A Prayer for the Nation

Liberating God, I ask that you make us a spark that lights torches in the inky blackness of night and alights whispers that slowly lurch toward a house on the hushed horizon, 

Make us the thick black smoke lingering over a sugarcane field in the midst of a deep and holy burn, and the warmth it gives those smiling in the shadows, 

Make us the warm tears that slide down a mother’s cheeks as she watches her child being carried away through a fence, knowing they are now a casualty in a war against life itself, 

Make us the raw throat of a very pissed-off Mother Mary already coated with tear gas, hope, and the names of the fallen, 

Make us unafraid to build bridges to the shores where your people still lie languishing in pain, awaiting your healing, O God, 

Give us the courage to burn those same bridges behind us when they only lead to continued oppression, and grant us the vision not to look back, 

Give us hope to cling to in wicked days that are thick with the stench of death and evil that rises over a weary world, 

Give us leaders who actually give a fuck about us already, 

Give us all the weapons, tools, sacred stories, lessons, blood, and combined might of the ancestors, saints, and any spiritual energy of any beings that want to help us because we need it, 

Send us out into spiritual warfare with the heart of a child, the wisdom of a serpent, the ability to lay our peace upon comrades, and to revoke it in the places that don’t receive us or it, 

Send us out in the name of Love, no matter our plans, ideologies, organizing collectives, political ideologies, or continued systemic trauma,

Make us ambassadors of Love, 

Send us out to remind the world that Love has burned empires for lesser sins than the ones that lie at the feet of this republic, 

Send us out to wage peace because we have seen what the warmongers have wrought, and we come to you now, for we have never felt so lost.

Amen +