Mary, Don’t You Weep

“Oh, Mary, don’t you weep. Oh, Martha, don’t you moan…”

This week, I saw Mary weep.

Not the Mary in Scriptures who stood at her brother’s tomb, but Mary the food vendor, weeping for those detained outside the gates of a federal immigration facility. For years now, she has served warm food by the curb of this building, its concrete worn by the footsteps of the damned, the desperate, and the devoted. This place has become her place of constant care and simple hospitality.

But something has changed. She says it has never felt this cruel.

She has noticed the detention vans leaving more frequently now. Just last week, a man with a heart condition left the building clutching his next appointment slip. He sat down beside her car, exhausted, having forgotten to take his medication. While resting and eating her food, he was suddenly taken back into custody, presumably headed to an immigration detention center, right there in front of Mary.

This week, Mary had stepped inside the building to use the restroom when a woman stumbled out, shell-shocked and sobbing, clinging to a loved one’s belt like it was the last piece of him she might ever hold. He had been taken. I saw her too, one of the moaning Marthas, undone by grief, crying into the open air with no one to answer. I walked beside her, but she wasn’t ready to receive consolation, not from a stranger. Then Mary emerged behind her, also weeping. She let me walk with her to her usual place behind her car and simply listen.

Mary’s eyes have seen too much. Her heart is overwhelmed.

She wonders, “Why are so many good people suffering?”

The cruelty is crescendoing. It is there in the tears, the belts, and the vans.

The cruelty is crescendoing. It is there in the tears, the belts, and the vans.

These are heavy days. If immigrant families and those who accompany them are to endure the years ahead, we must care for ourselves and one another with fierce tenderness. We must name the trauma and admit that even as we walk with others through their valleys, we are being wounded too.

Casa Alterna’s volunteers and staff are not immune to compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma.

We might notice a restless urge to fix, to solve, or to stay constantly busy.
We might hear teammates express feelings of not doing enough, even when they are giving their all.

I find myself napping most afternoons, always feeling behind on the rest of my work. Sometimes, I feel the pressure to have answers for every crisis, as if certainty could ease the pain.

These responses are natural. They show how deeply we care and how much this work touches us.

This is not a struggle we win with haste or force. It is a calling to steadfast presence, where love becomes our measure and truth our guide.

This is not a struggle we win with haste or force. It is a calling to steadfast presence, where love becomes our measure and truth our guide.

A volunteer and I recently reflected on this work of accompaniment as a kind of hospice care, tending to those facing deeply painful transitions with dignity and presence. Statistically, the prognosis may be grim. The systems may seem immovable. But that does not make our work futile. It makes it sacred.

And the sacred is not a place of certainty but of mystery. It is a place where agency and dignity can be reclaimed against all odds. Where an interior liberty can free even the most oppressed soul from the shackles of fear. Much of the world knows this. Most people on this planet live with uncertainty. The courage of those we accompany calls us not to pity but to reverence.

We are witnesses to redemption seeking to redefine our history. The deeper we listen to the stories and sorrows of our modern-day Marys and Marthas, the more we break and the more we are invited to unmask our privilege and choose a life of solidarity. The question for us is: In that breaking, will we allow more light and love to get through the cracks?

Harriet Tubman, Clara Barton, Oscar Romero, and a long line of ancestors are still singing. Can you hear them? They’re singing over us. Singing through us. Singing to Mary, and to every one of us whose hearts are raw from bearing witness:

“Pharaoh’s army got drowned in the Red Sea. Oh, Mary, don’t you weep.”

One day, though we do not know when, the empires will fall.
The silence of complicity will give way.
And justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Until then, we take heart in this:

Outside these gates, we witness a convergence of the wretched and despised from every corner of the world. Each morning they arrive, carrying fear, yes, but even more carrying hope.

They are a stream of living water,
Flowing through despair,
Washing over cruelty,
Carving a way, drop by drop, toward a more beautiful world.

“Pharaoh’s army got drowned in the Red Sea. Oh, Mary, don’t you weep.”