ONE LIFE WITNESS

A Common, Sacred Place to Begin Again

For 32 years, RCND has worked to prevent and rectify the unjust, inequitable violence that segregates our community and diminishes our humanity. We have pursued slow, persistent peace in practices that search out the deep roots of violence in our systems and our souls. We have walked in transformative relationship alongside hundreds of neighbors on every side of violent harm. 

Over 1,000 times in those 32 years, we have measured this pursuit of boundless belonging against a Durham where one of our own kills another of our own. Living in that tension, we are mindful of how easy it can be to look past, shut out, and talk over this chasm in our common life. Facing generations of communal trauma laid bare, fight and flight are intuitive responses. When some Durham neighbor is shot most every day—someone killed most every week—compassionate attention is costly indeed. Such is the self-replicating nature of our violence: efficiently reproducing in our reaction and prevention, steering us back toward familiar corners while neighbors suffer alone.

For all these reasons, we offer the following as practices for renewing our sacred attention. Ways of making intentional space to feel, own, and name what violence costs our community. Pathways of response to overwhelming tragedy, and witness to the immeasurable worth of every one life. Things every one of us could do. Not as a place to end. But as common, sacred space to begin, and begin again, and again, and again.

Connect with our Vigil Ministry of long-term survivor care…

Practices of One Life Witness

‘Walk the Bull’ with Homicide Survivors

[On winter hiatus holiday for December 2024 and January 2025. Revisit this space for updates on February and beyond.] Each first-Thursday at 6:00 pm, join members of RCND’s Grief Circle (held monthly for loved ones of homicide victims) in a communal walk of witness around CCB Plaza in downtown Durham. This monthly practice emerged in community among neighbors living in daily conversation with the human toll of our violence, and continues in hope of a City that might do the same. Every body is welcome as we seek solidarity in the truth of our public grief, and the light of a Love that will not let any one of us go.

Vigil Meditation

A pandemic response turned annual practice, Durham Vigil Meditations are lasting echoes of the Annual Vigil where we gather to call aloud each name taken violently during the prior year. Join us in sacred attention to the ever-present absence of these named, loved ones, and intentional reflection on a shared geography of violence hiding in plain sight.

Micro Vigil

We invite you to extend this Vigil Meditation practice into your own life through simple everyday acts of vigil in places where our collective violence breaks forth. By locating our own stories and bodies amidst Durham’s violence, we nurture the humility and imagination that undergird all nonviolent response. Where might you—guided by Spirit and your own traditions—foster meaningful intersections with these stories of grief, place, and sacred life so present in the community we share?

As a resource to your practice, we lift up Bull City Homicide’s online resource mapping Durham homicides (2010 to present), and the following prayerful reflections. And we welcome inquiries (vigil@nonviolentdurham.org) from neighbors in search of resourceful community in this immeasurable work.

God of all humanity,
in times of violence we see how inhuman we can be.
We pray for those who, today, are weighed down by grief.
We pray for those who, yesterday, were weighed down by grief.
And the day before, and all the days before the day before.
We remember especially our [sibling/neighbor, ...], whose life and death, beauty and blood, 
have marked life in this space in ways beyond our knowing.
We pray too, for those who turn us toward justice and peace.
Turn us all toward justice and peace.
Because we need it.
Amen.
["A Prayer in Times of Violence", Daily Prayer with the Corrymeela Community]

[God of the land,]
We honor this ground, 
this space and its stories. 
We take this moment,
because this place holds memory and meaning.

We breathe in:
the memories and the silences,
the seasons and the sacred.

May we move in tandem with the stories of this space. 
May we walk humbly in the the light and dark of this land. 
[In the name of all that is holy, amen.]

Why are you doing this, and why should I?

• We do this to affirm that “Durham’s vitality is built upon the health of our residents and the capacity of our community to foster and enhance the wellbeing of every citizen.” 
• We do this because every one of us knows the lovely, fragile thing it is to have a body, and the precious gift it is to be known, named, and called by name. 
• We do this out of a ragged, hopeful understanding that: “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” [James Baldwin]
• We do this in the firm belief that compassion is inseparable from prevention, and our response to violence mirrors the violence we are willing to accept and allow.