An awful Advent hymn

By Katharine E. Harmon, December 13, 2025

Another active shooter. Another life. And another.
Be strong, fear not.

This is a desert, a parched land. There are students hiding under their desks in the dark.
Your God comes to save you.

Death is hiding in the streets of Providence.
Lord, come and save us. May sorrow and mourning flee.

Can we do more than offer thoughts and prayers?
No more violence. No more weapons. No more.

The Lord secures justice for the oppressed.
The way of the wicked he thwarts.

Then the desert and the parched land will exult.
Children will have no fear, and parents have no reason to weep.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Pray for all the people of Brown University, of Providence, RI, and all the corners of the earth where broken souls strangled by evil take the lives of the innocent. Pray for an end to gun violence.

Katharine E. Harmon

Katharine E. Harmon, Ph.D., is Project Director for the Obsculta Preaching Initiative at Saint John’s School of Theology and Seminary in Collegeville, Minnesota.  A Roman Catholic pastoral liturgist and American Catholic historian, Harmon is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s liturgical studies program.  She has contributed over a dozen articles and chapters to the fields of both liturgical studies and American Catholicism.  She is the author of  There Were Also Many Women There: Lay Women in the Liturgical Movement in the United States, 1926-1959 (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2013) and Mary and the Liturgical Year: A Pastoral Resource  (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 2023). She edits the blog, Pray Tell.

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