Prelude. “Fey Oh Di Nou” (“Oh Leaves Tell Us”) by the Creole Choir of Cuba tells of a group trying to invoke the divine power of medicinal plants to heal a sick person.
Call to worship. “Resurrection Blues.” —Otis Taylor.
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Introduction. From Circle of Mercy Congregation’s beginning, 25 years ago, our pastors ask 2-3 members to share “stories of resurrection”—something experienced or witnessed—in our Easter Sunday worship (in lieu of a clergy sermon). Below is one from this past Sunday.
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Bodywork therapy in Cuba
by Jessica Mark
Last November, a colleague and I traveled to Matanzas and Oliva, Cuba to share the bodywork therapy we practice, Ortho-Bionomy, with our friends there. This was my fifth trip to Cuba. (My fourth was 19 years before this one.)
During our week-long stay, our days unfolded something like this: a morning group class of self-care and body awareness explorations, followed by a few hours of hands-on work for anyone who wanted it. Then lunch, and more hands-on work or time spent visiting in other ways. Over the course of the week, I had sessions with over 50 people.
My story for today is set in Primera Iglesia Bautista in Matanzas—where many of you have visited before, and where our friends Kim Christman and Stan Dotson lived for years before moving to Havana. We had just finished our morning movement class with the Tercer Edad (“Third Age”) senior adult group, and I began working with a few women, my table set up in the center aisle of the church.
For those unfamiliar with Ortho-Bionomy, it is a gentle form of bodywork with roots in osteopathy and homeopathy. It supports the body’s innate wisdom to self-correct and heal from within. It allows the brain to recognize what’s happening in the body and respond, creating more ease and communication throughout the whole system. There is a structural component, as well as an energetic and fluid one. As practitioners, we are not fixing—we are facilitating, supporting the body to remember its wholeness.
So, I began working with maybe my third friend of the morning, and I noticed my own body beginning to feel irritated and 
frustrated. Gratefully, I’ve learned to pay attention to those sensations because it’s usually a clue about how I’m working or what I’m working with.
I recognized this one quickly: a sign that the tissues of the body I was working with were unresponsive. It was like no one was home. I tried most everything I could find in my bag of techniques to help stimulate a response—some kind of movement, a sense of presence, connection—but nothing.
‘No es fácil’
I realized I had felt a very similar sensation in the bodies I had worked with before hers. There was a theme. It felt like a familiar pattern, but not quite. This felt deeper. More ingrained.
I kept working, and kept listening. And then I wondered—Is this what systemic trauma feels like? Could this be the tone of generational trauma in the body?
Something in me recognized that as true.
My eyes suddenly grew hot and watery, and tears began rolling down my face.
I had touched into something—quite literally.
Into grief.
Into long-term holding. Into bracing for impact.
Into hypervigilance.
Into living in a culture of not enough… of struggles upon struggles.
“No es fácil” (a common Cuban aphorism).
“It’s not easy.”
A phrase I had heard 20 years ago—and one that had not changed. And suddenly, I felt helpless. Hopeless. With no sense of how to support what I was feeling. I had never before felt this depth of loss, uncertainty, and hopelessness in the tissues of the body—all at once.
‘Ask for guidance’
So I did the only thing I knew to do. I prayed. I asked for guidance. For something—anything. Of all places for this to be my “office,” how fitting to be in a church.
I lifted my gaze to the front of the sanctuary. To the cross. And I opened—to something beyond my understanding.
I stayed as present as I could. With my own overwhelm. With my connection to the body under my hands. I began working with a familiar technique—one that holds past energy and invites it into the present time. But something felt incomplete. One-dimensional.
I asked the moment: What is missing?
And then, something shifted. Not as an answer exactly—but as a wondering.
What if this body… this community… this country…was not only holding the struggles and injustices of the past—and working like mad to survive present day-to-day life, but also struggling to imagine, feel into, or visualize the possibility of a future?
Where did hope live in the tissues? How did expansion towards what might be embodied in the physicality of their flesh and bones?
So I continued to wonder…and something new floated into my consciousness.
What if I held the past with my left hand…the present through my torso and legs…and the future with my right hand? What 
if they could all three come into relationship?
I had nothing to lose. So I reorganized my hands and my energy. And then I felt a movement emerge—like a figure eight moving between my hands. It took a moment to recognize what was happening, but then it became clear.
The energy was circling the past, crossing through the present, and connecting into the future. Over and over. Clear. Connected. There were moments of doubt—because what I was feeling was so unfamiliar. But I stayed. I listened.
And then…the tissues began to respond. They softened. They moved. They breathed. They woke up. There was a connection.
I stayed steady. Awestruck. Watching. Listening. Participating in something I did not fully understand—but could not deny. And I wondered: Had hope been reawakened?
Ever the skeptic, I thought—maybe this is a one-time thing. So I tried again. And again. And again with each of the following friends who came to my table.
Each time I met that same quality—stuckness, contraction, absence. And each time, I held that relationship—past, present, future.
And each time…something shifted. Something expanded. Something came back to life.
‘Embroider a new world’
Upon reflection of what happened that day, I remembered a quote by Bjork, an Icelandic singer and songwriter. She said:
“After tragedies, one has to invent a new world, knit it or embroider, make it up. It’s not gonna be given to you because you deserve it; it doesn’t work that way. You have to imagine something that doesn’t exist and dig a cave into the future and demand space. It’s a territorial hope affair. At the time, that digging is utopian, but in the future, it will become your reality.”
I realized that’s what happened that morning. I held a pathway to knit together the hope, hold the sensory feel of hope, and imagine it so fiercely that it demanded space and connection and realness. Until the body could sense it and bring it into fruition.
On Sunday, during the church service that closed our week, Primera Iglesia’s pastor, Orestes, offered words of gratitude.
With tears in his eyes, he said:
“You brought us hope. We have been living without hope—and you brought us hope through your work, your presence, your gifts.”
And while I received his kind words, there was something in me that wished I was able to put a response into words. If I could do it over, I would grab the microphone and say something like this:
“Oh, dear friends…That may be true. But something else is also true. By being in your presence this week, by laughing and crying and moving and singing and eating with you…you have embodied for me a depth of hope I did not know existed. We have ignited a hope within each other.
You have shown me that hope does not always manifest as certainty, or ease, or even relief.
‘We carry hope for each other’
Sometimes hope looks like staying. Like being with. Like being here, in this moment with each other. Like continuing to show up inside of conditions that are impossible. You have helped me realize that hope is not something we carry alone. We must carry it for each other.”
I would also have shared this quote from Muriel Ruckeyser:
“The moment is real, this moment is what we have, this moment in which we face each other…Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen in the world, it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future. Here is all the developing greatness of the dream of the world, the pure flash of momentary imagination, the vision of life lived outside of triumph or defeat, in continual triumph and defeat, in the present, alive. All the crafts of subtlety, all the effort, all the loneliness and death, the thin and blazing threads of reason, the spill of blessing, the passion behind these silences – all the invention turns to one end: the fertilizing of the moment, so that there may be more life.”
And maybe this is what resurrection looks like.
Not only something that happens once, long ago—but something that happens again and again in the living body.
In moments where something feels lost…numb…unreachable…And then—through relationship, through presence, through love, through connection—something begins to move again. To breathe again. To awaken again.
Together, we remind each other that life is still here. That wild possibilities are still here. Together, we keep imagining the hope we yearn to see in the world. For each other. With each other.
I think resurrection hope is this—the quiet return of hope when we think none is possible, made real through our willingness to stay, to listen, to imagine a new reality. Where we carry hope for one another and are held fully by the Divine.
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Benediction. “In this marathon of Hope, / there are always others to relieve us / in bearing the courage necessary / to arrive at the goal which lies beyond death… / Accompany us then on this vigil / And you will know what it is to dream! / You will then know how marvelous it is / To live threatened with resurrection! / To dream awake, / To keep watch asleep / To live while dying / And to already know oneself resurrected!” —Julia Esquivel, Guatemalan poet and theologian
Postlude. “And we will move through the world with faith and living hope, / celebrating, singing, smiling, struggling for life. / And we will smile, together with the child and our brothers & sisters, / and to the one in need, we will extend our hand. / We will organize with strength and wisdom / and keep singing and struggling for life. / And we will walk with much faith and confidence / and keep singing praise to God.” — translation of “Fe y esperanza viva,” Enrique Sosa Rodríguez, performed by Circle of Mercy Congregation band and guest musicians
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Mark is an Advanced Practitioner and Instructor of Ortho-Bionomy® and founder of Embody in Asheville, NC. She began her career with modern dance troupes in New York City and Philadelphia and has performed liturgical dance in many locations in the US, Canada, Cuba, and South Africa.
BONUS track. “O, gather up the brokenness / Bring it to me now / The fragrance of those promises / You never dared to vow / The splinters that you carried / The cross you left behind / Come healing of the body / Come healing of the mind / And let the heavens hear it / The penitential hymn / Come healing of the spirit / Come healing of the limb.” —“Come Healing,” Leonard Cohen, performed by the Circle of Mercy Band and Chorus, dance by Jessica Mark
