My Columbus Day Confessional

God, I’m contemplating today–

in an age of Columbus day, and Capitalism and Cancel Culture.

God I’m thinking of the slow spread of Indigenous Peoples’ Day,

Where we try to slowly acknowledge a heritage

we cannot claim,

and a past of slavery and disease and Colonialism, we must confess.

God, I’m thinking hard today about my white bloodstained past

My Pilgrim heritage–my ancestors physically came over with them —

My Imperialistic Roots–after the revolution we disappeared in shame for a while

My Religious anxiety–we pushed our white God onto everyone with the best of them

I’m thinking hard God, because Indigenious history is my history, even as it isn’t my heritage.

And I know (and you know God) that no land acknowledgment is going to fix that.

There is work to be done–that isn’t cancel culture or capitalism or Columbus Day.

But it is confessional and listening closely and doing the hard work of the day.

God help me to do the hard work of Decolonizations today,

and everyday, but especially today,

I pray.

In the name of Jesus Christ–refugee of his time, friend of the marginal and victim of Imperial violence, in the name of that Jesus Christ I pray.

Amen.

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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