Today, we sit in the grief of a school year that begins with a school shooting. I’m struck by the words of the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey who said, “Don’t just say this is about ‘thoughts and prayers’ right now. These kids were literally praying.” All around St. Louis, too, children were praying in their own all school masses, and many districts held previously scheduled active shooter drills. What will it take for us to learn that more guns are not the answer?

In our community, we hold the complexity of the shooter being of trans experience with tenderness. Hurt people hurt people. In a tragedy like this, we pray for all those who are hurt. All the failed systems. All the wounded healers. All the heartbreak. All the empty seats. And, we work for those same people and families. We work so that our streets become safer not because there are more weapons but because there are fewer. We work so that Catholics can worship in peace and trans kids can receive the care they need. We work to open our own hearts to things we don’t understand.

Last night, at an event held by Margaret of Scotland Parish in St. Louis, a panel discussion on LGBTQ inclusion was held. We prayed for the violence of our world, for broken families, and hear stories of the ways some in the Catholic Church are shaping the conversation toward inclusion of LGBTQ people. It was a healing evening full of hope.

And so we work and we pray. We pray, not in the ways prayer can be used as an excuse to dismiss the pain, our complicity in living in a society that holds guns with such reverence, but we pray to discern our part in the solution. We pray to channel our energy to the broken and brokenhearted. We pray to bind our destinies to the work of love. And so, as we watch for legislature in our cities, counties, and states, we pray that our next steps become clear.

Let us pray these words by Padraig O’Tuama:
God of day and night,
In the great poem of creation
we read that
we were considered very good,
and that you
find glory
in us.

We look around our city:
the birds finding home
the name of it
the shape of it
the bustle and magnificence of it

the poverty of it
the complicity of it
the repressed stories of it

the generosity of it
the corners of kindness
on every corner

the future of it
the past it hides from
greed and goodness
violence and visions
burdens and bodies
everywhere.

We pray for our city
and for the cities we are.

Breathe in us
just like you always do and renew us
with every twilight
with every morning
with every encounter
with every opportunity.

With you in every breath, every action of love, and every prayer,
Pastor Lauren