Psalm for the Martyrs of Nigeria by Jeff Callaway

Psalm for the Martyrs of Nigeria

By Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

"If one member suffer any thing, all the members suffer with it." — 1 Corinthians 12:26 (Douay-Rheims)

In Benue State the grass does not grow back the same after blood has soaked it.

The red clay remembers what the world has chosen to forget —

the night of the thirteenth into the fourteenth of June, the year of our Lord two thousand and twenty-five, when gunmen came on motorcycles out of the dark in pairs like something sent from the mouth of the pit —

and the Catholic mission at Yelwata held for a few minutes and then did not hold —

and at least one hundred and fifty souls who had already been stripped of everything once, already displaced, already sleeping on mission concrete because the Church was the last door open in their world —

crossed through fire into the arms of the martyrs.

The world gave Nigeria a paragraph. Turned the page. Moved on.

I will not move on.

God of armies —

I am not arriving at this page with the posture of ceremony.

I am arriving the way David arrived at the cave of Adullam — Saul's spear still ringing in the wall behind him, the world reduced to rock and dark and the sound of his own breathing — and the words left in him not poetry but blood.

I am standing before You with the names of the dead pressed against my chest like a coal from the altar —

and the question burning its way through every pew that still calls itself the Body of the living Christ:

Where. Have. We. Been.

Hear what the honest record shows.

Of every four Christians killed anywhere on earth for the name of Jesus —

three of them died in Nigeria.

Three out of four.

Open Doors counted the bodies: three thousand, four hundred and ninety of the four thousand, eight hundred and forty-nine martyred worldwide for their faith bled out in Benue and Plateau and Kaduna and Taraba and Yobe and Nasarawa —

the states whose names have not yet learned to break through American headlines.

In Benue — one thousand, three hundred and ten Christians killed. Twenty-nine Muslims.

In Plateau — five hundred and forty-six Christians killed. Forty-eight Muslims.

In northwestern Kaduna — one thousand, one hundred and sixteen Christians taken from roads and homes and churches. One hundred and one Muslims taken.

These are not sectarian numbers. These are targeting numbers. These are the fingerprints of systematic extermination pressed into the red earth of the Middle Belt while the court of international attention was occupied elsewhere with other things it considered more important.

Governor Caleb Mutfwang of Plateau State has said the word — genocide — and it fell into the silence like a stone into deep water and the ripple never reached Washington never reached Brussels never reached the Sunday bulletin of any church in suburban Texas.

The children of Zike village gathered on Palm Sunday — April the thirteenth, 2025 — the holiest threshold of the Christian year, the Sunday of the lifted branches, the day the whole Church learns again to cry Hosanna in the streets —

fifty-six were dead by morning. Fifteen of them children.

Children killed in their sleep, machetes drawn over cradles — the way Herod moved through Bethlehem — without asking names first, without requiring reason, without needing anything more than the faith their parents had given them.

A boy, seven years old, survived with a machete wound to the neck. His father shot dead before his eyes. His mother's arms severed from her body. His siblings beside him — gone.

Three days later he was still screaming in a hospital in Jos and there was no international camera in that room. No candlelight vigil. No hashtag that survived a Tuesday.

Lord God — when Herod slaughtered the innocents of Bethlehem, Rachel wept for them, and You recorded her weeping in the book that lasts forever.

Who is weeping for the children of Zike? Who is recording their names?

I need to say the name Leah Sharibu.

Slowly — because the world has a short memory and she has been living in the dark a very long time.

February the nineteenth, 2018. Dapchi, Yobe State. Government Girls' Science and Technical College. Five-thirty in the afternoon.

One hundred and ten girls taken into the bush by the Islamic State West Africa Province — the sons of Boko Haram, whose name in Hausa means Western education is forbidden.

A month later, through negotiations conducted in the dark, one hundred and four came home. Five died along the road.

One did not come home.

Because when they brought Leah Sharibu to the gate — when they named the price of the open road, the price of her mother's face, the price of every ordinary afternoon she might have lived —

the price was Jesus.

Fourteen years old. Surrounded by men who had already explained what they do to women who refuse.

She said no.

On the fourteenth of May, 2025, Leah Sharibu turned twenty-two — her eighth birthday in captivity.

Her mother Rebecca sat beside her daughter's photograph and opened the Book of Psalms because there was nothing else left to open.

The global Church was discussing other things.

Eight years.

Eight years of Leah Sharibu choosing Christ in a darkness none of us have ever been asked to enter.

Eight years of her mother counting birthdays on a calendar that will not move fast enough.

Eight years of official statements and diplomatic channels and advocacy campaigns that have not yet turned a single key in a single lock.

The medieval doctors of the Church called it fortitudo — the courage that does not require an audience, the endurance that holds when no one is watching and no rescue is coming and the night does not end.

Leah Sharibu does not know if anyone is still saying her name.

She holds Christ anyway.

I do not possess the language to stand outside that kind of faith and describe it adequately.

I only know that the Church she is holding Christ for owes her more than a prayer request buried in a bulletin between the bake sale notice and the parking lot committee update.

We owe her our voices. We owe her our fury. We owe her the organized, documented, sustained, ferocious attention of a Body that has not forgotten one of its own.

Lord of armies — Lord of the whirlwind — Lord who shook Sinai to its roots and brought the chariots of Pharaoh down into the sea —

I am asking You now in the raw and ferocious register of righteous anger that You Yourself built into the chest of David —

for justice.

Not as a theological category. Not as an eschatological footnote.

Justice. Here. For these. Now.

The forty-fourth Psalm did not ask it gently — Arise, why sleepest Thou, O Lord? Arise, and cast us not off to the end —

and neither will I.

The souls beneath the altar in the sixth chapter of Revelation did not ask it with measured pastoral tone — How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost Thou not judge and revenge our blood? —

and neither will I.

I am asking for the weight of Your justice to fall on the men who hold Leah Sharibu — and on every man who came on a motorcycle in the dark to burn a mission full of people who had nowhere else to sleep.

I am asking for the reckoning the courts of this world have refused to deliver.

I am asking You to see the seven-year-old boy still screaming in Jos and be at least as angry about it as I am —

and I am very angry.

Now I turn — not away from the altar but with the altar still burning behind me —

to the Church in the comfortable nations.

You who call yourself the Body of Christ.

What part of the Body are you?

What part of the Body goes insensate while another part hemorrhages? What part decorates itself while the wound spreads and the blood thins?

Paul did not suggest the law of the Body. He laid it down as architecture — if one member suffer any thing, all the members suffer with it —

and that law carries no geography exemption. No language exemption. No news cycle exemption. No this-is-too-complicated-and-far-away exemption.

Tertullian said it in blood-soaked Carthage while the emperors were still burning people — Sanguis martyrum semen Christianorum — the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church.

I believe that with every rebuilt bone in my body.

But Tertullian did not say it quietly. He said it in the public square with his name on it while the persecution was still active.

Cyprian of Carthage named the emperors. Named the apostates. Organized, argued, wept, wrote — and finally knelt on a field outside the city walls and gave the same witness he had demanded of his people.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church calls martyrdom the supreme witness — testimonium supremum — to the truth of the faith.

Nigeria is producing supreme witnesses at a pace that should have broken the silence of the global Church years ago.

That silence has a name and it is not patience and it is not wisdom and it is not holy endurance.

The displaced people of Yelwata had already lost everything once before June of 2025.

Already burned from their first homes. Already walking the red road to the one door still open —

the mission door —

not a campus not a conference center not a building with a donor portal —

a wall.

The last wall between them and the open ground.

They slept on its concrete floor because there was no other floor.

The men on the motorcycles burned the wall too.

That is what is happening in the Middle Belt of Nigeria — not in the past, not in a history book, not in a region too complicated to understand —

right now. This week. While we read this.

So I am saying to every person who reads this page and calls the Body home —

Say the names.

From the pulpit. At the altar. In the silence after Communion when the church is still and Christ is present and the moment is holy enough to hold the weight of this:

Yelwata. Zike. Dapchi. Benue. Kaduna. Plateau.

Say Leah Sharibu. Say the children of Palm Sunday. Say the seven-year-old boy still screaming in Jos. Say the names that nobody is saying.

Give your money to organizations with people in the actual burning — Aid to the Church in Need, Open Doors, International Christian Concern.

Demand your government hold Nigeria to the standard of accountability its Christian population is owed. Demand it with teeth. Demand it like someone who believes one body bleeds as one.

And then get on your knees and stay there.

Lord of the broken — Lord of the hunted — Lord who rose from Your throne to receive Stephen and has been standing ever since —

I believe You see Leah Sharibu in whatever room they keep her in.

I believe You know every name carved into the red clay of Benue that no human archive will ever find.

I believe the martyrs of Nigeria are not statistics in heaven.

They are the honored dead. The glorified. The ones whose white robes were washed in the blood of the particular choice they made when the price was named and they said no.

Lord — do not let them be forgotten on earth.

Let this page land like fire in the hands of the comfortable. Let someone who has never heard of Benue State, who has never said Leah Sharibu's name, who has never wept for the children of Zike —

read this today and be unable to look away again.

The Body is bleeding.

Not as a metaphor. Not as a theological proposition.

The Body is bleeding in Nigeria and the comfortable portion has largely chosen not to look —

and the Apostle's law has not changed because of that decision —

we are one —

the wound belongs to all of us —

and the blood on the grass of Benue State is on the hands of every member of the Body who knew and stayed silent.

Christ sealed this truth with His own.

Act like it.

Amen.

~ Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

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