WASHINGTON — This Mother’s Day is dedicated to those in the community who live each day in fear of losing their children to violence or who have lost a child due to violence.
Women took to the pulpit at about 40 churches across the Episcopal Diocese of Washington on Sunday to deliver a special message, says Rev. Jocelyn Irving, with the Episcopal Church of the Atonement in Southeast.
“We asked women to be in the pulpit to preach this morning,” Irving says, “even in churches where there are rectors who are male.”
Irving is the longest serving black female rector in the Episcopal Diocese of Washington.
This wasn’t a Mother’s Day celebration, rather, it was a day of prayer: “It’s something very hard to rejoice when you think of our children who have died,” Irving says.
Following the church service, parishioners fanned out through the neighborhood, passing out red ribbons with the words ”Black Moms Love — Black Moms Cry.”
“We cannot deny that the painful truth that children of color are at far greater risk than white children in every category of danger and vulnerability,” diocese Bishop Mariann Budde wrote in a letter. “On Mother’s Day, I ask that we join in prayer and collective witness on behalf of all mothers’ children, and especially children of color who are disproportionately at risk in our land.”
