By: Rev. Dr. Velda Love, Minister for Racial Justice
“And a little child shall lead them” Envision a future when children endowed with ancestral wisdom and spiritual awareness know without a doubt that abolitionists blood runs through their veins. I imagine a future when children will lead nations. They will work, play, share meals, and create peace agreements alongside their siblings of every race, culture, ethnic and nonbinary identity.
Children will end world hunger, eradicate borders around the globe, and create sustainable peace and climate accords that end genocidal wars. Children will dismantle racial capitalism, disarm nuclear weapons, provide universal healthcare, and develop healthy and sustainable technological practices. Children will rule nations and restore peace well beyond the next millennium.
Isaiah 11:10 provides an image of the prophet symbolically speaking about the Spirit of the Lord bringing peace, hope, and renewal to oppressed people. We are witnesses to empires and religious elites using power, policies, and strategies that perpetuate division among people so their efforts to realize their collective power to unite, live peacefully, share the land, and the bountiful resources of the earth never become reality.
Children with justice, liberation, peace, and freedom as their primary language will be the prophetic voices and the ancestors—Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Jarena Lee, Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael, the Black Panthers, Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Diane Nash, James Baldwin, John Lewis, James Hal Cone, Howard Thurman, Bernice Johnson Regan, Toshi Regan, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, adrienne maree brown, Audrey Lorde, and Octavia Butler will walk with them all the days of their lives. Let us commit to the abolition journey and follow where they are leading us.
Inhale: With ancestors and children as my guide,
Exhale: I will dream us all free.
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The ability to imagine that many of us had so fully as children has been stolen from us. As the Nap Bishop, Tricia Hersey reminds us, “It is radical to tap into a daydreaming practice. You must imagine what is possible.”
Take a moment to practice daydreaming right now.
Go outside and stare at the sky or stare out the window.
Follow your mind wherever it leads.
Dream yourself and this whole earth, free.
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