Oscar Wilde once wrote that by 40 we all have the faces we deserve.
The hidden dimensions of our human lives, or our ‘faces’, is not visible to others – it applies to that which lies within, to the heart, and not merely to one’s face as a surface feature of one area of the body. At least that’s the way I interpret his remark.
We probably do deserve the faces we carry with us!
I thought about this as I followed Dr. Rosa last Sunday when the aubergue at Pinal Villa was open to the public. What prevents even well-intentioned, thoughtful people from seeing what is simple and straightforward – that there is much to give those less fortunate – and others, like Dr. Rosa and her group of volunteer ‘green berets’, ready to initiate, create and bring about what did not exist a few years ago, as well as sustain remarkable harmony among the disparate groups, a migratory and indigenous people, a few gringos and a warrior queen of a doctora, alive in power and goodness.
Dr. Rosa is beautiful on the outside as well. I would do well to study her, not because there’s any hope of acquiring any of her features at my age, but because of her spirit, or the core of who and what she is as an individual. I watched her struggle under a barrage of questions that day as shifting emotions flitted across her pretty face in an effort to answer her inquisitors graciously, and I realized it was no straightforward matter at all, this huge effort of hers to cure and educate this community of people, but something complicated, the exercise of her will and well-trained spirit, carefully guarded. Where others are content to simply drift through life, or set their hearts on too many things and give themselves over to exteriors, some cultivate the life ‘within’ and devote themselves to removing barriers to love. Like Dr. Rosa and her troops who, as far as they have their eyes on what counts, sustain something that is good.
A light comes into darkness, and darkness loses.
Who can earnestly care to be left out of what is going on there? Who could ever want to be on the losing side?