Hear My Prayer: A Lament for Blackness

by Amy Steele

Dear God,

Hear my prayer. Just like that! the sun can feel like it is setting. And night can seem an eternity. I know that I do not have to rush beyond these feelings, for tradition reminds me that there are those who pray sorrow’s mysteries.

How anyone could despise black skin, I sit in awe. Blackness is so utterly profound to me. The night is my comfort. The shade is my relief. The color is my classic. The people are my bodies’ recalibration to feeling, thinking, and loving. Blackness is 1000 differences and yet beneath the difference is the pounding syncopated rhythm of heritage, improvisation, and survival. I AM black is my affirmation and my reward. My flesh is the rule of complexity, change, the human turf of contradiction. I know that these paradoxes are the materiality of humanity. You God have made it so. And it is good.

On days like today when I hear of another violent death at the hands of police, I am reeling from this blow to the gut. After the nausea leaves I cry, weep as broken mother sister family childhood pastor at burial shaking with heartbreaking cries for the one whose life was swept away with out regard for you, o God, nor your labor. O, for an ash heap that I would rend these clothes and cry at the city gates for another life, gone.

We have empowered these police uniforms. We have consented to their protection, their security. We bought their guns, financed their departments, consented to their procedures. The uniform has replaced their humanity.  They have forgotten the humility of service, basic respect for life and flesh, soul and mind. They have taken our consent and they terrorize us with it. I can not look at them at the moment. My eyes turn down lest they lie to appease mindless power. When rogues rule, my heart shall remain pure, though it breaks. O, my soul cries.

Those who manipulate charges to confuse grand juries are no better. They simply oil a machine that has long run over black and poor people and their communities. The machine runs so well. The machinists are blinded by its shiny new polish. O, that the engine of injustice would crumble and those chained to it be seized by the winds of truth and thus break their chains and save themselves, our legacy, and their very lives. May truth awaken them from their long night’s slumber. May truth quake the ground beneath their feet. May truth erode the sharp edges of injustice, as water polishes magnificent stones.

I am one who can not be comforted right now. I am weary with weeping. While it is day, I say to you o, God, please do not abandon us forever. And when night comes, I shall say the same. For I pray as one who has not lost hope. Jesus’ name shall remain near my heart. He is my brother and one who knows quite well.

Amen.

Amy Steele is a R3 Contributor

*Note: This is a personal statement from Amy and not from her institution

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