Verbindung and Human Connection
Four years ago, I read a short news piece about a young family driving home from church somewhere down south. Their car was involved in a crash. The father woke up in a hospital bed to the unbearable truth that he was the only one left. His wife and two children were gone.
I never knew this man. I don’t know the colour of his eyes, what prayers he uttered with his children the night before, or what hymn they had sung that morning, or the last words spoken in the car. Yet, he lingers in my thoughts. Even now, years later, he appears unbidden — while I’m walking by the sea, or when I hear a church bell toll, or see a father holding a child’s hand. Why should the sorrow of a stranger take up residence in my heart?
The Germans have a word, Verbindung. It means connection, but not merely in the way we connect a plug to a socket or link one thing to another. It is richer, deeper — a “binding together,” a joining of threads into a single weave. It suggests that between all human beings there is a hidden lattice of belonging, invisible yet unbreakable, and that sometimes, without knowing why, a strand is tugged.
That man’s grief tugged on something in me. It crossed the boundaries of anonymity and distance, entered quietly into the private rooms of my heart, and stayed. That is Verbindung: the soul’s refusal to believe we are separate. It is the truth Martin Buber gestured towards when he wrote, “All real living is meeting.” Not just the meetings we arrange with friends, but the ones that happen silently — when one life brushes another and changes it, even if they never share a word.
His suffering illuminated something I would rather ignore: that the membrane between my life and loss is thin and easily pierced. In his story I glimpse my own vulnerability, and that of those I love. The word makes the sorrow of another mirror my own. It dissolves the “them” and the “me” until all that remains is us — a fragile, fearful, loving us.
C.S. Lewis wrote after losing his wife, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” The fear, perhaps, is not just of loss, but of the illusion it strips away — the illusion that we are islands, safe and separate. Verbindung insists we are not islands at all. We are peninsulas jutting into one another’s seas, shaped and reshaped by every tide of joy and sorrow that laps against us.
It is the connection that makes the tears of a stranger salt our own eyes. It is Verbindung that lets us feel less alone in our private griefs because someone, somewhere, has felt this too. And it is that word that characterises and stirs in me a quiet hope that the man in the hospital bed, four years older now, has found a way to live within the ruins — that perhaps he too senses the unseen threads that still connect him to the world.
The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “We must learn to regard people less in light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.” That is the essence of Verbindung: to see the human being not as stranger or statistic but as kin, bound to us in the vast, aching story of what it means to live and lose and still love.
And so I think of him. I cannot help it. His sorrow is stitched into my own sense of the world, a small knot in the fabric of my humanity. Perhaps that is why we are here — to bear witness to each other’s stories, even the silent ones, and to keep alive the knowledge that we belong to one another.
The word hums quietly beneath it all. A binding. A thread. A reminder that, though our paths may never cross, our lives are woven together, strand by invisible strand.
Image by Copilot