When Caesar Presses: Tax Day, a Pope, and the Ground That Doesn’t Move

Tax Day arrives the same way every year with a kind of resigned inevitability, like a relative you didn’t invite but knew was coming.

This year my husband found me at the screen, deep in what can only be described as a metaphorical affair with H&R Block. The intimacy of it. The things you have to confess. The way it asks question after question and you just keep answering, hoping it ends well.

He didn’t say anything. He knows better.

When the session was finally over, I sat with the uncertainty on the screen: the unfinished business of a return still waiting for numbers that haven’t arrived yet and a CPA working through my husband’s business return somewhere across town. The amount Caesar will ask of me this year is still unknown, sitting somewhere on a server, moving through electronic processes I cannot see or touch. And yet the discomfort was already present, settling in the way it does every April, familiar and uninvited.

My wallet reflects my values. I have followed the principle of ahimsa—non-violence—for forty years. I shop carefully, eat carefully, choose carefully, because I believe that where our money goes, our energy follows. Every purchase is a small vote for the world I want to inhabit.

Except today.

Today the government reaches past all of that and makes the choice for me. My dollars will move toward things I did not choose and would not choose. Weapons. Policies. Priorities that feel not just misaligned with my values but in direct contradiction to them. There is no opt-out. There is no ethical filter I can apply on the way out the door.

I am a person committed to non-violence, writing a check to fund violence. I sat with that. I didn’t try to resolve it, because it doesn’t resolve. It just sits there, an honest question on an ordinary Tuesday, asking something I don’t have a clean answer to.

And then I read the news.

While I was sitting with my uncertainty, a 70-year-old man from the South Side of Chicago was boarding a plane. Pope Leo XIV—born Robert Prevost, raised in the working-class village of Dolton, Illinois, lifelong White Sox fan, the first American ever elected to lead the Catholic Church—had just had a week that would have buckled most people.

The tension had been building for months. In January, reports emerged that a senior Pentagon official had summoned the Vatican’s ambassador to Washington for a closed-door meeting. According to those accounts, the official reminded the Cardinal of the Avignon Papacy—the 14th century period when the French crown used military force to bend the papacy to its will. The Pentagon disputed the characterization and the Vatican said nothing publicly while they quietly shelved plans for Leo to visit the United States for the nation’s 250th anniversary.

Then came Holy Week. On Easter Sunday, as Leo stood at the altar calling on those who carry weapons to lay them down, Trump attacked him on social media calling him weak and terrible for foreign policy. A politician masquerading as a pope, he said. Minutes later, the President posted an AI-generated image of himself as a Christ-like figure healing the sick.

Leo’s response, delivered to reporters aboard the papal plane as it lifted toward Algiers, was four words.

“I have no fear.”

Four words.

Not defiance. Not outrage. Not a counter-attack dressed up as theology. Just a quiet, unshakeable statement from a man who knows exactly where he stands and has decided that no amount of pressure from the most powerful office on earth is going to move him from that place.

What struck me wasn’t just the courage of it. It was the rootedness. This is a man who, the very next day, would land in Algeria and travel to the ancient city of Hippo. Not as a tourist, but as a pilgrim visiting the home of his spiritual father. Pope Leo XIV is a son of the Order of Saint Augustine. He has said so himself, publicly and with evident pride. Augustine of Hippo isn’t a historical footnote to him. Augustine is the formation beneath his formation. The deep soil from which his sense of self grows.

Augustine knew something about empires pressing on the soul. He lived through the unthinkable. In 410 AD, the Visigoths sacked Rome. The city that had stood for centuries as the symbol of order, civilization, and permanence itself. The psychological shockwave was enormous. If Rome could fall, what could be trusted?

Augustine’s answer became his masterwork, City of God. Distilled to its essence: you have been building your security on the wrong foundation. Empires rise and fall. They always have. Your ultimate citizenship is somewhere the Visigoths cannot reach. He wrote those words from Hippo, where Leo landed yesterday.

Three people. Fifteen centuries apart. The same question.

When the empire presses—when Caesar reaches into your life and makes choices you would never make, when the most powerful office on earth turns its attention toward you, when the city you thought was permanent begins to crack at its foundations—what do you do with that?

Fear has a very clear answer. Manage it. Control it. Fight it. Withdraw from it. Fear reorganizes your entire inner life around the threat, until the threat is all you can see.

However, there is another possibility. I call it Sacred Repatterning. It begins not with denial. Not with pretending the empire isn’t pressing, or that the number on the screen doesn’t matter, or that the bombs aren’t falling. It begins with a conscious choice about which level of reality you are going to respond from.

I cannot undo my tax dollars once they leave my hands. Augustine could not hold Rome together with a theology book. Neither of us could roll back what had already unfolded.

But Leo is doing something different. He is not trying to undo anything. He is standing in the middle of the pressing and speaking anyway. Amid the Pentagon meetings, the social media attacks, the AI messianic imagery, the weight of an entire geopolitical conflict, he is planting something anyway. He trusts that words rooted in love, spoken from a place of genuine fearlessness, enter a field that is still being written.

Because here is what Sacred Repatterning asks us to remember: what happens next is still being written, and your consciousness is participating in writing it. The moment we meet what frightens us with awareness rather than fear, with love rather than reactivity, with the deep knowledge that our ultimate ground cannot be taken from us, something shifts. We don’t necessarily see it in the headlines, but feel it in the pattern beneath the pattern—the quality of consciousness that will shape what grows next.

Augustine called that ground the City of God.

Leo calls it the Gospel teachings.

I call it Oneness.

Different languages. The same unshakeable Truth.

The CPA hasn’t called yet. The number is still unknown, sitting somewhere on a server, moving through electronic processes I cannot see or touch, waiting to tell me what Caesar will ask of me this year. I can’t control that. I can’t filter my dollars on their way out the door or attach a note explaining which purposes they may and may not serve. That tension isn’t going away, and I have made a kind of peace with not resolving it. Because some honest questions are not meant to be resolved. They are meant to be inhabited with grace, as part of what it means to live consciously in an imperfect world.

What I can control is the level of reality I respond from. I can let the uncertainty press me into fear: scanning the news, bracing for the number, and measuring the distance between my values and the world’s demands, finding it unbearable. Or I can do what Augustine did in Hippo, what Leo did aboard that plane lifting toward Algeria, what mystics and peacemakers and ordinary people have done in every generation when the empire got loud and the ground felt unsteady: I can remember where I actually live.

I don’t live in the headlines or the tax code or the distance between the world as it is and the world as I believe it to be. I live in the Oneness that underlies all of it. The ground that was never Rome’s to give and has never been any empire’s to take. The place fear cannot reach because it was never built by fear in the first place.

The CPA will call. The number will arrive. Caesar will get what Caesar gets. And I will close the laptop, step outside, and return to the only work that has ever actually mattered. The quiet, persistent, daily practice of letting Love reorganize what happens next.

Four words, after all, can change everything.

“I have no fear.”