Dear Southminster,
I wrote the following prayer for an interfaith vigil held last week at Morning Star Baptist Church for victims of Buffalo and Uvalde. What stood out to me from that gathering is how desperately we need space to gather and grieve and lament, and how the rapid and on-going pace of gun violence is destroying our ability to do so. I share these words below because I too need the support of our collective lament, and because I believe God is calling us as people of faith to be a strong voice for gun reform.
O God of weeping people, right now it feels like too much to wrap our broken words around the shattered families left in the wake of this latest gun massacre. Where our words fail, be with them.
For as people of faith, we affirm your presence with us.
You hold us in confusion.
You hold us in grief.
You hold us in our trauma.
You hold us in war.
You hold us in political unrest.
You hold us in disconnection.
You hold us as we acknowledge the ways we have perpetuated systems of harm, complacency, and patriarchy, and you do not celebrate our pain, but meet us with deep compassion.
Help us O God. Help us not rush through this horror and become numb to the violence of our nation, we have a problem. In our grief and our brokenness we cling tightly to the life of individual freedom and safety, we idolize our guns thinking they are the answer to our fear. But this is idolatry. We cannot live this way and we refuse to die this way.
Bring us back to relationship, to community, to presence. In this deep woundedness, tend our bodies and minds and souls, like a patient gardener, help us as people of faith not to offer cheap affirmations of “thoughts and prayers” but as John Lewis put it, “when we pray, we move our feet.”
Since the struggle deepens, since evil abides, and good does not yet prosper, let us gather what strength we have, what confidence and valor, that our small victories may end in triumph, and the world we long for, be the world we attain. Be with us as we weep, and work, and walk for your world. Amen.
