Twice the usual number of people showed up at the Service of Meditations and Sacrament at the Church of the Ascension, which we sometimes attend of a Sunday evening. It could be a coincidence, but it may be the raw existential vulnerability people are feeling approaching a culture-defining election and in a week in which frightening hate took violent form as a white man sent pipe bombs to critics of the President, another white man killed two African Americans - Maurice Stallard and Vickie Jones, may they rest in peace - in a grocery store parking lot because the black church he intended to shoot up was closed, and a third white man entered a synagogue during Shabbat services and murdered eleven, one of them a Holocaust survivor. Lord have mercy.
I prayed for the victims of these attacks and those who survive and mourn them, and for all those living in a new kind of fear because of them. But then - I guess this is part of the idea of a service which includes a long period of shared silence - I found myself praying for the broken men, white men, who committed these crimes. Where does all that hate come from, how can it be transformed?
All this was framed by a prayer from Janet Morley's All Desires Known which we had recited together (and which, picked up last at last week's Service, we've taken to reciting at the end of grace before dinner):
I prayed for the victims of these attacks and those who survive and mourn them, and for all those living in a new kind of fear because of them. But then - I guess this is part of the idea of a service which includes a long period of shared silence - I found myself praying for the broken men, white men, who committed these crimes. Where does all that hate come from, how can it be transformed?
All this was framed by a prayer from Janet Morley's All Desires Known which we had recited together (and which, picked up last at last week's Service, we've taken to reciting at the end of grace before dinner):
May the power of God this day enable me,
the nakedness of God disarm me,
the beauty of God silence me,
the justice of God give me voice,
the integrity of God hold me,
the desire of God move me,
the fear of God expose me to the truth,
the breath of God give me abundant life.
