We are the Dead to whom We Pray

The Resurrection Revival part one

In one of the most batty scenes in the highland time traveling lark Outlander, a young father encounters a time traveler from the past who is really his many-times great grandfather. This rough-and-tumble Scott, dumped into a future he cannot imagine, discovers to his dismay that he once tried to kill his descendant because he thought, in another time traveling episode two hundred years earlier, that the young father had designs on his wife. I know, it’s confusing. But we’re just getting started. Because, after a serious of nefarious goings-on, these two men—ancestor and descendent—head back to the past to straighten things out, only to land further back than they intended where they both meet, catch your breath, the fathers they never knew. The modern man’s father had disappeared during World War II—through it turns out a time traveling portal. The great-grandfather had been abandoned by his real mother and father and now he arrives just in time to meet them as they meet each other. It’s fathers and sons in every direction and they are all around the same age, in the same time, bumping into each other. The time travelers sort of know what’s going on, and the others can feel something eerie and unsettling. Everybody can tell they know each other, feels related, although on the surface they are all strangers to each other. Ultimately the two men, ancestor and descendant, not having received the resolution they imagined through their encounters with their unknown fathers, father each other in a moment of healing magic.

Whew. My husband, watching with me, kept asking me to pause the video. “Who is that? What is going on? How are they connected?” I’d read the books so I was a step ahead of him after all.

As nuts as this all feels, it is actually a perfect representation of our lived experience—a reality that used to define our reality and inform our relationships. What if we were all each other’s mothers and fathers from lifetimes we sometimes remember but usually don’t? After all, time is not linear, the physicists tell us, but folded over itself like origami. That is why a place in our dreams can feel like two places at once, why a stranger can instantly feel so uncannily familiar. It’s not just that we’ve all been here before (we have) but that we’re all here now.

The child we meet is our grandmother returned. These kids toddling around us are our elders. We pray to the mother who died when we were young and an unexpected stranger reaches out to lend us a hand. Our most ancient ancesters lived inside the knowing of the eternal return, the circles of the seasons, the comings and goings of the moon, the cycles of reunion. A mother died and the next season her husband brought down a deer to feed his family that he know was his wife returned. An elder passed and a babe was born.

The accidental time traveler is appalled to realize that the man he nearly murdered was his own great-great grandson. But once we acknowledge that we are all time travelers, we know that every soul is our grandchild and our granmother or grandfather. To live in the eternal return is to live in the entangled mysteries where we all belong to each other. To live in such a world is to fear violence and to honor the gifts of everything we eat and all that we are.

We cannot drop bombs on our grandchildren, on our future mothers. We cannot deprive our kin of food and care and love. Who are our kin? Everyone. Everyone. Every soul that is.

Today, move through your day as a time traveler, knowing that each soul you meet—the raccoon scuttling into the forest, the grumpy cashier at the super market, the villain in the headlines—is kin. Your kin. A relative. Somehow. Some time. Some way. What then? What does it mean about who we are and how we behave?

After all resurrection isn’t a singular event—but an organic reality of the natural world. Matter and energy don’t go anywhere but they are always on the move, always time traveling, always becoming something else.

You are a time traveler and so is everyone you meet.

This is a nine-part series in the lead-up to Easter, a much misunderstood story of the eternal return I hope we can reclaim together.

This has been a free offering. I also offer a paid subscription that includes, in addition to excerpts from books-in-progress, a monthly zoom conversation about our adventures with the unseen world. Our next meeting is April 20 a 3 pm est and everyone is invited to bring their stories and questions about resurrection, rebirth and renewal.

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Perdita Finn writes extensively about her own adventures with “the long story of her soul” in her book Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World. She teaches workshops on collaborating with the dead and with her husband Clark Strand is the founder of the Way of the Rose, an the co-author of the book of the same name. Her next book, Mothers of Magic, has just been completed and will be out in 2026.