June 19, 2022

Indigenous Day of Prayer, the Sunday before National Indigenous Peoples Day (June 21), is an opportunity to celebrate First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples’ values, customs, languages, and culture.

~ from The United Church of Canada’s website

A Prayer for National Indigenous Day of Prayer

Shared in our Parish on June 19, 2022

Creator God,

We look at our world and praise you for the diversity around us.

Thank you for the gifts of relationships — our connection with people, animals, and the land.

Helps us, Lord, to see differences and diversity as strengths.

Help us to listen and understand, to meet one another with wonder and anticipation.

Help us to love as you love, without expectation.

Reveal to us your way of reconciliation and guide us into right relationships with all living things.

Lead us to understand how Indigenous people have been and continue to be profoundly harmed by settler people and institutions.

Lead us to repent when we deny Indigenous peoples respect, dignity, and fullness of life.

Help us to listen compassionately, to speak humbly, and to act justly.

Help us to seek the peace, justice, and reconciliation you desire among all your children.

Thank you for your mercy and grace.

Amen.

Source:  Mennonite Central Committee

Photo credit: steveowst / Pixabay

A paraphrase of Psalm 106:1‒5:

Praise our Creator!
O Meegwetch give thanks to the Maker, for Turtle Island nurtures us; love lives forever in ancestors dancing in the aurora borealis.
Who can truth talk the mighty doings of the Creator or drum all their praises?
Joyful are those who observe justice, who work for right relations at all times.
Remember me, O Great Spirit, when you show honour to your people.
Help us when you lead us into places of protection.
We see the grateful hunting of creatures, generous gathering and abundant harvest and prosperity of our kin, that we may dance in the ceremonies of our nation’s people, that we may glory in your ancestry.
All my relations.

From 2022 Indigenous Day of Prayer – All My Relations worship service and sermon by the Rev. Nancy Best.