Heroes and miracles

For a short while the other night I was watching the Golden Globe Awards. I suspect there were an awful lot of other people doing the same thing. I finally got bored and turned it off.

Afterwards I thought about what it was I didn't much like about it all (apart from the rather adolescent humor of the host - if that isn't insulting adolescents). There were all those 'glamorous' men and women dressed in hugely expensive and often rather odd, outfits - celebrities we call them. It isn't that some of them are not wonderfully talented creative artists because many certainly are, but there are an equal number who are celebrities simply because they are physically beautiful or know somehow, how to gain attention.

I am often saddened by our focus on celebrity in our society. It is fairly easy to become one and just as easy to fade quickly from sight after a moment's stardom. Why do celebrities play such a part in our lives? It is almost as if we admire people and set them upon a pedestal simply because they are: powerful, rich, beautiful, or odd. We need heroes and because we don't see others we choose them. We seem often not to care how they have become powerful or rich which is also sad I think. Someone recently said that she found it hard to understand the people  her son admired - mostly very rich young men who can put a basketball through a hoop or hit a home run.

I wonder if the focus on celebrity says that we don't think much of ourselves or the people we know in our own circle of friends or associates. Do we think of ourselves as too ordinary and uninteresting and do we long to escape into the world of others whose life seems more exciting?

But you know what? Each of us and each of the people we know are pretty special. We should cherish that. The values that matter most, like courage and integrity and selflessness and kindness and deep beauty are to be found, if we look, all around us in our own circle of family and friends. All around us are people who give their lives as caregivers of elderly parents or of children or as good neighbor friends. I am almost certain most of us know someone or several someones who courageously live difficult lives of ill health, or handicap or poverty or loneliness. We know others who we can count on for help when we need it or truth when we ask for it or compassion in the face of our own weakness.  In each one of us, God lives out a life of love in weakness. If that isn't celebrity I don't know what is.

A man named Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us of what is all around our ordinary lives each day. He says: Around us, life bursts forth with miracles - a glass of water, a ray of sunshine, a leaf, a caterpillar, a flower, laughter, raindrops. If you live in awareness it is easy to see miracles everywhere. Each human being is a multiplicity of miracles. Eyes that see thousands of colors, shapes and forms; ears that hear a bee flying or a thunderclap; a brain that ponders a speck of dust as easily as the entire cosmos; a heart that beats in rhythm with the heartbeat of all beings....

Each human being is a multiplicity of miracles. Maybe then, if we watch out for these miracles in our daily, ordinary life and our daily, ordinary friends and family we won't have to yield to the celebrity culture so much for we will know our nearest and dearest as our real heroes.