The Maps They Draw
A Meditation by Rev. Cameron Trimble
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” — Martin Luther King Jr.
There are days when it is difficult to know where to place our attention. I could have written about Shell’s first-quarter profit beating estimates and hit its highest in two years at $6.9 billion yesterday, boosted by gains linked to the Middle East war, prompting it to raise the dividend by 5%.1 I could have written about the illegality of the administration’s actions in Iran.2 I could have written about President Trump continuing to provoke a Pope who possesses too much wisdom and historical awareness to be pulled into political theater.3 I could have written about his manic crazy-posting on his Truth Social account (seriously, you should take a look).
But when I think about what matters most right now, I keep coming back to voting rights. I keep thinking about maps.
Districts are being redrawn in southern states to weaken Black political power and protect those already in charge. I keep noticing how the Voting Rights Act is being chipped away, and how some political strategies now focus more on limiting who can vote than on convincing people to support them. This should alarm all of us.
Democracy fails through court rulings, rule changes, and official language that seems harmless until you look at the results. Things may look legal on the surface, but real access to power becomes less fair and accountability gets harder to maintain.
The words used in these efforts are chosen carefully: election integrity, redistricting, states’ rights, efficiency. But history shows we need to watch closely whenever it becomes harder for some groups to take part in politics, especially in the American South.
We’ve seen this before. We remember literacy tests and poll taxes. We know about district lines drawn to split Black communities and strengthen white political control. There’s a long American history of keeping up the appearance of democracy while limiting who can truly take part. This history is much closer to us than many would like to admit.
Some who marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge are still alive. Many who were beaten, jailed, threatened, and murdered for demanding voting rights belong to the living memory of this country. We remember them now because societies become dangerous when they convince themselves their past is fully behind them.
The theological layer underneath all of this is not difficult to recognize. Scripture repeatedly tells the story of power protecting itself by narrowing who counts. Pharaoh fears the growing Hebrew population and tightens control. Rome maintains social order through domination while calling it peace. The prophets condemn rulers who manipulate systems while vulnerable communities lose protection, voice, and agency. Buddhist teaching names another layer beneath this. Fear changes how we see. Attachment to power and identity creates the illusion that some lives matter more than others. From that illusion, entire political systems can be built.
That’s why voting rights are also a spiritual issue.
Democracy has never been perfect. But voting stands for more than just a political process. It shows that we believe everyone has dignity and a say in our shared community.
Authoritarian movements know this well. When leaders can’t convince most people, they look for ways to limit participation instead. If you can’t win the voters, you change the maps.
Still, I feel that more and more of us are starting to wake up. More people see that these aren’t just isolated policies or normal political arguments. We’re witnessing a bigger fight over who truly belongs in American democracy and who is left out. I’d like to think we are witnessing the death throws of our worst racist instincts. But I caution myself: I never dreamed we would be here watching Jim Crow return.
It bears remembering: democracy survives when regular people choose to protect it by getting involved, organizing, paying attention, showing courage, and refusing to give in to cynicism or exhaustion. The Civil Rights Movement happened because everyday people risked everything to push this country closer to its promises. Sadly, that work isn’t finished yet.
Maybe that’s the clearest thing I understand right now.
The maps they draw show what they fear most. They are afraid of what can happen when people stay alert, stay involved, and refuse to give up.
We are in this together,
Cameron
Reflection Questions
Where do you see systems protecting power while limiting participation or dignity?
What does it mean to remain spiritually awake in a time when democratic erosion is becoming normalized?
How do you resist cynicism without turning away from reality?
A Prayer for the Day
A Prayer For Courageous Citizenship
Loving Spirit, we confess how easy it is to grow tired. The systems feel large. The changes feel relentless. The future can feel uncertain and fragile. Do not let exhaustion become surrender. Keep us attentive to the ways power distorts truth and narrows who belongs. Strengthen all who continue the long work of protecting dignity, participation, and justice. Give us wisdom without bitterness. Give us courage without cruelty. Give us endurance without losing tenderness toward one another. And remind us that democracy is not sustained by institutions alone. It survives because ordinary people choose, again and again, to care for the shared life of the community. Amen.
Spiritual Practice
Paying Attention to the Map
Today, pay attention to the systems shaping your life.
Notice who has easy access to power and whose participation is made more difficult. Notice the language used to justify exclusion, fear, or inequality. Pay attention to the places where people are told their voices matter while systems ensure those voices carry less weight.
Then spend time learning the history of voting rights where you live. Read about the people who organized, marched, suffered, and died to expand democratic participation in your community or state.
Let their courage interrupt the illusion that democracy sustains itself automatically.
Before the day ends, make one commitment to participation rather than withdrawal. Commit to register someone to vote. Support an organization protecting voting rights. Call an elected official. Have an honest conversation. Refuse the temptation to disappear into cynicism.
The maps they draw matter. But so do the people willing to redraw the future together.
Upcoming Events That Might Be of Interest…
My team and I launched a new experiment we are calling “The Commons.” It’s an online space centered around communities of practice: groups of people who share a common concern, set of problems, or passion for a topic, and deepen their knowledge and expertise by interacting on an ongoing basis. Join the community here.
May 11, 2026, 7-8pm ET - “Art as Resistance” on the Commons. My dear friend Rev. Shawna Bowman and their colleague Rev. Anna Kendig Flores are offering an incredible online experience of engaging creatively around the role of the artist in movements for social justice and human rights. In this session they will be exploring collective power, and Shawna will demonstrate creating art with wheat paste (whatever that is…I will be learning with you). I hope you can attend. It’s free and such a gift to your spirit. Register here.
May 12, 2026, 11am ET - FREE WEBINAR - Join me online in conversation with “free range priest” Cathie Caimano as we explore how and why we started using Substack and why a platform like this is essential in our world today as people of progressive faith. Register here.
May 27, 2026, 12pm ET - FREE WEBINAR - I will be hosting an online experience titled “Reclaiming the Power of Imagination: A live experiential webinar with Jackie Sussman." Jackie, a psychotherapist, author, and leading expert in Eidetic Image Psychology, has spent over forty years helping leaders and individuals unlock creativity, uncover hidden strengths, and move through limiting patterns. During this session, she will lead a live Eidetic process shaped by mythic imagery, offering a direct experience of the work. REGISTER HERE.
October 18-21, 2026 - PREACH! 2026 Conference- I’ll be co-hosting PREACH in Minneapolis with Church Anew, a new gathering for preachers, storytellers, worship leaders, and spiritual communicators navigating what it means to speak with clarity, compassion, and courage in a changing world. If you’ve sensed that the preaching moment has changed and are longing for thoughtful community and renewed imagination for this work, I hope you’ll join us.
I drafted a Strategic Framework for Congregations as we move into the coming years of increased authoritarianism around the world. If interested, you can download it here.
Fun Things My Friends Are Up To…
I get to work with such amazing, creative people. This section is my way of celebrating them—no paid promotions, just joy in what they’re creating.
Perhaps some of you know some women religious who might be interested in this offering: Join Land Justice Futures for our first Summer Read, featuring Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting Our Past and Reimagining Our Future by Patty Krawec! Women Religious Communities (vowed members, lay associates, staff, volunteers, etc.) are invited to come together to deepen on our journey of repair as we consider how our faith is calling us to look anew at the legacy we have inherited and imagine a healing, just future. The series begins on June 29th. Register here.
My colleague, Dr. Tim Eberhart, is offering a summer course that I wish I could take! Regenerative Mission & Ministry: Ecological Practices for Land Repair is a 7-week course for those seeking to integrate eco-theological reflection, earth-based spiritual wisdoms, and regenerative design principles for land repair. Participants will journey as a community of learners through a cultivated curriculum that incorporates selected readings, video instruction, ecological practices, and more aimed at healing social and ecological relations for the sake of mutual flourishing. It starts on June 3, so sign up soon if you’re interested!
The University of Victoria (UVic) offers an online course, A Meta-Relational Approach to AI. The course is designed for participants who are interested in thinking about AI in ways that challenge modernity’s extractive programming patterns in both humans and machines. The next cohort starts in NEXT WEEK. Registrations are open.
If you are a leader or member of a congregation looking for consulting support in visioning, planning, hiring or staffing, please consider Convergence.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/shells-profit-beats-expectations-69-billion-2026-05-07/
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/trump-sees-swift-end-war-iran-reviews-us-peace-proposal-2026-05-07/
https://apnews.com/article/trump-rubio-pope-iran-19fac7bba8f7c9b4d59630b7d5537868
While political engagement is necessary and good, we need to remind ourselves that the entire political process is designed to prevent progress toward equity, justice, and peace. The political process is a masquerade designed to pull everyone in to work very hard at movements designed to fail.
I continue to be amazed at the folks who just a few weeks ago cried out “No Kings!” And then recently swooned over the corrupt monarch from the UK when he flew into town to direct the colonies on how to do imperialism better.
Democracy will not thrive and grow through engagement with the ecocidal and genocidal system that is already pulling the sacred temple down upon us.
True democracy — such as work for local water, food, and energy sovereignty — is consistently thwarted by the very corrupt system that has brought us into this rapid, anthropogenic extinction event.
True democracy is rooted in deep, widely shared reverence for all of life.
It has been said that if we want peace, we ought not to pray that all people think alike, but rather that all people become reverent.
If we dare to become reverent, we see that we humans no more control ongoing evolution and creation than a murmuration of birds controls the course of the stars.
If we dare to become reverent, we see that we were not there with Creator when the universe was made, and that we have never been the managers and co-creators in any way that we can imagine.
That is why Jesus continually told us to be like the tiny birds and flowers, and to be like children. Jesus specifically taught us not to become like the rulers of this world, who bully and intimidate.
We have been trying to reduce our spirituality into the broken framing of Bronze Age ideas, religions and institutions.
Modern churches exist downstream from the corporatist economic and political power that tells us now to go out there and restore the phantom pseudo-democracy that haunts our past and tempts us to see ourselves as heirs to some golden age rather than as heirs to those who have shredded the biosphere and genocided countless peoples in misguided effort to “rule the universe with Jesus Christ” in the model of the very people who Jesus taught us not to emulate — and who of course executed Jesus as a criminal.
I understand that most religious people today cannot understand that the Kin-dom of Heaven is already here. And so they cannot enter into it, and are deceived into entering into all kinds of false kingdoms that bring death instead of life.
We enter into the Kingdom-dom of Heaven when we finally see that we are here to love as best as we can. We will die as individuals. Our species will die also.
While are alive here in these bodies, we touch eternity. We are not told — nor can we understand — the mysteries of time, space, matter and energy that we apprehend so little of.
We do not understand resurrection or eternal life any more than we understand creation, birth, evolution, death, and extinction.
Mother Earth has been dancing around the Sun for four and one half billion years or so, and will likely continue dancing for at least that long…. Our species is here for a blink of an eye, and then gone forever. Heaven and Earth pass away….
The eternity of God, God’s Word, Logos, Tao, Love — this is the Kin-dom of Heaven.
Heaven is the ability to love.
Hell is the inability to love.
If we follow the example of Mother Earth as the very body of God, we would see our lives as a continual give-away.
We receive light, water, food, and shelter — all we need — as a free gift.
We are to give ourselves away in the same sacred manner.
We are not here to live for as long as we possibly can. We are not here to amass wealth or power. We are not here to create empires that straddle the globe or all of space. We are not here to create empires fhat last for a thousand years or last forever.
We are here to love, with all joy and humility.
Love is all.
Love is sufficient.
Politicians, priests, preachers, and our corporatist leaders generally won’t retain power, prestige, and wealth with such a message.
We need to nurture our spirituality far upstream from the polluted waters that are making us sick. We walk around like hungry ghosts — dead before we have physically died.
Jesus knows we are spiritually asleep and dead.
That is why Jesus told Nicodemus that we need to be born again.
We need to be born out of the broken ways — ecocidal and genocidal ways — and born into awareness of the body of our Mother Earth, who gives us all we need.
Jesus tried to help Nicodemus further, when Nicodemus could not understand being born again.
Jesus said that we must be like the wind. Those born of the wind/spirit/breath are like the wind. Always in flight, always fugitive. Always dancing our prayers upon the earth.
Mother Earth shows us this. She is a cosmic Skydancer. She shows us that when we dance upon her in a good way, we are already dancing among the stars.
All of this talk of politics may be well and is good intentioned, no doubt. And we must engage to protect all the most vulnerable. But we must not allow ourselves to be drawn right back into the sleep of death.
Jesus called us to be woke.
That means more woke than the so-called “civilization” we live within, which is now thrashing about with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.
Jesus spoke clearly about this in Matthew 23, 24, and 25. We live in civilizations that will grow more and more powerful — godlike in power — only to collapse. And we live on a planet and in a galaxy that will also eventually disappear. None of this will be left.
But the Kin-dom Jesus invited us into is eternal: not of this world.
Rather than pretend we are in control, maybe we need mostly to humbly admit that we are not in control.
Privilege destroys itself with the illusion that we understand the problems and have the solutions.
We do not understand the problems and we do not have the solutions.
Indeed, our lives are not a problem to be solved.
Our lives are gifts of love for us to recieve and to give.
Life is a give-away.
I do not pretend that we will be able to have a Disney-esque “happily-ever-after” future. That kind of secular or religious eschatology is part of the ecocidal propaganda machine.
We can try our best to reduce suffering and to make a way for life.
Th reality is that the impacts of what seems like the “long slow violence” of the last few thousand years have brought us to a time of consequences beyond our control.
Such a time was bound to come — but we have, apparently brought such a time quickly and by our own collective hand.
I pray that we will leave our illusions behind, and simply become reverent — if even for only a brief moment.
I pray that we learn that we are here to love.
I pray that we learn that love is sufficient.
Thank you for another great letter!The Republican party’s mad scramble to redraw maps to stay in power is about as craven as it gets, and a distinct and obvious threat to democracy. Even more concerning is the Supreme Court’s role in enabling this erosion of our country’s foundation. FWIW, one experiences “death throes,” not “death throws.”