Two weeks ago, I sent a newsletter about cultivating a “Resurrection Imagination.” There, I argued the world was in an unrelenting cycle, one that’s “all spinning negative.” This, of course, was before the Hindenburgian experience that was the Presidential debate and before President Trump was diagnosed with COVID-19. It was before whatever melodramatic event unfolds this week.

2020—It’s can’t catch a break, man.

While walking the dog, I found myself waxing melancholic about near-death experiences with a friend.* These experiences fascinated me, I said, and she responded, said her mother had experienced her own death’s-door moment. There was a bright light. A voice asked whether she was ready. She wasn’t, she said, because she needed to care for her husband. She’d made the right call. Months later, he was later diagnosed with a terminal disease. It was an experience that shaped her mother’s life, she said.

“What’s made you so interested in near-death experiences?” she asked.

I gathered my wits and put it straight. We’re on the edge of some kind of collective death, I think. Perhaps its the moment just before the bright light, just before we hear the voice asking whether we’re ready for another shot (maybe one that’s less consumptive and more fraternal?). Perhaps burned through all our shots. Whatever. Still, I said, I have to believe in a resurrection one way or the other. I have to believe that something like new life will rise from these chaotic death-throes.

I don’t know whether any of this is true, of course. We could simply be in the middle of an ugly cycle, one that ends come January 2021. Perhaps we’ll go back to some kind of status quo, some more unified, less pandemic reality. Somehow, I doubt it. And so, I’m praying for a sort of national resurrection. A resurrection into something more like hope and brotherhood.

*If you have a story of a near-death experience, I’d love to hear more. Would you consider sharing it by emailing me?

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