How do you do it? How do you see all your children dying and still keep seeing?

I’m sure you don’t look. I’m sure you turn away, close your eyes, cover your head. I’m sure you don’t look but still see. Tell me how you do it.

Tell me how I can change my vision, how I can see farther, how I can accept a world that’s so distant from the city that I love.

Tell me how you walk down the streets where I was raised, how you see the neighborhood where I learned what manhood meant.

Tell me how you notice what I remember and how you still keep noticing where all that love still sits.

Tell me how you keep your heart soft when the images across every screen fundamentally harden my grip on my sons’ necks for fear that what I see is all there is.

Tell me how you do it.

Tell me how you stay with it, present to it, unflinching in divine love, how you posture yourself on the pavement of the undefended.

Tell me how you’re so at home on the floors of 79th and 63rd and up north where NBC-5 doesn’t report on all the same pains that happen on the west side.

Tell me how you do it. Tell me how you see this. Tell me how you do it even if you don’t look.

Tell me how to see.

I’m thinking of people of who feel especially disinherited. I want you to think of them the way you always do.

Grant them the light of your company in the midst of this present darkness.

Give them the lift of love when the weight of their world feels depressing.

Replace their burden with the yoke of grace, the weight of glory, the heaviness of splendor.

There is so much in the way right now, so much that makes loving hard.

Make it a touch easier today, this week.

Make love among us possible so that justice rolls and runs like raging waters.

The litter of the week frames my prayers. Garbage phrases, unconsidered decisions, poorly chosen statements. They’re all in my mind as I pray.

I know you’ve seen these things, heard them the way I have. I wonder what you’re saying. I wonder if we’re listening.

Make us listeners. Better listeners. Listeners period. Help us to hear you. Help us to hear ourselves. And then each other.

Perhaps we can surrender some of our words when we hear. Perhaps there’s room in our listening for you to work.