…let us remember particularly the mothers who grieve – for sons and daughters lost to our never-ending cycle of war and violence; to grinding poverty, hunger, and malnutrition; to preventable diseases like HIV/AIDS and malaria. Jesus Christ promises in the Sermon on the Mount:

Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.

That is not just a beautiful promise – though it is that – but, I think, it can also be read as a charge to Jesus’s followers. Let us be the (partial) fulfillment of the promise of Jesus, and commit ourselves to comforting the mothers – and the fathers, and the brothers and sisters, and the sons and daughters – whom Jesus joins in mourning for the victims of the injustices of this world.

And let us commit ourselves to the long, hard, impossible-without-God task of working to end these injustices, so that fewer mothers mourn in the future.