What I am actually asking for
This entry began as a set of Latin formulations about banners and people protected according to what their proxies had relayed. I want to keep the meaning while taking away the mechanical feeling of the original list. These are not guarantees, weapons, or permission slips. They are written intentions: a way of stating that protection must be specific, proportionate, lawful, and faithful to the person whose interests are being represented.
The central formulation is: Vexilla mea et homines mei rite protegantur, defendantur, sanentur, serventur atque adiuventur, secundum ea quae procuratores eorum ad hoc scriptum rettulerunt. In English: may my banners and my people be properly protected, defended, healed, saved, and assisted according to what their proxies relayed for this writing. The repeated phrases are deliberate. They slow me down long enough to notice that protection, healing, rescue, and assistance are related but not identical responsibilities.
I also use a shorter prayer: God, guard my banners; protect, defend, heal, save, and properly assist my people only in the way their proxies relayed for this writing, with consent, dignity, freedom, and peace. The word only is important. It keeps the wish from expanding beyond its authority.
Protection without domination
When I say banners, I mean the symbols, identities, projects, and places gathered under my care. When I say people, I mean actual people whose lives cannot be reduced to symbols. A banner may be preserved. A person must be listened to. No one should be defended through hatred, controlled in the name of healing, or made to carry a false burden because someone else believes they know what is best.
- Protection should preserve freedom, dignity, personal boundaries, and consent.
- Defense should be just, proportionate, effective, and as peaceful as the circumstances allow.
- Healing should be offered, never imposed, and should include body, mind, heart, and spirit where the person wants that language.
- Saving should mean helping someone reach safety, not deciding their entire future for them.
- Assistance should arrive through qualified, lawful, trustworthy people and practical resources.
If the proxy’s message is unclear, action should pause until clarity is possible. A proxy can communicate within legitimate authority; a proxy cannot erase the person’s own will. I want what is relayed to be understood faithfully and without distortion, and I want any harmful interpretation to be stopped peacefully rather than carried forward because a document happens to sound formal.
Healing, refuge, and completion
The healing section asks for wounds to be treated carefully, stability to return, fear to ease, hope to be renewed, and inner peace to come back in a way the person can accept. It also asks for no one to be forced into recovery. That may sound like a contradiction, but it is the ethical centre of the whole entry: care has to be strong enough to help and restrained enough to remain care.
The saving and facilitation language imagines safe pathways, lawful refuge, proper resources, and good helpers arriving at the right time. It asks that unjust obstacles be removed without creating a new injustice. It asks that what was rightly begun be completed well and that what is harmful be brought to a peaceful stop.
I know the difference between a carefully written intention and a verified change in the world. The first can orient my conduct; it cannot replace emergency services, medical care, consent, or accountability. I keep these formulations because language can reveal the boundaries of a desire. At their best, they make my protective imagination answerable to the people it claims to protect.