250 Years of a Nation, Ten Generations of Auburn

Anniversary Message 

Friends, 

This year our country turns 250 years old. Auburn has been present for ten generations of that story, founded in 1818. 

It is hard to stand at these milestones and celebrate. When this country was founded, entire generations of people were not considered fully human. Neither the nation marking 250 years, nor the institution called Auburn, would have counted them among those the founders imagined as free, as citizen, as whole. 

We hold two things at once. We grieve the historic violence woven into these foundations, and the violence that continues against the land, against the vulnerable, against communities pushed to the margins. And we give thanks for the ten generations who labored anyway, who tended the acequia so that we might drink today, who planted what they would not harvest so that others might one day stand whole and free. 

This is why we lead with love. Not love as sentiment, but love as the hard, patient work of repair. Love that names the wound and seeks healing. Love that sits between the ancestors who dreamed of a better society and the descendants who will inherit what we build now. 

The founders could not see us. And yet here we are, tending what they could not imagine. That, too, is a kind of healing. 

A Prayer for Healing 

God of our ancestors and of our descendants, 

we come to these milestones with grief and with gratitude. 

For every generation counted less than human, we ask your mercy. 

Where there has been violence, make us instruments of healing. 

Where there has been fear, teach us to lead with love. 

Root us deep enough to shelter those who come after, 

that they may find shade from what we plant today. 

Amen.