I remember staying up all night,
And waking up to the phone in my dorm
(landline, yes)
It was the 2nd week of Freshman Year.
And God, all I can remember
Is that everyone was so angry.
Because no one seemed to know
How to be sad.
Never Forget–
How to be angry I wondered?
As we marched off to war?
As I viewed the Holocaust museum in embattled Israel?*
As we became more embittered against Brown people.
And now,
After Iraq, and Afghanistan,
and a million Covid deaths later,
God, I think that maybe,
we are way more apt to get angry–
because we as a nation are not good at getting sad.
How often do I see our leaders cry?
How often do we encourage mourning?
So Today I’m glad that you are the God who weeps with those are weeping.
Today I’m glad that you affirmed
that
Jesus wept.
A tear for every life.
God does not need to get even for justice to be done.
And today, I am so thankful, for a God that weeps.
As I remember the first day,
that I realize that justice is so separate from anger–
and mourning is too.
So today, God, I think I’m going to concentrate on mourning,
and nothing else.
Please sit with me, again,
while I cry
whatever more tears
need to be cried.
Amen.
Feel free to share/adapt/use with Credit to Pastor Katy Stenta
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Pandemic Prayers & Resources
*The Nationally Funded motto of all the museums in Israel is also Never Forget, which I discovered upon a pilgrimage there in 2010.
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Author: katyandtheword
Pastor Katy has enjoyed ministry at New Covenant since 2010, where the church has solidified its community focus. Prior to that she studied both Theology and Christian Formation at Princeton Theological Seminary. She also served as an Assistant Chaplain at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and as the Christian Educational Coordinator at Bethany Presbyterian at Bloomfield, NJ.
She is an writer and is published in Enfleshed, Sermonsuite, Presbyterian's today and Outlook. She writes prayers, liturgy, poems and public theology and is pursuing her doctorate in ministry in Creative Write and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.
She enjoys working within and connecting to the community, is known to laugh a lot during service, and tells as many stories as possible. Pastor Katy loves reading Science Fiction and Fantasy, theater, arts and crafts, music, playing with children and sunshine, and continues to try to be as (w)holistically Christian as possible.
"Publisher after publisher turned down A Wrinkle in Time," L'Engle wrote, "because it deals overtly with the problem of evil, and it was too difficult for children, and was it a children's or an adult's book, anyhow?" The next year it won the prestigious John Newbery Medal.
Tolkien states in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings that he disliked allegories and that the story was not one.[66] Instead he preferred what he termed "applicability", the freedom of the reader to interpret the work in the light of his or her own life and times.
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thanks