The March That Changed Her Theology

She had read Luke 9:23 a hundred times in her suburban Bible study, always assuming the cross meant personal suffering — a difficult marriage, a health scare, a season of doubt. Then Maria joined a water protectors camp in Standing Rock.

The temperature dropped to fifteen below. Her fingers cracked and bled. She stood beside Indigenous elders who sang prayers to the Creator while militarized police lined the ridge. Nobody had forced her to come. She had denied herself the comfort of her heated apartment, her predictable routine, her safe theology that never asked her to show up anywhere inconvenient.

Rachel Held Evans once wrote that the Bible is not a weapon or a shield but an invitation into a story bigger than ourselves. Maria discovered that discipleship was exactly that — not a private spiritual discipline but a bodily, communal, daily decision to follow Jesus into the places empire would rather you avoid. The cross Jesus carried was not metaphorical. Rome built it. The state executed Him on it for threatening the order of things.

To take up your cross in the Progressive tradition means asking whose suffering you have been comfortable ignoring. It means following the crucified God not just into prayer closets but into courthouse steps, migrant shelters, and contaminated neighborhoods where children drink poisoned water.