He didn’t raise his voice, yet it seemed to find every hidden corner of the room. By speaking to the “many,” he gathered together people who rarely saw themselves on the same side: those who had been crushed by indifference, and those who had grown used to looking away. The word worked like a slow key, turning in locks they hadn’t realized were there. No one was excused, but no one was discarded.
As his blessing widened to hold both wound and weapon, the air thickened with a different kind of responsibility. Not the shame that freezes, but the kind that asks, quietly, “What now?” In that shared stillness, “many” became less a number and more a promise—that we might learn to live as if every life alters our own, and that mercy and courage are not opposites, but the same hard, necessary breath.
