After attending a conference on the theology of joy earlier this month, I picked up a book mentioned at the conference and have been reading it.  Its title is The Book of Joy, a conversation between the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa.  At one point the conversation's moderator, Douglas Abrams, recounts a story he heard about a man named Anthony Ray Hinton.  Arrested, tried, convicted, and imprisoned for a murder he did not commit, Hinton spent thirty years in solitary confinement before a court ordered his release.
     A few years into his stay, Hinton was in his cell one night when he heard the inmate in the adjoining cell crying.  When he inquired as to what was wrong, the inmate told him that he had just heard that his mother had died.
     How poignant, I thought.  Here is this man, locked away from the rest of the world, unable to affect or shape anything of importance, now weeping because he had lost the only person who really cared about him.  And he didn't even get to say good-bye.  It's tragic.
     Sure, it's easy to say that this man deserved to be imprisoned for his crimes.  And sure, it's easy to say that in committing these crimes he forfeited his right to normalcy in human relationships.  Too easy, perhaps.  So often eager are we to deal with people whom we deem to be socially aberrant that we often equally forget that they are human beings, too.  And they are as deserving of love as any of us.
     In the end, everyone wants to be loved.  Made in the image of a loving God, we are created to love.  And to do so unconditionally.