Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation update
At Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation, we feel grief within ourselves and our community, our youth, our families. However, our spirituality challenges us to step up, speak out, and become a voice for the voiceless, to offer sacred spaces for facing the pain, sharing the grief, weeping, and feeling compassion and God’s abundance of love through the community holding the sacred space.
PBMR has created a healing team, focusing on creating those sacred spaces for prayer, circles, rituals, and activities that foster healing and transformation.
Our Front Porch (Community Healing Center) has been alive with many activities. Biweekly, we invite our community, particularly the elder members, to a morning of coffee and treats made by Ronnie, one of our youths. Several weeks ago, during our “Café on May,” we had an acupuncturist spend the day with us, offering our community, staff, and youth the opportunity to experience healing through the five-needle protocol. Many participated and spoke of the peace they experienced, of much better sleeping nights, and of the healing from stress and grief.
Recently Old Town School of Music here in Chicago offered our youth and staff an evening of Capoeira art combining dance, music, drumming, and spirituality. The room was alive with laughter; youth were engaged and experiencing fun with drumming and connecting.
On Oct. 30, we celebrated Dia de los Muertos by decorating an altar of remembrance with pictures of our loved ones, especially our young women and men who have lost their lives through gun violence. It was a beautiful time of gathering young and old of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, sharing stories, praying, crying, eating, and laughing!
Several weekends we have had the opportunity, thanks to supportive friends, to go away from the center to have “Mother’s Healing Retreat” days or weekends. This offers the mothers who have lost loved ones to gun violence or the violence of incarceration to share, to be pampered, and to experience healing activities such as sound therapy, art therapy, yoga, meditation, and sleep!
Our Precious Blood spirituality calls us — challenges us — to be instruments of healing in our fractured world. Our hope is that through these individual and community activities, our hurting selves and our community can emerge with large, compassionate hearts into a broken world hungry for healing.