We hold Sabrina Fulton and Tracy Martin in our hearts, mother and father of Trayvon Martin, and the rest of his family, sending them love and compassion and hope for a greater justice.

May we send George Zimmerman, his family and his legal team and his family love and compassion, deeply woven with hope of eventual redemption and restorative accountability.

We hold Marissa Alexander in our hearts, an African American woman in Florida, who last year was sentenced to 20 years in prison for standing her ground, though she killed no one, firing a warning shot into a wall to scare her abusive husband.

We pray for peaceful and loud persistence in the face of deep discouragement and righteous outrage.

May those who are emboldened by this verdict, feeling the raw and misleading surge of power should they overstep standing their ground, may they be saturated by patience, by equanimity, by renunciation — all these before acting.

We pray for a judicial system that is not racially biased.  We pray to end the confusion between “the workings of the legal system and the idea of justice.”   We have been praying for a very long time. It looks like we have a hell of a lot more prayer ahead of us.