Praying the News
Once again you place
before us the opportunity for transformation.
Can we see it? Help us to see it! This portal, this apocalypse--make it plain
so that all of us pass through to a more perfect union. Help me to find my place in it. You see me bristling against private prayer, my
lack of institutional pulpit, and checking my own privilege. Are these checks on my self-destruction or
are they mirages that provide me with safe escape from my own
responsibility? I cannot tell. I do not know. Make plain my role, my part. Find me Sabbath. Find me work.
There are remnants, scraps
inside this country’s history and inside and outside the church which make me
believe the impossible. Might we be
ready for transformation? I cannot
tell. I do not know. This portal, this apocalypse—may it register
finally that we cannot escape our interconnection. Now teach us like the life that flows on the
Missouri, that great vein that courses through our Mother, that all our work is
intersectional. Your hand touches it all
in hope that we will finally awaken to our call and solve for pattern.
As mothers make their
way to borders seeking safety, do not let them be forgotten by mothers who
wonder if they can afford food and the rent and, oh, damn it, “I forgot to
register her for school!” We are kept so
busy, so a-part. Teach us how to find a
more perfect union. Move in and around
us to remind us what is possible.
Please, Mother of Lovingkindness, this time may it be revealed. This time . . . walk with us through the
portal. Amen.
Soundtrack: The The
Revolution Will Not Be Televised
One of
the ways the imperial narrative gets into our brains is to make us think we are
not moving the dime, making progress, or participating in transformation. That may be one of the hardest things about
working in a white, middle to upper class church—no matter how progressive it
is. Race, the insidious evil it is,
makes us white folk think that if it doesn’t happen tomorrow, if I can’t tell I’m
making a difference after the first meeting or first event, then I’m out. We get used to our power carrying the day so
that when it doesn’t, when Jericho’s wall doesn’t fall in the first go round,
we lose hope, shrug our shoulders, and move on to the next bright, shiny
movement.
I can’t
tell you the number of times someone has wanted to part of a particular
movement only to bow out after one or two meetings because the glory they had
seen in a presentation (after years of work) did not happen in two boring
meetings that were required for relationship or clarification or just to hold
space.
Some
folks are part of the movement because their very lives depend on it so that
when the boring, and the slog, and the defeat comes their way, they don’t worry
about hope. The struggle must always be
joined. Something I love is at
stake. And love doesn’t necessarily
win. Love endures.
It has
been an amazing several weeks. Movement
leaders as prominent as Angela Davis have said that this movement feels “very
different” and that this is “an extraordinary moment.”[1] I feel that too. But it should not be forgotten that this
moment was cultivated and made ripe by years of work by people simply talking
to their families, pounding the pavement in community organizing, or people
developing skills over long periods of time in activism. From below, God has been at work to remind us
of our interconnection and intersectionality—like an everflowing stream.
We
were reminded of that this week when both he Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the
Dakota Access Pipeline were shut down.
Winona LaDuke and Honor the Earth have been working for years and
reminding us that we are close. Winona
has long said that the time for fossil fuels is coming to an end and it will
soon no longer be profitable to go forward.
That day is arriving! I hope when
you saw those headlines over the last two days, you remembered the years of
work of Honor the Earth, Oceti Šakowin, and so
many other indigenous leaders across the world who have made this day
possible. Mitakuye oyasin.
The
revolution will not be televised. I pray
that we will still join hands with it as Creator walks with us through that
portal to a new day.
[1]
Angela Davis, “'An Extraordinary Moment': Angela Davis Says Protests Recognize
Long Overdue Anti-Racist Work,” Here and Now, WBUR, June 19, 2020, https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/06/19/angela-davis-protests-anti-racism.
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