Radical Loving Care: Journal of Sacred Work

Meditation: On Self-Kindness & Empathy

To emphathize, you recall within yourself a time when you felt even a particle or thread of what another person now seems to feel. With that beginnning, you continue to listen carefully with your heart...coming as close as you can to appreciating what his or her experience is like. You don't try to duplicate it within you - you just stay with it, fathoming it as well as you can.  -The Art of Being a Healing Presence - James E. Miller with Susan C. Cutshall

   A colleague and friend of mine has a ten-year old daughter. Recently, she came to him and said, "Daddy, I think I'm too dumb and too fat."

   What does a father say? It requires empathy to know how to respond to heart-breaking comments like this. But how does a man in his forties empathize with the feelings of a ten-year old girl? What we know is true is that the more he can empathize, the more likely he is to come up with a good answer.

   An unthinking answer goes like this: "Stop feeling that way. You're not dumb and you're not fat." This answer denies the person's feelings and doesn't help resolve them...

HCN: The Power of Peacemaking Circles - How They Make Oasis an oasis

   So many of the people I counsel come to me depressed because they feel unheard. - Mary Lynne Musgrove, Professional Counselor, Columbus, Ohio

  Peacemaking Circles have become a powerful way to help both the children we serve & many of their parents feel heard.  - Anne Pruett, Oasis Center

   How do we know we exist? Most of us look for cues from the people around us. Are we seen, heard, recognized by anyone else? So many people's lives are damaged because they grew up never feeling heard & therefore not valued. In Nashville, some teens seek help from a marvelous organization called Oasis Center. Why?... 

The Magic of Awareness

What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.  - - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)

   Here it is, the formula for our transformation in one sentence. Maslow's statement may be true, but this level of actualization is hardly as simple as his words suggest. In fact, Maslow placed it toward the top of his hierarchy of human needs - the last layer before transcendence.(click on image to enlarge) How do we change our awareness of ourselves for the better?

   This process is critical for caregivers because, by definition, caregivers are engaged in helping other people through times of great change. If I come to you in need of loving care and your self image is that you are not a very loving person, we've both got a problem.

Learning to be a Caregiver - A Story

On Being a Caregiver

It’s the sense of touch…In any real city, you walk past other people, brush against them. In L.A. nobody touches you, we’re always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other just so we can feel something.

                               -Opening lines from the movie   -Crash.

 

Jean was tired. Only on the job for three weeks, she wondered if nursing was really for her. “I thought the nurse’s aides would handle bedpans,” she moaned to her charge nurse as she washed her hands. “I didn’t go to nursing school for this.”

Lorraine the charge nurse lifted her coffee mug off the counter and invited Jean to sit down. “Why did you go to nursing school? It can’t have been because you wanted to get rich…”

The Power of the Journal Habit --- Enriching Your Life With News From Your Heart

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.  - from The Little Prince by Antoine de St. Exupery   

In Antoine de St. Exupery's charming and now eternal story, a little prince goes searching strange lands (click on this illustration from the book). Toward the end of the story, he is advised by a wise fox that one can only see the truth with the heart.

     In a world of health care governed, today, so powerfully by measurement-oriented science, how can we learn to attend to our belief in that which is "invisible to the eye?"  How can we listen more closely to the news from our hearts?

     One way for us to do this is to begin asking questions that plumb the depths of our priorities. What are the days that stand out most in your life? What are the moments that are etched so vividly in your memory that you find yourself calling them up in exact detail as if they happened yesterday? 

New Series: Sunday Meditations for Christian Caregivers

Happy are those who consider the poor. - - Psalm 41

The Journal of Sacred Work was created for caregivers of all faiths and of no faith. It is founded out of the Baptist Healing Trust, whose mission is: "To be a caring ministry devoted to healing with love in the Christian tradition."

     In recognition of our roots, our tradition, and our desire to offer love to all, we begin, today, an addtion to our regular daily meditations by launching a series of Sunday meditations. They are offered as support to all, but will most likely resonate with Christian caregivers whose faith rests in the ministry, teachings and glorious example of Jesus.

     A thousand years before Jesus, King David wrote (and sang with his harp - as in the image above) his Psalms in praise and thanks to God. Sunday is not only the day of designated rest - the Sabbath for Christians - but a day of living in gratitude. I know that I am grateful, today, for a particular thing. It is my wife's and my 40th anniversary. What is it that floods YOU with gratitude on this day of rest?

Weekend Reflection from the 13th Century

Surrender
Weep, and then smile... -Jalaluddin Rumi - 1207-1273

Over the last seven centuries, millions of people of all faiths have, on occasion, turned to the wisdom and beauty of the great 13th century Persian poet known as Rumi. Like so many in the world, Rumi reportedly grew up in a difficult childhood enviornment. Yet he grew to become one of the great masters of Sufi thought and practice and a sage for the ages.

Rumi's message speaks to all those who seek to love others in the best spirit of our humanity. His belief was that when we open our hearts to others, we are opening our hearts to God. He preached surrender to God's Love.

Let some of his words, passed on to me by a reader of the Journal, speak to you and move through you this weekend as you contemplate your work as a caregiver over the past week, your plans for the week to come, and your celebration of your now - your time of weekend rest....

The Robot Crisis?

O wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is!

O brave new world,

That has such people in't!   -Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene 1

       It was from this hopeful Shakespeare quote that writer Aldous Huxley drew the title for his terrifying novel of human degradation, Brave New World (1932). In the novel, the human spirit is challenged. What makes us human? Do we need humanity? ...

The Presence Meditations

Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world, we will have discovered fire.    -Teilhard de Chardin

    If there's one thing my two-year old grandson still understands, it's how to be present (click on photo to enlarge.) With limited memories in his short life and little to worry about in the future, he knows how to do something many of us have forgotten - he is a living meditation on presence to this moment.      

     It turns out, the rest of us, with long memories and a simultaneous preoccupation with the future, need to re-learn what we knew when we were two. That is partly what this Journal is about - relearning presence we once could provide naturally as very small children.

     Now barely two months old, certain things are becoming clear about the Journal of Sacred Work. We know that the vast majority of our readers are the people we were trying to reach from the beginning - caregivers. More than 200 comments have been posted from people coast to coast (and internationally) from hospital, hospice and other caregivers. People like Sim Yoon and Karen York and Sonya Jones at Alive Hospice in Tennessee, Elizabeth Wessel at St. Joseph Home Care in California, Kathy Parolini with the American Cancer Society, Diana Gallaher at the Tennessee Justice Center, Natalie Sellers with Parrish Medical Center in Florida and nurses like Jane Sirac in New York and Jennifer Stanhope, and physicians like Dr. Brian Wong in Seattle and Dr. Keith Hagan - along with so many others around the nation. And this doesn't begin to cover the millions of caregivers who work quietly at home. As one reader, Reeta Parks, told me, "I'm not a professional caregiver, I'm just a Mom and a wife and a daughter and a friend." In others words, as I told her, "You are a caregiver...."

     What does it take to "harness for God the energies of love?" Can there be any more important thing for us to do?...

*A Revelation for Non-Profits - "Customer Service" is a Failure!

   What does it mean for a charity or hospital to carry a faith-based name? When you enter a hospital that has a cross on the building or a Star of David in the lobby, what do you expect? When you enter a charity called St. Vincent’s or Sisters of Mercy or Methodist, is it fair for you to anticipate a higher standard of loving care? A standard grounded in the love of Jesus?

   Faith-based hospitals were founded in a loving tradition that includes the stunning beauty of the Sermon on the Mount and all the great parables including the story of the Good Samaritan – offered by Jesus as a penultimate example of how we may travel the pathway to heaven by showing mercy toward others. Sadly, for many so-called charities, a religious name has become simply a quaint artifact that no longer means what it once signified. The terrible phrase "customer service" has become a mockery of true loving care.

   Consider the for-profit foundation of "customer service." By its nature, customer service calls employees to pretend to like customers so they'll come back and buy more products. Is that the basis on which charites were founded and are grounded today? Customer service language is an embarrassment to non-profits and should be discarded immediately. More important, the intention beneath it must be completely re-thought... (*note: More Comments (12) were received on this meditaion than any other yet posted!)...

Meditation: The Most Personal Invitation

Come, now, to your place of rest. Not your bed, for this is not about sleep.

Find a chair, a place on the floor or a large log in the forest lying on its side where it fell after all those years of standing tall on the only spot it ever occupied in the core of the deep woods. Now it’s smooth bark offers itself to you. See light as you have never seen it before - how it creates new things through its shadows. Why is the shadow not like its parent? Look at the shadow of the twig, look how the sun changes a hanger (click on the photo I took in 1978 to enlarge.) Consider your own shadow & how it changes in the shfiting angles of sun and moon and Love.

   Go, now, to that place within. The place where you sit at the crossing

& watch the train of your thoughts steaming by. Before you close your eyes, you see.

There’s the male cardinal

in the evergreen. You wait & watch knowing she’s nearby & soon she appears,

shadowing her mate faithful as a Geisha. But she is not her mate...