Every Wednesday, we invite you to Pause & Pray with us. Today’s Pause & Pray is curated by Director of the Chapel Beth Quick.

IMAGE: @naimah_creates, https://justseeds.org/graphic/radical-healing-heart-in-blue/

PRAY

Just God, we confess that we have performed horrors and called them salvation. We have deluded ourselves into thinking that we are the heroes, that we are the saviors. Help us to become honest that we are the ones the world needs to be saved from. Empire has terrorized and erased so many expressions of the divine image in the name of ‘civilization.’ Mourn with us for the loss of cultural autonomy and the beauty that has been undone by colonialism. Reorient our global citizenship toward a reverence of the Indigenous, and an honoring of people and place, that we would at last contend with how the appetite of the powerful has led to an ecological crisis that lands heaviest on the backs of those nationals historically excluded from power. Reveal and indict the greed that propels foreign policy. May the intruder in all his forms be caught and cast out before he claims more of what was never his to claim. Raise legions of peace-makers and truth-tellers to dismantle the unholy union of white supremacy and imperialism. Expand our capacity for empathy beyond our borders and across languages, that a virtue of respect would grow in us. We are not the heroes. Protect them from us. Amen.” (Cole Arthur Riley, Black Liturgies, p. 130)

MEDITATE

“Indeed, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.” Luke 13:30

LISTEN

“We Shall Overcome” at the March on Washington