“Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me.” –– Jesus Christ
“Like a caring mother holding and guarding the life of her only child, as if it was her own life, so with a boundless heart of unlimited, loving kindness and compassion, hold yourself and all beings as your beloved children. What’s done to the children is done to society.” — Gautama Buddha
“See others as yourself. See families as your family. See towns as your town. See countries as your country.” — Lao Tzu
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We are all confused in this world. We desperately need certainty – some way to figure out who is right and who is wrong. We want to know who is good and who is bad so we know who to love and who to hate. We sort ourselves into our different teams or tribes and join the endless war where everyone knows their truth and talks and shouts at the same time and no one hears. No one listens.
And then a child cries. And everyone stops. For a moment, we pause from the battle and remember why we’re here. The cry of a child brings us back to our own child, the one we have or had or the one we were or in some ways, still are. We recognize that cry, that simple, pure plea for love. It’s what we all want – to be loved and understood and cared for. We want to be safe, not threatened. Accepted, not judged. Understood, not blamed. Admired instead of criticized. Loved, not hated. And we have cried like that. We know what it’s like to be abandoned, rejected, neglected and ignored.
Within the cry is a message for us. She wants us to do something. She is looking at us now. There is a question in her cry, a desperate, terrified appeal in her tear-swollen eyes. Her suffering is in some sense our suffering. It is our responsibility and we can’t look away. We can’t run away because everywhere we go now, a child is crying – waiting to be held and comforted.
We are tempted for a moment to shift the blame and hate someone. This isn’t my fault. This isn’t my responsibility. Someone else has hurt the child. Let’s find them and hurt them. That will make this right. The child will keep hurting. She will keep crying. All the children will continue to suffer, but we can ignore all that as we punish the parents, the bad adults who deserve this blame. They’re the bad ones we were looking for. These are the ones who deserve our hate.
Or we can choose to love. We can focus on the child and her simple cry for love. We can find her parent and bring them together and savor the sweet silence and peace when the crying stops. The two halves of the one broken heart are made whole again.
It’s so simple to see, once we are willing to see it, once we open our eyes, minds and hearts and see that child as our child and the parent as ourselves. Each of us is like the child wanting love and safety and we are all parents wanting the very best for our child – knowing that people who don’t know anything about us or our suffering – will judge, hate and persecute us.
We are all confused in this world. Intelligent, moral people can disagree with one another about everything that matters. It seems impossible to find a common cause around which we can all agree. And yet here it is before us in a young child’s cry for love.
We will never go wrong in answering that cry with our own selfless love. It is easy to forget that this is why we are here. One team, one tribe, one life taking care of all life; all life taking care of the one life with the one thing we all share: love. When we get that piece right, we can’t go wrong.
