What We Do When the News Won’t Let Us Look Away

The Reverend Kay Dennis, Deacon Episcopal Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast

There are days when the news feels impossible to escape. Headlines arrive before we are fully awake. Images follow us through the day, unsettling, unfinished, unresolved. War, violence, displacement, grief—suffering streams toward us faster than our hearts can absorb it. We are told to stay informed, to pay attention, to care. And yet there comes a moment when attention itself begins to wound.

The question is not whether we should look away. The deeper question is how we look—and what we do when looking becomes too much.

Christian faith does not ask us to be indifferent to suffering. Nor does it demand that we consume every tragedy until we are exhausted and numb. Instead, it offers a different posture altogether: one that refuses both denial and despair. It teaches us how to remain open without being destroyed by what we see.

The danger of constant exposure is not simply sadness; it is distortion. When suffering is presented without context or care, it can shrink our capacity for compassion. We begin to skim pain rather than attend to it. We grow reactive instead of responsive. Or worse, we harden ourselves, mistaking emotional distance for resilience.

Faith insists on something more difficult. It asks us to stay present without pretending we can fix what we see. This is a profoundly countercultural discipline. We are trained to believe that attention must lead immediately to action, that outrage must produce solutions. But not all suffering can be resolved by our effort. Much of it calls first for witness.

To witness suffering is not to stare at it endlessly. It is to acknowledge it truthfully and refuse to let it become abstract. It is to resist the temptation to reduce human lives to headlines or statistics. When the news will not let us look away, faith teaches us to slow our gaze—to pray names instead of scanning numbers, to grieve particular lives rather than absorbing endless images.

The Christian tradition has always made room for lament. Lament is what we do when the world is broken and explanations fail. It is a form of prayer that does not rush to optimism or resolution. It allows sorrow to be spoken without being managed. In a culture that demands quick reactions and hot takes, lament restores moral depth. It keeps us human.

But lament alone is not enough. Faith also shapes how we carry what we have seen back into daily life. It reminds us that we are not called to bear the weight of the world alone. When the news overwhelms us, the answer is not withdrawal but shared burden. Community becomes essential. We speak our fear aloud. We pray together. We let others hold hope when we cannot.

There is also wisdom in setting limits. Constant exposure does not make us more faithful; it often makes us less attentive. Faith permits us to step back—not to escape responsibility, but to protect the inner stillness where compassion is sustained. Attention, like love, must be tended if it is to endure.

Perhaps most importantly, faith reframes the meaning of helplessness. When the news confronts us with suffering beyond our reach, we are tempted to despair. But the gospel refuses the idea that significance depends on scale. A single act of kindness, a single prayer, a single refusal to dehumanize another person matters. God’s work is not measured by visibility or speed. It is often hidden, patient, and relational.

When the news won’t let us look away, faith does not give us answers. It gives us a way of standing—grounded, honest, and open to grace. It teaches us how to see without becoming cruel, how to care without collapsing, how to remain human in a world that too often forgets how.

We cannot carry everything we see. But we can carry one another. And sometimes, that is the most faithful response of all.