fascism, and immigrant bashing - I felt something wash over me: "I am SO done with first world problems!" Privileged whining is not ministry - especially at this hour in our collective brokenness. I had the same sense wash over me five hours later as I gathered with about 300 of my neighbors in solidarity with Charlottesville. "What WOULD it take," I mused "for us to be a church that hate mongers surrounded with torches?" This is a question worth asking in a prayerful, honest, and vulnerable way these days.
A prayer from a Charlottesville seminarian put it like this:
To the God whom we have forgotten;
To the God who is not male and is not white;
To the God who takes no pleasure in violence;
To the God who is Love;
To the God who is tender-hearted and warm embrace;
To the God who is not deaf to Her children’s cries and is moved to tears by their suffering;
To the God whose law is love of neighbor, hospitality for the stranger, care for the weak;
To the God whose touch is healing, whose gaze is compassion; whose way is lovingkindness;
To the God who is Justice;
To the God who tramples fear and hatred under Her feet;
To the God who convicts our hearts, stirs our spirits, transforms our minds;
To the God who revels in the joyful dance of community and invites us to do the same;
To the God whose own child’s lynched body hung limp on a tree,
not by Her own hand,
but because of the fear and hatred of those human beings
who feared the kind of world they were promised would be ushered in
and hated the changes they would have to undergo to get there;
Our memory is so short:
Our failure to remember the sins of our parents,
Our aversion to repentance,
Our refusal to make reparations,
Is killing us.
Our souls are wasting away.
And black, brown, female, queer, trans, Muslim, differently abled bodies
Are dying.
Every day, so many.
O God whom we have forgotten,
We do not even know how to call on your name.
We have not seen you in the faces of our sisters and brothers.
We have not felt you in the pain of our neighbors, strangers, friends and enemies;
O God whom we have forgotten,
Do not let our imaginations be infiltrated by war-mongering forces of violence.
Do not let our spirits be colonized by the depressing fear of our oppressors.
Transform our minds that do not know how to think of you
Existing without these heavy chains we have placed on ourselves
and on each other.
Amen
Hard times call for hard questions - and first world problems, carping and
attitudes are so much over for me. Like Lou Reed sings, "Stick a fork in them - their done!" Like Valarie Kaur, I too sense this could be a birthing moment, but it is clear it's going to be a damn hard delivery.
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