National day of prayer to end gun violence

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Eric Sabelman

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Apr 21, 2023, 11:57:59 PM4/21/23

to PAFM clerk, Mary Pat O'Connell, Barbara Babin, David Hoffman, bayarea...@googlegroups.com

Friends:

Multifaith Voices for Peace & Justice will be signing this letter as a group. Peace Committees may meet before Monthly Meeting business meetings, so they could sign as committees instead of the whole Meeting. I plan to sign as an individual.

Which brings up an idea I once floated, without getting any traction. Friends recognize "minutes of concern" and "action minutes" when unity is reached. Should we also have "minutes of endorsement", authorizing the clerk to sign a letter such as this, without requiring it to be re-written into Quaker-specific language?

-Eric

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: sacredseaturtles via mvpjsteering <mvpjst...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Fri, Apr 21, 2023 at 11:40 AM
Subject: PLS VOTE re: national day of prayer to end gun violence
To: mvpjst...@googlegroups.com <mvpjst...@googlegroups.com>

Dear Friends,

PLEASE VOTE re: supporting this effort.

Basically, Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) wants signatures (of clergy, congregations, and parishioners/congregation members) on an interfaith letter urging President Biden: We appeal to you to declare this Mother’s Day, Sunday, May 14, 2023, to be a national day of repentance, mourning, prayer, and reflection to address the culture of gun violence that is staining our collective soul.

If you want to sign it individually, please do!

PLEASE VOTE RE:

1) signing on behalf of MVPJ (I'm happy to do with your permission) AND

2) me sending it out to urge others to sign -- and asking you all to do the same.

Thank you!

peace, diana

-----Original Message-----

Dear Diana,

I want to make sure you don't miss this time-sensitive appeal sent out this week by our executive director, Ariel Gold, and our senior advisor Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler. Within the past week, FOR has organized hundreds of interfaith clergy and lay leaders nationwide for this urgent call. Can you reach out this weekend to the leaders in your congregation or faith community and ask them to join? Here is a template you can copy and paste to contact those important and respected leaders.

Dear faith leader/congregation,

I am writing to ask you individually as a faith leader and the name of your faith community as a congregation/organization endorse a call being made by faith leaders for this Mother's Day to be a national day of prayer and contemplation to end gun violence. Since just last Saturday, at least 255 people have already died in the United States due to guns. These tragic deaths affect every community.

More than 400 clergy and lay people, including Reverend Jesse Jackson, Cornel West, Liz Theo Harris, the Kairos Center, and Sojourners, from diverse faith traditions — including the heads of national denominations and global religious organizations — have already signed this urgent call. You joining this call would mean so much to me and this collective effort.

You can sign the Mother’s Day appeal via this link: https://forusa.org/mothersday2023/

Towards peace,

Your name

Thanks so much for your efforts. Our collective voice is immensely strengthened by your support.

Faithfully,

Ethan Vesely-Flad, FOR-USA Director of National Organizing

Dear Diana,

We are mobilizing faith leaders to address the war taking place in our schools, places of worship, grocery stores, nightclubs, and more. The gun violence epidemic, intertwined with the racist white Christian nationalist movement, is a scourge on our communities and a blaspheme of the divine.

Will you ask the leader(s) of your faith community to join Rev. Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, General Secretary Emeritus of the Reformed Church in America, Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis of the Kairos Center, Rabbi Jill Jacobs of Tru'ah: the Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, Dr. Shane Claiborne of Red Letter Christians, Dr. Cornel West, Rev. Adam Russell Taylor, President of Sojourners, and many many more?

Ask your church, synagogue, mosque, or other faith institution to join the call for a national day of prayer to end gun violence!

ADD YOUR NAME!

Faith leaders are calling on President Biden to declare a national day of repentance, mourning, prayer, and reflection this Mother's Day to address gun violence.

We see “God, Guns, and Country” on car bumpers and front yard signs. God, Guns, and Country isn’t just a phrase printed on t-shirts, it's white Christian nationalist violence in action.

“From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, disarm!“

— Original Mother’s Day Proclamation of 1870

Though it may sound like a prophetic cry from sacred scripture, these words have a much more recent, American source. Abolitionist and Christian social activist, Julia Ward Howe included this language as part of the original Mother’s Day Proclamation for peace in 1870. Over 150 years later, the sentiment could just as easily be coming from the mouths of mothers in the United States today. Mothers who lose their children each year to the war taking place daily on American streets in the form of mass shootings with automatic assault weapons. It is the only war that the United States clearly has no will—or desire—to end.

As a century-old interfaith coalition, made up of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and other faith traditions, the Fellowship of Reconciliation remains devastated that, in the United States, the second amendment continues to have more rights than our children.

Given the gravity and urgency of this issue, in the pursuit of Reclaiming the Name of God from those who blaspheme God with hate and violence, we ask you will join our call to have this Mother’s Day, Sunday, May 14, 2023, be a national day of repentance, mourning, prayer, and reflection to end and atone for the collective sin we are committing by allowing guns to be considered more sacred than life.

Ask your congregation's leader to join Dr. Daisy Khan, Founder & Director of the Women's Islamic Initiative in Spirituality & Equality, Rabbi Phyllis Berman, Spiritual Director for the ALEPH Ordination Program, Rev. Dr. Susan Frederick-Gray, President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, Rev. Dr. Dorsey Blake of the National Council of Elders, and other prominent other faith leaders in calling for a national day of repentance, mourning, prayer, and reflection this Mother's Day to address guns being treated as more sacred than children.

In fellowship,