What Is Coming to Life
A Meditation by Rev. Cameron Trimble
“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” — John 12:24
For those of us following the Christian lineage we have just come through Holy Week where we tell the story again of life that is given, taken, and somehow continues. The Christian tradition does not treat this as a metaphor alone. It names a pattern that shows up in the natural world, in human communities, and in history itself. Life unfolds, something ends, and something else begins that could not have emerged any other way.
It is not difficult to see what is ending around us.
We are watching institutions lose credibility that once held public trust. We are watching political systems strain under pressures they were never designed to carry. We are living inside an economic order that has produced extraordinary wealth alongside extraordinary inequality, and the strain is visible in the lives of people who are working harder for less stability. We are also facing ecological limits that can no longer be ignored. The assumption that the earth exists to be used without consequence is reaching its breaking point.
These realities show up in rising costs, in anxiety about the future, in the growing sense that the systems we inherited are no longer capable of holding the life we are asking them to sustain. We can name all of that with clarity.
But Easter does not end with naming what is dying. It asks us to attend to what is coming to life, even when it does not yet have scale or power.
In the Gospel accounts, resurrection is not immediately recognizable. Mary Magdalene mistakes Jesus for a gardener.1 The disciples walking to Emmaus speak with him at length and do not know who he is.2 Recognition comes slowly, and often only in hindsight. This tells us something about how new life appears.
It rarely arrives in the form we expect.
If we are willing to look, there are signs of that kind of life emerging now.
Across the country, farmers are shifting from extractive agriculture to regenerative practices that rebuild soil rather than deplete it. They are planting cover crops, reducing chemical inputs, and learning how to work with natural systems instead of overriding them. These changes do not produce immediate profit at the same scale, but they restore the ground that makes future life possible.
In cities and neighborhoods, people are forming mutual aid networks that operate outside formal institutions. They are sharing food, covering rent, organizing childcare, and responding to crises in real time. These are not large systems, but they are relational. They are built on trust rather than transaction.
We are also seeing experiments in economic life that challenge long-held assumptions. Worker-owned cooperatives are growing in sectors that were once dominated by hierarchical structures. Employees are choosing shared ownership and shared decision-making over models that concentrate power at the top. These efforts are not yet dominant, but they are redefining what participation and responsibility can look like.
At the same time, younger generations are asking different questions about what it means to live a “good life.” They are less convinced that success should be measured by accumulation alone. They are more attentive to mental health, community, and ecological impact. They are pressing institutions to account for how their decisions affect the wider web of life.
These shifts are uneven. They are incomplete. They do not yet add up to a fully formed alternative.
But they are real.
Indigenous teacher, Robin Wall Kimmerer, in Braiding Sweetgrass, writes, “All thriving is mutual.”3 She situates that claim within a wider understanding of life as a network of relationships, where giving and receiving are not transactions but conditions for survival. In that vision, nothing stands alone, and nothing is exempt from responsibility to the whole. That insight is beginning to reshape how people think about ecology, economics, and community life, pressing us to reconsider success not as private gain, but as the capacity for life to thrive together.
Wendell Berry has long argued that “the earth is what we all have in common.”4 That conviction is beginning to move from poetry into practice, as more people recognize that human life cannot be sustained apart from the health of the systems that support it.
What we are beginning to see is the early formation of a different kind of world. It’s a world that takes limits seriously. It understands relationship as foundational, not optional. It measures success by the well-being of the whole, not the advantage of a few.
This is not yet the dominant story. It exists alongside systems that are still driven by extraction and control. It exists in tension with habits that are difficult to change and structures that resist transformation. That tension is part of the moment we are living in.
Easter does not resolve that tension for us. It does not offer a timeline or a clear path forward. It offers a way of seeing.
It trains us to recognize life before it becomes obvious. It asks us to pay attention to what is small, relational, and easily overlooked. It invites us to participate in what is emerging, even when it does not yet have the power to define the whole.
The early followers of Jesus did not begin with institutions. They began with shared meals, mutual care, and a commitment to live differently in the midst of an unchanged world. What they practiced in small communities eventually reshaped the larger one.
That pattern is still available to us.
We are living in a time when something is ending. That much is clear. What is less clear, but no less real, is that something else is already beginning.
The question is whether we are willing to see it, and to give our lives to it before it is fully formed.
We are in this together,
Cameron
Reflection Questions
Where do you see signs of new life emerging that you might have overlooked before?
What assumptions about success or stability are you being asked to reconsider?
Where might you be invited to participate in what is taking shape, even in a small way?
A Prayer for the Day
A Prayer for the Courage to Tend What Is New
God of life, You who bring forth what we cannot yet see, steady us in this in-between time. Do not let us become so focused on what is ending that we fail to recognize what is beginning. Give us the patience to notice what is small, the wisdom to nurture what is fragile, and the courage to align our lives with what leads toward wholeness for all. Amen.
Spiritual Practice
Tending What Is Alive
Today, choose one expression of life that you can support. It might be a local farmer, a community initiative, a cooperative business, or a relationship that needs attention.
Take one concrete step: buy from them, contribute, reach out, or offer your time.
As you do, remind yourself that new worlds are not built all at once. They are grown, tended, and sustained through small, faithful acts over time.
Pay attention to how it feels to participate in something that is coming to life.
Let that awareness guide your next step.
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.
April 7, 2026, 7-8:30pm ET - Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox and I are hosting another 4-part series on “Visions for the Common Good.” This series will include sessions with David Abram (cultural ecologist), Lynne Twist (global activist), Randy Woodley (Cherokee scholar and wisdom-keeper), and yours truly! All sessions are recorded, and you will get the link if you can’t make it. Learn more here.
NEW!!! On July 19-24, 2026, I’ll be leading a Women’s Wellness Retreat in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming, and I’d love to extend the invitation to you. We’ll spend five days off the grid, riding horses through wide open landscapes, sharing meals, and creating space to slow down enough to hear ourselves think again. This isn’t about becoming someone new. It’s about returning to yourself, settling your nervous system, letting go of what you’ve been carrying, and getting clearer about what matters now. The group will be small (no more than 10 women), and we’ll move at a steady, spacious pace, with plenty of room for both conversation and quiet. I hope you’ll consider joining 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.
My friends at the Center for Action and Contemplation are offering a fantastic program called “Have We Been Here Before? Ancient Wisdom for Days of Disruption.” At this live 90-minute online gathering, CAC Faculty Carmen Acevedo Butcher, Ph.D., James Finley, Ph.D., Fr. Richard Rohr, and guest teacher Kaitlin Curtice, will show you how ancient contemplative wisdom and traditions may support us in times of social, political, and spiritual instability. Sign up here!
The Benedictine Sisters of Erie are hosting a webinar with my friend, Fr. Adam Bucko and Katie Grodon April 14th. Katie and Adam will explore how new expressions of monastic community are bridging this ancient tradition to contemporary seekers in ways that enable more people to commit to lives of prayer, service, and transformation, in and beyond the monastery. Register for free to receive the zoom link.
Have you discovered Randy Woodley’s Substack yet? He is writing a 15 part series about democracy as an indigenous teacher and theologian. He just told me that next he is doing a 7 part series on AI. I can’t wait!
If you are a leader or member of a congregation looking for consulting support in visioning, planning, hiring or staffing, please consider Convergence.
“She, supposing him to be the gardener, said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.’” — John 20:15 (NRSV)
“Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight.” — Luke 24:31 (NRSV)
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions, 2013. (See chapter “The Three Sisters.”)
Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture (1977), pg. 97
Superb! Couldn’t ask for a better Easter season homily. Thank you.
The way that this pattern of life, death, and resurrection plays out in every life reminds me of Richard Rohr’s Order, Disorder, Reorder pattern. These archetypal patterns help so much to reassure us when things look bleak - thank you for sharing the hope of rebirth and the hints of it that are already taking shape.