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Connections...
FEBRUARY 12, 2000
SIXTH SUNDAY OF THE YEAR
A leper came to Jesus and kneeling down begged him and said, "If you wish, you can make me clean." Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand, touched him, and said to him, "I do will it. Be made clean."
Mark 1:40-45
The spark
Meryl Streep is one of our most accomplished actresses. Whether on stage or screen, she has no equal in her ability to capture both the strength and vulnerability of the women she portrayed in such acclaimed films as Kramer vs. Kramer, Silkwood, The Deer Hunter, the television series Holocaust, and her current role as music teacher Roberta Guaspari in Music of the Heart.
In a recent interview, Ms. Streep says she has no method, no secret, to her ability to capture the complexities of her characters in their voices and mannerisms. " I don't know how it works," she says of her gift.
But Robert Brustein, who was the dean of the Yale University School of Drama when Meryl Streep was a student their in the mid--1970s, does have a theory about the source of her acting gift:
"The secret of how she does it is in herself, in her great compassion. Her entire career, every one of her performances, is animated by this inner spark, this humanity. That's how she's able to identify with her characters; that's how she feels their feelings and becomes so astonishingly believable in their skins."
["The Spark She Can't Explain" by Lawrence Elliott, Reader's Digest, November 1999.]
CONNECTION: Throughout the Gospels, we see a Jesus who is
moved by compassion for the plight of others. In today's
gospel, Jesus risks the possibility of contracting leprosy in order
to touch the man seeking to be made clean. In doing so, Jesus
not only cures him but enables him to rejoin his human and religious
family. Jesus comes to teach us the compassion of God -- that
"inner spark" that each one of us possesses that makes us a son and
daughter of God; that sacred sense of humanity that transcends
competitiveness, selfishness and vengeance to enable us to re-create
our world in the justice, peace and reconciliation of God. Y
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