Radical Loving Care: Journal of Sacred Work

How Love Moves Through Us

L'amor che move il sol e l'altre stelle - Last line of Dante's Divine Comedy

   My Italian son-in-law tells me that this last line of Dante's masterwork means (translated from the archaic Italian) "the love that moves the sun and the other stars." In the Comedy, the people come outside to be in the presence of this magnificent force - the Love of God.

   The greatest gift of our human existence is the chance we have to witness God's grace and power. This love that moves the sun and all the other stars can guide the hands and eyes of caregivers as well. You carry this gift with you and unwrap it for others when you reach out from your heart to help another...

Review & Renew

Weekends are times to review your meditations of this past week. Are your reflections becoming more meaningful? Do you feel yourself learning how to find your center, to re-balance?

If these things remain difficult, part of the meditative experience involves accepting the discomfort of temporary imbalance. Grief, sadness and pain are great teachers. Yet there is no need to wallow there. Today, as you reflect on this past week's experience, take time for gratitude. Gratitude is the greatest gift and the finest way to help us recover the balance that we, as caregivers, need so that we may let love pass through us to others.

Read back through the past week's meditaions. See if they raise different thoughts for you than they did when you first read them. Today, write your own meditation as a gift to yourself.

Seven Special Words

     Thirty-eight years ago today, a hospital caregiver delivered into my ears seven of the happiest words I ever heard. It was the days when almost all husbands were still relegated to the waiting room as their wives were wheeled away from them for the sacred moment of delivery. As I sat back in the empty, sun drenched waiting area, I closed my eyes a moment, tried to imagine my wife in the delivery room. Then, I heard the softest of whimpers.

     The nurse spoke my name and these seven sweet words, "Would you like to meet your son?" It was 7:56 a.m. Sunday, July 28. (click on photo to enlarge)

     The poet William Blake advised us that he who "kisses the joy as it flies/Lives in eternity's sunrise." That day, (and for some days after as you can see in the slightly damaged old photo above) I kissed and hugged joy in every way I knew how. There before me was our precious son. Could anything be happier?

       One of the great joys of being a maternity nurse or doctor is the chance to deliver good news. I got equally good news three years and three days later when our daughter was born. And that time, with some effort, campaigning and persistence, I got to see her first precious seconds in the world in person - starting at the minute of her birth, 10:20 a.m. These kinds of moments are precious to loving parents and they are precious to healing caregivers for whom each birth is a sacred event...

Sacred Eyes

Our task is to become aware of God's presence...We are called to see differently and then to live differently.   - Sallie McFague, Ph.D, Life Abundant

   Why is it that some caregivers seem to have such a genius for caregiving? Could it be that, as Dr. McFague says, they have learned to see differently and, therefore, they live differently?

   The best definition of God I have ever seen is the one offered by both the apostles Paul and John. God is love. The latest polls show that over ninety percent of Americans say they believe in God. Yet if they were asked if they believed in love, perhaps the percentage would be even higher...

Beauty's Thorns

One of the hardest things to understand about beauty is how much pain sits next to its joy. Look at this rose. Inside its beauty do you not also feel some sense of pain? Not only the awareness of the thorns that warn you to touch carefully, but the knowing that beauty often draws tears with its joy.

Each patient or client in need - the patient with cancer, the child that has been abused, the homeless woman - is beautiful because he or she is human. When they are in pain, they remain beautiful and the compassionate among us feel the thorns of their pain and do not turn back. I admire and love the patients and caregivers of this world. I think they are gorgeous beings. Caregivers bring their love and attention to complete strangers - and they do it for inadequate pay. Some may think of doctors as rich. But in my thirty years of experience, I find that most physicians are underpaid for the hard and dedicated work they do to bring healing to those in need. The best caregivers embrace the beauty of the rose always knowing they will sometimes suffer the wounds of her thorns...

HHN: Parrish Medical Center Continues Successful Campaign

   In the great way they so often do, Parrish Medical Center, Titusville, Florida, keeps finding new and more creative ideas to nourish loving care in their organization. Often, the Loving Care campaign needs supporting materials. Liz Vierra & Natalie Sellers, members of the Parrish leadership team, together with other staff,  brainstormed images this past spring and came up with several to support their initiative, some of which are portrayed in this photo (click to enlarge.) What's more important, are the other elements that have characterized their success.

   The leadership of Parrish, under George Mikitarian, demonstrates a pattern of thought and behavior that characterizes successful loving care organizations.

Meditation: Courageous Caregivers

      On National Public Radio (NPR) recently, a reporter interviewed doctors and nurses in a burn unit treating soldiers suffering the exhausting and exquisite agony of severe burns (click on photo to enlarge.) One soldier had been flown in from the front lines of the Iraq War. He entered the hospital more than a year ago with burns over 97% of his body. "These patients never survive," a doctor said. "But somehow this fellow did." It took over four hundred days of radical loving care to bring about this miracle.

"In this work," a nurse said, "you either celebrate glorious success or your heart is broken..."

Wherever You Are

  Perhaps we occupy more locations than the place in which we breathe at this moment. We live in the minds of those who think of us and care for us. And some part of us lives in the places we have been and might be in the future. Wherever you are, you, as a caregiver, have the chance to live not in your yesterday or your tomorrow, but in your now.

   Caregivers are the subjects of great demands because they are presented with such great needs from others. We place a heavy burden on caregivers to ease our pain, cure our disease, sit with us in the midst of our anger and sadness as well as in our happiness and joy. The challenge to conscientious caregives is not how to take a break, but how to give themselves a break. Poets always say it better. And Mary Oliver says it best of all in these words...

Tough-minded AND Tender-hearted

Love's One Line: We must always be tough-minded and tender-hearted at the same time.   - Martin Luther King, Jr.

   One of the most common mistakes people make in interpreting loving care is the notion that it's only about kindness and compassion. Some executives (usually my fellow males, I'm sorry to say) try to demean the work of Radical Loving Care by barking: "Oh, is this some of that touchy-feely stuff?"

   This ridiculous phrase demonstrates a deep misunderstanding of the nature of love. Loving care requires a combination of discipline, competence and courage balanced with caring and compassion. The most loving thing a physical therapist may need to do is to compel a stiff-jointed patient to move - even when that movement will cause short term pain. A good counselor, to be effective, may need to push his client to confront his or her worst fears in order to gain healing. A leader may need to remove a supervisor that is engaging in bullying behavior.

   Yet people will still say to me: How can we be loving in the middle of laying people off? ...

   

How We Move

After young people go through our program, they move differently through the world.    - Village Cultural Arts Center

Love's One Line: Live Love & you will move through the world with grace.

Water Gatherers, Ghana

   On a large blue mat in the center of a big room, a group of African-American children ages 8-14 are gathered. Some sit in a circle, some sit in a row of chairs playing rhythmic instruments. In the center of the circle, two children face each other. They engage in a dance unusual to my eyes. They circle each other, sometimes jump over each other, rarely touch. "Respect the dignity of the circle," their leader, a man from South Africa warns as one of the children acts restless. The child quiets down. 

   "Yes, we teach West African culture," the head of the Village Cultural Arts Center tells my colleague, Kristen Dinger, and me, "but we are really teaching pride, gratitude, respect, and positive approaches." That's when her partner chimed in with that memorable image, "After young people go through our program, they move differently through the world."

   How do we, as caregivers, move through the world? What kind of presence do we signal with the subtle movements of head, hands, the way we walk?

Meditation: Unconditional Love - The Case of Casey

Why do people love their pets so much? Look at this little photo and see if you don't feel better. Meet Casey, my younger sister Martha's dog. Martha is a caregiver at The Toledo Hospital in Toledo, Ohio. Each day, she greets hundreds of visitors in her role as receptionist at the front desk. She does her job so well that last year she was named employee of the year at this large hospital.

How do you keep up your energy in such a demanding job, especially when many people are asking you the same questions every day? As she comes home tired at the end of her work, Martha knows she can count on something special from Casey - uncondtional affection...

On Hope

    Inside everyone is a great shout of energy waiting to be born.       - David Whyte

Fatigue enters the life of every committed caregiver. In those times, no matter how committed and loving, the prospect of facing one more patient or one more client or one more phone call can seem overwhelming.

      If you're feeling strong at the moment you read this, it may be difficult to recall the bone-tired exhaustion you have felt at those other harder times. The emptiness at the end of working a double-shift, the way you felt at the end of child labor right before your baby was born, or simply the fatigue you feel when the alarm erupts before dawn. In the comfort of your own bed, the temptation to hide there can feel very appealing. And then some pinprick of light appears, first a bother, then recognized as the glow of hope rising from someone calling to you for help. Off in the distance, you are needed. And your humanity will rise, once again, to greet that hopeful need with your love...

Meditation: The Caregiver's Surprising Reward

A spiritual truth that I have experienced...is that whatever we do to another we actually do to ourselves.                                    --Elizabeth Wessel, R.N., M.S. - St. Joseph Health System, Orange, California

I was so struck by the above comment, posted by Ms. Wessel in the Journal, that I wanted to highlight it for today's meditation. What if what she says is true? What if "whatever we do to another we actually do to ourselves?"

If we lived this truth and followed the winding path to compassion, imagine the impact on our lives. This nurse's observation is a concise explanation of the reason why true caregiving - those extra Samaritan-like efforts special people make - is so rewarding...

Meditation: Mothering & Caregiving

     For most of the world's population, our very first experience of love is through our mothers. It is mother who is the first to coo love to us, to hold us to her breast, to wrap us in her warmth. Regardless of our age, it is mother who we most often call for when we are frightened or in pain. As babies, and beyond, we seek a mother's love.

     Some psychologists posit that people who have trouble with caregiving may not have received this loving warmth as babies and small infants. Clearly there are exceptions, surrogates who stepped in to give love when a mother died in childbirth or was, for whatever other reason, unable to offer the gift of love to her baby. Our mothers (or their stand-ins) are the ones who teach us love before we can speak.

     Recall the person who first gave you love. Consider how you are passing that gift to others in your work. Read Ancle Rubin's lovely reflection on motherhood from "Sitting in the Grass", brought to my attention by reader Emily Fluhrer of Greenville, South Carolina...

On Love

Do not waste your time bothering whether you 'love' your neighbor, act as if you did. As soon as we do this, we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less.                                                    -Mere Christianity - C.S. Lewis

   

   The only way to fail the test of sacred work and of life is not to take it – to retreat to the grandstands and watch passion playing out on the great field before us.

Mission Fraud - Part II - Ten Steps Toward a Healing Culture

(a continuation of yesterday's Meditation: Mission Fraud, Part I)

Is your organization promising compassion and caring in its mission  statement and rarely delivering it? Are you who you say you are, or are you living a fraud? All employees of hospitals, hospices and charities are caregivers. They report to patients and clients, not to bosses. They need our support and our encouragement, not our condemnation. That is the challenge for America’s health care leaders. And here are some ways to make it happen. It starts with re-examining all the systems that support, or don’t support caregivers, and it continues with these ten steps...

Health Care: Mission Fraud - Part I

            David Whyte, like all fine poets, tells the truth in his poetry. His truth can help we, as caregivers, see ours. Consider his poem, “All the True Vows,” that appears in his marvelous book of poetry: The House of Belonging (julie@www.davidwhyte.com).

I thought about Whyte’s words as I sat in an Emergency Department waiting room recently:

All the true vows

are secret vows

the ones we speak out loud

are the ones we break...

HHN: Mercy Magic! - Mercy-Gilbert Builds Healing Culture with New Hospital

It's one thing to build a hospital (thousands of organizations have done that.) It's quite another to create a healing facility and healing culture at the same time! That's what CEO Laurie Eberst and her partners have done in planning, developing and bringing into being the recently opened Mercy Gilbert Hospital (click on photo to enlarge) just outside Phoenix, Arizona. And they got to do that because of the leadership & support of Catholic Health West & its President & CEO Lloyd Dean...

Meditation: When Forgiving Caregiver Errors is Wise as Well as Loving

  Love's One Liner - We are not our mistakes, we are children of God who err.

When French soccer star Zinadine Zidane head-butted an opponent in the World Championship on Sunday, July 9 and was ejected, it was clear that millions would pass harsh judgment on this now hapless hero. In an instant, the great Zidane jeopardized his legacy as one of the finest players in the history of the world's most popular sport. When Italy went on to win, the hostility toward Zidane intensified. Announcers and other commentators heaped venom on this man's "shameful act." The hero of France had, in the eyes of many, suddenly become a goat. Would he, should he, will he, ever be forgiven?    

Meditation: Heroes of Grace

When you''re a healing presence, you're an artist.  - James E. Miller & Susan C Cutshall in: The Art of Being a Healing Presence

She'll be ninety-four years old next month. She's far from being the oldest person in the country, but she's the most gracious one I know. Perhaps you can see this grace in my mother's eyes in this recent photograph - the sparkle and warmth that gracious people offer to us by their presence. Whatever I knew about grace as a child, I learned from her. From whom did you learn grace?