Prayer for Immigrants

If you are free tonight, Tuesday, May 13, I urge you to join us at All Souls Unitarian Church at 29th and Peoria, at 7:00 p.m. Many members of the faith community of Tulsa will be gathering to stand against wholesale deportation and protesting the unjust acts of this administration, especially the threat to rescind habeas corpus. Many millions of lives would be affected by this planned horror. Please help us speak with force. I will be delivering the following as an official speaker:

—

God of Sarah, God of Abraham,

Who brought them forth from between the Rivers,

Help us to be loud and angry and confrontational.

You brought our ancestors across ancient borders

Because Canaan was rich with milk and honey,

And they could hope to inherit better lives,

Land and descendants until the end of time.

This is not the hour for murmured hopes, for quiet reflection,

And templed fingertips;

For patient whispers and tranquil musing.

It is the time for boldface signs and shouted slogans;

For the televised images of suffering children

Torn from the arms of their powerless mothers

And disappeared into the nefarious prisons of their oppressors.

No butterfly wings will keep them safe,

But the great, clamorous wheels of insistent activism.

The millions who came across our southern border

Came in response to the call of business;

Came in response to the call of industry;

Came in response to the call of agriculture.

They came because there was work to do

And white Americans had no taste for that work,

For the stoop labor of harvesting ripe tomatoes,

Or ripping the feathers off slaughtered chickens.

America called on brown people to do that work

And installed them in shanties and labor camps and barracks.

And demanded that their children stand by their sides

Until they dropped asleep in the troughs and the drains.

But now we have decided that we no longer want them;

That they are unwelcome interlopers and racial contaminants.

Yet they most certainly aren’t what people say they are:

Murderers and rapists and the criminally insane.

So let us rise as one to stand for all of them.

They love their children, they pay their taxes,

And they are a blessing to all who call themselves Americans.

Let us be loud and angry and confrontational.

Let us be the protest against the madness of tyrants,

And let us all say: amayn amayn.

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