Editorial February 1, 1988 Issue

The real connection

Michael D. Rissler

A reporter who has traveled throughout the Americas for the last five years wrote three sentences that would be hard to equal for their succinctness and ability to capture the tremendous contrast between bondage and the bonds of love. She writes: "A little boy with his head shaved and trousers five sizes too big is learning to fly a newspaper kite. He does not know how to play, his childhood having been spent on the streets picking pockets, shining shoes, and scavenging garbage. But his face lights up, and he clings to me fiercely, when I offer him a hug."^{Pamela Constable, "The truth about covering Latin America," The Boston Globe Magazine, September 20, 1987, p. 13 .}

There are terrible limitations that would utterly conceal the idea of man as God's child. Servitude and neglect can arouse strong feelings—sometimes feelings of outrage and despair. At the opposite end of the human spectrum there are powerful connections that compel the most heroic and compassionate response to others. They are connections that waken in us nearly indescribable attraction to love.

The innate capacity of a child to accept love and to give it —even in horrible circumstances—hints at our spiritual nature and at what we are capable of. How else are we to describe, for example, the affection that irresistibly drew Mary the wife of Cleophas, the Magdalen, and the Apostle John, along with Jesus' mother, to the foot of the cross, even while the centrifugal forces of fear drove away and silenced so many others?

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