Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

by R. Eric Thomas

We had the easiness that comes from knowing the same stories and knowing which parts you’re supposed to say at what time. I often wonder who the audience is for those stories, the ones everyone gathered has heard every year, the ones most of us lived through. Maybe they’re not for anyone outside of the circle. Maybe the telling is the metronome by which we set the beating of our hearts.

To celebrate the death and resurrection of Christ, we hide treasure and then release children of varying developmental levels and abilities in a desperate, clamoring pursuit. Remarkable! It’s The Hunger Games in pastel. It’s a Black Friday sale at Walmart. The last biscuit at Golden Corral.

Easter is about salvation, and salvation is free and available to everyone. Yet so many churches put barriers around it. If our religions aren’t about the business of achieving justice in our time, in this world, for everyone, what are they doing?

Listen. Here’s my living will, okay? I have no desire to survive the apocalypse. The minute the cable goes out, I’m gone. If I can’t watch rebooted versions of television shows I used to love, what even is the point? What even?! I do not understand the people in disaster movies who want to survive so that they can rebuild society. That sounds terrible. So boring, and yet so much work. Haven’t these people ever worked at a small nonprofit? It’s that. But with, like, zombies. No thanks.

I don’t want to shoot a gun. I don’t want to figure out how to make fire. I don’t want to have to dig deep to find hidden reserves of resilience. Ugh. I don’t want to form a new system of government with a bunch of other idiots. I’ve only memorized Angelica’s part in Hamilton; I wouldn’t even know where to start with creating a constitutional convention.