Prayer, pictures, and video from Solidarity Through Song
On Sunday, March 22, UCC Norwell hosted a community-wide event called Solidarity Through Song as area churches and their choirs came together to support our neighbors to call out for justice in the face of violence. This event included:
musical performances by church choirs,
group singing opportunities,
and a time of prayer and reflection led by local faith leaders.
We have so much gratitude and appreciation for church member John Galvin who took pictures at the event and we are sharing them here, after the prayer in this post.
Additionally, we are pleased to share that the event will air in its entirety on Harbor Media’s hyperlocal television channels, Comcast HD 1072 and Verizon 2139 and on demand on their website here. Thank you, as always, to Norwell Spotlight TV for capturing events like these so they may be appreciated by the wider community! For ease of access, we’ve included the video in its entirety after the prayer and pictures in this post.
And now, we invite you to read and meditate on the prayer Rev. Tim Garvin-Leighton shared to open the event.
He has shown you, O mortal, what is good — and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God. — Micah 6:8
Prayer for Justice
God of the prophets, you have not hidden what you ask of us. You have written it in the mouths of those who stood at the gates of power and would not be silent: Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly.
Forgive us for the times we have made religion a refuge from the world's pain rather than a road back into it. Forgive us for the theologies we have constructed to comfort ourselves while our neighbors suffer, for the prayers we have prayed that asked for peace without requiring change.
Call us back to the ancient, unfinished work.
Where courts fail the poor, give us the courage to name it. Where wages are stolen and workers are ground down, make us restless until it is made right. Where children go hungry in the shadow of plenty, let our faith be measured not in words but in what we do with our hands and our power and our vote.
Teach us that justice is not an abstraction — it has an address, a face, a name. It is the woman fighting her landlord alone. The man who cannot make bail. The family at the border. The elder who cannot afford her medicine. Let us not love justice in the general while ignoring it in the particular.
And when the work is slow, when the arc of history seems not to bend at all — teach us the second thing: to love kindness. Not as a consolation prize for what we could not fix, but as its own form of resistance. The small mercies that insist on the dignity of every person the powerful have decided does not matter.
And when we are tempted toward pride — toward the righteousness that becomes its own corruption, the certainty that hardens into cruelty — call us back to the third and hardest thing: to walk humbly. To know that we do not have all the answers. To listen before we speak. To stay in the work even when we cannot see the outcome. To trust that you are working in the places we cannot reach.
God, the world is heavy with its own injustice. We do not ask you to spare us from that weight. We ask only for the strength to carry it faithfully — to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk, humbly, beside you and beside one another, all the way to the world you are making. Amen.
