A decade ago, Berta Caceres was assassinated in her home in Honduras. She had been on the military hitlist for years because she led her Indigenous community - the Lenca - in a movement resisting the mining and dam projects of corporate developers with deep ties to American investors.

The Lenca people believe that they come from the earth, water and corn - and that they are called to be guardians of the rivers that sustain every form of life. They believe that they are protected and guided by the spirits of young girls who teach them how to give their lives for the well-being of humanity and the planet.

A year before she was murdered, Berta Caceres talked about the kind of spiritual practice required for her daring political work:

When we started the fight for Rio Blanco, I would go into the river, and I could feel what the river was telling me. I knew it was going to be difficult, but I also knew we were going to triumph, because the river told me so.

During my Rama-Lent fast, I’ve been reflecting a lot on the power of this kind of prayer. Because in this season, I can really feel how powerless I am over the ways and means of the wealth-hoarders and war-mongers. 

On the 10-year anniversary of Berta's assassination, Spirit seconded the motions during my pre-dawn devotionals. I read the story of the last supper in Matthew's Gospel. It says that right after the meal, Jesus was grieved and agitated. Because he knew that ruling elites were conspiring to crucify him. 

Jesus walked to the garden of Gethsemane with his inner circle. The text says that he went out a little further into the woods, and “fell on his face” to pray. 

Jesus threw himself on the ground and poured himself out to Something Else. 

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Christian pray while prostrating. But Muslims do it five times a day. 

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During my Rama-Lent fast, in this season sagging with gloom, I’ve been reflecting on the ways that prophetic leaders like Berta Caceres and Jesus of Nazareth metabolize the grief and agitation and mobilize it for collective liberation. 

The professor and therapist Dr. Bruce Rogers-Vaughn coined a phrase that’s become very helpful for me during these dark days: third-order suffering. Bruce says that neoliberal capitalism, which isolates us while extracting and exploiting the entire planet, has created a new form of "zombie suffering." 

Most of us are not awake to the extent of our distress, let alone the origins of it.

Most of us are just out here trying to manage it the best we can.  

Bruce understands matters of the Spirit in much the same way as Berta Caceres and the Lenca people. He says that soul is like a fabric that embeds every one of us within all that is. Soul is a web that inextricably connects us to every living being. 

Our emotions emerge from the entangled social, political and economic systems in which we exist. 

Third-order suffering is not the result of anything specific. It is a sign that the soul fabric is ripping apart. However, neoliberal capitalism trains us to either blame ourselves for our heavy feelings, or to just stare into the fog.    

Bruce says that the worst thing that we can do is numb our grief and agitation with addictions and distractions. The alternative is to press the pause button on life, pay attention to our pain, feel it, process it, and then allow it to speak in redemptive ways. 

Bruce says that depression is our soul’s sigh or cry of resistance. He calls it “the despair that bears witness.” Our lamentation is a form of prayer. 

When we wake up and engage it, our grief and agitation can transform us - and transform the world too.

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More than three decades ago, Walter Wink wrote that depression is not neurotic, but a healthy sign of our capacity to take in the suffering of the planet. Wink was an activist and theology professor who was writing about what it means to redemptively engage what he called “the Powers,” the ideologies and institutions that order our society in all sorts of insidious ways. 

Wink proposed that racism, capitalism and militarism are more than just beliefs that people subscribe to. They have the power to possess us. Like demons. 

Islamophobia is one of the Powers doing a lot of heavy-lifting right now. In America, the lives of Muslims matter less.

Just dig in and research how many politicians, pundits and influencers, in the past year, have threatened and scapegoated Zohran Mamdani, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib solely on the basis of their race and religion. 

This week, a sitting congressman tweeted, “Muslims don’t belong in American society."

Just imagine what would happen to a politician or a CEO if they proclaimed that Jews don't belong in American society.

Islamophobia is not just some sort of bad idea that backwoods folks subscribe to. It is a Power that possesses a culture of fear. 

Islamophobia is not rational. It is emotional and spiritual. 

So is Zionism, the belief that all the land of historic Palestine belongs to Jewish people - because God said so and/or because "the Jews were there first." 

Zionism is a Power that has hoodwinked conservative and liberal Americans into staying silent and walking on eggshells in the face of horrific things being said and done to Arabs and Muslims, here and abroad. 

Zionism deviates from the dictates of love, moral logic and international law. Its demonic power thrives on disinformation, blame displacement and quoting bible passages out of context.

The grip that Zionism has on Americans does not make any sense – unless we understand it as a kind of dark energy that attaches to people’s unprocessed grief and agitation.

Jewish author Peter Beinart says that Zionism is not just an ideology. It is idol worship.

In American society, the same is true for neoliberal capitalism, careerism, celebrity culture, AI, American exceptionalism, social media algorithms, and patriotism. 

If you take a stand and call out these Powers, if you refuse to cooperate with the fairy tale mythology that has made these fake gods worthy of worship, you will become a leper in the eyes of socially respectable people. 

Of course, when the Powers possess people and institutions, they cannot be neutralized by crafting better arguments. They can only be cast out. 

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Six decades ago, Harlem street lawyer and lay theologian William Stringfellow called for “politically informed exorcisms” like the one performed by the notorious Catonsville Nine in 1968. 

These holy renegades stormed a Vietnam War draft board in the middle of the day, stole 378 draft files, and took them out to the parking lot and set them on fire with homemade napalm. Then they waited in prayer and song for the police to show up.  

This creative nonviolent "hit-and-stay" action did some serious work on the soul of America. The Catonsville Nine did not end the war. But they did cast out the demon called "Vietnam" from thousands, if not millions, of Americans moved by their witness.  

Back in the 60s, Stringfellow warned of a demonic “technological totalitarianism” that was taking over the constitutional institutions that, at their founding in the late 18th century, at least partially prioritized the protection of human life. 

Stringfellow lamented the out-of-control growth of "principalities" like the Pentagon, the FBI, the CIA, secret police and security agencies, as well as multinational corporations, conglomerates and utilities. 

Stringfellow waved the red flag decades before mass incarceration, the militarization of police, Palantir, ICE and AI. The power of the principalities he exposed has grown exponentially since his death in the mid-80s.  

Walter Wink said that intercession is spiritual defiance of the Powers. He said that prayer is the strongest weapon in our soul arsenal because it has the power to cut through “the atmospherics of imperial legitimation.” 

Prayer delegitimizes the Powers and visualizes an alternative future summoned by Something Else. 

This is what Berta Caceres did when she waded into the river. 

This is what Jesus of Nazareth did when he fell on his face in the garden. 

But prayer only makes sense if you believe in Something Else - and belief is not just about mentally assenting to certain ideas.  

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Dr. Butch Ware says that, in the Koran, there are more than two hundred passages about the heart, but the mind is not mentioned once. The split between the heart and the head is a Western construct. It is not found in Indigenous cultures like the Lenca. The heart is where feeling and thinking happen together. 

Dr. Ware says that, if we don’t have an emotional stake in the story, our data and analysis won't do anything for us. 

Brazilian liberation theologian J.B. Libanio once wrote that prayer is not rational. It is an invitation to experience the mystery of God. It is a beckoning out of our head, into our heart and our body, immersing ourselves in “the free, the creative, the unforeseen, the original and the spontaneous.” 

Walter Wink’s spiritual defiance is rooted in what he called the “integral worldview.” It is the conviction that everything that God creates is interconnected. This is the paradigm-shift that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King preached time and time again: 

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. 

The integral worldview is an Indigenous way of being and seeing that subverts the isolated, individualistic Western Christian orientation that dominates American culture. 

Prayer works because everything is connected to everything else - at the soul level.

My ancient Celtic ancestors called this fighte fuaighte (pronounced feecha foicha), a Gaelic phrase that describes how the eternal is woven into and through every living being. 

The soul is not in the body. The body is in the soul. 

Before his sudden death, the Irish poet and priest John O’Donohue prescribed a new art of prayer. We simply sit upright and relaxed, reminding ourselves that, all around us, there is a secret and beautiful soul light. With every intentional breath, we draw in what he called the shadowed shelter that surrounds us. 

O’Donohue said that when we pray with this kind of belief and intention, we bring cleansing, healing soul light into our body, and it has the power to heal the neglected and tormented places within us - and the neglected and tormented places in others too. 

These places have been neglected and tormented by the Powers.

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Back in the 60’s, during her agnostic days resisting the Vietnam War, the poet Denise Levertov was starting to sense that there really is Something Else that’s bigger than us and totally committed to us:

Something is very gently,
invisibly, silently,
pulling at me…

It’s like the deepest part of who we are is attached to a world-wide web.

No barbed hook
pierced and tore me. Was it
not long ago this thread
began to draw me?

This greater Power does not coerce, it compels. 

Not fear
but a stirring
of wonder makes me
catch my breath when I feel
the tug of it when I thought
it had loosened itself and gone.

In these days, it often feels like Love is gone, like we are all alone in this fight for the soul of America, like all this grief and agitation are too much. 

We can drop the fear. 

We can let a little wonder in. 

We can do something defiant and totally irrational. 

We can pray.