Delivered by Senior Minister Rev. Nancy Taylor at an interfaith service mourning the victims of the Orlando mass shooting, held at Emmanuel Church in Boston on June 15, 2016.
Dearest God, it is with trepidation and defeat that we dare ask more of these small flames than they can bear to do: stand in for ones lost to us. It is with the most profound despair that we ask these tiny lights to somehow represent, to signify, those taken by hate, those subjected to an unfathomable brutality. Dearest God: we know, we confess, that these slim flames are no substitute for 49 dancing bodies. No substitute for the 49 young, gay bodies … bodies filled with life and love, bodies solid and warm, pulsing and breathing, swaying and undulating.
And yet, because we know not what else to do, or how to make real and solid those who are now the stuff of eternity, still we ask you, plead with you: bless the ones theses candles would stand for, but cannot. Bless the dead. Bless the lost. Bless the murdered ones. Bless the persecuted ones. Bless the ones sought out and hunted down and executed because of who and how they loved. Because this world failed them, we beg you, dearest God: Do not fail them in heaven. Bless them.