Transfiguration

   A downy doe
   in fresh snow
   stilled to bone
   behind birch bark
   pins me to the cattle
   path like a frozen
   mannekin in stride.

   The lace of copse
   frames her sideways
   face in stone.
   Her motionless camouflage
   defines oblivion, but
   she's so close her back
   hairs bend in breeze.

   Her left eye sparkles
   under passing stratus patches.
   Her panting even
   echoes in the air.
   Suspended in her splendor
   I taste eternity
   till she bolts brush,

   breaks sacrament,
   and my heartbeat stops.

--Jerome L. McElroy

Villa Maria, Pa.

The magi's journey to India

In the end, it felt like a journey similar to what the Magi had undertaken. After 30 hours of travel to the East, including an eight-hour layover in Mumbai (known in the British days as Bombay), I finally arrived at the destination, Calcutta, the first leg of a journey to meet the sponsored children of remote northeastern India.

The sponsors I journeyed with from the Christian Foundation for Children and Aging, headquartered in Kansas City, Kan., had come seeking the child of their prayer lives with a single purpose; to see with their own eyes just what the financial treasure they had bestowed on a little child had been able to obtain for them.

Unlike my doubting-Thomas self, these folks came with pure, believing hearts represefiting a cross section of professions from around the United States such as a retired Army colonel and his wife from Vermont, several retired registered nurses, a speech pathologist, a travel agent from Chicago, a lawyer, and a mother who took her sixth-grader son out of school so that he could meet his peer.

Each brought an array of gifts for their child and any other child they might happen to meet along the way. Soccer balls, stickers, pens, combs, Band-Aids, toothbrushes, vitamins-the small incidental items we take for granted and toss away when we feel they are completely used enjoy a greater meaning when given to a child halfa world away who has never heard of vitamins and whose growth is tragically stunted for lack of them.

My years of travel to the West Bank, where poverty and cruelty subsist hand in hand, I trusted to prepare me for what I was about to witness, but it did not. There was no amount of life experience to prepare our little group entering the tribal region. There was nothing to soften the blow. A tsunami wave of shock and horror at the sight of unrelenting human hardship and struggle swept over us, leaving behind anger at the sight of the world's untouchable class, the world's poorest people.

Driving on roads crowded with buses, cars, cows and dogs, with "potholes" as large as a swimming pool, it was difficult to grasp the plight of the human beings we saw beside us walking, dragging, pushing, shoving, heaving forward anything that had a wheel -attached to it. One sponsor whispered to me, "This is like the Middle Ages," and I immediately thought of the scene in Monty Python's movie where the character is yelling, "Bring out your dead!" as he collects bodies on a cart with giant wooden wheels. So many carts with wooden wheels passed by our bus. Most lacked even a rusty piece of metal to give them some stability. I realized that longevity, anything and anyone's longevity, is of little significance in a world of wet mud and gray terrain.

Surviving a torturous cab ride with an expert Indian driver, our group of sponsors arrived at their long-sought destination of Bhagalpur, a city famous for its silk production. But it wasn't the silk that lifted the battered spirits of the Americans. Rather it was the smiles of their sponsored children, who greeted each of them over successive days with a hearty welcome, showering them with flowers placed lovingly around their necks, anointing their faces and foreheads with bright colors of welcome as if they were a family member, and in some instances washing the feet of their most highly honored guests. Gifts were exchanged, songs sung, hands held and tears shed, all because of the simple gift of a visit from the magi, American magi.

Struggling to push aside my own feel ings, I attempted to seek a reasoned perspective from the group's youngest sponsor, sixth-grader Brendon Quigley. Did he think it had been worth all the effort to come and see his sponsored child for just a few hours? I mean, after all, besides the donation every month that goes to giving the sponsored child literally a new life--clothes, education and access to medical care--what more can be gained by coming all this way?

Brendon told me he planned to do a class project about his trip and he thought that might prove to be just as much work as all the travel was. I agreed, it was a great idea and the whole class would benefit from his personal story. Who knows? He might just inspire others to sponsor kids as well.

"But when I asked what he had found the most fascinating in India, his reply forced me to take a long view. "It's the traffic," he replied, "they go so fast, and at first, you think they won't make it but then they do."