Journal of Sacred Work

Saturday's Rose?

Go and look again at the roses. You will understand now that yours is unique in all the world.
   -The Little Prince, Antoine de St. Exupery   

   I cannot offer you an image of Saturday's rose because she is gone. She was cut, in innocence, by my wife who didn't know I was writing this series for you. The rose is in good hands now, off in Boston where my wife flew with her on a trip to see our children, their spouses, and our grandchild.  Our rose has performed her service for you and endures, now, on what water she sips through the straw of her cut stem.
   What is, after all, the role of a rose? From her standpoint, she has no "role" since role's are masks humans take on. The rose can only be true to who she is - beautiful and pink and delicious across her prime, now dying in a land far from where she grew...   

How Much Do We Love? How Beautiful is a Rose?

The effort to quantify love degrades it.   -Erie Chapman
   Think for a moment about someone you love. Describe this love. Then answer this question: How much do you love that person?
   This question is often asked, yet it has a hollow ring to it. How can we possibly apply a measuring stick or a calculator to something as important to us as how much we love our spouse, or children or parents or best friends?  In the case of saints like Mother Theresa, how can we quantify her love for the poorest of the poor?
   Am I am yielding to a measuring conceit when I use the word quantum to describe caregiving? It may sound like it. But what I am really trying to do is search, with you, for words that will help healthcare leaders value loving care at a higher and more balanced level... 

The Best Leadership Secret - Take care of the people who take care of people

The health care leader's job is to take care of the people who take care of people.  - Erie Chapman
   The secret of great health care leadership isn't a secret. It's perhaps the best advice I've ever offered to managers who seek to do their work well: Take care of the people who take care of people."
   Love the first line caregivers. These are the one's who give care. Most executives (fortunately) don't look after patients. They often lack the skills and their calling is to lead. The best way to model care giving is to serve the servers.
    This is what Jesus modeled for us when he knelt down to wash the feet of his disciples (see painting by Ford Madox Brown, circa 1852.) Whether you are Christian or not, you can see the power in Jesus' example. Leaders can talk endlessly about humility. But the best leaders teach by modeling the behavior that they seek from their staff....

The Meaning Effect

It is the human commitment to high purpose that can brighten and change our world.
-Erie Chapman 

   We all know the phenomenon. A certain number of patients in research studies designed to test new drugs will recover from their illness even though they are in a control group that is only taking a so called "sugar pill" or some other harmless substance. The notion is that these patients are getting better because they believe they are taking some magical new treatment.
   It turns out the placebo effect is the wrong way to describe the quantum impact of this phenomenon. What the studies prove is the role our belief has on our bodies ability to recover. Drs. Daniel Moerman and Wayne Jones believe, therefore, that we should rename this process "The Meaning Effect." 
   The great Dr. Victor Frankl (photo) would probably have preferred that we call it the "Purpose Effect" based on his discovery that there was a direct relationship between the purposefulness of concentration camp victims and their ability to survive...

Quantum Caregiving

Caregivers chronically underestimate their ability to be agents of healing as well as curing. - Erie Chapman

  One of our finest popular thinkers on healing is the physician and writer, Deepak Chopra. Dr. Chopra's insights can help us understand how we, as caregivers, can engage the energy of love in healing. This does not mean that we become healers, but that we may become agents of healing.
   As Dr. Chopra has said, "What has surprised me most is that when given insight, even a little bit of insight, patients find themselves empowered to do the impossible."
   Caregivers that have learned the gift of presence can awaken healing in others. This is part of the gift of not Quantum self-healing, but a new phrase for something ancient: Quantum Caregiving. We have the ability to help redirect energy in others as well as in ourselves. The best caregivers engage in a lovely choreography with patients that converts what was once seemed 'impossible' into a healing reality...

Monday's Rose

A rose is the curved shape of nature's breath. Her gift, like love's, offers petals, stem, leaves, thorns and a whiff of life.
-Erie Chapman

   The usual gift of romantic love is a dozen roses like those in the picture. Roses are the gift that comes with the ring of a doorbell, the happy embrace of nature's beauty in this particular version of love's expression.
   I send the gift of this rose to you today. She lives in our backyard. I send it to you as an image of gratitude, portrayed on a screen because I know no other way to send it to you. Be sure to click on the picture to enlarge it so you can appreciate her in a broader view. Although a rose can be a gift of romantic love, I offer it to you as something more: the gift of deep gratitude to you as a caregiver. Enjoy her many pink shades and her degrees of green all the way down to black and up to white. She is the curved shape of nature's breath... 

Gentleness Born of Wisdom

13 Who is wise and understanding among you? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom...17 But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits... James 3:13,17

   And what is this wisdom that gives birth to our gentler nature?  In the next chapter of his letter, James quotes the answer,
                 God opposes the proud
                 but gives grace to the humble.
   It is in humility that we find grace and with it the gentleness and compassion we need to be loving caregivers.
   All of us are born with some level of aggression. We are fiilled with endless desires to fill our own needs. That is why we need James, among others, to remind us to let go of our desires. Conflicts and disputes "come from [our] cravings" he warns us. But we cannot simply stop craving, can we?...

Rain Watching

Rain can nourish our souls.
-Erie Chapman
   The eyes of my daughter's and son-in-law's home in Boston stares over the top's of trees. Rainfall smears their windows. Wire mesh ensnares her drops. I watched it rain their one day and took this picture of it for you.
   Open-eyed meditation may mean looking at things we normally ignore. Rain watching has no function. It does not involve doing anything the world counts as productive. No one is paid simply to rain watch. But the experience can be deeply restful. Meditation is about being, not doing. Rain watching means letting the close sky and darker day wrap us in her shadow... 

Autumnal Equinox

   Those who are present to nature know that seasonal change is gradual, happening over many days. Yet there is a pivot point on the calendar. September 22 is the date when day and night are equal.     Fall, as the gateway to winter, is a celebratory time for some and more difficult for others who fear the cold. If you can make out the moon tonight, you may celebrate it as the Wine Moon since this is the time of year when grapes are harvested.    Wine Moon. The phrase has a pretty sound to me. And the word images we use have so much to do with how we feel about seasonal change.
   For many years, starting at age twelve (my age when my family moved from southern California to northern Ohio) I disliked fall. I even came to dislike the word "crisp" because it was always the word my dad used to describe the first cool day. To me, the word was simply a reminder to me of warm California days that were no more. After some hard winters on the edge of Lake Erie, fall began to feel to me like a death sentence. In fact, something had died. I didn't know what that was at the time. But it was my childhood...

The Physics of Love

There is more potential power in a single human spirit than in any atom bomb.
-Erie Chapman

   On August 6, 1945, the world learned of the stunning power that could explode from a single object when an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.  How could such extensive devastation arise from such a relatively small metal tube? How could a bomb smaller than a typical room destroy all the rooms in almost all the houses in the city?
   It doesn't take a physics major to understand the raw mathematical result: 100,000 people killed in seconds.
   And, fortunately, we don't need to be expert scientists to appreciate Einstein's insight that enormous energy is locked up inside even the tiniest mass, an energy made evident when that mass is multiplied by the speed of light squared.
   What energy is locked up inside a human being? How can caregivers make use of their enormous power to mix love with the tools of medicine to create healing?... 

The Fragrance of Forgiveness

Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that crushed it.  - Mark Twain

   Thousands of marvelous quotes are attributed to Mark Twain. I think the one  above is among his finest. The violet will shed her aroma on the one who crushes her to death. She does this involuntarily because she must. Her beauty requires it.
   For us to spread the aroma of our forgiveness on our enemies, we must make a hard and conscious choice.
   One of the hardest blows to the human condition is betrayal. We have all experienced broken trust. A dear friend of mine is dealing with this now as his wife of sixteen years leaves their home for another man. Their children watch their mother turn her back on them and wonder what they have done to provoke such an attack on their family. What is the role of foregiveness?
   Betrayals occur with such frequency that they are the stuff of daily soap operas. But the real life experience is deeply painful. And there are harder blows than an errant spouse. Recently, I heard the story of a mother whose innocent son was mistakenly shot in a drive-by shooting. What is she to think about the killer?... 

Velocity

There is more to life than increasing its speed.  - Gandhi

Yes, we slow pokes can see a lot. - Thomas L. Turtle in Scotty the Snail, by Erie Chapman   

   I asked my wife what I should write to you today. She said, "Write about how everyone is rushing so much. People are in more of a hurry now than they were when I was a little girl. Everybody rushes around the grocery story like it's on fire," she said recently. "What's the big emergency?"
   I don't know if people are rushing more or not, but if they are, why?  We've got all these labor saving devices - all those things that were supposed to give us more leisure time. Dishes can be dropped into machines that wash and dry them. Same with clothes. Food can be microwaved hot in seconds, teeth brushed electronically, cars washed in less than a minute, letters emailed in miliseconds.
   Now that these tasks are done for us by machines, what are we doing with our free time? Are we conversing with each other at ever deeper and more sophisticated levels? Are we plumbing the depths of wisdom literature, reading more, taking greater opportunities to help our fellow humans in need?...

Invitation to Sanctuary

In 1888 a children's book by Francis Hodgson Burnett appeared in bookstores across England. It was called The Secret Garden. It's enduring popularity led to two film versions (1949 & 1993.)

Why is the story so popular? Perhaps we all imagine a place as magical as the one in the story - a garden paradise hidden behind high walls where spring blooms eternal. In the story, the garden proves to be a healing preseence for the main character (as well as others.) This is the image I offer to you today. Your own secret garden. Each of us can create a place like that within us. A place we can visit behind closed eyes as we take some minutes to rest & restore ourselves.

You who are covered in tasks. You who are
busy with the needs of others. You who need
to give yourself rest's gift. Come with me up
the path. I invite you to sit awile, to nurture...

Sabbath

Be content with what you have;
rejoice in the way things are.
When you realize there is nothing lacking,
the whole world belongs to you.
       -Lao-Tzu

   Wayne Mueller, in his marvelous book Sabbath describes the wisdom present in the Jewish day of rest. It begins at sundown. And the point here is that it begins at sundown no matter what time of day that might be - 4:30 in winter of as late as 9:00 in summer. This means stopping work not by whether the job is done, but by recognizing it is simply time to stop. What is the wisdom in this?...

Our Great Strength

We are so much stronger than we think.
-Norman Cousins

   I heard Cousins speak at a conference in Denver about fifteen years ago. Most of us don't remember much about a given speaker's presentation. But I was struck by the above line, the last one Cousins delivered in a magnificent speech.
   In his book, the Anatomy of An Illness, Cousins, a gifted writer and former editor of the Saturday Evening Post, describes his own remarkable journey from the brink of a terminal illness back to health. Diagnosed with a dreaded disease, he laughed his way back to health and homeostasis. That's what he claims, and the evidence of his doctors proves he's right. Given a death sentence, Cousins said Yes to life and No to his illness...

Our Season of Change

O leaf, you give your gifts freely to me. Why have I not seen your riches before?    - Erie Chapman

  September. Summer rustles her green skirt, rises to leave her place at the head of the table of seasons.  In the Colorado Rockies, the Aspens surrender their emerald and give way way to gold. From Idaho, across the midwest and up into to Maine, oak leaves set sail on their final journey. Across the southern United States, summer hesitates, stays her warm han d on the faces of days. Along the California coast, it's hard to tell when summer ends and fall begins.

   However many years you have lived, you can mulitply that by four. If youv'e lived forty years, you've seen one hundred sixty season come and go. Or have you? Did most of them slip from your view unnoticed? Did you find yourself living most of your springs beneath flourescent lights, most of your winters indoors?...

Our Energy Age

   Recently, a woman in her twenties was part of a team making a presentation to our Healing Trust for a grant. She mentioned that her charity was holding a 5k race as a fundraiser. "I'd love to enter," I said, "but you'd have to add a category for people over ninety." Instead of laughing, as I thought she would, she gave me a confused look and said, "Well, I supposed we could do that...wait, so you're ninety?"
   Ouch! What does ninety look like? Imogen Cunningham photograhed her father at that age (left). But putting aside my ego damage, the truth is that to people in their twenties, most people over forty or fifty seem generically "old." So I thought of another way to think about age. The new question I have for you today is: What is your energy age? Not what the calendar says, but how you feel? And here's an even bigger question, how are you using the energy you have?...

The Seventh Principle: Live in Gratitude

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.   - Cicero

   Is gratitude truly the parent of all the other virtures as Cicero wrote more than two thousand years ago? The more I think about it, the more I agree that it is. Gratitude is a beautiful form of self care. When we live in it's glow, we feel Love's light passing through us. This gives us the strength to practice some of the other virtues.
   It also helps free us from some of life's vices. As I cultivate gratitude, anger eases away from me, frustration departs, hunger for approval eases...

The Sixth Principle - Humor & Humility

Note: On the fifth anniversary of 9/11, a column on humor may seem odd. There wasn't much funny that happened on that terrible day in 2001. On this anniversary, however, I was struck by the comment from the young daughter of one of the victims, broadcast on CBS. She said she was trying to figure out what could make her happy again. "Then I realized," she said, "that the thing that would make me happy was helping other people."
   What wisdom. What a great message for all of us. Now, in the middle of hard memories, here is an essay honoring humor and some leaders who discovered ways to express it.

Take your work seriously, not yourself.  -  Senator Robert Kennedy

 We're all vulnerable to it. We go through lots of education and training and one day we arrive in the role of caregiver. We are entrusted with the care of another. It's a big responsibility and carries with it a measure of power. Soon we may fall victim to thinking our work is so important that we must be also. This leads to the condition reflected in the line above. We begin taking ourselves seriously as well as our work. In the middle of grim times, we may lose balance...   

Sunday Meditation: Words & Actions

The people honors me with
   their lips
but their hearts are far from
   me;         (Mark 7:6)

   Matching actions to words is a life long challenge for all of us. We speak lofty values because we know we're supposed to and because it's easy. Soon we discover a gap of a certain distance between word and act.
   We announce our support for truth and practice our own versions of white lies (or worse.)  We  express our belief in equality and often ignore the plight of the underprivileged. We nod our heads in agreement with Jesus' plea that we love one another and then find our hearts filled with anger and hatred. What can we do to close the gap between word and action?...