the Prayers of (White) People

As a White person, I try to be on the look-out for ways that I have been privileged and to be aware of experiences in my life that I have been permitted, but which people of color and those who are Black have not. What I find in doing this is that sadly new things just keep coming up. The other week I discovered one that hit especially close to home these days and it’s caused me to reflect. 

I was listening to Brandi Miller and Cole Arthur Riley on Miller’s podcast, Reclaiming My Theology. Cole Arthur Riley is the person behind the Black Liturgies instagram handle and she writes prayers that reflect her Black experience in the world. But what got me was what she said about how it began, and how these prayers could be used. She said this,

Black Liturgies…it was born of rage, it was born of anger. I started it in July of 2020, and so the whole world was deciding to pay attention, for a little bit, to Black trauma, to Black people being murdered by White officers and White people. And so it was a very intense time of longing for shelter, I think, for a lot of Black people. Spaces that I thought were safe weren’t as safe as I thought they were, or maybe always knew––even with well-intentioned White liturgical spaces––I find myself reciting these liturgies and thinking, here I am sharing this confession with White people when really I feel like I deserve an apology. And it’s complicated. There were so many times in that season that I felt, here’s a Prayer of the People and this person might mean well, but this is really a prayer coming from the vantage point of White guilt and White shock, and I’m not shocked and so where’s the prayer for me and my people?….I need some kind of practice, I need some kind of shared practice that centers Blackness and that allows for the fullness of the Black body and the fullness of Black motion.

I imagine you can see why I was so taken and convicted by this interview between these two Black women. Perhaps this only proves my naivety, but I had not ever considered the Prayers of the People to be the prayers of White people. Ouch. But then Miller jumped in and said this: “I think that your stuff proves a thing that theorists have been saying for a long time, that when we center the margins…that there is freedom for all people.”

And it got me thinking about our Sunday Night Service and the Prayers of the People that we offer to God. The Book of Common Prayer makes clear that Prayers of the People should be for the Universal Church and its members, the Nation and all in authority, the welfare of the world, the concerns of the local community, those who suffer and those in any trouble, and the departed. And so I, as a White person, have been writing prayers or using other prayers that I have found with what I thought was only this one lens. I hadn’t considered my Whiteness as an additional lens. But if these women are right, which it feels in my body that they are, then what would it look like for us as a community of many White people to decenter ourselves from the Prayers. What if we stepped aside and sat with prayers that weren’t for us. What kind of space would that make for folks joining us who are Black or people of color? 

Cole Arthur Riley says it best: 

“...liturgy can be a really beautiful form of solidarity, when it’s written by the marginalized. Something about liturgy––you're reading these words and you're committing to staying in these words––and you read the words whether or not you have experienced them or not. In liturgical services you read them, even if it doesn’t make sense to you, and it’s this shared experience. So what does that mean if it’s not the words of dead White men, who didn’t care about me or my words. Now White people have to be in a position where they’re coming against a phrase, they’re coming up against a situation or an emotion that they don’t immediately understand, and what does it mean for you to remain. And so I think it can train us toward a kind of solidarity, of staying in the proverbial room that’s not for you. 

And so, in this season of Lent (and beyond), we at the Sunday Night Service will be praying prayers written by Cole Arthur Riley. We are not all White at this service, but it seems right that the prayers of Black folks and people of color be placed at the center, while I, as a White person stand aside and just remain. If you are Black or a person of color, I’ll hope you find the kind of shelter of which Riley speaks. Amen.

P.s. you can listen to the entire podcast here. 

p.p.s. I typed up this transcription myself, so any grammatical errors are mine, not Cole Arthur Riley’s.