Prayers for CLUE Annual Workshop

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We Carry Them Into This Room 

Opening Invocation
CLUE Fall Annual Workshop 2026
Sunday afternoon, October 25, 2026
By Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.



















Spirit of Life, Spirit of Justice, love that refuses to abandon anyone who suffers, Holy One known by many names, and by no name at all: we gather now.

Let us arrive. Let us breathe together.

Between the Santa Ynez Mountains and the Santa Barbara Channel, where fog lifts from the water and islands rise blue on the horizon, may beauty deepen our responsibility for one another.

We gather on Chumash homelands. We honor living peoples, their sovereignty, and their enduring relationships with land and sea. May acknowledgment become listening, listening become relationship, and relationship become accountability and repair.

We carry into this room our neighbors sleeping in doorways off State Street, and those living in vehicles: workers, families, elders, people with disabilities, making home wherever they can. They belong here as surely as anyone.

We carry Eastside and Westside families who open a rent increase with trembling hands, whose lives have helped make this city and whose future here grows uncertain.

We carry the ache of wealth beside hunger: estates in the foothills, empty cupboards nearby, wages that never catch the rent.

We carry our immigrant neighbors, beloved for who they are, and the fear that follows them to the job site and the school gate. We lament what our neighbors name as ICE kidnappings, the terror of seizure, the anguish of separation. May our solidarity give frightened families somewhere to turn.

We confront racism in housing and hiring, in confinement and exclusion. May we recognize where we participate in injustice and find the courage to change.

Spirit of Justice, deepen our willingness to listen to those who know these wounds from within. May their wisdom guide our shared work.

Let the Beloved Community take shape among us: every person housed, every table full, every family safe, every neighbor able to shape our common life.

Bless the patient labor already underway. Renew our courage for the work unfinished. May love move through our listening, our choices, and the power we share.

Held by this living Earth and one another, may we be present now.

Amen. Blessed be.

As the Tide Goes

Closing Benediction
CLUE Fall Annual Workshop 2026
Sunday afternoon, October 25, 2026
By Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

Spirit of Life, Spirit of Justice, we give thanks for this time together. Now we turn toward the city beyond these doors.

May we remember those in our county jail, those awaiting trial, those who needed care and found confinement. Strengthen our work to reduce the jail population and keep people with mental illness out of jail.

May crisis bring a healer to the door. May treatment be there when it is sought. May housing offer safety throughout recovery. May no one's illness become their sentence.

Remember those returning home, the families who waited, and survivors of harm. May safety take root in prevention, care, accountability, and repair.

Remember people subjected to trafficking, to labor and sexual exploitation, and workers afraid to report abuse. May freedom bring safety, and the power to shape what comes next.

Remember the coast: Goleta Slough breathing with the tide, pelicans over Refugio, the Channel alive beneath the light. May our response to Sable's oil operations be guided by care for these waters, the climate, and generations still to come.

May we go out ready to organize, to accompany our neighbors, to testify beneath the Courthouse clock. Strengthen our work for rent stabilization, truly affordable housing, and an end to homelessness.

The meal, the blanket, the ride to court are holy. Let our care reach also into laws and budgets, into institutions that deepen racial and economic inequality. May we confront concentrated wealth and power, and share decisions with those too often denied a voice. May CLUE's work reach the roots of injustice.

Grant us rest without retreat, accountability without despair, and the grace to begin again. Bind us in solidarity that outlasts the headlines, the season, our discouragement.

May the Beloved Community grow through our faithfulness: neighbors housed and nourished, immigrant families secure, care within reach, and belonging made real.

Go now, gently and boldly. May the mountains steady you. May the sea renew you. May you go as the tide goes: returning, returning, returning, until the shore is changed.

Amen. Blessed be.

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