"Let us pray, Spirit of Life and Love, in whom we live and move and have our very being..."
Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Phoenix
July 30, 2008
Let us pray, Spirit of Life and Love, in whom we live and move and have our very being. We hold up in love and prayer the two Unitarian Universalist congregations now grieving after this deadly attack. Our hearts go out to the victims and their families, to the hundreds of witnesses, the men, women, and the children, who now live with the scars of this terrible event. We lift them up that they might find healing for their hearts and for their communities.
We honor the bravery of Greg McKendry, who died forcing the gunman down. We honor Linda Kraeger, a member of the Westside UU Fellowship in Knoxville visiting just for the children’s program, who lost her life. We pray for the continued healing, physical and emotional, of Jack Barnhart, Linda Chavez and Tammy Sommers who are still in serious condition, and for Joe Barnhart, who is in stable condition in the hospital, and for Betty Barnhart and John Worth, Jr, who have now been released from the hospital. In addition, we hold in our thoughts Allison Lee of Tucson who was visiting family in Knoxville, and who was hurt while helping protect her two daughters. She has been released from the hospital, but will have surgery when she returns to Tucson.
In this most tragic time, when one of our own churches has been attacked for practicing the loving, open and embracing faith we hold so dear, may we find strength in our tradition’s call to respect, to search for truth and understanding, and above all to love one another, and to reach out to others in compassion.
In this most difficult time when we search for answers to unimaginable cruelty, when we gather here to make a place simply to feel what we feel, when we acknowledge our rage and our fear and our grief, may our faith help us hear the higher call to love. “May we find even in this darkness, compassion for Jim Adkisson, whose tremendous pain brought us to this tragedy—we pray for justice and for healing for him as well” (Rev. Virginia Jarocha-Enrst).
Love, be with us, and with our colleagues and friends and fellow church goers, and those everywhere who work to end violence and injustice, and who with courage refuse to be silenced by fear, and who everywhere remind us of a better day, and a more loving and peaceful world. May we too be among these people.
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Last updated on Thursday, June 3, 2010.
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