Draw Close in Your Hearts

Draw close in your hearts.

A child like a flower wet with morning dew, a beautiful angel, standing bewildered, asking his brother — not yet twelve years old — as they stand in an empty square in Rome:

— Where did Father go? Where did Mother go? They exchange lost glances, and the answer comes from his brother: — They went to the sky.

The little child looks up at the sky, cups his hands around his mouth, and calls out: Baba, Baba. He repeats the call. But death has no echo in the time of corona.

Who will care for these two children, with the streets empty and the doors locked, in a time of fear and silence that eats dreams and scatters them?

Who protects whom?

The child will keep sending his calls to the sky. And the sky is far away. Nothing echoes his voice but locked streets and grieving houses and people inhabited by fear.

— Stay away from each other.

— And to whom shall we entrust our loved ones and our lovers’ songs? To whom shall we tell our love stories and leave the shores of our dreams?

And the answer comes, as if a whisper: Draw close to each other in your hearts.

Perhaps the child was about to ask: Has God abandoned this place?

He will call and call until his lips go dry, his words stumble, and the voice and its echo are lost. For the sky is still far away.

Death is never late. It is a game that begins with a first cry announcing arrival, and the cry dies at the journey’s end — as if life were a dream from which death awakens us.

What changed everything we were, making us flee and hide behind masks and distance ourselves from one another, leaving even the houses of God — the call to prayer saying: “Pray in your homes”?

Where are our projects, our money, our poverty, our piety, and the atrocities of our deeds? None of it saved us. We went to hide in our homes, hoping to find safety, and began mocking our condition, our women, and what our destinies have come to.

Some mocked what we are in and spoke of a grand conspiracy. Others poured their rage upon poor food that caused this chaos. Others began searching for evidence that we knew of the disease long ago.

And we forgot people with no shelter, homes with no food, patients with no medicine, children with no schools, people who lost their jobs and their livelihood.

Fear divided us just as corruption, misgovernment, the plunderers of the country, and subservience to others divided us. And we forgot the homeland and its people.

Who will feed the hungry and those who lie awake from hunger? Who will help them, while some of us distribute the crumbs from their tables just to photograph them as poor wretches and publish their pictures as they receive their handouts?

O, the mockery of fate! O, the wickedness of the deed! This is not how we show mercy to one another. He who gives with his right hand should not let his left hand know. Such is the way of giving — not showing off and displaying need.

The question remains: how do we extend our hands to the needy and the hungry? Do we not need to emerge from the cocoon of fear into planned volunteer work, built on knowledge of the needy and the dignified poor in every neighborhood, so we may offer them help — as long as those in authority do not allocate money even for people’s health and lives, and some of them still prefer a dance and banquets for sycophants over even merely considering the needs of others?

Who will take the right step? That is the question.

Prayer to God finds no echo as long as we do not change what is wrong within ourselves, our demeaning view of each other’s humanity, as long as there are thieves, murderers, and slaves among us — as long as the fear of remaining silent about the truth nests in the hearts of others.

Yet the cry of the oppressed remains closest to the sky.