named the confusion & chaos. Soft gaze is not the same as averted gaze. You can see the wound clearly and refuse to let the wound be the only thing you see.

What Kimmerer points to, and what this story enacts, is something like this: the world is more beautiful and more interconnected than the loudest voices in our culture want us to believe. The story of scarcity, isolation, and meaninglessness is not the whole story — and insisting on that, quietly and stubbornly, in the way we pay attention and share meals and recognize each other, is a form of resistance.

What would it mean to be defiant in our insistence that beauty is real? That connection is real? That everything actually is interconnected? That a stranger on the road might be carrying something we need?

The disciples had to invite the stranger to stay before their eyes opened. Hospitality preceded recognition. They didn't know who he was when they said come in, stay with us, it's getting late. They just knew the evening was coming and there was room.

One practice this week… Soften your gaze once — deliberately — at something you usually rush past on the way to something else. A person. A tree. A meal. A moment with someone you love. A moment with a stranger. The view out a window you stopped noticing.

Don't try to extract meaning from it. Don't analyze it. Just let it be there. Let yourself receive it… And notice: was something already present that you hadn't been still enough to see?

The road is already there. The stranger is already walking beside you. The bread is about to break.

You already have eyes to see it…! May it be so.

Thomas gets a bad reputation for doubting, but maybe he was just honest — and maybe that honesty is exactly what brought him back into the room. This week we explore how naming what's broken, rather than hiding it, is often the very thing that opens us to belonging.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Starting with a little rehab here…

Thomas has been getting a bad reputation for about two thousand years. Doubting Thomas. We've turned his name into an insult— something you call someone who won't take your word for it. Someone who needs proof. Someone who's being difficult.

But here's what I want to suggest today: Thomas wasn't being difficult. Thomas was being honest. And that honesty — that refusal to pretend he was okay when he wasn't, to perform belief he didn't have — might be exactly what brought him back into the room.

(Set the scene)

It's the evening of the day of resurrection. The disciples are huddled behind locked doors — afraid, bewildered, not sure what to do next. Jesus appears, shows them his hands and his side, breathes peace on them, and sends them out. It's an extraordinary moment.

And Thomas isn't there.

We don't know why. The text doesn't say. Maybe he needed air, or to put his feet on grass. Maybe grief just does that — sends us off alone sometimes.

The others find him and say: we have seen Jesus. And Thomas says — and here the Greek is vivid and visceral, not politely skeptical: unless I put my finger into the wounds in his hands, unless I thrust my hand into his side — I don’t buy it.

Not a mild maybe. A raw demand, dripping with grief. Show me the wound. Don't tell me it's okay. Show me. My most recent– and now maybe permanent– memory of this person is intimately tied to his death…

A week later, Jesus appears again. And the first thing he does is turn to Thomas and say: here. Put your finger here. Reach out your hand and put it into my side.

He doesn't scold Thomas. He doesn't say why couldn't you just trust the others? He shows him exactly what Thomas asked to see.

And Thomas says: my Lord and my God.

The most complete confession of faith in the entire Gospel of John — spoken by the one who has  been labeled “the doubter,” as if that’s a bad thing.

I want to slow down and look at what Thomas really did here, because I think we've been reading it wrong.

Thomas did not hide his doubt. He did not perform belief he didn't have. He did not sit in the back of the room and smile and nod and go through the motions.

He said the true thing. The hard thing. The thing that probably felt embarrassing and exposed and maybe even a little dangerous to say in a room full of people who claimed they'd already seen.

I need to touch the wound to believe it.

That is not a failure of faith. That is an act of extraordinary courage — the courage of honesty. And because he said the true thing, because he named what was real for him, he got to be there when Jesus showed up again. He was in the room.

What if the doubt wasn't the obstacle to belonging? What if naming the doubt was the very thing that kept him connected?

Fred Rogers understood something about this — and he spent his whole career trying to teach it to children, and really, to the rest of us.

His full version of the famous line is this: "Anything that's human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone."

Not just: if you can say it, you can handle it. But: anything human can be said. And saying it is how we stop being alone in it.

Rogers was actually an ordained pastor who believed deeply that the most spiritual thing you could do was tell the truth about how you were actually doing. That naming the wound — whatever it was — was the beginning of healing, not the end of dignity. 

And he didn't just preach this. He demonstrated it. In 1969, Rogers testified before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Communications. Nixon wanted to cut public broadcasting funding in half. Senator John Pastore of Rhode Island was chairing the committee — impatient, skeptical, running behind schedule. He told Rogers he had six minutes and that he'd already read his statement, so Rogers could skip it.

And Rogers — gentle, calm, completely unintimidated — said he'd like to share some of it anyway. And for six minutes, he talked about what his show tried to do: help children name their feelings. Anger. Sadness. Fear. The hard stuff. He even recited, quietly, the words to a song from the show about what to do with the mad that you feel.

(video clip here)

An abrupt, impatient senator… not entirely closed, but not exactly open either… moved not by argument, not by data, but by someone willing to speak honestly and vulnerably about what actually matters to human beings. 

What Rogers did in that hearing room is what Thomas did in that locked room. He named the real thing. And the room changed.

Here's where I want to push into something important, because there's a version of this story that is too easy.

The easy version says: Thomas doubted, Jesus showed up, Thomas believed, everything was fine. Transformation as erasure. The wound healed. Clean ending.

But look at the text again. Jesus shows Thomas the wounds — and the wounds are still there. His body still carries them. Resurrection doesn't erase the harm. It transforms it into something that can be touched, named, even — in the tradition — venerated.

Theologian Shelly Rambo, writing in the feminist and womanist tradition, argues that the wounds of Jesus speak directly to present-day wounds that persist — the wounds of racism, of trauma, of systemic harm — and that theological claim about resurrection must resist what she calls the covering over and erasing of wounds. Pretending the harm didn't happen is not renewal. Resurrection… revival… new life… is the insistence that the wound doesn't have the last word in our lives — while still honoring that the wound is real. It hurts.

This matters enormously for us. For people in this room who carry wounds — personal, communal, historical — that some well-meaning religious community has told you to get over, move on from, stop bringing up: that is not what this story is about.

Jesus doesn't say to Thomas: you should have believed without seeing. He says: here. Touch it.

The wound is the door, not the obstacle.

What This Looks Like Here

So what does this mean for a community like Fabric?

A lot of us came here — or are here exploring — because some other room didn't have space for real questions. Real skepticism or doubts. Real wounds from what religion has done, or what life has done, or what systems have done to us and the people we love. 

And what this story says is: that honesty isn't what keeps you out of the room. It's what makes it possible to be in the room in any real way.

When you say I don't know if I believe any of this — you're doing what Thomas did.

When you say I'm not okay and I'm not going to pretend I am — you're doing what Thomas did.

When you say I need to see the wound before I can trust the story — you are in good company. Ancient company.

And the invitation this community wants to extend is not: clean yourself up and then come in. It's: come in as you are. Bring the doubt. Bring the wound. There's room.

Fred Rogers said that the people we trust with the important talk help us know we are not alone. Thomas needed to touch the wound before he could actually become present to the seemingly impossible thing that was happening in their shared life. Both of them are pointing to the same thing: naming what is real is how we find our way back into connection.

So this week, one practice. Just one… Name something true — to yourself, or to one person you trust — that you've been carrying quietly. It doesn't have to be dramatic. It doesn't have to be resolved. It just has to be honest. This is hard for me. I don't know what I believe about this. I'm more tired than I'm letting on. I miss someone. I'm angry, and I haven't said it.

Name it. Say the mentionable, human thing. And notice what shifts — even a little — when the wound gets to be in the room. You don't have to have this figured out to belong here. Bring the doubt. Bring the wound. There's room.

May it be so.

Jesus shows up on a beach after the worst week of his friends' lives and asks a disarmingly simple question: have you eaten anything? This week we push back against the lie of scarcity and practice the defiant, countercultural act of believing there is enough.

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TRANSCRIPT:

A beat of honesty to begin…

This week's message is built around a phrase that should not be controversial. It shouldn't raise anyone's blood pressure. It shouldn't feel political. It shouldn't require courage to say.

The phrase is: There actually is enough.

And yet… depending on your life experience, where you grew up, what your bank account looks like, what neighborhood you're in… that phrase might land anywhere from obviously true to laughably false to offensive, because you don't know my life.

So before we go anywhere else, let's hold all of that. Let's hold the complexity of that sentence in the room together.

Tell the story…

Let’s paint the scene: It's after the resurrection. The disciples are rattled, confused, grief-stained. They've seen what they've seen, but nothing has quite settled yet. So they do the thing people do when they don't know what else to do: they go back to work. Peter says, I'm going fishing. And the others say, We'll come too.

They fish all night. They catch nothing.

Then, as dawn is breaking, a figure appears on the shore. He calls out: "Hey, you don't have any fish, do you?" They say no. He tells them to throw the net on the other side of the boat. They do — and suddenly there are so many fish they can't haul the net in.

And then — and this is one of my favorite mental pictures of Jesus ever — they get to shore, and he’s already has a charcoal fire going. Fish already on it. Bread already there. He doesn't wait for them to bring what they caught and make it into something. There is already something prepared.

And he says: "Come and have breakfast."

There’s no moment of like… “let's debrief the last week.” or “I need you to understand what just happened.”

Come and have breakfast. Pull up some sand and have a seat.

The first thing the newly-alive Jesus does with his bewildered, grieving, exhausted friends is to feed them.

Now — here's where we need to be honest with each other, and honest about the world we actually live in.

Because it is not true that everyone in this room or in this city, or this country has always had enough to eat. Or enough to feel safe. Or enough to rest.

In 2024, nearly 1 in 7 U.S. households — that's 47.9 million people — experienced food insecurity at some point during the year. Nearly 1 in 5 households with children were food insecure, the highest rate since 2014. 

And those numbers are not distributed evenly. Almost 1 in 4 Black households, 1 in 5 Hispanic households, and nearly 1 in 3 American Indian and Alaska Native households were food insecure in 2024 — at least double the rate for non-Hispanic white households. These inequities reflect the impact of structural barriers rooted in systemic racism and other forms of discrimination that result in higher rates of poverty. 

So when we talk about scarcity — we have to say this plainly: for a lot of people in our lives and community, scarcity has not been a philosophical problem or a spiritual metaphor. It has been Tuesday. An embodied, lived reality.

And we have to also say: that is not because the earth doesn't produce enough. It's not because there isn't enough food, or enough housing, or enough care to go around. The pie is plenty big. But the slices are cut unevenly..

Research from the Federal Reserve Board shows that Black families' median wealth was approximately 15% that of white families — $44,900 compared to $285,000 — in 2022. Studies indicate these racial disparities persist even when factors like income and education are accounted for, suggesting that pervasive racism embedded in historical, political, and economic systems continues to drive the gap. 

Scarcity, as most of us experience it, is manufactured. It is the product of systems — empire systems, to use a biblical word — that concentrate abundance at the top and make the rest fight over the remainder.

The problem is not that there isn't enough fish in the sea. The problem is who controls the nets.

And this is where the Easter story opens up into something larger than one morning on a beach.

Because if you read the Gospels as a whole — if you trace the arc of what Jesus actually did — you start to notice a pattern. Feeding keeps happening. Abundance keeps showing up in the middle of scarcity.

Five loaves and two fish for thousands of people, and there are baskets left over. Water turned to wine at a wedding — not a trickle, but somewhere between 120 and 180 gallons. A woman who loses a coin and sweeps her whole house until she finds it, then throws a party that probably costs more than the coin. A father who sees his prodigal kid coming from a long way off and kills the fatted calf — we're celebrating tonight.

Over and over, Jesus enacts this: there is enough. More than enough. Abundance is the character of the divine, not scarcity.

And then he dies. And the people who crucified him — Rome, the religious gatekeepers, the systems that depended on keeping people in their place — they thought that was the end of it.

But here's what resurrection means, in part: his teachings didn't die with him. The practices didn't die. The communities he formed kept forming. Throughout history, untold numbers of people, inspired by this life and death, have put their bodies and their resources on the line to insist — there is enough, and we're going to share it.

The church at its best — not its worst, not its empire-adjacent self, but its best — has always been a community that takes the fish off the fire and says come and have breakfast.

That is what resurrection looks like in a neighborhood. In a coalition. In a food pantry. In a protest. In a community that shows up, over and over, to say: the story of scarcity is a lie, and we're not going to live by it.

And here's where I want to get concrete, because I think this community is doing exactly that kind of work — and I don't want us to miss it or undervalue it.

Our new partnership with ISAIAH — a statewide coalition of congregations and allies working for racial and economic equity in Minnesota GuideStar — is one expression of this. ISAIAH was founded in 2000 and has won real, tangible things: healthcare access for all children regardless of immigration status, billions in public transit funding, paid leave, homeowners' rights. These are not small things. These are exactly the kind of retooling… taking systems built on scarcity and bending them toward abundance… that the beach breakfast points toward.

When Fabric shows up in public — at Fabric on the Town events like this past Friday at Midtown Global Market, for Fabric in Action events, or simply at tables in the neighborhood— we are not doing outreach in the old-school sense of trying to recruit people to our club. We are practicing what it looks like to be a community that shows up and says: we're here. We see you. There's room at the table. 

When you show up on Sunday, or in your Fabric group, or check in on someone during the week — you are participating in this same movement. You are part of a network that is slowly, stubbornly, defiantly insisting that there is enough connection, enough care, enough belonging to go around.

This is not soft or peripheral… this is the work.

But here's where I want to gently push, because there's a move in this story that's easy to skip over.

The disciples don't just witness the breakfast. Jesus tells them to bring what they caught — and they do. And then he says: come and eat.

Receiving is part of this. And for a lot of us — especially those of us who've been trained by scarcity, by systems that told us our needs were a burden, by communities or families that taught us to make do and not ask — receiving is actually the harder practice.

Self-compassion researchers Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer have spent years documenting something that resonates here: one of the key barriers to human flourishing is not a lack of generosity toward others, but an inability to extend that same generosity to ourselves. Their work in Mindful Self-Compassion identifies a move they call mindful awareness — which is simply this: noticing what is actually happening in your experience right now, without immediately narrating it, judging it, or trying to fix it.

Not: I shouldn't feel this way. Not: Other people have it worse. Not: If I just work harder, I'll feel okay.

Just: This is what is happening in me right now.

That kind of honest, gentle noticing — of your own hunger, your own exhaustion, your own longing — is actually a prerequisite for being able to receive. You can't take food you don't know you need.

Closing Practice

So let's close with something simple. An invitation to practice mindful awareness — and what this story might call coming to the fire.

Take a breath. Let your feet feel the floor.

And ask yourself — without judgment, without fixing — one of these questions. Just one. Let whichever lands, land.

Where am I running on empty right now?

What kind of nourishment have I been telling myself I don't need, or don't deserve, or can wait?

Mary stands weeping at an empty tomb, convinced she's alone — until someone says her name. This week we explore what it means to be truly seen, and why that experience might be more essential to our survival than we've been taught.

LINKS:

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TRANSCRIPT:

For the next several weeks, we're going to hold some of the Easter resurrection stories up to the light the way you hold a ViewMaster slide up to the light. You don't travel to those places. You hold the image up, and something in it travels into you. The depth, the color, the detail — it gets in you. And when you set it down, you're back in the room — but you've changed. You're carrying something you didn't have before.

That's the invitation. We're not asking you to settle theological debates about what literally happened. We're asking: What do you see, when you really look? What wakes up in you?

This series follows the thread we pulled on at Easter — "He is Woke Indeed." Woke, in its original 20th-century AAVE meaning: alert, awake, seeing clearly. These stories are about people who suddenly started seeing what they couldn't see before. That's what we're after.

Read it… invite people to really take it in…

"Mary stood outside near the tomb, crying." She's not praying. She's not worshipping. She's wrecked. She looks into the tomb and sees two angels, and even this doesn't pull her out of her grief. Wild. She turns and sees Jesus but doesn't recognize him. She thinks he's the gardener.

Then: "Mary." One word of recognition: her name. And everything shifts. She wakes up to what’s happening… 

Sit with that for a moment. What just happened? He didn't offer an explanation. He didn't prove anything. He simply said her name. And she woke up.

This is the moment we're exploring today: the experience of being truly seen. Called by name. Recognized.

We live in a culture (and many of us carry a theology) that quietly teaches: survival first, connection later. Get the basics handled. Then, if there's time and you've earned it, relationship.

This is, in fact, the story we absorbed from one of the most influential frameworks in modern Western thought: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Food, water, shelter. Safety. Then belonging. Then esteem. Connection shows up only after your survival needs are met.

But here's something worth knowing about where that model came from — and what it left out initially

In 1938, Abraham Maslow visited the Blackfoot (Siksika) Nation in Alberta, Canada. He was stuck on his theory of human development and went to spend time with their community. (Grow Your WHY article) What he encountered there profoundly shaped his thinking — but when he built his famous hierarchy, he "borrowed generously" from the Blackfoot worldview and then made that source essentially invisible.

And here's the deepest problem: he inverted what he found. In the Blackfoot model, which uses a tipi rather than a pyramid, self-actualization sits at the base — not the top. It is the starting point. Community actualization comes next, and the highest aspiration is called "cultural perpetuity" — the ongoing flourishing of the people across generations.

In other words: you don't earn love or belonging after you've survived. Love and belonging is what makes survival possible in the first place.

While in Maslow's model we find love and belonging only after attending to basic needs and safety, the Blackfoot model describes that our tribe or community is the very means through which we are fed, housed, clothed, and protected. (PACEsConnection)

The pyramid we all learned? It's a Western, individualist distortion of an Indigenous communal wisdom that was never given credit. For the record, I think the same distortion has happened to the wisdom of Jesus and his people; it’s been whitewashed to center the individual…

The Siksika/Blackfoot Nation understood something our public health system is only now naming as a crisis.

In his 2023 report "Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation," Surgeon General Vivek Murthy wrote that loneliness is associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death. In fact, lacking connection can increase the risk for premature death as much as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.

And social neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman's research shows that our brains react to social pain and pleasure in much the same way as they do to physical pain and pleasure. Social connection ensures infants' survival; their safety and physiological needs are dependent on it. Unmet social and psychological needs create pain that is just as real as physical pain.

Connection isn't a reward for getting your life together. It is how we stay alive.

So when Jesus says her name… this is not a small thing. This is not a warm gesture. This is an act of resurrection in itself… of coming back to life.

She was invisible to herself in her grief. She couldn't see clearly. She was looking right at the one she was looking for and couldn't see him.

And then: her name. And she sees.

This is what being truly seen does. It wakes something up in us that grief, fear, and shame had put to sleep. We can't fully come alive alone. We come alive when we are recognized — when someone looks at us and says, in word or action: I see you. You are here. You matter.

From a womanist theological perspective, this moment carries particular weight. Mary Magdalene — a woman, the first witness, the one the tradition has spent centuries trying to sideline or diminish — is the first person Jesus appears to. He doesn't appear to the disciples gathered in the upper room. He appears to her. By name. The people Empire tends to undervalue, or say they don't matter are often the first to see clearly.

Two movements:

First, receiving: Is there a part of you that's still at the tomb — still in grief, still unable to recognize what or who might be right in front of you? What would it mean to let yourself be called by name? To let yourself be seen, not as you should be, but as you are?

Second, offering: Who in your life needs you to say their name? Not fix them. Not explain things to them. Just see them. Call them by name. The Easter story suggests that is what resurrection looks like in everyday life.

This week's practice: Say someone's name — really mean it. Or let yourself be known in one small way you normally hide. Notice what wakes up.

We’re living in a moment that feels deeply divided—where fear, violence, and separation can feel almost inevitable. Easter tells a different kind of story; one where people thought it was over, only to begin waking up to the possibility that love might still have the final word.  Maybe we could hope for that same kind of waking up...

LINKS: Current Conversation | Connect | YouTube |  Coming Up

Prayer doesn’t have to be polite or perfect it can be truth-telling– anger, doubt, gratitude, grief, longing– and honest prayer weaves us more deeply into community and even action. If God can handle the universe, maybe God can handle your real feelings.

What if prayer isn’t about convincing God to act, but about becoming more awake to ourselves and each other? This episode explores prayer as self-honesty, integration, and connection, discovering that we can’t draw closer to the divine without also drawing closer to our own souls and our neighbors.

For many, certainty is the assumption before approaching prayer. This week, we’ll gently unpack the “God boxes” we’ve inherited and consider whether prayer begins not with certainty, but with an openness to mystery. If God is bigger than our categories, maybe prayer starts with wonder. We might even discover that we pray a lot more than we thought…