From The Washington Post: 

When there are mass shootings, like this week in Chicago, or the previous week in Toledo — or, really, any week in this country — Episcopal Bishop Scott Hayashi thinks of that split second in a Tacoma record store decades ago. The beat when he turned toward a man with a gun to ask, “What did you say?” and saw his own 19-year-old face in the man’s mirrored shades before his body hit the floor.

Hayashi spent two months in the ICU and almost died after being shot in the stomach during the robbery. He now advocates with a group of other U.S. Episcopal bishops on the issue of gun violence. In 2018 the clerics decided their push was missing something: a prayer.

What resulted was a pleading that could only have been created by and for our modern America: “A Litany In The Wake Of A Mass Shooting.”

The prayer is among a new generation of spiritual tools specifically designed for the horror of mass shootings. Written by an Episcopal priest for the bishops, it was constructed with the cruel assumption of its growth, with additional shootings that result in more than four deaths continually added at the end. The litany now takes more than 12 minutes to pray.

“The function of this is keeping things in memory. Many people would like to forget it. Memory is one of the most important things, that makes us human. We can look back upon things and learn,” said Hayashi, now the bishop of Utah. “It’s like ‘Say her name: Breonna Taylor!’ Repeating it makes the events, the people holy. It sets those people apart with meaning, versus just a senseless act of violence.”

Hayashi recites the litany in the mix of his private prayer routines and said it earlier this week.

The prayer begins: “God of peace, we remember all those who have died in incidents of mass gun violence in this nation’s public and private spaces,” before launching into three-line sections, each with the same structure, but with their own unique horrifying details.

Read on. 

The article mentions this Catholic prayer:

In 2016, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops offered “Prayer for Peace In Our Communities.” The prayer, which refers to being “surrounded by violence and cries for justice,” is also, like the litany, constructed as a pleading. It asks God for virtue and to strengthen hearts “so that they beat only to the rhythm of your holy will. . . . Strip away pride, suspicion, and racism.”