Living as if All Beings Mattered
Easter 2025
by Fumi
We live in overwhelming times. The assault on human rights, civil liberties, and vulnerable populations is unrelenting. In this context, perhaps it’s helpful to remember the political situation surrounding that first Easter two thousand years ago. On the day that Jesus rose from the dead, political power was concentrated in the hands of an aging Emperor in Rome, Tiberius. According to Wikipedia, his reign was marked by tensions with the rest of the Roman government, particularly the Senate. He relied on an unelected confidante, Sejanus, who exercised immense power over the administrative state (though eventually Sejanus seems to have taken that too far and was executed for treason). Military generals, the landed elite, and others with Roman citizenship fared well enough, but the rest, including immigrants, the debt-stricken, and the colonized people of Palestine, struggled under an imperial government designed to benefit the already wealthy.
The resurrection of Jesus did not immediately and miraculously bring about a more just society. Yet something happened that day. And, perhaps just as importantly, something is happening today.
Fumi and his father fold peace cranes in Hiroshima
A group of social outcasts – widows, orphans, immigrants, tax collectors, imperial collaborators, prostitutes, country fishermen – experienced something new. They knew in their bones and in each other that, contrary to what they’d been told, they mattered. They knew without a doubt that there existed a power – call it Life, call it Love – beyond the daily reality of Roman oppression.
The resurrection of Jesus did not immediately and miraculously bring about a more just society. Yet something happened that day. And, perhaps just as importantly, something is happening today.
As they worked out the implications of this new awareness in their lives, they didn’t so much oppose Roman rule as ignore it. They decided right then and there to live as if they and all other beings mattered. They created dozens of small communities where women had as much say as men, where outcasts and the poor were welcomed, where it didn’t matter if one was a Jew or Gentile, a citizen or immigrant.
What freedom!
In nonviolent resistance, a powerful strategy is non-cooperation with systems of oppression. Gandhi urged his fellow Indians to simply not buy British textiles. Add to this the element Gandhi called the constructive programme – weaving their own clothes, for example – and we begin to create a new society, right in the midst of the old.
How are we called to live into a new world, in the face of threats like authoritarianism, militarism, and systematic theft from the poor?
What if we, like the first followers of Jesus, decided today to live as if all beings mattered? What if we, too, set about the task of creating multitudes of small communities where we sheltered immigrants and the unhoused, in our spare bedrooms and empty church buildings?
Fumi’s father in front of the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima
Our Rooms for Love program is a small attempt at responding to the present moment. Through mentorship and financial assistance, Dandelion House supports a network of friends offering housing to those in need using the spare bedrooms in their homes. Would you consider offering a room for love in your home, for 3, 6, or more months a year?
We don’t pretend to have the magic remedy to our current challenges. Yet with your love and support, we continue our experiments in love, grasping for a way forward that is life-giving, authentic, and creative.
This summer we will lead a group of young adults in our first Fierce Nonviolence Pilgrimage. We will combine training in nonviolent social change with visits to sites in the Pacific Northwest connected to the U.S. nuclear arsenal, as we call for peace, disarmament, and a shifting of resources to meet the needs of people and planet. We want to re-engage our rich tradition of nonviolent struggle alongside a new generation of movement leaders. Find out more at fiercenonviolence.org, and encourage a young person (age 22-35) you know to apply!
Thank you for journeying with us.
