Pastor Kaji Douša offers prayer on the floor of the New York State Legislature
Pastor Kaji Douša offered this prayer as faith leaders and advocates gathered today in Albany to help legislators understand the importance of the #SCARAct, requiring agencies holding children separated from their parents to report the numbers – how long children have been in custody, how many are in their care, whether or not they were reunited with their parents.
Holy One
Most Merciful One
Blessed are you.
Blessed are you amongst your people
Blessed is the fruit of all that YOU bear.
We call on you, O God.
We call on you because we need you.
Oh, there can be a way in which we feel as if
WE are the ones who are needed.
Like WE are called to be saviors
Redeemers
The bearers of all holiness.
Is this our call, O God?
Or are we meant, called, anointed to something different?
To seek and hope to find
To listen and discern
To see the many crises that surround us with a word burning on our lips and say:
Oh GOD! What are we to do?
With the children suffering
The parents crying
The state groaning
The people moaning
In the midst of all this, what are we to do and…
WHO
WILL
YOU
SEND?
Is it I, O Lord?
Is it me?
Is it her?
Is it my enemy?
Or is it some inscrutable combination of the same?
But to these questions we turn, for answers, to your Holy Word.
And we know ourselves to be written into an ancient story of ancient wisdom of words already written.
And when it has been asked:
Whom shall I send?
Might the answer for each and every legislator gathered here be:
Is it I?
Might the call of the heart
The anointing on the head
The purification of the mind
The humbling of the soul say:
Send me?
Send us, O God.
Prepare us, Holy One.
May the requirements of the hour meet the gifts we have to share.
May our souls never be for sale.
May righteousness call us to a reckoning that reminds us of the ultimate hour.
And, in so seeing, may we never be the same.
For your sake. Amen