Over the last month, I’ve been reflecting on how Lent intersects with the work we do here at the the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery. The season itself invites us into deeper embodiment — into the incarnational reality this work requires of us.
Lent is a season about turning aside and being reshaped – the call to repentance is a call to reverse direction and move in a different way. And so it is also a season where something must die. It begins at the threshold of death — ashes pressed onto our foreheads — reminding us that the path to resurrection always runs through surrender.
And that framing is a fitting container to more deeply examine our relationship to the legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery.
While we have our 100 year policy goal – and we are working to educate at grass roots levels – dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery is not just legal or cultural work. It is spiritual work. It is interior work. It is embodied work.
The Old Testament prophets repeatedly called the people to examine the structures of their society — to see where their worship contradicted the justice God actually required. They asked hard questions: Who benefits? Who is crushed? Whose land is taken? Whose labor is exploited?
The people believed they were faithful. They believed their sacrifices were sufficient. But the prophets revealed that their worship was hollow if the systems around them were rooted in domination.
And I feel those prophets’ voices calling out to us across the centuries – asking us to examine the structures of OUR society too.
When we talk about Indigenous justice, reconciliation, and repair, we have to wrestle with what that means in lived reality. The Doctrine of Discovery produced a world — a world organized around extraction, hierarchy, ownership, and control.
Many of us, whether we chose it or not, live within and benefit from that world.
I keep returning to what Mark Charles shared at the Coalition’s annual gathering last August — imagining what might have been different if settlers had arrived as guests instead of colonizers. If humility had marked the beginning. If we had been willing to be taught by the original stewards of this land. If governance had grown
from listening instead of conquest.
What would be different today — not just politically, but relationally, ecologically, spiritually?
If repair is real, if reconciliation is real, it cannot simply mean inclusion within colonial frameworks. It may mean relinquishing governance. Not symbolically. Not partially.
Literally.
Not handing over a portion. Not offering a seat at a table built on exploitation. But handing it over. The whole kit and caboodle.
Which may very well mean letting this entire way of organizing our common life pass away.
And that is the Lenten edge I want to lift up today.
Because we cannot keep most of the body and sacrifice only a limb. In the Christian story, the whole body dies so that a new one can come. Resurrection does not preserve the old order with slight adjustments. It transforms it entirely.
If someone says, “You can’t actually mean we give all this up?” — meaning the conveniences, the economic stability, the assumed authority we have inherited through exploitative systems — then perhaps that reaction is the very place Lent is asking us to look.
Because dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery is not about feeling morally aligned. It is about surrendering what sustains injustice. And that will press into our careers, our investments, our voting, our property, our consumption, our sense of entitlement — even our imagination about what is “normal.”
And yes, that sounds radical.
But so is the cross.
So is Ash Wednesday.
So is the claim that death is the doorway to life.
This is also where the work becomes embodied. Notice what rises in your body when you imagine relinquishing control. Notice where there is resistance. Notice where there are comforts you do not actually want to lose, even while you are committed to justice.
That is not failure. That is information.
And alongside the large structural questions, perhaps there are smaller places we begin practicing death — trying on different relationships with land, consumption, power, and whose wisdom we trust.
Lent trains us in relinquishment. It trains us in letting something die so that life may flourish.
If we believe resurrection is real, then we cannot be afraid of that threshold. The question is not whether something must die. The question is whether we are willing to let it. And when we notice our own resistance — the parts of us that hesitate when surrender becomes real — we may find a little more humility. A little more patience. A little more capacity to build bridges with, rather than simply assign blame to, those we often fault for standing in the way. That humility is not a compromise. It is spiritual maturity. And that, too, is part of the invitation before us in Lent.
The Rev. Rachel Harber is the founding vicar of St. Cornelius Episcopal Church in Belton, Texas, a new community planted by the Episcopal Diocese of Texas worshipping on the ancestral lands of the Tonkawa, Lipan Apache, and Comanche peoples. Her ministry explores the intersection of contemplative spirituality, justice, and emerging forms of church life. Rachel participates in the Episcopal Indigenous Justice Roundtable and is committed to the spiritual work of dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery and cultivating right relationship with land, neighbor, and history.
