A prayer for the children gunned down in our streets

Those weekly recitations might sound rote and mechanical to some ears. The prayers, however, aren’t just for show. They are heartfelt in the belief that God hears prayers.

It’s clear that, unfortunately, many others don’t.

That lesson was driven home in the hours and days after last Sunday’s morning service.

Sometime before 1 p.m. Sunday, a teenage boy was shot on Birney Place in Southeast D.C. and taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. An hour and a half later, another boy was found shot, but conscious and breathing, on Massachusetts Avenue SE. He, too, was taken to a hospital.

Shortly after 4 p.m., two teens were shot on Stanton Road SE. One was found conscious and breathing. The second made it to the hospital on his own.

That was Sunday.

Just after 11 a.m. Monday, two teens were shot on Warder Street NW. Twenty minutes later, a boy was shot in the leg and a man was shot in the stomach on Columbia Road NW.

On Thursday, 15-year-old Andre Robertson was sitting on his great-grandmother’s porch on 48th Place NE when a car pulled up around 3:30 p.m. Three people got out and opened fire, striking Robertson multiple times. He was pronounced dead at the hospital.

This Sunday, and on all the Sundays, and in morning and evening prayer services in the days ahead, people in this city will be heard praying for an end to the shootings, bloodshed and heartbreaks caused by the violence choking the life out of this city.

Some of you might be sick of reading this kind of column. I, too, have despaired of going down this written road year after year, month after month, seemingly day after day. But we can’t pretend that oceans of weapons are not out there. And that there aren’t people in our city, at younger and younger ages, who are able and willing to fire bullets and plunge knives into the bodies of others.

There’s no escaping that grim, ghastly reality.

As with some of you, and my fellow congregants, my focus has not been limited to putting words on a page. Living here and seeing the residues of violence up close — yellow crime-scene tape, kids in handcuffs, mothers with haunted eyes, politicians and public servants searching for answers, for anything that will make the problems go away or at least to change the subject; my own setbacks (mentored kids kept alive, out of jail, but not on solid ground) — those things keep me at this.

As do the lingering thoughts of gunned-down children lying on the streets.

D.C. crime prevention and diversion programs — city-funded interventions to get at “root causes” — are not to be criticized or scoffed at. But they can only supplement, and in no way supplant, what is missing: the sustaining glue of close, enriching and supporting family that begins at birth and grows along with our children.

This isn’t finger-pointing or shaming or any of that other rot that inhibits self-examination. It’s about the shared commitment evoked at the beginning of this column: recognition that faith without good works is nothing; that we must be shaken from our complacency and cry out for change. A commitment that means stepping beyond prayer and stepping up to offer time and treasure, whether in personal aid, or charitable contributions or directing our taxes to support children trying to make their way.

That one way — hard though it might be and with community roadblocks along the way — is to build families, rear children, reinforce values and protect them with loving arms. These are steps that might help get us to a place where, as a community, it may finally be said, “No more, no more, no more shall perish.”