The cry of the heart

I was at a church service recently and, because it is Lent, it began with an acknowledgement :

Before God, with the people of God, I confess to my brokenness, to the ways I wound my life, the lives of others, the life of the world.
I always find it good to remind myself that I and all those around me are not yet 'there'.

And in that vein, the other day I was reading something written by the spiritual writer Henri Nouwen and it is, I thought, a really vivid example of how we do or don't care for one another. The excerpt is from his book *Gracias!. Nouwen had been spending time in South America living and working with some very poor people and these were some of his reflections in the early days of his visit:

*How little do we really know the power of physical touch. These boys and girls only wanted one thing: to be touched, hugged, stroked and caressed. It seems that without such a safe place. No human being can be truly free, can truly think boldly and live courageously.

Probably most adults have the same needs but no longer have the innocence and unselfconsciousness to express it. Sometimes I see humanity as a sea of people starving for affection, forgiveness and gentleness. Because they receive so little, if anything of it all, they make pistols, guns, rifles, missiles and similar toys instead, to ask for attention.

Everyone seems to cry: 'Please love me'.

Of course, there are many people who would say, 'but I was loved'. But love is the gift we all thrive on and yet so often we fail to give it or show it or say it. And when we are hurt or feel alone and in some sense abandoned we lash out sometimes either against another or against ourselves.

Can't we try and change this? Won't this, slowly, transform our world?

*Nouwen, Henri: Gracias!: A Latin American Journal, Harper and Row, N.Y. (1983) and Orbis, Maryknoll, N.Y. 1993.