Elena Desserich

Every now and then in the drama that is mankind, a Great Soul emerges. The Indians use the word Muhatma, as in Muhatma Ghandi, to make note of them. We usually look to great religious or spiritual leaders for the title and, in doing so, often overlook the simple, unassuming among us. It's unfortunate...because so many Great Souls are just simple and unassuming people. Many of them are only children.

I was touched by a story I read recently about a little girl who was diagnosed with brain cancer. She was only six years old. This little girl...this Great Soul...reached out to comfort her parents in the midst of her illness. After being diagnosed with brain cancer Elena Desserich wrote hundreds of love notes and hid them around her home for her parents to find. They found them in the pages of books and in stacks of CD's and other places. Each one an unselfish act of love.

Just the thought of this beautiful little girl focusing on love and grace in her illness touches my heart so profoundly that I had to make a note of her life and her passing. The thought crossed my mind that God saw the heart of this little blessing and said to Himself: "That's all I need to see...This soul is worthy of My Kingdom"...and He allowed little Elena to pass on. She touched hearts and, in so doing, taught us something priceless.

Elena sleeps now, awaiting the resurrection of the just. I have no doubt that God has found another jewel for His crown. He certainly blessed the rest of us with her coming and going. Elena's parents, out of their own love, are publishing a book of her notes to share with the rest of us. What a gift!

Make note...a Great Soul has passed this way.

Sleep now little one...You will breathe again...Your name will not be forgotten.

Unsung Heroes

I was having a conversation with a friend recently about the little things people do every day that change the world. Their stories are seldom told because their acts are done quietly behind the scenes. My friend works at the local ski resort teaching the disabled to ski. She told me a story about one disabled Desert Storm veteran that had lost both legs in that conflict. He was learning to ski with his disability. He was trudging through the snow with his prosthetics hidden from the view of others. Nearby a mother and her little girl were making their way through the snow drifts too. The little girl was a tiny little thing struggling to make her way through the deep slush. She complained to her mother that she was having a very hard time. This veteran, this American hero, reached out to the little girl and said: "Here sweetie, I'll help you..." No one could see the struggle it was for him but my friend knew and the scene touched her heart. When I heard the story it touched mine too. I felt like the story deserved to be told.

This was a very simple thing. This man neither asked for, nor expected any recognition for helping this small child. He could have displayed his own disability in an attempt to elicit sympathy for himself. He, instead, took no thought for himself. Whether it's in the heat of battle, or in the simple act of helping a child, that's what a hero does.

I'll never know this mans name or how he lost his legs, but in this simple act I can know his heart and his heroism. Things like this happen everyday all around us. There are heroes among us who's stories go untold, their songs unsung. In their simple acts they preserve what is best in us...

Home

There is no other place on earth quite like the American West. The rugged mountains, the vast plains and the sunbleached desert all dominate here. I've always felt something deeply moving about the places where the desert meets the mountains especially. Such places make me feel small and inconsequential. At the same time they make me connected to something much bigger than me. I recently moved from my home in Texas to just such a place in New Mexico.

From the front door of my new home I can look out and see Capitan Gap in the Lincoln National Forest every morning. Something quite unexpected has come from that for me. I'm much more aware of the skies here. The changes in the weather seem more spectacular, bigger than life even. When thunderstorms move in they can often be seen coming from miles away. On several occassions I've seen them share the sky with rainbows and clear blue patches on the other end of the same mountain range.

I now have deer in the yard every day. I've seen bear, elk and mountain lions around the mountains and the African imported Oryx in the nearby desert. The edge of the desert is only miles from here and, like I said, the place where the mountains meet the desert has always been magical to me.

The local culture is made up of Mexican, Spanish, Apache, Navajo and Old Western influences mixed with modern American. A few miles to the East is the historic town of Lincoln of Billy the Kid fame and twenty miles to the South is Ruidoso, a mountain resort community, known for skiing and horse racing. The Mescalero Apache reservation is right next door where people come to gamble at the Inn of the Mountain Gods. Whenever I hear that native Americans got the worst land in the country, I think of the Mescalero reservation. It is one of the most beautiful places on earth. White men once saw it as useless because they couldn't grow crops or raise cattle on it. The modern world would, no doubt, bring a smile to the Ancestors of the Apache now making money hand over fist from white gamblers.

I now live in a town that doesn't even have a stop light. I've jokingly referred to it as New Mexico's version of Mayberry. Some great folks live here...most I've met are very friendly. Most people seem to come here to be left alone and just about everyone respects that. It is so easy to feel blessed here. It feels easier to breathe here somehow.

I often think of a line from the movie "Dances With Wolves" wherein Kevin Costners character says of the American West: "Every day here ends with a miracle." I know the truth of that now. I see miracles here everyday. I don't often use the word 'spiritual' but I have to say that there is somiething deeply spiritual about this place. When I'm away it seems to whisper to me to return. God has left His fingerprints all over this...land of enchantment.

Change Has Come

No matter what your political views are, we have all just witnessed an historic event. An American of partial African descent has been elected the next president of the United States. In a mere half a century since the great civil rights movement began, a man who would have once been denied an education, denied the right to eat or drink in the same places a white American and denied the right to vote has come to hold the most powerful office on earth. America has struggled to live up to it's creed for over two centuries. In our sacred documents it is declared that "All" men are created with equal rights under the law. At first that meant only white, land-owning men. Slowly, over the decades, it came to include all citizens.

What this has meant to most Americans is that we are struggling to live up to our creed. We, as a nation, voted for a man because we didn't care what color his skin is. Most of us didn't care that is... That isn't true of black Americans. Most black Americans voted for this man only because of the color of his skin.

Now, I am inspired by the words of the great civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King that one day a man would be judged, not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his heart. Most white Americans did just that. Black Americans, however, didn't live up to the creed that they, as a community, claim to believe in.

It is my hope that black Americans will begin to lay aside their anger and their own racism and live up to the creed that Dr. King so beautifully enunciated. It's time we begin to heal from our past national sins.

I didn't vote for Barak Obama. But he will be our president the day he is sworn into office on January 2o, 2009. As an American I will accept him as my president because I've chosen to take part in our democracy and I accept the will of the majority of the people. I hope that those who voted for another candidate will do likewise. I will watch my president closely and I will voice my opinions when I agree, and when I disagree, with his leadership. That too is a part of being an American. We can all use this opportunity to live up to another of our mottoes: E Pluribus Unum... Out of many...one.

Child of God

I used to think that carnival sideshows were cruel. I believed they exploited those unfortunate people born with genetic and other defects. My views have tempered over the years. I now think there is some legitimacy in being made aware of those on the edges of the human condition. They have their stories to tell and those stories deserve to be heard.

I recently saw a show on the Discovery channel that focused on a young girl in Haiti. She was the victim of a horrible tumor that had so disfigured her face she no longer even appeared human. The program was about how a team of doctors set about to help this child. She had to undergo a series of operations to regain some semblance of a human being. After the first operation she looked into a mirror to see the results of what the doctors had done. She hadn't looked into one in over two years. I watched as a single tear streamed down her face. I was so touched by that moment that I thought about it for days.

I'm like most people, I am attracted to beautiful people. Like most men, I like to look at beautiful women. Some call that shallow...I don't know...it seems to me to be written into the genetic code somehow. What I know is that seeing this child made me want to turn away. At the same time my heart went out to her and I was again reminded of the words of John Donne: "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." You could just as easily substitute the words illness or disfigurement for death in that Donne quote. It was not her death but her condition that I felt connected to... We are all connected even though most of us turn away from those so afflicted.

None of us are free until all of us are free. None of us will be completely healthy until all of us are. My faith teaches me that we, human beings, are all a part of one family. This child of God, so horribly disfigured, is connected to me and I to her. My heart went out to her and I felt some small twinge of the pain that she has endured. My heart understands a part of what she has gone through because we are connected.

Perhaps only the strongest among us are called on to bear such burdens. Perhaps the very reason they are sick and broken is to teach the rest of us. Thinking thus keeps me from blaming God for such things. Sometimes things just happen. My faith helps me to understand that one day she, and all the sick and broken human beings...all the children of God...will be healed and made whole. That's what helps me to go on. Twenty-five million years from now their afflictions won't matter...what will matter is what we learned from them and how we responded to them. My faith helps me to understand that when I encounter the sick and the broken, those with afflictions I can see...and those with afflictions I can't see... I need to reach out to them as I would my own family...because they are my family.

But for the Grace of God...there go I.

Values

There’s a popular bumper sticker that says: “He who dies with the most toys wins!”

This slogan speaks to what many, many people have come to believe either consciously or unconsciously. Materialism is the dominant value of our culture these days. Think of the people that will spend millions on some artifact or piece of art just to be able to say they own it. Then weigh that against how much money they spend giving back to the world, feeding the poor, curing a disease, housing the homeless... Too many of us live our lives completely devoid of any greater meaning than acquiring more stuff…as if life were some kind of competition to ‘die with the most toys’. How empty our lives have become…how devoid of any real meaning.

Our culture is set up to value only one thing…the ‘so-called’ bottom line. Profit is the ultimate goal. Profit has become the very definition of success. It’s become more important than our quality of life. It’s become more important than the health of our planet and even the health of our children to some. Just witness the recalls of various products found to have been made with cheaper, less safe, ingredients all for the sake of profit.

There are old, beautiful neighborhoods all across America that are being destroyed because investors are buying properties in them, tearing the old homes down, and putting up duplexes and other monstrosities to wrench out every possible penny in profit. The air we breathe and the water we drink are being polluted to produce more and more products that we have become convinced we need. We crave more and more energy to produce more stuff…and that means greater dependence on fossil fuels and more nuclear power plants, both of which have their own set of problems and both of which harm our home...the planet earth.

We can’t turn on a TV, drive down a highway, or flip through a magazine without being bombarded with ads trying to sell us the latest gadgets or services. They want to convince us that to be happy we must have what they are selling! We are drowning in our own greed and lust for more stuff! What we are losing in the process is beyond any monetary value. As a culture, we’ve forgotten that there are things far more important than money and the stuff it can buy. The quality of our lives isn’t improved one bit by having the latest fads. We have begun to use stuff to fill the voids in our lives.

Materialism has replaced spirituality as the defining character of the American people and it is destroying us. People, at one time, came to these shores to better their lives. They believed in the principles that America was founded on. Now they come here only to get rich…and many couldn’t care less about the principles this nation was built on.

America used to stand for something deeper and more meaningful than gross materialism. This nation was founded, not only on free enterprise, but on freedom of religion. It was so important to our ancestors that they be able to freely express their religious beliefs that they left their homelands and came here to build a nation on that principle. Their religious beliefs were in the forefront of their minds and at the center of their lives. That was the foundational value that built the greatest country in the history of the world. It wasn’t about who has the most stuff. Think about that…

Labels

Nigger, Kike, Spic, Cracker, Faggot, Bitch…these are all words that people have used, and in some cases still use, to demean and dehumanize other people. They’re labels that people have attached to others to categorize and pigeonhole them into some preconceived notion of what those others are supposed to be like. Most of these words have largely fallen out of use because of the negative, and even hateful, connotations that they are associated with.

Not everyone who has used such words has meant them to have hateful connotations. I remember when I was a child my grandmother used the word ‘nigger’ to refer to black people. Though she was a product of her generation, having some of the preconceived notions about race that were common in that era, she had no hatred of any black people. She treated everyone with simple respect…because “that was what Jesus would do”. The label didn't mean to her what it came to mean to so many others. We give our labels their power.

It's politically incorrect to use such words these days…even if the underlying feelings are still around. It is the underlying feelings that are so hard to eradicate. That's where the power of our labels comes from. I believe there is just as much, if not more, hatred in the hearts of people now as there ever was. Just mention that you are a Conservative Christian in some circles and you’re automatically reduced to the labels: racist, sexist, homophobic and narrow-minded bigot. The labels, Christian, Conservative and Republican evoke contempt and even hatred from many “enlightened” people. The same can be said of the terms: Liberal, Democrat, Feminist, and Gay among other people. None of them tell us who the individual is...

The funny thing about labels is that, once you pin one on someone, you no longer feel any need to get to know them personally. With the act of labeling someone, the other person is summed up and nothing else need be known about them. It is a peculiar power of human language that naming something gives us a sense of power over it. We all do that to some degree.

The truth is that human beings are more complex than any label. Most people are much more multifaceted. We only tend to see the sides of them that we want to see, or are conditioned to see. Kids tend to see their parents in only one way. Parents tend to see their kids in only one way. Men sometimes see women in only one way. Women sometimes see men in only one way too. We can even become socially conditioned to see, whatever race we're a member of in some preconceived ways. We can also learn to see other races in preconceived ways. When we limit ourselves to see others so, we tend to see only those things that reinforce our preconceived notions and ignore everything else.

A big part of human history can be summed up as people rebelling against being seen by others in only one way. Minorities in every age and nation have fought to be seen as the equals of those in the majority, just as varied, just as complex and just as worthy. It’s an old story that has replayed over and over in our history and literature.

When someone does something we disapprove of, we typically see only how they’re different from us and ignore how they’re the same. That’s the root of prejudice…seeing only the differences and ignoring the similarities, then labeling “them” as “all the same”. They’re just not like us after all!! Among human beings, things will always be this way until our human nature is changed. It is a strange irony of life that the thing that makes us all the same is the very thing that makes us focus on our differences? The good news is that individuals can change…if they make the choice and the effort.

It takes energy to do so, but each us of has it in our power to learn to see the world differently. We all have it in our power to see each other as individuals that could never truly be labeled and should never be dismissed out of hand. The results of learning to see the world in such a way makes it a far more interesting place. Seeing people as individuals instead of numbers in some category makes them more real…and harder to hate. Not a bad goal if you ask me…