A Valentine Phone Call

On Valentine’s night,  as usual, this year I made that same transatlantic call which I have made every year since Valentine’s day, 1988. (Next year, will be our twentieth anniversary.)

                Anita sounded a lot better this year than last. I was truly worried about her last year. It is always the same words: “I love you; you were a good friend; when will I see you again.”

                She knows why I call. It is because of who she is and because of her dear son Carlos who died from AIDS on Valentine’s day, 1988.

                Carlos was born in New York, the third and baby of the family. Very soon after his birth Anita found herself raising the children on her own. Carlos would describe how he loved playing at night with the toys his mother used to borrow from the big houses she worked in,  and how dejected he was as she returned them to their rightful owners,  on her return to work each morning.

                By nine,  Carlos was a truant from school and by early teens he already had been in a remand home. I met him in Sing Sing prison serving time for crimes related to his heroin addiction through which he contracted AIDS.  He was one of the lucky ones to be allowed home to die. All the others served their last days in prison if their sentences had not expired.

                This week, which is now a week-long Valentine week, I recall the love of those prison and family days with Anita and Carlos, his sister and brother. But, this was a compassionate love, a love which suffers with another, a love which feels the pain of another. (As St. Vincent once said: Que j’ai peine de votre peine: I suffer when you suffer. In the milieu of the AIDS wing in prison and in the intimacy of Anita’s family I caught a glimpse of the compassion of God as revealed by Jesus today.

                One of the men once said: “I feel Jesus Christ in my bones, he has AIDS today.” Imagine the effect of holding that man in a gentle embrace – he was as fragile as fine porcelain.

                The pity is that Valentine’s day comes only once a year. How changed our lives could be if there were people like Anita whom we could contact when we judge and condemn– people who remind us that our God is a God of compassion, a God who indeed understands others as we might like to understand them.

         Fr. Michael McCullagh, C.M.  

18th February, 2007