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.

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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.