Friday Care Package
What If Repair Was Our Most Radical Form of Prayer?
Dear Substack Community: It is Friday, again, and I’m writing from Chicago. I have been nurturing relationships here in Chicago this week and we keynoted an event at LSTC. You can catch the audio in a previous Sutbstack Post.
Today, as most days, I’m thinking about repair. How do I repair myself and how do I repair the world? So, take a breath and step into this morning’s post!
Thank you for being here and for investing in community supported scholarship!
Paz, —RCE+
What If Repair Was Our Most Radical Form of Prayer?
“We are the ones who write in lightning, who turn silence into war cries, who dare to scratch our truth into ancient stone.”
— Kate Harris, The Poet’s Rebellion
There is a kind of prayer that doesn’t fold its hands.
It shows up with open palms and calloused fingertips.
It kneels not in piety, but in pieces—gathering what’s been shattered.
This prayer does not ask for escape.
It asks for courage to stay.
Lately, I’ve been wondering:
What if repair is our most radical form of prayer?
Not a whisper to the heavens, but a holy insistence here on earth—
to mend what empire has broken,
to rethread kinship through the jagged holes of harm,
to rebel through tenderness.
We’ve been told that prayer is private.
But what if prayer is public, collective, and wild?
What if it smells like paint and sweat, like the glue of rebuilding something that was torn?
What if it is the poem we write with our bodies, our boundaries, our breaking and remaking?
Kate Harris, in her fierce, luminous book The Poet’s Rebellion, invites us into a different kind of discipleship. Not of control, but of creativity. Not of dogma, but of disruption. She reminds us that the poet in each of us is not ornamental—it is insurgent. “The poet is the one who breaks the spell of resignation,” she writes. “Who dares to say: not like this, not anymore.”
So I ask again:
What if repair is the poet’s prayer?
Because when we choose to repair—
a friendship strained by misunderstanding,
a church fractured by fear,
a body carrying more than it was meant to bear—
we are not just restoring something lost.
We are writing a new world into being.
This is not repair as perfection.
Not smoothing out the cracks.
It is kintsugi repair—gold poured into the fractures,
marking them not as flaws but as story.
This is rebellion by care.
In a culture that tells us to numb out, to cancel, to cut off,
we show up with balm and bravery.
In a world that profits from our disconnection,
we practice sacred, sweaty, inconvenient connection.
Again and again.
And yes, sometimes repair looks like retreat—stepping back to gather strength, to remember what matters.
Sometimes it looks like accountability.
Sometimes it looks like an apology, trembling on the tongue.
Sometimes it looks like a garden you keep watering even when the harvest is far off.
Repair is slow.
It is often unseen.
But like the roots beneath the surface,
it is where new life takes hold.
So today, beloveds—pray with your presence.
Let your boundaries be a hymn.
Let your refusal to abandon the broken be a psalm.
Let us be the poets who rebel through care.
Let us scratch our truths into the stone of this moment.
Let us gather the fragments and call it holy.
Mantra for the Week:
I do not abandon what I love. I repair it with prayerful hands.
Reflection Questions:
Where in your life is something asking to be repaired, not erased?
What would it mean to see that work of mending as a form of prayer?
How can you rebel through care this week?
