A Prayer for Our Indigenous Neighbours
“Creator, Spirit, Comforter, Advocate,
We greet you this day with thanks for the blessings of our lives and for the blessing of the people of our community. We pray especially this morning for the original peoples of this land. We think with gratitude about the welcome Indigenous peoples gave to the first visitors who arrived here from afar, from other parts of the world, and settled in this place. We imagine that there must have been misunderstandings and hardship in these early relationships, but we also know from the stories we have been told that working relationships, bonds of friendship and even bonds of kinship and love, grew out of these early encounters.
Our ancestors in this place agreed to share these sacred lands in a covenantal relationship and to live side by side in peace as neighbours, respecting each other as communities of peoples with different customs and traditions, and unique understandings of their relationship with you, but created, as we have been taught, each and every one, in your own image. We see you in each other and learn about you as we encounter each other.
You, Creator God, know the needs of the Indigenous peoples of this place far better than we do. We are aware of the ongoing injustices and adversity, including racism, which our Indigenous brothers, sisters, and cousins experience. The violence faced by some in our own community angers us, saddens us, frustrates us, and leaves us searching for answers.
Lord God, you know that we have a deep love for this place. As your faithful disciples, we long to know what we can do to best show that we love our neighbours as ourselves.
Help us to use our gifts, our knowledge, our skills, our positions in society, and our strength in Christ, as a community of faith, to support our neighbours. Give us humility and the wisdom to know when and how to follow their lead in seeking solutions, and in making positive changes. Open our hearts, our minds, and our spirits to new possibilities when the steps our Indigenous leaders and neighbours wish to take may be uncomfortable or unfamiliar.
Holy Spirit, fill us with the power and the courage to trust in you and to trust in others. Help us to trust in the deep wisdom and traditional knowledges that you have gifted to our Indigenous neighbours. Help us to accept the gift of learning from our neighbours that we may broaden and deepen our understanding of how to live together, to share resources, to put our complementary skills to work together, and most of all to build on our common desire to live in wholeness together as all of your peoples. We thank you for the blessing you have given us to know you better by getting to know our neighbours better in all of their diverse God-given beauty.
We pray for our Indigenous neighbours. We ask that you will help us to let our Indigenous neighbours know that we honour them, we want to live together with them in harmony, and we share their hope for a blessed future together, for growth in mutual understanding and respect, for healing, for justice, and for reconciliation. We pray for all of our relations.
Amen.”