Parker J. Palmer is a writer, educator, and activist whose work sits at the intersection of spirituality, education, community, and democratic life. A lifelong Quaker, he doesn’t celebrate Easter in a traditional liturgical sense, but engages it as a season and symbol of resurrection, resistance, and renewal. In a recent essay, he reflects on how “resurrection” can feel more threatening than comforting, both personally and politically, because genuine new life asks us to leave behind familiar forms of “death-in-life” and risk change.

He recalls a months-long depression in his early 40s that felt like a kind of living death. He came to see that part of him clung to its bleak familiarity; the prospect of feeling, engaging, and taking responsibility again was frightening.

This insight—recognizing how he was “collaborating in his own diminishment”—became part of a broader healing process that included therapy, short-term medication, and long walks in nature.

He then widens the lens, noting how many of us resist “resurrection” by holding on to unhealthy relationships, resentments, overwork, or addictions because they are familiar, even as they diminish us. Letting go can feel like a loss of identity or control, so staying stuck can feel perversely safer than change.

He connects this to the political through Julia Esquivel, whose 1982 book Threatened with Resurrection emerged from exile and advocacy for Indigenous Mayan people, tens of thousands of whom were “disappeared” by a military regime. Her witness reframes resurrection as resistance: a refusal to turn away from cruelty, state violence, and abuses of power, even at great personal risk.

Palmer warns that the real “death-in-life” to fear is spiritual deadening—the loss that occurs when we avert our eyes from injustice and stop caring about others’ suffering.

What stays with me is his line about “collaborating in my own diminishment.” It names, with clarity, the ways we choose the perverse safety of being half-alive rather than risk what new life might require.

The alternative is learning to collaborate in our own renewal—personal and political—by choosing practices, relationships, and forms of courage that help us rise together rather than recede from ourselves and each other. The essay invites us out of quiet complicity with our own shrinking and into the shared work of becoming more fully human, again and again.

Palmer closes with a “memo to self,” suggesting that Easter be treated as “Rise and Resist Day”: a time to free ourselves from fear and whatever keeps us silent in the face of harm. He encourages readers, whatever their tradition, to keep choosing forms of resurrection—renewed engagement, truth-telling, and solidarity—because as long as we are alive, saying yes to life is worth the risk.

ARTICLE: Threatened with Resurrection

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