[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 7]
[House]
[Pages 9708-9709]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

                                 PRAYER

  Reverend Kevin Kitrell Ross, Unity of Sacramento, Sacramento, 
California, offered the following prayer:
  May we turn within and look higher to the God of our understanding 
and pray.
  Loving Presence, we invoke from the celestial balconies the witness 
of the pioneers of our progress whose bloodied journeys marshaled 
unprecedented faith and birthed a new nation of radical inclusion.
  Bless these sons and daughters of promise gathered in this, the 
people's House. Let them reach higher for crowns of conscience to 
exemplify compassion and bring from their districts to their desks 
sharp pencils that carve

[[Page 9709]]

on their hearts the faces of freedom that they represent.
  Let this House be an incubator for our best ideals, not a prison for 
our poorest politics.
  Let these heroes and sheroes of the people's House summon the 
intellectual imagination and intuitive navigation to serve bolder 
together and break through the ideological gridlock that arrests the 
potential of our great Republic.
  Let these innovators of cooperation and builders of the beloved 
community reunite these States of America and lead the way for a world 
that works for all.
  This is enough. In the name of a love supreme we pray, and so it is.
  Amen.

                          ____________________