Dear Brooklyn Church Family,
The Cruelest April, and Our Calling to Remember
We have now come through Lent and are entering the season of Eastertide. I wonder how you have spent this Lenten journey. As for me, I have spent these weeks wrestling each day with the long and searching passages of Luke’s Gospel.
And now, April arrives.
T. S. Eliot once called April “the cruelest month.” In The Waste Land, he described a world left barren by war—a landscape where spring had come, yet nothing seemed able to bloom. His words captured a generation marked by loss, disillusionment, and the sense that life had lost its meaning.
That phrase still speaks to us today. Not because April alone is cruel, but because every person has a season that feels that way. There are months, places, and anniversaries that carry memories too heavy to forget. Even when the world moves on, the heart remembers.
People often forget what does not belong to their own story. Yet each person carries sorrows that may remain for a lifetime. We may not fully understand another person’s pain, but Scripture gives us a clear calling: “Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.” Sometimes that is the most faithful and holy response we can offer.
To mourn with others is no small thing. There are many ways to do it. Some serve through justice, advocacy, education, counseling, or financial support. Others offer the quiet ministry of presence, a listening ear, a held hand, a faithful prayer. However we respond, what matters is that we do not look away. We remind one another, in word or in silence, “You are not alone. We remember. We are here.”
We should also be careful never to compare suffering. Even what seems small from a distance can feel overwhelming to the one carrying it. It is not our place to measure whose pain is greater. Our calling is both simpler and deeper: to offer compassion, encouragement, and the steady witness of love.
That calling extends beyond personal sorrow. It reaches into families, churches, communities, and the nations of the world. Today, as violence and war continue in the Middle East, innocent civilians are suffering, families are grieving, and many are living under fear and uncertainty. In moments like this, the church must not look away. We are called to pray for peace, to grieve with those who grieve, and to hold before God every life touched by the cruelty of war.
So what does the church do in a cruel month?
We remember. We remain present. We pray that the Lord would wash wounded hearts with mercy and bring comfort where sorrow still lingers. We pray that acts of terror, violence, war, and disaster will not continue to repeat themselves in this broken world. And wherever we can, we become small signs of God’s compassion through our advocacy, our presence, our kindness, and our prayers.
So many people still live with the ache of losing someone they love. For them, the wound has not simply disappeared. The memory still stings. The grief is still real. If we can walk beside them, pray with them, and weep with them, then perhaps even a cruel month may begin, little by little, to become a month of life again.
Perhaps this is part of our calling in the cruelest April: not to explain away pain, not to rush people past grief, but to remember, to remain, and to help one another rise again in the light of Christ’s resurrection.
Blessing,
Jinkyoung You