Cairn Vol 1: Welcome to the Resistance is in your hands because our little community at BitterSweet shares a sense of embattlement. Standing for anything requires a steady heel and a leathery shoulder. But these days especially it often feels like a commitment to the Light means a willingness to enter the frayed darkness.

What is more, it looks as though resistance is required at every level of our individual and common lives. The economy, the body politic, the collective consciousness, the church, the village, the family system—every stratum of our geology is quaking.

American politics is flamboyantly polarized. Wars rage in Eastern Europe and in what a slight majority of human beings consider the holiest land on Earth. Churches are embattled in conflicts social, political, and occasionally theological. Family holidays seem mockably tense.

Maybe I’m just 31 and tired. But it sure as hell feels like peace has no place, and that very fact itself has started to feel like a sign. Isn’t it curious just how… un-right the world seems to be?

The BitterSweet of us wants to resist this.

To reject cynicism. To defy apathy. To celebrate good.

To be a refraction of Uncreated Light in a shattered world of restless terror.

No such stance is possible without resistance, and no such resistance is possible without a realistic account of the powers that are against us.

We are not just up against powers that can be named by words like national, systemic, institutional, privatized, corporate, corrupt, fascistic, demagogical, hawkish, unjust, even sinful. There is also the satanic, the demonic, the diabolical.

The question is, of course, what do we do in the face of that?

There is a lovely little verse in a letter written by Jesus’ half-brother. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. (James 4.7-8) There is our answer. Resist.

All we have to do to defeat the Accuser is resist. We do not have to accomplish the Accuser’s defeat ourselves. We just have to stand at the gentle place that is God.

The danger with thinking too myopically about resistance in any form is that we become reactionary—only critical, never constructive. It seems rather wiser, healthier, holier to think about resistance on behalf of something, resistance from somewhere. That is what James’ letter suggests.

First, be for God. Be in God. Be with God. Be under God. Draw near to God and God will draw near to you.

Where is God that we might draw near to him? I think that’s the question we are all asking, and if there is anything difficult about answering it, it is that God “plays in ten thousand places” to quote Gerard Manley Hokins.

God is in the dusty old haunts that these ancient traditions have suggested to us. God is in the pages of Tanakh, in the ascended Jesus, in communities that temple the Holy Spirit. But God is also in the earthiness of things—in the face of your neighbor, in the home of your neighbor, in the unemptied litterbox that you can smell from the moment you walk through your neighbor’s door. God is in your church and God is on the street. God is in Kiev and somehow also in the Kremlin. God is in the places that God is famous for being, and also in other places too.