Let me tell you something I’m nervous to admit.
“Wrongfully deported” can sort of sound like “dropped off at the wrong bus stop.”
I don’t know if I cared about the deportees until I saw the pictures.
I mean, I cared. I was alarmed; I was angry and sad for them and their families—theoretically. But I was also very, very, very tired. I made up reasons why this couldn't happen to my friends who are immigrants.
I could already hear the voices of the people in my life who say I overreact to these things. “No one is ever going to mistake us for members of South American gangs.” “Someone has to do something about immigration.”
What do you do? How do you fight that? Once the words “gang member” have been uttered, how many times do you try to replace it with “human being” before you give up?
Sometimes I don’t want to see the pictures. Sometimes I get tired of being angry and afraid. Sometimes I give up.
I am a Christian and this week is Holy Week. It’s eerie to sit with the deportation of innocent people1 to a concentration camp as we walk with Jesus toward his death. The deportees are caught between Trump’s and Bukele’s refusal to take responsibility for their own actions. Jesus’s fate hung upon the cruelty, indifference, hubris, and cowardice of Herod and Pilate.
The two imperial officials send him back and forth between them, neither convinced that he is guilty of anything, but both afraid to appear weak. Eventually, Pilate trades Jesus’s life for that of a convicted criminal at the behest of some power-hungry religious leaders.
By contriving this situation, he can claim a mandate. He will say that he traded one death-by-torture for the empire’s continuing uneasy peace.
To empire, the life of a brown man remains a rounding error.
The trappings of justice, a farce.
The children of God, mocked and humiliated.
“Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ Having said this, he breathed his last.”
Luke 23:46
My friend since middle school came to visit last week from far away. They’re about to complete their hours to become a Licensed Clinical Social Worker. They started their degree six years ago in order to better work with refugees. That is not a career anymore.
They recommended an episode of How to Survive the End of the World that’s been haunting me ever since. In it, Daniel Hunter says:
What if instead of having a movement that’s built on winning, we had a movement built on losing? And we honored and valued losing? We are losing people, we’ve lost rights, we’ve lost homes, we’ve lost people that we care for. We’re not a winning movement. And rather than making that our selling point: “Join us so you can win,” it’s a selling point to just lose…
We’ve really built up a story: When we organize, we win. And that is in contradiction to how I’ve experienced the last 43 years of my life. A lot of organizing has resulted in a lot of loss.
Hunter is a career strategist. He’s not saying he wants to lose or plans to lose. He’s saying he knows that the way of victory is strewn with losses. That people who know how to lose are the people you want by your side when empires are crumbling.
It doesn’t take courage to sign up to win. It doesn’t take character or fortitude. Sometimes the only way to move your body to do what’s necessary is to act as though you had nothing left to lose.
Today I listened to part of the story of the Last Supper, where Jesus serves his disciples bread and wine just before he is apprehended as an enemy of the state.
Jesus tells his followers that he is going away, and they won’t be able to follow him. His firebrand of a friend, Peter, demands to know: “Lord, why can I not follow you now? I will lay down my life for you.” Jesus answers, “Will you lay down your life for me? Very truly I tell you, before the crock crows, you will deny me three times.”
I think this story is often interpreted to mean that Peter doesn’t know himself. Maybe that’s true; he’s not the most reflective person. But today as I heard it, it seemed to me that what Peter didn’t know was his moment.
Only a few days earlier, Jesus had been welcomed into Jerusalem as a liberator by an adoring crowd. Of course the disciples must have known that such a demonstration put them on an imperial insurrectionist watch list; but it would have felt heady and hopeful to be in that parade. It would have seemed that if the Romans came for such a popular figure—Peter’s popular figure, with whom he’d walked from obscurity to here, the very center of things—they would at least have to take him down in a rip-roaring, glorious fight.
Instead, the Romans came in the night, and they met with little resistance, and Jesus responded with silence and riddles and a weird, not very inspiring sort of defiance. The crowd who’d been so happy to wave palm branches was not so keen to take up arms.
Maybe Peter was prepared to die—on his own terms, according to his own script, holding a sword, co-leading a righteous revolution.
Maybe Peter wasn’t prepared to follow Jesus into darkness and confusion and loneliness,
to feel the futility of opposing a shadowy cabal of enemies who baldly, even gleefully veiled violence in doublespeak,
to meet, not a battle against red-hot evil, but cold indifference and contempt;
and to do it alone.
Maybe Peter wasn’t prepared to lose.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia has already lost weeks of his life and perhaps his sense of safety, forever. My middle school friend has already lost her career.
Chronic illness is learning to lose. Early parenting is learning to lose. Sometimes marriage or friendship is learning to lose.
Surviving the American empire as a disabled or trans or Black or Indigenous or Brown or woman or poor person is becoming someone who lives with loss—with all that is actively taken away from you—and who keeps choosing to stay human, to find connection, to create something of this life anyway.
This is what I mean when I say things like “follow the marginalized” or tell stories about meeting God in food pantries and emergency rooms. You could say my book is partly about learning to lose.
But how do I invite you into such a thing? How do I really lay it out there?
How to say in plain words that everyone who always tells me I’m overreacting to these things has been spectacularly wrong so far; and that if it turns out that “when we organize—we win,” then before we win, it will first get much more deeply dark and scary; and some of us will lose things forever before we even get the chance to decide whether we were actually willing to sacrifice them; and all of us are going to keep being confused and probably often lonely; and I really believe anyway that it is deeply worth it? That we can do it? That if you lose the world you might gain your soul?
Here is what I know today: plain logic tells you if you think you’re going to lose, you give up. You fold and nurse your wounds and hoard whatever you had left to bet.
Peter gave up.
But this thing I’m talking about, learning to lose, it is the opposite of giving up. You keep showing up, even with empty hands and a broken heart. You keep going; you speak in riddles; you bleed all over the place and spend it all.
You look for the lonely and you quietly hold their hands. You weep the tears you thought were no longer in you. You take a risk, even a tiny one, that’s a little farther than you would have stretched last week—and you know how, because you took a different tiny risk yesterday.
You feed the destitute, the addict, those condemned to death at dawn, because full human bellies still matter, though always and only for a few hours at a time.
You learn to say you’re sorry. You learn how to look for beauty and how to survive another hour from its nectar. You learn to wait. You learn to see. You learn that “I can’t do this without crying” is not the same as “I can’t do this.” You learn what you can do.
I don’t tend to believe that when he chose to go peacefully to a tortuous death, Jesus knew exactly what would happen next. I’m not sure he walked with dignity into that experience because he understood it as the portal to some next-level shit.
I think maybe he was deeply, purely convinced that it mattered in some cosmic way; that his endurance was an ultimate act of love for a world that would betray him; that after his death he would be near to God; but I don’t read these stories imagining that he knew anything at all about the outcomes here on Earth. Maybe he knew that when they buried him, he would become a seed; but for what? Who could tell?
Peter hung at the back of the crowd, denied Jesus, and eventually ran away. But there were others.
They lost, but they didn’t give up.
Jesus had stayed with them. The Holy Spirit stayed with them. They had already bet it all on love. Now they, too, stayed.
Are you here for the spectacle, or for the silence?
Sometimes bearing witness hurts too much to even beat your breast. Bear witness.
Sometimes trying feels like foolishness. Be a fool.
Sometimes staying feels like losing.
Stay.
they are all innocent, because they haven’t been proven guilty, but it’s especially creepy to hear Bukele describe Kilmar Abrego Garcia as a “terrorist.”
This is beautiful and holy and strangely hopeful, thank you.
You have terrific insight…Thank you for this….I may share this with my pastor!