How long o lord

How long before you answer?! I turn to Psalms like this one. The more times you read it, the deeper it will reach into your soul. You might want to remember that these are not just the words of the psalmist, they are words of the Lord as well. This psalm is so relevant now with the state that our country and our leadership is in.

This gives me comfort and you could not have posted this at a better time! Thank you! Thank you so much for your timely posts. Thanks for the insight and the Psalm. It will be with us as we pray. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Will you utterly forget me? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I carry sorrow in my soul, grief in my heart day after day? How long will my enemy triumph over me?

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Get fresh music recommendations delivered to your inbox every Friday. Purchasable with gift card. God smelled it, tasted it. As of old, it is again today. As a year-old black Jesuit priest, this is a familiar smell for me. It stinks. Its smell and the reactions it provokes in black Americans is impossible to avoid.

It is a strange and bitter fruit. The video that allowed the world to witness the murder of George Floyd stinks as well. I have undergone periods of paralysis, disbelief, anger, numbness, fear and despair since watching those agonizing nine minutes. I feel paralyzed because I am away from the community that I normally rely upon to process this filth.

I am angry at the banal and vanilla statements put out by many, including too many Catholic leaders. I have become numb by the sheer number of these events. But there is something new to me in this experience.

It is the fear I feel not just for myself or for black Americans in general, but for the 80 young black children who are students at the middle school I have been asked to lead: Brooklyn Jesuit Prep. I fear what this summer has in store for them and other black children of central Brooklyn. I fear that without summer jobs or camps, and faced with over-policing, more black youths will have encounters with police—encounters that often do not end well for people who look like them.

In the face of those nine minutes, words telling these black and brown children how much I love them, how much they are valued seem to fall flat. I must admit that there have been times that I have found it difficult to hold despair at bay. But it is not only that they fall flat; it is that these children are already loved; they already know they are loved as children of God.

Yes, we all need reminding of this, but in the face of these nine minutes they do not only need to be told that they are loved. They are not void of love. They are not victims. It is not they who need a message but our world, our country and our collaborators.

Perhaps you do as well. As a black Jesuit and a priest, I mainly live in a white world. Which means it is my burden, responsibility and task to talk about events like this with my white brothers and sisters. These conversations happen after every sensationalized black death. Sometimes my friends and collaborators just want to talk. Sometimes they call to listen. Usually, these conversations include a desire to better understand or to participate in some way.

But I must admit that I often avoid these conversations—and not because these people are unimportant to me or because these issues do not need to be discussed.

I avoid them because they are exhausting. They are exhausting because, I have found, that while white people can engage these issues at their leisure, discuss them in person or on social media and then withdraw again to their daily concerns, I cannot do that. The students whom I love and for whom I am responsible cannot do that.

Black America cannot do that.