Letter to the Future: Institutions Have Fallen
To our descendants,
Our institutions will not save us.
As Auburn’s Dr. Walter Wink wrote, the Powers have fallen.
I do not say that with bitterness. I say it in truth, and because you need to hear it from someone who loves institutions, who has given his life to one. I say it as someone who believes in the slow sacred work, of building something that outlasts any one person. The sooner we understand this, the sooner we can get to the real work.
For ten generations, Auburn has done this work. We prepared faith leaders to go into a world where the courts, the churches, and the legislatures have repeatedly failed to make things whole. When our institution was founded, not one member could vote. Half of our staff's descendants were not even considered fully human by the Powers. And our founders could not have imagined the leadership shaping this institution today.
Our ancestors lived and worked for a future we now inhabit. We have outlasted every fracture this country has handed us. We are still here. And yet, I find myself returning to this truth: the institutions, even the ones we love and lead, were not designed to heal what ails us. They were designed to manage it.
Look at what the courts have done.
This last week, on April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Callais v. Landry. In a 6-3 ruling along partisan lines, the court held that Louisiana’s congressional map, which had created a second majority-Black district, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, leaving what remains of the Voting Rights Act a hollow shell of what it was before. The 1965 Voting Rights Act, born out of the Civil Rights Movement, paid for in blood and sacrifice, gutted. Not by enemies from outside the system, but by the system itself.
The court has shown us who it protects before, not just in this moment of what feels like a widening political divide. In May 2025, the Supreme Court refused to hear Apache Stronghold v. United States. At the heart of the case was Oak Flat, Chí’chil Biłdagoteel, a sacred Apache site in Arizona’s Tonto National Forest, where Western Apache people have practiced religious ceremonies for centuries. The Apache Stronghold argued that transferring the land to a private copper mining company would destroy a site that serves as a direct corridor to the Creator, the only place where certain ceremonies can be performed. The court declined to hear them. The land is set to become a crater two miles wide and a thousand feet deep. Sacred ground, gone. And this court, the same court that has repeatedly expanded religious freedom of protections for others, could not find the same urgency for the Western Apache. The treaties were signed, and the land rights were promised. But when Indigenous nations went to reclaim what was theirs, the land they had purchased back on the open market, land that had been illegally taken from them, the Supreme Court said no again.
In City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whom many of us admired, wrote the 8-1 opinion ruling that the Oneida Nation could not restore sovereignty to lands that had once been theirs, lands taken through transactions that clearly violated the terms of the Federal Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts. The reasoning, at its core, was that too much time had passed. Justice Ginsburg seemed to say: your lands were taken from you illegally, but there is nothing we can do for you now. The court reached back to the Doctrine of Discovery, a legal construct rooted in 15th-century papal edicts that gave European sovereigns the right to take lands occupied by non-Christians, and called it settled law.
Even the church, my church, the institution I am accountable to and love, has not always been writing a letter to the future that is faithful to a God of love. The church blessed the Doctrine of Discovery and looked the other way when the residential schools took children from their families. The church has too often reflected the world’s imagination rather than challenging it. Healing from these wounds is the long work of leadership.
The Powers are fallen. But can they be redeemed? Can we achieve a healed future?
The failure of institutions to heal us does not mean healing is not possible. It means the healing was never going to come from institutions that were not designed for healing, but for power. It was always going to come from the circle. From the community. From the stories we are writing together. Returning to Wink, we remember that the Powers can be redeemed by our better angels.
Those better angels are you.
If our story circles have had any impact at all, somewhere right now a community is naming a wound that has never had a name. Somewhere a leader is sitting with the grief of their people and not running from it. Somewhere the historical trauma that was supposed to be passed down silently, invisibly, generation after generation, is being interrupted. Healing is happening and just as in our body, it happens through relationships below the surface, evidenced later by the scars we carry.
In the last two years, ninety-five emerging leaders have come through our programs. Ninety-five faith leaders rooted in their traditions, committed to justice, and now, I pray, equipped to see their work in a longer lens. They are not just fixing what is broken in front of them. They are healing a world they may not even live to see fully restored. That is the letter we are asking them to carry to the future, to you.
We were not asking for better institutions, more responsive courts, or a church that finally gets it right. Those things matter, and I do desire them, but they are not enough. What I want,what we are called to build, is a healed society. One that works for all of God’s creation. Citizen or not. Member of my congregation or not. Inside the treaty or outside of it.
And so, we write. We gather together in a sacred circle. We tell the truth about what has been done, about what has been lost, and about what, by the grace of something older and deeper than any institution, still remains. We train leaders not just for the next election cycle or the next budget year, but for the next generation and the one after that. We send letters into a future we will never fully see. Trusting that love, pressed into the work, carried in the stories, embodied in the leaders we form, will find its way there.
The institutions will not save us. They have fallen. But they can be redeemed.
Our better angels, you, rooted and healing and refusing to forget, just might see the healed future so many of us are working towards.
A Prayer for Courage
God of all generations,
the time before our treaties and before our courts,
before our institutions and our arguments about them,
hold us now in your patience.
Give us the courage to name what has been broken
without letting the breaking have the last word.
Give us communities that can hold grief and hope at the same time.
Give us leaders with eyes long enough
to see a future, they may not inhabit
and lead with love.
May the healing we plant today
take root in soil and in circle.
May the children inherit a world
shaped by those who loved it before they arrived.
And may we, in our moment,
be faithful to the ones who are coming.
Amen.
With love across time,
Rev. Patrick B. Reyes, Ph.D.
Executive Vice President and Dean