Every night at 8 p.m., after the war began, Pope Francis called Holy Family Church in Gaza. Every night until he drew his last breath, Francis faithfully picked up the phone and checked in.

I haven’t been able to get this picture out of my head.

Actually, what I haven’t been able to get out of my head is the image of what happened after the Pope spoke with Fr. Romanelli, the pastor. After the assembled community, listening in on speaker phone, said hello. AfterFrancis asked about the bombings of that day, about whether they had food, if there was clean water. After he asked for the names of the ones who were hurt. After he heard about the losses around them, about the new people sheltering in the church. After Francis hung up. 

This is the image that I can’t get out of my head: the handset of the phone replaced and silent. Francis alone, eyes closed and head inclined, silent. 

I don’t know this, of course. It’s my mental image, and it might not be how it happened. But try as I might, I can’t get this vision of Francis—bowed down, stillness surrounding him, praying in silence—out of my head.

In spite of being the pope, Francis couldn’t fix the situation in Gaza. He couldn’t relieve the pain of those with whom he spoke every night. God knows he tried: he issued appeals for peace, he met with families of Israeli hostages, he called for an investigation of genocide, he decried growing antisemitism, he urged Hamas to release prisoners. But he couldn’t fix the situation, couldn’t end the war, couldn’t even make sure people had clean water.

Still, every day, he faithfully called and witnessed. 

In my experience, the hardest work of all is the work of simply witnessing. When bodies are broken, when suffering is present, when no end or solution is in sight, simply being with a suffering one is excruciating. Everything in my body wants to run away from these people and places where I feel powerless to help.

Staying with those people and in those places is absolutely necessary. 

Because faithful witnessing is the start of real prayer, the prayer of contemplative solidarity that occurs when we come alongside each other in the heart of Love. It’s this kind of prayer that softens us and changes our tightly held ideas. It’s this kind of prayer that moves us out of the way so that the Spirit can flow. It’s this kind of prayer that will reveal the actions that we are called to take. It’s this kind of prayer that forces us into a deeper reliance on the Holy and a willingness to see the world with a different pair of eyes.

But it has to start with the painful act of witnessing.

The Easter and post-Easter gospels are rife with the question of witnessing. There are witnesses who accompany the dying Jesus, witnesses who run away, witnesses who believe, witnesses who want to see for themselves, witnesses who stand in front of the risen Christ and still can’t see him, witnesses who only recognize Jesus when he feeds them.

It’s always interesting to me that the women who witnessed at the foot of the cross are also the first to witness the evidence of the Resurrection. It’s also interesting that they can’t necessarily see what it means. The evidence of our own eyes can be insufficient to wake us up. Waking up requires that we see with the heart. When Mary runs into Jesus in the garden, she doesn’t recognize him until she hears the voice of her Beloved. Cleopas and his walking partner—likely his wife Mary, who was among the women at Golgotha—need to experience the bread being broken in order to have their hearts broken open to Christ. 

So steadfast witnessing is the start—but not the end—of how we stand with the suffering of the world. The end is a kind of wild letting go into the overwhelming, creative glory of God: it is opening the eyes of our heart to see The Beloved. The end is letting ourselves see, and believe, that new life is among and within us. The end is beginning to live as if the living Christ were really risen, inhabiting our hearts even as—especially because?—they are breaking. Even as we do everything within our power to excise and heal the corruption that cripples this world.

These days, if you are paying even a little bit of attention, there’s a lot to witness. We might sometimes want to hide from all this suffering: I know I do. But if we are being faithful—as the women were faithful, as Pope Francis was faithful—we will know that witnessing is the very thing that can lead us to recognize The Beloved in this world. Witnessing is the very thing that can shift us from self-centered fear into right action, regardless of the “success” of that action. Witnessing is the very thing that can lead us to recognize that The Beloved lives in us, and loves through us, for as long as we draw breath.