Psalm Against Silence — For the Persecuted Church by Jeff Callaway

Psalm Against Silence — For the Persecuted Church

By Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

"And if one member suffer any thing, all the members suffer with it: or if one member glory, all the members rejoice with it." — 1 Corinthians 12:26

They are burning them alive in Benue State while we are arguing about the color of the carpet in the sanctuary.

Thirty-two Christians before breakfast.

Every morning. That is what the numbers say. Numbers we have trained ourselves not to read.

In the first two hundred and twenty days of 2025 alone seven thousand and eighty-seven souls dragged off the map of the living in Nigeria because they bore the name of Christ —

and nineteen thousand, one hundred churches turned to ash and rubble and not one homily in the comfortable West was rearranged for it.

Not one.

I want to speak plainly to the Body of Christ today, not with theological architecture, not with the scaffolding of a formal lament — I want to drag us past the threshold of comfortable grief into the room where the wound is.

Because we have not earned the formal lament yet. We have not earned the beautiful structure. The beautiful structure is what you build after you have wept until you had nothing left. We have not wept yet.

Lord, let that land.

On June 22, 2025, a man walked into Mar Elias Greek Orthodox Church in Damascus, Syria, during the Divine Liturgy — the Liturgy of the Living God — and detonated himself inside the house of worship.

Twenty-five. Thirty. The counts differ. The dead do not differ.

They were at Mass. They were at Mass, Lord.

And the Syrian Christian who survived told the world: "This was our hardest day. But most concerning is the general atmosphere of extremism."

Most concerning.

He still speaks in the careful language of the endangered — the soft vocabulary of a people who have learned that screaming draws more fire —

while we in the comfortable West still argue about the parking lot and the sound system and the youth ministry budget.

Syria had one and a half million Christians before the war. She has three hundred thousand now. That is not emigration. That is erasure.

Iraq had one point two million. She has one hundred and twenty thousand. Mosul held a Christian liturgy for eighteen hundred years. Eighteen hundred years, the Mass was said in Mosul.

Until it was not.

The last Mass in Mosul and we were barely awake for it.

I must confess something before the face of God.

I, too, have scrolled past the headline. I, too, have clicked away from the photograph. Not because I am evil. Because I have been trained to live at the comfortable altitude where suffering is a statistic that does not personally arrive.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church says, in its treatise on the human community, that God has willed us to need one another — that solidarity is not a sentiment but a virtue, a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good, to the good of all and of each individual.

We are determined. We are determined about many things.

We are determined about our politics, our national identity, our preferred television opinion —

but we are not yet determined about the two hundred thousand Christians murdered in Nigeria since the year 2010. Not yet determined about the bishops of Benue State burying farmers who knelt for Morning Prayer and never came home.

This is not a political poem. This has nothing to do with parties or governments. This is a poem written by a sinner to sinners about the specific kind of sin that looks like nothing at all — the sin of the unlocked door, the sin of comfortable distance, the sin that Scripture names with the most terrifying simplicity:

"As long as you did it not to one of these least, neither did you do it to me."

There are children in Kebbi State who went to school at Saint Mary's Catholic School and were kidnapped in the middle of November 2025 by men with guns who came for them because they are Christian.

The Bishop of Kontagora said: "These children left their homes in search of education and were instead confronted with terror."

His heart is broken. He said his heart is broken.

And ours — where is ours?

Lord, where is the Church's heart?

I know where it is. It is insulated. It is safe. It is wrapped in the thick wool of Western prosperity and the comfortable assumption that Christianity is a personal lifestyle choice rather than a blood covenant with a slaughtered God and His still-slaughtered Body.

We are the Body. We say it at Mass. We believe it at Mass in the small and gasping way that we believe most things that cost us nothing —

but when the Body bleeds in Nigeria, we do not bleed.

When the Body burns in Damascus, we do not burn.

When the Body disappears from Mosul, from Aleppo, from the plains of Nineveh where the Assyrian Christians held the faith for longer than America has existed —

we do not disappear with them.

We turn the page.

We scroll.

We go to brunch.

Three hundred and eighty-eight million Christians are living right now under conditions of high persecution and discrimination.

Three hundred and eighty-eight million.

One in seven of every Christian alive on this earth wakes inside a cage or a crosshair.

And the Western Church puts out a statement and returns to its schedule.

A statement.

What is a statement to a mother in Plateau State who is identifying her son's body by the shape of his hands because his face is gone?

What is a statement to a Syrian priest who is celebrating Mass with one eye on the door?

What is a statement to a Chaldean patriarch who said in a voice that should have cracked the spire of every cathedral in the world:

"We feel forgotten and isolated."

Forgotten. By the Body they are part of. Isolated. From the communion they share bread with.

Lord God of hosts — God of the Psalms, God of the Suffering Servant, God who did not look away from Your own Son's execution —

are we going to make Your Chaldean children say that they are forgotten and call it acceptable?

The souls under the altar in Revelation cry out: "How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and revenge our blood?"

How long.

They do not ask politely. They do not preface it with a thank-you. They have been waiting and they want to know how long.

I am borrowing their question.

How long, O Church, will you let the martyrs cry alone?

How long will you sit in the padded pew of your insured and climate-controlled cathedral while your brothers are carried out of their burning churches in the red country of their own faithfulness?

How long before solidarity stops being a paragraph in the Catechism and becomes a wail in the nave?

I am not asking for a crusade. I am not asking for violence. I am asking for the one thing the Western Church has refused to give them —

the acknowledgment that they exist, that their dying is our dying, that their children are our children, that their altars are our altars, and that when those altars burn, something burns in us or we are not what we claim to be.

I am asking for the ancient cry of Isaiah: "Cry, cease not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet."

Not a statement. A trumpet.

Not a footnote. A trumpet.

Not a prayer chain that dissolves by Tuesday. A trumpet.

This is not a psalm with a neat resolution.

I will not give you the tidy turn where lament becomes praise and the wound closes and we all feel better about ourselves.

Because they are still dying. They are dying right now as you read this.

Before you finish this line, another Christian in Nigeria has paid for the name of Christ with everything he had.

The Body does not get to feel better while one member still bleeds.

That is what Paul said. That is what the doctrine says. That is what we cannot outrun with our programming or our platforms or our very sincere regrets.

We are not spectators of martyrdom. We are the Body.

The Body does not watch its own members die from a safe distance and call it compassion.

The Body breaks open. The Body bleeds. The Body demands. The Body refuses the comfortable silence that is complicit in the slaughter.

Lord — let that begin today. Let it begin in the nave of this poem, the only church I own, the only altar I was given.

Let the silence crack.

Let it crack.

~Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

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