Speaking honestly in a time of fear

In recent weeks, our nation has witnessed acts of state violence that should never have occurred—lives ended, families shattered, and communities left reeling. The killing of Renee Macklin Good. The killing of Alex Jeffrey Pretti. The callousness with which these deaths have been explained away, minimized, or justified has compounded the harm. These are not isolated incidents. They are symptoms of something profoundly broken.

For many in our community—especially our international students, faculty, staff, and their families—this current moment is not experienced at a distance. It is lived in the body. It is carried in sleepless nights, altered routines, hesitations about leaving home, fears about visibility, heightened self-consciousness about speaking one’s native language in public, and questions that have no easy answers: Am I safe? Am I welcome? Does my life here matter?

If this is how you are feeling, I want to say this as clearly as I can: your fear or unease is not an overreaction, and your presence here is not conditional. You belong to this community.

Others will ask: Where is the public outcry for the thousands of neighbors who sit in detention centers? For Latiné migrants killed on our border, fishermen bombed at sea? Where is the wailing when Somali children are torn from their families? Why did it take these victims to galvanize wider cultural empathy and action? These, too, are righteous and critical questions. No statement can encompass the fullness of our grief; no letter will name every calamity. My faith moves me to speak, but my heart also breaks with every word left unspoken.

Pastoral care does not mean offering reassurance where none is warranted. It means telling the truth about the world as it is, while refusing to surrender the world as it must be. Scripture is unflinching about naming unjust power, about grieving innocent blood, and about God’s particular attentiveness to the sojourner, the stranger, and those made vulnerable by systems they did not choose.

We are a theological seminary. That means our calling is not only to interpret texts, or even the world, but to form people capable of loving it truthfully—and resisting it when love requires resistance.

This moment asks something of us.

This moment will call forth different responses from different people, and that is not a weakness of the community—it is one of its gifts. Some among us will feel compelled to act publicly: to organize, to advocate, to stand where visibility itself is a form of protection. Others will work more quietly and no less faithfully: ensuring that students and colleagues are not left alone with their fear, that practical needs are met, that accurate information replaces rumor, and that accompaniment replaces isolation. Still others will labor in classrooms, libraries, and study groups, refusing thin or distorted theologies and insisting that Christian faith cannot be disentangled from the dignity of human life. And many will pray—not as retreat from responsibility, but as a way of remaining open to God when grief, anger, and fatigue tempt us toward despair.

No response is complete on its own. Public action without care hardens. Care without truth exhausts itself. Study without embodied commitment risks becoming evasive. Prayer without courage becomes sentimental. What we need—what this moment requires—is not uniformity of response, but a community willing to let its many forms of faithfulness strengthen one another rather than compete with one another.

Formation for ministry has never been about choosing the right posture and dismissing the rest. It has always been about learning how truth, compassion, courage, and hope must be held together if the church is to bear credible witness in a wounded world.

Each of these responses matters. None of them is sufficient on its own.

What will not help—what cannot help—is our turning against one another, questioning one another’s faithfulness or motives, or retreating into the safety of abstraction. The work before us requires more than outrage and more than piety. It requires community that is disciplined, courageous, and tender enough to hold one another in fear without normalizing the conditions that produce it.

To our international members especially: you should not have to navigate this alone. Seminary leadership continues to actively work to ensure access to accurate information, legal resources, and pastoral support. More importantly, we are committed to cultivating a campus culture where vigilance does not replace trust, and where fear does not get the final word.

Jesus prayed not that his followers would be removed from danger, but that they would not be abandoned to it—and that, in their costly unity, the world might glimpse another way of being human. That prayer is not a sentimental hope. It is a demanding vocation.

Hearts are heavy right now. They should be. But heaviness need not lead to paralysis. If we stay with one another—truthfully, prayerfully, and in action—we may yet become the kind of community that does not look away, does not harden itself, and does not forget who its neighbors are.

May God grant us clarity where there is confusion, courage where there is fear, and the stubborn hope that justice is not an illusion, even now.

With hope and resolve,

The Rev. Dr. Javier A. Viera

President, Garrett Seminary