Racial Justice and Healing
Racial Justice and Healing
Seeking and serving Christ in all people, loving our neighbors as ourselves, striving for justice and peace among all people, and respecting the dignity of every human being: these are some of the promises we make in our baptismal covenant. To live into these promises, we apprentice ourselves to Jesus, learning to see as he saw and love as he loved, speaking out against injustice and modeling right relationship, and seeking the peace of true reconciliation where prejudice, colonialism, and systemic racism have caused deep wounds in the fabric of our Body.
Register for the September 20 retreat at St. Andrew's by the Lake, Duluth HERE
ECMN RACIAL JUSTICE AND HEALING COMMISSION
The ECMN Racial Justice and Healing Commission is made up of Episcopalians representing Minnesota's beautiful diversity—racially, geographically, culturally, linguistically, and in many other ways. The Commission was formed in the shadow of the murder of George Floyd and the unrest that followed. As many of our well-intended faith communities, mostly Anglo in heritage, rushed to learn, to shout, to express outrage, to "do something," it quickly began to feel that we were called collectively to something more, to something deeper, that it was not the time to get bigger and louder, but time to be humble and listen. Following the lead of Black clergy and the community creating and stewarding the sacred space of George Floyd Square, it became clear that this was the time to listen, pay attention, do the deeper work, to transform hearts and minds—starting with our own.
OUR APPROACH
The ECMN Racial Justice and Healing Commission began its work together in early 2022, meeting monthly to do the initial, and most important, work of building relationships across our many differences. Part of what the group discerned was what it didn’t want: a “one-and-done” or “check-the-box” anti-racism training that people would tolerate and then never want to do again, or that would make anyone believe that they were “finished.” As Dr. Catherine Meeks has taught us, the work of racial healing is the hard work of self-interrogation, taking seriously Jesus’ question, ‘Do you want to be healed?’ In her words, “The work requires a willingness to commit to the process of interrogating ourselves.” It’s faith formation work that takes exactly one lifetime to accomplish.
The team began to envision an in-person retreat experience that could focus on four interwoven areas that propel us into the work of self-interrogation and racial healing and justice-making: liturgy, history, advocacy, and somatic/body awareness. The team believed that if it could bring these four focus areas to bear and stay grounded in our inter-connectedness, it might have some opportunities for engaging racial healing in a way that is fully immersed in our Episcopal theology and charism.
Our inaugural retreat was September 2023 at St. John the Evangelist, St. Paul. Many of the resources from that retreat can be found in the tabs below. Our current dream and work is to adapt this retreat so that it can travel around the state. Although the framework will remain grounded in faith and liturgy, with each new place we go, we will focus on history and advocacy topics relevant to the community we are in.
Read on below to learn more about these four areas of focus, and find practices and resources to further explore the lifelong disciple work of pursuing your own healing in each of those four areas.