“And the young man walking beside me, who was working with Dr. King, said, ‘Major, give us a moment to kneel and pray.’

 

And the major said, ‘Troopers advance.’”

 

~ Congressman John Lewis, remembering Selma

A young man stood beside John Lewis, that March day in 1965 on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. Major John Clyde of the Alabama State Troopers was facing them, in a “sea of blue”-coated officers.

Confronting these waves of intimidation and fear, this young man felt his spine reach up to the heavens, and deep down into the earth.

He  knew the time had come to say grace. And perhaps he did, in the seconds before impact. But soon the troopers were upon them, and any muffled words for mercy and strength were lost.

Now, looking back on Selma from a distance of fifty years, I would like us to imagine this young man’s unheard prayer and speak it out loud.

See them now, in your mind’s eye.

Hundreds of marchers, in tidy work clothes, some in their Sunday best, kneel on the bridge in unison. A young man, his name now lost to history, leads them in prayer…

 

Dear Lord, dear Kind One

whose steady hands we feel

 

on our bowed backs

like new spring sun –

 

we ask for nothing but to see,

within this sea of fear that surrounds us,

 

the unborn souls who hover close

and allow us to glimpse

 

through a chink in their fingers

 

the beloved country we are calling up

from the deeps of our blood

 

and claiming here, on this bridge, this day.

 

This land, sown with pearls

of stolen sweat, jewels of secret pain

 

is promised to the meek, the stranger,

the outcast.

 

I hear you say, O Life,

this means it is promised to us all.

 

Help us see you, even in the faces

blurred with hate, crashing down upon us

 

as huge but powerless waves: we know,

O Source, the taste of salt upon our lips

 

and welcome with gladness

these waves of blue washing us

 

clean of fear and shadow

and revealing to us the light cast

 

in broken human form: give praise!

 

I close my eyes and see a smile wake in the face

of my sleeping child, sleeping in her bed

 

under the oak branches in Selma.

 

She is dreaming, O Light, and her smile

is Us. We are the sign, in this world,

 

of my daughter’s dream – a visible

proof of all the beauty

 

that brings her

in the darkness of sleep

 

such joy.

 

Dear Friend, I feel your hands

on my back as a burning brand –

 

a burning brand

turning my shoulders

 

into wings.

 

See how they unfurl

and shelter us all!

 

My wings stretch and open

in the hot noon sun

 

and allow me to stand

on this bridge

 

and withstand

whatever comes.