Journal of Sacred Work

The Tears of Things

...crying is healthy. It is the twin emotion of laughter.   - Dr. Linda E. Jordan

   Enchanted as I am with poetic language, I could not resist seeking out the genesis of Lucretius' phrase, the "Tears of Things" when I saw it referenced by poet Robert Bly in one of his essays. In the course of tracking this phrase, I found, on the Internet, an exceptional essay on the role of tears in caregiving. It by Dr. Linda E. Jordan, Manager of Duke Community Bereavement Services, part of Duke Community Care. Dr. Jordan's brief essay is a brilliant commentary on the respect we need to offer to the unusually visible way that our grief may express itself - if we let it.
   I offer Dr. Jordan's one page reflection in its entirety. It may forever change the way you give care:

Smoke Trees & Monday Peace

  Here are three choices for the next few minutes of your Monday. First, you can do what American society and Karen Carpenter's song call you to do. You can let Monday get you down (especially if it's raining where you're reading this.)
   Second, you can email me and I'll send you my thoughts on using Monday as a way to challenge "patterned thinking" - a way to test your cognitive thought process and how change can occur. But do you really want to go through a thinking exercise with all the other challenges facing you as a caregiver?
   The third choice is to join me for a couple of minutes in a meditation on the image of a special living thing: A Smoke Tree...

Transmitting Love

Then Jesus said to him, "What do you want me to do for you?" The blind man said to him, "My teacher, let me see again." Jesus said to him, "Go, your faith has made you well." Immediately, he regained his sight and followed him on the way.   -Mark 10:51-52

   Christians often speak of the way Jesus healed people. But Jesus never took credit. Here, he does not claim to have healed the blind man. Instead, "...your faith has made you well," Jesus says.
   Jesus understood that he was a vehicle for God's Love, not the source - that the healing came not from him but through him. 
   When we have an experience of helping someone else to regain their health, it's tempting to take credit personally. But when we are successful, it is become we have become channels for healing, not because we have healed. How can healers become better pathways through which Love can travel?...

Dr. Adams

My mother loved me, so you can't hurt me.
-Hunter "Patch" Adams, M.D.

   Most people are dressed in business suits. It's a typical-looking fund-raising luncheon for a wonderful charity, Hospital Hospitality House, a place that offers a safe, low cost, haven for those whose loved ones have been hospitalized. One person, however, stands out in the crowd. "Who the devil is that?" someone asks me. "That" is a giant of a man wearing a full orange outfit. Half his long hair is blue, the other gray. He wears a broad moustache.
   The clothes match the personality of the man - more or less. The less he can seem to be like everyone else, the happier he is. Before his speech, someone overhears him making a pattern of startling comments, "We need to get those murderers out of Washington," he tells one startled listener...

The Secret of Quality

Ultimately, the secret of quality is love.
Avedis Donabedian, M.D. (1919-2000)

Without radical loving care, quality management can be an empty exercise.  -Erie Chapman

   Shortly before he passed away, Dr. Donabedian, internationally known for his "Seven Pillars of Quality" did an interview with Health Affairs magazine. My friend and colleague, Rosemary Gibson, who works for the renowned Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, sent me the article just recently. I was overwhelmed with the power of Donabedian's words and his piercing insight into the motivation which must underlie any effort at quality.
   Dr. Donabedian, considered by many to be the father of quality assurance, spent his career trying to help organizations, especially hospitals, understand the systems and processes necessary to improve quality in caregiving. Yet, in the end, it was not the systems where he placed his biggest emphasis...

Readiness for Change

The only way words can change anyone is if the listener's heart is ready.
-Erie Chapman

    I suppose, personally, it  could be a big life event. That's how I've cast it in the tiny constellation of my mind. I've been given the opportunity to summarize, in an hour and a half, all of the essential elements of the loving care work I've been focused on for over thirty years. Three television cameras will be set up to record the presentation before a live audience (what other kind of audience is there?) The event is scheduled for November 9. Post presentation, DVDs and CDs of the speech will be available. What pressure, huh?
   What would you do if you had an hour and a half to summarize the main points of your life credo? Different from my usual approach of speaking impromptu, I've been making notes like crazy. It's a dilemma. If I read from the notes, the speech will be boring. But if I don't check my notes, I run the risk of missing important aspects of this work.
   But does the speech matter? Probably not. It's the subject, not the speech that holds the power... 

Caregiving & The Energy of Loss

If you want to assess the mood of some American males with whom you work or live, check the sports page on Monday morning.  - Erie Chapman

   I know there are plenty of exceptions - that millions of men and tens of millions of women could care less about sports. But scan the television screen on Saturday and Sunday afternoons and you will see a fascinating phenomena. Grown men (and some women) who may otherwise seem sane the rest of the week, who will don suits for work on Monday morning, who would never think of shouting in a business meeting, have actually painted their faces various colors, stripped off their shirts, put feathers in their hair, tatooed their bodies, and done everything they can to imitate savage behavior including screaming their heads off - all on behalf of their beloved team...

Autumn Purple

By following autumn's purple thread, we may come to appreciate even more of the beauty of nature and of life.  -Erie Chapman   

   Beyond the fluorescent lights under which so many caregivers work, autumn births colors rare in the sterile environment of hospitals. In all the falls I've lived, I never noticed until this one how much purple emerges in October. I always think of this month as gold and red and yellow. But it's the purple I see this year.   

   Meditation allows us to see what we may not have noticed when we're in a hurry. CBS Sunday Morning recently presented the story of a National Geographic photographer. He spoke of traveling the world capturing stunning images for the magazine and the prizes he had won. Then his face softened. "My career was going great. But I was gone from home a lot. Then my wife found a lump. It was cancer. Everything changed."
   This story has a good ending...

How Does God's Love Appear?

...and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.
-Mark 10:44,45

   Jesus' teachings are so clear and so confusing. For the people of his time, it must have seemed he was speaking in riddles. How could the "first" be a slave to all others? Why wouldn't God's Son sit back like other kings and be waited on?
   This, of course, is both the genius and the challenge of God's Love. We are called, as caregivers, to serve others beyond ourselves. Yet when we gain power in any arena, the inclination of most of us is to use that power (and the money that goes with it) to serve ourselves...

Human Closeness

In human closeness there is a secret 
edge...
Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966)

   The complex caregiver/patient 
encounter has so many facets. The more 
acute the patient's need, the greater  
the opportunity for the encounter to be meaningful. 
   Opening our hearts in patient & client encounters
means that the caregiver will feel some of the pain  
of the patient. There is a cost in this. But there is  
also a cost if we close the door to our soul... 

Have You Changed?

We begin to die the day we are silent about things that matter.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

   PBS has been re-running their great series Eyes on the Prize, chronicling key events in the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and '60s. One of my regrets in life is that I didn't find the courage to join those marchers when I was in college and law school in the '60s. My reflection about that time caused me to wonder something each of us may ask: Have we changed? Would I find the courage to join a similar kind of march today? Or would I remain "silent about things that matter?"
   In a broader sense, how are we different now than we were, say, five years ago? As caregivers, have we matured in our ability to give love, or have we become more bitter and burned out?...

The Dark Comfort of the Status Quo

The status quo, in its seductiveness, can trap us like a straitjacket and keep us from accomplishing meaningful change.
-Erie Chapman

   The hardest thing about advancing the Loving Care Movement is not people understanding what it's about. Everyone agrees that loving care is a good thing. Loving care is like motherhood and apple pie. No one can say they oppose it. Love is an essential value. Only a fool or a deep cynic would say they're against love.
   The problem is not in the words, but in the actions. Meaningful change, rare as it is, lies in persistent follow-through. For examples of this, consider your workplace...

Secrets

Some of our most beautiful secrets are unknown even to us.
-Erie Chapman

   When we think of the secrets within us, we may imagine that all of them are dark. But our hearts hold secrets we have yet to discover that are bright and beautiful. We need to listen to the voice of these secrets to enable them to find a home outside of us as gifts to this world. We need to be present to the lovely secrets that sit quietly within us.
   Every so often someone will say to me: "People are either kind or not so you can't teach people to love." Is this really true? Are people either lovers or haters? Almost everyone I know is somewhere in between. Most people can be kind to those they know and love and have an almost equal capability to be mean towards those they feel are threatening...

You Alone...

And it was then that in the depths of sleep
Someone breathed to me: "You alone can do it,
Come immediately."
-Jules Supervielle (translated by Geoffrey Gardner)

   We spend about a third of our lives in sleep and part of that time in the strange land of dreams, (imagined in this painting by Thomas Moran) The late Uruguayan-born poet, Jules Supervielle (1884-1960) left us many beautiful lines of poetry and prose. The above three lines from the end of his poem "The Call" provoke memories of times when we have heard voices in the quiet of the night, perhaps in dreams, possibly in half-awake moments when suddenly we hear a voice calling to us. We raise up on our elbow, look about, realize that the voice was probably coming from within. What do these secret voices breathe to us? What is it that we alone can do?...

Camels, Needles & Love

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.  - Mark 10:25

   The middle and upper economic classes hate this statement from Jesus. I got to feeling so guilty about my own wealth a few years ago that I considered giving most of what I have away. For awhile, the idea seemed enchanting (my wife, understandably, was less enthusiastic.)
    Of course, I didn't do anything - except to increase my contributions to charity and to become more active in working to help the poor & vulnerable.  I suppose this is the best most of us do. We've worked so hard for our money and the stuff it buys that the idea of parting with it seems not only hard but foolish. Yet, all the way back to the prophet Amos (see image, left) we have been admonished to help the poor...

Peace

Peace, like happiness, eludes pursuit. Instead, perhaps we can cultivate her presence, invite her into our lives, establish the kind of garden in our hearts where peace feels welcome & can bloom anew.
-Erie Chapman

   My friend and colleague, Tracy Wimberly, R.N. and I, worked together in all three hospitals systems where I was privileged to serve as CEO. Her favorite greeting has always been, "Peace." She used to have a china plaque on her office door bearing the same word in green letters.
   Peace. The word has a lovely energy around it for most people. Just the saying of it or the reading of this single word imparts to some a feeling of rest. The great Peter Paul Rubens even sought to paint Peace (click on image to englarge.)
   One of the goals of the Journal is that it be a place of sanctuary for you and other caregivers. A place where you can come for rest. Whether it's Friday the 13th or Monday the 1st, I hope you find, here, images that bring you some inner peace across your week and weekend....

Catching Tears

[Jesus] told him, "Go wash yourself in the pool of Siloam" (Siloam means "sent"). So the man went and washed and came back seeing!  John 9:7

Compassion is not administered in cubic centimeters from a syringe but is found in a river of love that flows from the heart.  - Erie Chapman

   She crosses the threshold of the Siloam clinic in Nashville holding a wash cloth against the side of her face. She is from Guatemala and speaks no English. A caregiver sees her slumped in the waiting room. "Does she have a toothache?" he worries, because there are no dentists at the Clinic. "Has she received a blow to the face in an auto accident" he wonders next.
   He approaches her. Through a translater, the caregiver learns something stunning. Why the wash cloth?  "It is to catch my tears," the woman says in Spanish.
   Abused by her husband, this woman has no visible physical wounds, but her sadness is intense, deep, and beyond any translation that uses words. The Siloam Clinic does an exquisite job of caring for all kinds of health problems that afflict their largely immigrant patient population. How do they treat sadness, especially when there is the barrier of language?...

Partings

I should be content
to look at a mountain
for what it is
and not as a comment
on my life.
-David Ignatow

   This fall, I've written to you about leaves and roses and water fanning out from a garden hose across my back yard. In nature, poet David Ignatow thinks the idea is to be content with what we see, whether beautiful or scarred. It is our tendency to seek to fuss with and readjust nature. Cut flowers need to be arranged, we think. Dead leaves must be swept away. It's hard for us to leave the world alone - especially as she presents herself in our backyard. Parks we visit need to spread signs around warning us not to touch. Can we be content to observe the mountain or the rose for their strength and elegance and not as a comment on our lives?...

Profound Presence To Nothing Important

Where Attention Goes, Energy Flows. If we offer intense presence to integrity & beauty, we will find love in that which has drawn the gift of our deep attention.

-Erie Chapman

   What commands your attention? Whatever it is, that's where the power of your energy is directed. Like millions of men and women, I've kicked an awful lot of Saturdays & Sundays through the goal posts directing my energy to men playing football. I enjoy watching sports, but part of me always wonders - so what?
   Another thing I do in my idle time is water the grass. We have automatic sprinklers, but I also like to water the grass myself. As you know by now, most things are one kind of meditation or another to me and almost everything lends itself to allegory. Watering the grass has a function, of course. But I enjoy things like this more if I seek to appreciate the deeper meanings: the way sunlight catches the spray, the pressure of the hose against my hand, the smell of the wet grass.(click on photo to enlarge)
   So what? Football games, grass watering, driving to and from work. What draws attention during these in between times in life? Meditation is about rest - relaxing and breathing while imagining images that support easing back from the noise of the world. There's no need to do anything other than gaze at streams of water as they strike the light...

Monday Meditation: Passing Acquaintances

Presence to the ordinary helps us see the extraordinary.
-Erie Chapman

   Inside any given day we have countless tiny encounters that are random and forgettable. How can these brief glimpses inform the texture of deeper, more meaningful meetings?
   At dawn, we awaken to some kind of light, we brush aside the covers, our feet touch the floor. The news comes to us that it's Monday. We are seconds into our waking and there is nothing, yet, to mark the day as anything other than ordinary.
   In first light, we glance out the window as a light breeze scuttles a leaf across the driveway (click on photo to enlarge.) We see nothing special and the leaf leaves our life, never to be thought of again or spoken about. On the way to work, we see a woman at a bus stop in a worn purple coat. She smiles gap-toothed at someone. But we are already past her and she exits our lives. Driving by a self-storage company whose outer wall is painted with a long wavey blue line like the surface of the ocean, we see a man in a corduroy coat walking the sidewalk as if immersed in those waves. He too, will join the endless list of those we forget, bit characters in the drama of our lives...