"Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love." – Monet
How does Love overcome a caregivers need for scientific understanding?
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July 31, 2009
July 30, 2009
Day 211 - The Inner Journey of Leadership
Today's meditation was written by Cathy Self, Senior Vice President for the Baptist Healing Trust.
Parker Palmer, author and teacher, speaks often of the spirituality of work and, in particular, of the spirituality of leadership. In much of his writing, Palmer advances the ideal that spirit, thought, and human aware-ness are the deep sources from which change is created. Most of all, Palmer seems to believe that our inner quests lead us to co-creation of the world in which we live - and each one of us is responsible for projecting into that reality either a spirit of hope or of despair. A leader, asserts Parker, is particularly capable of projecting his or her own shadow or light, is particularly powerful in creating conditions that can be illuminating or dark, and must take particular responsibility for what's going on inside him or her self "lest the act of leadership create more harm than good." Powerful thoughts, and powerful possibilities.
Much has been written in leadership studies of the tendency in many noted leaders to be extroverted, operating most effectively in the outer world but sometimes at the cost of an awareness of what is going on (or not) internally. The risk, of course, is that an inward and deepening journey asks that we engage with what lies hidden in the shadows and for many of us that is the place shadowed by fear. It is just easier to stay engaged with the outer world, manipulating context and content to meet needs and desires. Palmer advocates for the only true way as "in and through" those dark places that we want to deny, moving on until at last we arrive at the place where we can rest in the one thing given to us all - the heart that cares.
Shadows in leadership may include believing that who I am depends on what I do. Identity, suggests Palmer, doesn't depend on titles or degrees or functions. It only depends on the simple fact that we are each created as a child of God, valued and treasured. When a leader knows that without uncertainty, organization changes and work is expressed with meaning and purpose. Another shadow cradles the belief that ultimate responsibility for all things of importance rests with me. Some authors have referred to this mis-belief as functional atheism. Such belief ultimately leads to burnout, stress, broken relationships, and surely unhealthy priorities. And, of course, fear lives in the shadows - fear of silence, of stillness, of non-doing, fear of uncertainty or lack of control.
These are some of our shadows, and like Beowulf we must also attend to what lies beyond and beneath in the form of not just the monster Grendle, but Grendle's mother. We need each other to find our way in and through the shadow. The journey is personal but our work asks that it not be necessarily private. As caregivers we need community; as leaders we need to especially pay attention to the inner quest. The German poet, Ranier Maria Rilke, called us to this shared journey with these words, offered here in a closing invitation: "Love is this- that two solitudes border, protect, and salute one another."
July 29, 2009
Day 210 - Summers of "Doing Nothing"
I think of summer with its luminous fruit,/ blossoms rounding to berries, leaves,/ handfuls of grain. -Mary Oliver
With so many things to do in our hectic lives, we may sometimes wish for nothing to do. What better season than summer to fulfill such a wish?
In our school days, we yearned for long summer break. I remember chapters of my childhood when I played alone in my California neighborhood. I hid behind trees firing at enemies with my Hopalong Cassidy cap pistols. Then I jumped on my horse (a red Schwinn bike) put my U.S. Keds to the pedals, and sailed off like the wind, hundreds of cavalrymen following my lead.
Sometimes, we drove east to my parents hometown of Elyria, Ohio. There, on the farm where my father grew up, I swung from trees like Tarzan and jumped into the Black River, swiming to my heart's content, fishing with my dad, and rowing an old boat upstream.
Doing "nothing," of course, usally means doing something we deeply enjoy.
Sometimes, I actually tried to do nothing. I lay beneath a bush, looked up at the eucalyptus trees, and daydreamed about cowboys and generals and Presidents. But, it wouldn't be long before I felt called to action to protect the neighborhood from marauding bands of pirates and bank robbers.
It's interesting to see how many of my contemporaries, now in their sixties, spend more and more time recalling their childhood summers - almost as if it were impossible to create any kind of joy in the current season of their lives. They may harken back, as well, to their first days as a doctor or nurse or social worker.
Through the misted lens of memory, they often see a special glow haloing their early days of caregiving.
Other than a week or two of vacation, there is no summer break for most caregivers. What life can teach us now has to do with something we may not have understood as children: How to savor the gifts of the summer can offer us right now.
Of course, we can choose to complain about summer's heat or her thunderstorms. But what about summer's "luminous fruit,/ blossoms rounding to berries, leaves,/ handfuls of grain"?
How do you experience summer's most joyful gifts? How do you "do" nothing?
-Erie Chapman
July 28, 2009
Day 209 - Spiritual Inquiry
A cartoon in a recent edition of The New Yorker magazine shows a man with an anxious look sitting in an armchair. His wife is instrucing him: "You should never engage in unsupervised introspection."
In addition to pastors, psychiatrists and pyschologists, there is a whole new set of occupations springing up in America to offer help to each of us with our "introspection." Life coaches are now available to help us maximize our life experience. Spiritual guides are availabe to aid us in probing the depths of our spirituality. Combined with these are a growing army of fitness trainers to make us exercise, yoga teachers to help us increase our flexibility and our sense of calm, meditation trainers to help us nurture the center of our serenity, and integrative medicine practitioners who meld the best of eastern and western medicine.
At long last, new versions of ancient healthcare practices have finally found a foothold in contemporary western civilization. In general, I think this is a good thing. Sure, it's possible to overdo anything. Sometimes, people who have spent a certain time working in these areas can even become self-righteous in passing judgment on others who, they believe, haven't yet "done their inner work."
The fact is, many people avoid intense introspection because it's hard work and can lead any one of us to a set of very difficult questions - the central one being whether our life has any meaning or not. Yet, spiritual guides of one kind or another can be invaluable in helping us navigate our trickiest passages successfully.
What counts is our willingness to ask ourselves these hard questions in an effort to ferret out our truth.
Carole, a dear friend, shared with me what the opposite view can look like. A member of her Presbyterian church complained that Carole's husband was asking "too many questions about faith in church meetings." She said, "Carole, if your husband is going to keep raising so many provocative questions why doesn't he just go to a church where more people agree with him?"
This woman doesn't want anybody disturbing her with inquiry. Clearly, she has a different idea about church than I do. She wants to be in settings where everyone agrees.
Perhaps, this is an understandable position for someone who either has a weak faith or a high desire for conformity and sameness. A church where everyone thinks the same thing may also be comfortable for someone who comes to church seeking complete harmony - a nice, tidy structure in the presence of as an escape from a personal life that may feel chaotic.
As you may imagine, I prefer an environment where people are not only free to discuss different understandings of God but will challenge how faith is practiced. Those with solid faith welcome questions and discussion because the questions help them with their own introspective search. In other words, their hearts are open.
The real choice for caregivers is to find ways to enrich their own beliefs through a balance of introspection and active expression of beliefs through work. In this way, we can be our own best spiritual guides to each other.
In more than thirty years of advancing what I call "The Gospel of Loving Care" in hospitals and charities, I have found widely different understandings among caregivers about what Love means in their own work. Challenges from others have helped me enrich my own understandings of Love.
The only way we make no progress in our personal spiritual journey is if we stop asking hard questions and accept easy answers.
The caregiving milieu is a good a place as any for each of us to look into the mirror of our soul to ask ourselves: "What does my belief mean to me and how am I living Love today?"
What do you think?
-Erie Chapman
July 27, 2009
Day 208 - No Holding On
"...there is no holding on with love - it is all a letting go...it seems that holding on is a fear of something else." - Karen York, Executive Vice President, Alive Hospice Karen York (left) and her colleagues at Nashville-based Alive Hospice work alongside death every day. 100% of their patients are terminal. Each has arrived at a remarkable moment when the idea of trying to "hold on" to life (whatever that means) becomes meaningless. Some reach this point with fear. Some come to it with Love. In a comment posted recently in the Journal, Karen quoted Rumi: "Death comes, and what we thought/ we needed loses importance."
As we reach the end of our days, what takes the place of what we thought was important?
I have asked people close to death this question. Some have told me that think of family and others dear to them. One middle aged woman, on the very day she died, told me she was thinking about her relationship with God.
No one has told me that wished they had spent more time at work or on the golf course. No one has told me they will miss their cars or their collection of things. Many have said they wished they had spent more time with loved ones or that they had lived more fully and joyfully.
Not all, of course, die with regret. Some live their final days in gratitude.
We don't, of course, need to wait for our last days to practice appreciation and Love.
In the midst of your day or night as a caregiver, perhaps this is the gift of Karen's insight for us - that there is "no holding on with love." And as we let go, perhaps we can replace fear with not only Love, but gratitude.
What do you think?
-Erie Chapman
July 24, 2009
July 23, 2009
Day 204 - The Way of Love
Today's meditation was written by Cathy Self, Senior Vice President for the Baptist Healing Trust.
"The worlds' battlefields have been in the heart chiefly; more heroism has been displayed in the household and the closet than on the most memorable battlefields in history" - Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887).
Who is the greater hero - the one who stands and cries out with a loud voice against injustice, only to be silenced through imprisonment or death? Or is it the one who leaves everything behind so as to protect and preserve family, safety, and health? What about the one who stays to stand with hope and perseverance, quietly touching the lives of scattered individuals living in the shadows of great injustice? In healthcare systems and workplace settings across America there are tyrants as real and as unjust as those who lord over the camps of North Korea or the desert plains of Rwanda.
It takes great courage to stand publicly and denounce what is wrong. I have witnessed the professional (and sometimes personal) demise of a number of caregivers who have chosen to take that path. They are heroes for many. And it takes great valor to walk away from a long career and strong ties in community in order to preserve (or restore) health and well-being that has suffered under the harsh hand of uncaring supervisors. As I've said goodbye to good friends who made that choice, we said we would stay in touch, but we haven't. Our community was forever changed. They are heroes for a few.
But it also takes a special bravery to stay, quietly working beneath the shadows, bringing hope to the hopeless and compassion to those who have given up on love. And for the patient whose only hope is found in the hearts and hands of those who stay to serve, they are also heroes, and will perhaps always remain unknown. It seems love calls us at times to stay, serving from a place of authenticity, a place occupied by the heart and soul.
Parker Palmer has said that a man or woman can skillfully use a knife to either cause harm or healing, the difference being found not in the external power but in the heart. External power seeks to control, impress, or succeed, and comes and goes with time and change. Fear dwells alongside external power. Sadly, in the hallways of many of our places of healing there are those who would seek to control with fear. Authentic power, however, emerges from within Love and perseveres, even when others would tempt with an easier path, a greater good, or a seemingly safer way.
The Christian sacred tradition offers the Way of Love, recorded in a letter from St. Paul to the Corinthians. These words seem to me to be words from the heart of a hero:
If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don't love, I'm nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. If I speak God's Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, "Jump," and it jumps, but I don't love, I'm nothing. If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don't love, I've gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I'm bankrupt without love.
Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn't want what it doesn't have.
Love doesn't strut,
Doesn't have a swelled head,
Doesn't force itself on others,
Isn't always "me first,"
Doesn't fly off the handle,
Doesn't keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn't revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end. Love never dies…. (Scripture taken from The Message).
I wonder where are the heroes of our today? How does love inform your way?
July 22, 2009
Day 203 - The Quality of Your Day
"To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of the arts." - Henry David Thoreau (statue of Thoreau, below, before his cabin by Walden Pond)
Sometimes, I discover that I have fallen into the odd notion that it is up to other people to "affect the quality" of my day. Perhaps, this is a carryover from early childhood when we were at the mercy of powerful people who stood above us and did affect the quality of our days.
Adults know that it is up to each of us, as Thoreau also wrote, "to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look..." Yet, we often default to our childhood notions and allow other people's actions to damage the quality of our moments.
My wise friend, Dr. Tom Bagwell, shared with me that he long ago heard a sermon whose message has stayed with him ever since. The minister quoted Pascal as saying that the worst sin was impatience. Impatience is an attitude devoid of God. Impatience suggests that the present moment does not matter. It is only a means of getting to the next moment.
I was startled at the enormous power of this idea - that impatience would actually be a sin. Yet, this thought makes complete sense. Any impatience robs the present of its potential power and sacredness.
We like to think that some day we'll be happy, that sometime out in the future, perhaps a forthcoming weekend, perhaps a vacation, perhaps retirement itself, we will find joy. You and I know people who live their lives dreading work and living for the time when they are free of it. The tragedy of wasted hours is great - and such a negative thought process is stunningly widespread.
Caregiving is such hard work that it is natural to hope that a given hard time will pass. Somehow, every moment has value, even the difficult ones. For these moments are also part of our sacred time here on earth.
What do you think?
-Erie Chapman
July 21, 2009
Day 202 - What News is Important
Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough. -Walter Cronkite
When I saw the news that legendary newsman Walter Cronkite passed away, I recalled the concern he expressed so often about the dangerous changes that were occurring in news programming. Real news, the way Cronkite viewed it, had to do with major world and national events. Yes, the death of Michael Jackson, for example would be real news. But, the extensive follow up covering every rumor and every aspect of his life was not news and would, in his opinion, push aside reports of more major events.
I thought of his words this morning when our local newspaper reported a giant piece of news that the television stations managed to miss. At this moment, the story said, it is estimated that over 200,000 people are being held as political prisoners in North Korea in conditions indistinguishable from the Nazi concentration camps of World War II.
Any caregiver would be appalled at the enviornment in which these people are living. According to the report, filed by Blaine Harden of The Washington Post, prisoners are fed a "diet of mostly corn and salt" causing chronic malnutrition and early death. They are given one suit of clothes for the rest of their time in prison and nothing else - no soap, no underwear, no sanitary napkins, no socks. Of course, the clothes often become rags. As if the forced labor and criminal living conditions were not bad enough, prisoners are often tortured by sadistic guards in the same way the Nazi's tortured Jews in Germany, Hutus murdered Tutsies in Rwanda, Serbs tried to wipe out Bosnian Muslims and Saddam Hussein tortured and killed Kurds in Iraq.
What can any one of us, as caregivers, do about such horrors? Part of the answer is for us to be aware of these injustices as well as to speak up about them. That's what Cronkite was trying to tell us. If we allow ourselves to be preoccupied primarily with fluff stories about Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, then we will lose our sense of the truly important news of the world. And we will turn our back on those in need.
Politicians and news stations say that they focus more on fluff now because "that's what the people want." It's frightening to think how true this may be.
Meanwhile, at this moment, tens of thousands of innocent people are suffering in North Korea along with millions of others elsewhere in the world. Who will do anything about international crimes if we, as caring Americans, do not?
And by the way, here's another quote from Walter Cronkite that describes a truth closer to home: "America's health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system."
What do you think?
-Erie Chapman
July 20, 2009
Day 201 - Reaching For Love
It happens toward the beginning of the Hitchcock movie, Vertigo. In a race across roof tops, the character played by Jimmy Stewart ends up in the spot about which many of us have nightmares. Hanging from the edge of a tall structure we wonder if he will be saved. A policeman stands above him. There is that crucial moment. Since Jimmy is the star, it's the policeman who ends up falling to his death in the course of saving Stewart.
The great Hitchcock understood what I have written about here before. We are born with only two fears: our startle reflex at loud noises, and our fear of falling. Every other fear we have is learned.
Because Hitchcock knew about our inate fear, he peppered many of his films with such images: Cary Grant clinging to a Mount Rushmore rockledge in North by Northwest; Jimmy Stewart hanging from the balcony at the end of Rear Window; Martin Balsam falling backward down the stairs in Psycho.
There is another fear that arises soon after our birth. We grow up yearning for Love and suffer when we don't get it. Newborn babies wither in the absence of love and loving touch. Yet, as adults, we seek it too.
What do we need to do to earn Love? What causes Love to leave our side?
Each of us has experienced abandonment at one time or another in our lives. It can be an awful and degrading feeling.
The good news is that since God is Love, Love is always present. The hard news is that so many of us decide to cut off Love's power when we encounter people we decide we don't like.
Caregivers can transmit Love to us when we are hanging on the edge of our "cliff." Sometimes, with reasons such as the sudden rudeness or depressive behavior of a patient or in deep fatigue, some caregivers will choose to withhold Love. Their patient, reaching for Love's hand and not receiving it, may fall into a deep chasm, waiting there for Love's return.
Of course, there are times when Love means letting go: the mother and father who need to let their child head off to college; the nurse who needs to let the terminal patient pass away. How are we to know what kind of Love is needed and when?
The reason why it is so important for health leaders to love their staff is that staff who are cared for are more likely to become vehicles of Love. The same is true for caregivers as they encounter each other. Love breeds Love.
Love knows when to hold on and when to let go. And it is Love that we seek when we are hanging onto the edge of sanity, or feel ourselves falling into isolation, dismay and melancholy.
What do you think?
-Erie Chapman
