Still Carrying the Oils

We just got home from a week in Nashville and the suitcases are still in the hallway and both girls are finally asleep and I am sitting at the kitchen counter typing this instead of finishing unpacking because something got under my skin on the flight home and it will not leave me alone and I need to get it down before tomorrow morning.

Tomorrow is Easter. Which, honestly, I did not fully register until my mom texted halfway through the trip asking what our plans were. Plans. We were in Nashville. We had no plans.

We also, I realized with the specific horror of a woman who has definitely done this before, had no Easter baskets. Truth be told, last year’s baskets have been living in an upper cabinet in the mudroom, long forgotten, and I am fairly certain those Cadbury eggs have crossed from “vintage” into “biohazard” territory and should not be consumed by anyone, let alone small children.

What followed was an Instacart order placed from the hotel, a dog sitter who is genuinely an angel on this earth for agreeing to unpack and arrange the baskets when the delivery arrived, and a high five between Drew and me that had the energy of two people who had just barely dodged a parenting bullet.

Easter baskets: handled. Performance of Easter: intact.

And that would have been the whole story except for what happened on the flight home.

The girls were watching their screens and I was scrolling mine, the way you do when you’re trapped in a middle seat and too tired to read a book, and I came across a post that stopped me.

It was about how we tell children the Easter story. About how we hand them the image of a man dying on a cross and tell them it happened because of what’s wrong with them, because of their sin, and how that is a pretty heavy and possibly traumatic thing to build an entire holiday around, especially if it is the only version of the story they are ever given.

And it sat on me like a stone for the rest of the flight. I don’t think the person was wrong, and I don’t think they were entirely right, but that’s not why it stayed with me.

It stayed with me because I realized I had been handed that same version, sin and shame and transaction, and I had never once asked whether the story might be bigger than what fit inside that frame.

I think it is. I think it is so much bigger than what most of us were given.

Because the man at the center of this story was a healer. He fed people the system had forgotten and he touched the ones society called untouchable and he walked into the temple and flipped the actual tables of people profiting off the faithful.

And they executed him for it, not for being wrong but for being free, for showing people that another way of living was possible, which it turns out is the most dangerous thing you can do in front of power.

When it got dangerous, when the empire made it clear what happens to people who won’t go quiet, most of the people closest to him did exactly that. Scattered, denied knowing him, disappeared.

And that pattern, the going silent when it costs something to stay, is not something that happened once two thousand years ago and never again.It lives in every century and you have seen it, maybe even lived it, I know I have.

But the women stayed.

And honestly, that is the part I cannot stop thinking about, the part I am sitting at this counter trying to put into words while the house is quiet and the suitcases are still waiting.

The women stayed at the cross when being seen there could have cost them their lives. They came back to the tomb carrying oils and linen, because that is what women have always done when the world falls apart: they tend to what is left. They did not scatter or go silent.

And the first witnesses to the resurrection were women. In a culture that would not count a woman’s testimony in court. The most important moment in this entire story was not given to the powerful or the positioned. It was given to the ones who stayed, as if the story itself already knew who it could trust.

I have been sitting with that for hours now and the more I think about it, the bigger it gets. The way the most sacred thing was entrusted to the people the system said didn’t count. The way the new thing, the impossible thing, the thing that changed everything, chose the ones who hadn’t left.

Not the ones with titles or authority. The ones with oils and linen and a willingness to show up before dawn, before proof, before anyone else believed there was a reason to.

I see that same thing in every woman I know.

In the ones at school board meetings when it would be easier to stay home. At the bedside when everyone else has stepped out. On the phone with their representatives on a Tuesday morning. At the soup kitchen on a Friday, where there is nothing glamorous about it and there is no content to be made from it, there is just the showing up.

And I will say the thing I keep thinking but haven’t typed yet, which is that right now, in this actual moment in history, women are being told to sit down and be quiet in ways that feel eerily familiar.

Books are being pulled from shelves and reproductive rights are being debated by rooms full of people who will never carry a pregnancy and women who speak up are being called divisive for saying things that used to just be called common sense.

The pattern is not ancient history, it is Tuesday morning news.

And still, the women I know are showing up. They are making calls and writing letters and running for school board and holding each other up in group texts at eleven p.m. when the news is too heavy to carry alone. They are not waiting for permission or an invitation or a less complicated time. They are doing what women have always done when the world tries to look away from what matters.

Still carrying the oils. That is the only way I know how to say it.

There is something in women, something that lives deeper than decision, that makes us show up to tend what is falling apart. And it is not weakness and it is not obligation. It is something so ancient it lives in the body before the mind catches up.

My faith looks different than it used to. I want to say that out loud because I think a lot of us are carrying this and not many of us are saying it.

I still believe. I believe more than I ever have, actually.

But the way I believe has expanded past the edges of what I was originally handed, and for a while that scared me. I thought it meant I was drifting. That the foundation was cracking. That I was losing the thing I had been given.

But I don’t think that anymore. I think what happened is the faith got bigger and my God got bigger and my Jesus got more radical and my understanding of what resurrection actually means got wider and wilder and closer to the ground.

I think the faith outgrew the container it was handed, the way all living things eventually do, and what is growing in its place does not have a name yet but it is more alive than anything I have ever carried.

The real Easter, I think, is not about proving you believe the right things or performing the right rituals or having your baskets ready on time.

It is about what pushes through the soil after the worst has happened. What comes back to life in the place where something was buried. And who has the courage to witness it before the rest of the world believes it is real.

I think about those women walking to the tomb before sunrise, carrying their oils in the dark, not knowing what they would find, only knowing they had to go.

And I think about every woman I know who does the same thing in her own life, in her own way, with her own version of the oils, showing up before anyone asks, tending what the world has looked away from, refusing to be the one who goes quiet when it matters most.

The suitcases are still in the hallway. The baskets are ready in the pantry, and the girls will find them in the morning and it will be sweet and ordinary and I will probably cry watching them because that is real too and that matters too.

But I needed to write this down tonight, on the night before Easter, while the thought was still warm and the house was still quiet and the whole thing still felt like something I was remembering more than something I was making up.

The world has always been changed by the ones who did not leave. If you are one of them, what you carry is not a burden. It is a lineage. And it is rising. And I think some part of you has always known.