Dearly Beloved,
Having just sent out the midweek message, I sat down to read Rev. Cameron Trimble's latest post from today. And I want you to read it as well. Because it tells so clearly the story of where we are and how we got here. And it invites us forward. Its central invitation, the message we have been receiving for quite some time as a congregation: UBUNTU. We belong to each other. Really and truly. I hope that Trimble's words bring you clarity, a way to articulate so much of what we have been feeling and grappling with, and a sense of hope, a sense of the way forward. And just how essential it is that we walk forward together, for we belong to each other.
Thandiwe
The Soil Beneath
A Meditation by Rev. Cameron Trimble
REV. CAMERON TRIMBLE
JAN 28
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” — Jalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī
This one is a bit long and a bit nerdy…but I hope you can stick with me. :)
I have been asking myself: Why does authoritarianism feel so alive right now, not only in the United States, but across so many parts of the world? Why does it no longer sound shocking to hear people speak passionately about strongmen, mass deportations, suspended rights, militarized borders, and the disciplining of dissent?
The easy answer is to blame a single leader or a single election. That answer does not go deep enough. What we are living inside of now did not arrive in 2016 or 2024. It has been building, metabolizing, and hardening for a very long time.
Part of what makes authoritarianism feel “new” is that many of us were raised inside a story that told us history was bending steadily toward justice. We were taught that the horrors of the twentieth century had inoculated us against their return. We trusted that institutions would hold. We assumed that cruelty belonged to a past we had outgrown.
But there is another story running underneath that one.
This country was built on historic asymmetry: some bodies made disposable so that others could feel secure; some lands made extractable so that others could grow rich; some lives marked as expendable so that others could imagine themselves protected. That pattern never disappeared. It simply learned how to speak the language of normalcy.
For African American communities, Indigenous nations, and generations of immigrants, state violence is not an anomaly. It is an everyday threat. It is a memory carried in the body. It is a grief passed down like an heirloom. It is the knowledge that law has not always meant protection, and that power has not always meant justice.
When people say, “This feels new,” what they often mean is, “This has now reached people who were previously insulated from it.”
Authoritarianism does not erupt out of nowhere. It grows from soil long fertilized by historical disposability. It feels plausible to those who benefited from that asymmetry and now fear its unraveling. It also feels plausible to those terrorized by it who are offered the false promise of inclusion in the protected class.
The violence is not new. What is new is its formalization into open policy and public ritual.
There is another layer beneath this one.
Our culture is exhausted. Metabolically exhausted.
We are not only tired in the ordinary sense. We are relationally exhausted. We are spiritually depleted. Mystic James Finley says we have “depth deprivation.”
We live inside an order that consumes connection and produces fear. It devours trust, moral imagination, and courage, and replaces them with distraction, competition, and low-grade dread. It trains people to survive rather than to belong. It teaches them to treat their lives as projects instead of as gifts.
When people are deprived of the freedom to participate meaningfully in shaping their futures, something inside them withers. Vitality does not disappear; it curdles. It turns into resentment and the longing for someone who promises control.
This is why authoritarianism so often feels like relief to a frightened, depleted population. Fear is a cheap energy source. It is easy to manufacture. It is highly controllable. A culture that has burned through its relational and moral capital becomes metabolically dependent on it.
And then there is the third strand, the one that lives in our minds.
We are losing our capacity to hold complexity.
We are being trained to collapse ambiguity into certainty, difference into threat, tension into a single, strong story. Plurality requires patience and humility. It asks us to live without simple villains and simple heroes. It demands that we hold multiple truths without erasing someone in the process.
Authoritarianism offers an escape from that work.
It gives us one story, one enemy, one explanation, one glorious past, one promised future (Make America Great Again!). It trades moral complexity for emotional simplicity. It replaces responsibility with compliance.
These three realities—historical asymmetry, metabolic exhaustion, and epistemic closure—are not separate problems. They are braided together into a single suffocating cord.
The asymmetry tells us whose lives are expendable.
The exhaustion supplies the fear that makes cruelty feel necessary.
The closure provides the story that justifies it all.
This is why authoritarianism feels both like a rupture and like a harvest. It grows from patterns we never fully confronted. It feeds on wounds we never healed. It stabilizes violences we never named.
And still.
This is not the only story being told right now.
Alongside the fear and the exhaustion and the closure, people are remembering how to protect one another. Communities are organizing themselves without waiting for permission. Neighbors are showing up when institutions fail. Grief is becoming moral clarity rather than private shame.
History does not move in a straight line. Civilizations decay. Orders collapse. Arrogance devours itself. But new relational fields also emerge in the cracks.
The question before us is not only how authoritarianism is taking hold. The question is what kind of people we will become inside this moment.
Will we allow exhaustion to hollow us out?
Will we allow fear to train us into compliance?
Will we allow simple stories to erase complex lives?
Or will we tend the harder, slower work of keeping our humanity intact?
Authoritarianism depends on our exhaustion, our isolation, and our surrender to simplicity.
Our resistance will not look like a single dramatic uprising. It will look like a thousand small refusals to let fear decide who we become.
This is not a comforting meditation. I don’t have a lot of comfort to offer. But I do trust this: civilizations do not only fall because of tyrants. They fall because people forget how to belong to one another. It’s the essence of all spiritual teaching.
We are not living at the end of history. We are living at the end of a story that never told the whole truth.
Something else is trying to be born.
And whether it lives or dies will depend, in part, on whether we are willing to metabolize our grief, hold our complexity, and choose relational courage over the seductive ease of closure.
We have been here before.
And we are not alone in it now.
We are in this together,
Cameron
If you'd like to read more by Rev. Cameron Trimble, their substack is: https://www.pilotingfaith.org/
