“The sort of acknowledgment of Jesus Christ for which Monica prayed for her son speaks directly to the situation in which we find ourselves today, on this fifth anniversary of the murder of George Floyd, and that acknowledging Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord in this particular way is something that we need, rather desperately in fact, in our world today.”
“Saint Katharine is considered blessed because she chose to look beyond what was, to bang the drum for parity and equality, to continually walk toward the need and to act on her belief that God values and loves everyone without ceasing.”
by the Rev. Jeckonia Okoth
I wonder what was going in the mind of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini when she arrived in New York on March 31, 1889, accompanied by six other religious sisters. Did she see herself as an outsider coming in or as an insider coming home away from home? Let us fast-forward this: suppose someone from the Congo, or Libya or Sudan came in and wanted to start a religious order; what would be the response, and what kind of people would we see in that order?
“I wonder where we would have been in the Selma 1965 story? Would we have been among those beaten, hosed, and jailed? Would we have been actively registering voters and been present, even living with those struggling for dignity and equality? Would we have been Jonathan Myrick Daniels, willing to confront evil and hatred at the end of a shotgun?”
“I argued that to remain silent and not to act in defiance when the Apartheid regime had been taken over by the Principalities and Powers legitimatizing oppression, injustice and racism, seeing this as even Godly, was not an option for us.”
“Perhaps another miracle in this story is about being brave enough to be reliant. Reliance is hard. It’s hard to go against cultural norms which prize independence, self-sufficiency, self-determination. It’s hard to admit that we need help an ask for it. It’s hard to risk the appearance of weakness. It’s hard, sometimes, to believe we are worthy of help.”
by the Rev. Daniel Romero
The Rev. Dr. Dorothy White and the Rev. Katie Ernst, preaching at our Racial Healing Eucharist to celebrate the consecration of Bishop Barbara Harris and the life of Anna Julia Haywood Cooper.
“Many women and men say that Mary, at least as often portrayed, is much too passive. I understand this thinking because I often feel the same way. The Magnificat, the Song of Mary, is not one of those portrayals.”
We might want to glamorize or glorify the legacy of King Kamehameha IV and Queen Emma, even as their descendants live with the consequences of a racist form of capitalist exploitation of the natural resources that were a sacred source of life for the original inhabitants of that land. How can we hold all these stories on this feast day, appreciating how Kamehameha and Emma lived, ruled, and worshipped, while also acknowledging the cultural genocide that has impacted their people? How might we find absolution and forgiveness? How and when will we turn to a new way?
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