Contemplatives Build Bridges
Kerem Yücel/Minnesota Public Radio via AP
By mid-December 2025, Minnesotans knew we were in for a rough winter.
On January 7, 2026, our fears were realized and expanded when Renée Nicole Macklin Good was shot by a federal agent after saying directly to him, with a sincere smile on her face, ‘I’m not mad at you.’
On January 24, 2026, Alex Jeffrey Pretti was shot multiple times and killed by federal agents while attempting to help from the ground and shield another civilian.
Both of these state-sanctioned murders were carried out in the course of duty by officers deployed to arrest and detain as many black, brown, and black-haired people as they could, with ‘daily deportation quotas’ set to determine the efficacy of their efforts.
The trauma for individuals, families, and communities has been incalculable.
Families locked in their homes for fear.
Parents and children separated without due process or recourse for reunion.
Individuals denied their Constitutional rights and the most basic of human rights: food, water, shelter, decency.
The crimes and sins were too numerous to absorb and too frequent to track.
The terror was meant to bring us to our knees.
And it did.
We knelt together.
We knelt before armed men to prevent them from taking our neighbors.
We knelt at the airport in search of corporate accountability.
We knelt in vigil at the site of state-sanctioned murder.
And from our knees, neighbors rose into action:
Tens of thousands of Constitutional Observers were trained within two months.
Rapid Response Teams developed within days.
Churches, community centers, and schools became distribution centers for food, diapers, rent, etc.
Drivers volunteered to get kids to school (those who opted to go in person rather than online, where many felt more safe), to medical appointments (for those who didn’t forego visiting a doctor while sick or pregnant), and even to immigration hearings (for those who clung to the hopes that if they kept doing everything they were supposed to do, they wouldn’t be deported).
Protests broke out.
Rallies erupted.
Vigils were held.
And peace prevailed.
This is a miracle.
There was – and is – a lot of anger.
A lot.
There were calls for violence.
Many.
But there were still, small voices urging peace.
When Renée was shot, we gathered on the street in a mass vigil. We sang. We lit candles. We prayed as community.
When Alex was shot, we gathered on our street corners, each in our own neighborhoods. We met one another. Relationships were created – and cemented.
And behind it all were contemplatives: people kneeling in prayer holding and honing inner peace.
Contemplatives created online vigils for the families of those deported, making sure peoples’ names are remembered and said aloud and peoples’ humanity is recognized and honored.
Contemplatives created online somatic and spiritual practices – that spanned the religious spectrum and stepped beyond it – to support Rapid Responders, dispatchers, mutual aid providers, and all who were traumatized on a daily basis.
Contemplatives built bridges across language and accessibility gaps.
Contemplatives ensured individuals and communities had access to resources and healing for mind, body, and spirit.
Contemplatives shaped public ceremony and stood in the crowd as Grief Tenders.
Individual daily practices became shared practices of breath and body awareness: releasing anxieties and fears, anger and powerful frustrations.
Two months after the so-called ‘draw-down’ (though we still see neighbors arrested on a regular basis), it is contemplatives who continue to provide weekly online somatic practices; to connect those in need with capable spiritual care; to create healing spaces in community and congregational buildings; and to facilitate conflict management among understandably brittle and shaky survivors.
It is contemplatives who are holding us accountable for grace and continuous introspection, lest we begin to rest on our laurels or boast – while some neighbors still suffer immensely.
It is contemplatives who are helping us cast a vision of what else might be – for after all the destruction and devastation, there must be something else in store for our hurting families and communities.
We kneel in practice – individually and collectively. We breathe, in each moment and together. We grieve and lament; we find grace and forgive; we scream our rage – as each has need and all of us in unity.
And as we exhale, we dream something more beautiful, more sustainable, more equitable, more joyful. We dream – and we know it is possible.
Through our shared breath, we find one another, we share what might be, and together, we are already beginning to kneel, rise, and walk toward God’s preferred future.
Thank you, Emily, for your presence and commitment in such difficult times.
Thank you, Emily, for sharing how contemplatives are engaged in these chaotic and uncertain times.
Contemplatives Build Bridges. I am happy for this blog for this reason, as a bridge builder: I return from a focus on living in community with brothers, to living outside a community spiritual house in 1972, to living in a rectory with one priest and myself, only to leave for the outside call in the world. As a man of color, I heard the voice to do what Jesus is doing with us all over the world. My sense of embedded theology and deliberate theology was constantly challenged, and it was a wake-up call as integration was clearly what I came into the world to see, experience, and assist in the liberation process. Way before getting my further academic degrees in ministry, psychology, spirituality, community organization, and human management. I was experiencing a cutoff. Multi-limitations, racism, and classism were enforced in our community. Imagine being in a car with your mother. I am not the oldest in a family of ten children, but that day, I am the oldest in the car. As the oldest child in the car with six children and your African mother is being pulled out of our by white polisman, leaving the car, the mother new born baby left in the car with six other children none of us could drive I am the oldest and I am not 13 at the time my mother is placed in a police truck with three police dogs and I have to take step that are new, did have time to cry, call for help beg the polish not to take my mother and leave her children, psychology call this trama, I ad to calm my sisters and brothers down, call 911 to get to my father’s job called to tell him my mother has been taken by the police and we are sitting outside of the movie thearter and it’s getting dark. This story is right, but this happened to my family and me. This story is a sample of active trauma, delayed trauma impact, as well as direct experience trauma and witness trauma. This case you give in the blog goes on to say people are taken, killed, hurt, and shamed with so-called justification. I am reading your blog during the Easter season. The command is to feed my sheep, preach the Gospel, and raise the dead. Many years in thinking of liberation theology,thses words were said by many people who try to live a led life both from within and without, Elizabeth O’connor, located in DC in late 70,80,90, belonging to church of the savior, a lay women and a writer of the book inward journey, this book is helpful for souls who are out on the front end of the work, again, still, another great writer that I help to get repulish and she is now on the Epicopal calendar, one of her books that is important.In the spiritual life book, Evelyn Underhill writes, in this book, the meaning of our life is bound up with the meaning of the universe; we get out of gear in either department (inner and outer life) when this correspondence is arrested or disturbed, and if it stops altogether, we cease to live. Today, a strong prayer life is needed. When one is working in the outer, competitive group, people trying to build community will need a deeper food from the Spirit to maintain and sustain the daily drive and need for life purpose. Don’t go out without being armed with a prayer, beloved worker for Christ. Always hold on to meaning, you will find like the author, Viktor Frankl, in his book, Man’s search for meaning, while any moment someone in the holocaust camp number could come up to die, Dr. Frankl, notes that people in the camp, having something to hope for, could find something in that dark moment at the hands of death, live a little longer, while many were dying around them. Dr. Frankl’s book offers solutions to the wounded one and the worker for Christ who need to try one more time again. During the Holocaust, many faced extreme hunger, debilitating illnesses, and brutal living conditions. Dr. Victor Frankl. Somehow managed to find out a way and meaning, to draw from during one of the most catastrophic events in human history, added with vietnam war, the civil rights march on washinton conflist, when each of us comes to know our early childhood teaching from our embedded theology, thou shalt not kill, yet due to thisDr.Frankl, placementin this destructive camp he with search, started to use the pratice in his convesartion and think and we are blessed with a book where it’s no wonder man’s search for meaning sold over 10 million copies influential the world to be hopeful .after after being a witness or a helper to the wounds of this world one might want to read Dr. Frankl thoughts in his writings, man’s search for meaning is spiritual food in your soldiering help in the outer world.Jacques Ellul, in an old book HOPE in time of abandonment, writes: “In the time of abandonment, one would have thought more than ever that we are finding it possible to do what our ancestors could not do.” We have more benefits from not being in foreign countries and enjoy other astonishing advantages, yet this is not always the case. Many people feel displaced, lost, not heard, over many at this moment, people I work with have no home, ill, no job, broken familys, while still many at this very moment man find himself breaking through the lid of the skies, it does no good to argue, or have to many meetings about what we are going to do. Like this group of people holding the contemplative prayer, being out in the street, getting people off the streets is my prayer. An optimistic man and woman are just sitting. This has run its course; we need hands-on activity in our community, with a deep, rich prayer from within to without, until the last person on the last island has been saved. All work will continue to suffer, move toward transformation, cross to the risen one, and continue to meet, pray, and hold vigil. Constantly, as the destructors are out there, you can find it in the book of Psalms, also with King David, saying, “O God, I call unto you, save me,” or “God, answer me, my enemies are mighty, here I am.” Here I am paraphrasing, yet each of us knows that, despite King David’s doing the things he did in the Old Testament, he held to God’s promise of everlasting life. You can find it in the forecast. Suppose you can find it on the street. Life is calling. Life is asking for help, yet unless we return to our Bible spiritual roots, we have not fed the hungry. I am grateful for this blog every person who take up the task to help, I can connects with what I do in my work in South Baltimore for women have and or raped violated traumatized as well as today many persons who have no place to go yet what keeps me going is returning back to spiritual practices and allowing this practice to be my posture in today’s world .one can get overwelmed, yet as key point to remember in the work is to” think globally but act locally”, our prayers go out to Minnesota a wonderful area of our country, I found people working so close together there, to me the state is a people state.Still wherever we are, that our call for coming together, I prayed, as life has place me in Baltimore, Maryland that many of us will go out come togther, for change so like minnesota we will be the same, we must pray constantly for prayer heals, liberates and changes the way, as well as the active willing workers process is change as one is forming and being formed; for discipleship of co-creator with our God Reverend Chris
Emily, thank you for sharing what many of us witnessed from the outside only. Thank you for your active role and bringing contemplation and prayer to action, modeling for all of us…. Minneapolis and my friends there have been an inspiration 🙏. Blessings for you and your work.
Thank you. Good to hear about this