Prayers for CLUE Annual Workshop
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 a...