There is a particular kind of sorrow that comes not from one terrible event, but from realizing how easily we have grown accustomed to terrible things. This week, many of us have heard that a military execution may be livestreamed for public viewing. Whatever one believes about justice, punishment, or the gravity of a terrible crime, something in the human spirit should recoil at the thought of a death being offered as something to watch.

We are not called to be naive. Evil is real. Grief is real. The families and communities wounded by violence deserve honesty, remembrance, and care. But there is a difference between accountability and spectacle; between a solemn recognition that human life has been violated, and the transformation of a human death into a public event.

Somewhere along the way, we have learned to look too quickly, judge too loudly, and feel too little. The screen brings the world into our hands, but it can also place a pane of glass between us and the suffering of others. We see images of war, cruelty, disaster, and death, and then scroll onward. We become informed, but not necessarily compassionate. We become loud, but not necessarily loving.

How did we get here?

Perhaps we got here one small surrender at a time. A joke that made cruelty seem clever. An outrage that made us feel righteous. A feed that rewarded anger more than understanding. A habit of seeing people first as enemies, then as abstractions, then as entertainment. Callouses do not form all at once. They form through repetition—until the heart that once flinched at suffering barely notices it at all.

The Finger Lakes are entering their most beautiful and most honest season. The hills are burning with red and gold, and the vineyards hang heavy with fruit. Yet autumn also tells the truth: the leaves are letting go. The air sharpens. The fields grow quiet. What was lush in summer becomes bare and exposed.

Autumn does not shame the trees for losing their leaves. It reveals them. Without the covering of green, we can see the shape of the branches, the strength that held the season together, and the bare architecture of what remains. Maybe this is what lament can do for us. It strips away the bright distractions and shows us the shape of our souls. It asks whether compassion still lives in our branches, or whether we have allowed the cold to settle too deeply into the wood.

The prophet Jeremiah wept for his people. Jesus wept over Jerusalem. Scripture does not treat tears as weakness; it treats them as evidence that the heart has not entirely gone to sleep. To weep is to insist, against all the noise, that every human being still bears the image of God—even the guilty, even the broken, even those whose actions horrify us.

So perhaps our prayer this week should not begin with a verdict. Perhaps it should begin with a wound.

God, in your mercy, soften what has become hard in us.
God, in your mercy, awaken what has become numb.
God, in your mercy, keep us from mistaking vengeance for justice, spectacle for truth, or numbness for strength.
God, in your mercy, teach us to weep again—over violence, over loss, over the callouses we have allowed to form upon our hearts.

May we become a people who do not look away from suffering, but who also do not make a spectacle of it. May we remember that mercy is not sentimentality. Mercy is the difficult, holy refusal to let another person’s humanity disappear—even when we are grieving, even when we are angry, even when the world tells us that hardness is wisdom.

God, in your mercy, hear our weeping. And teach us, in this autumn season, how to let what is dead fall away—so that compassion may live again.