Journal of Sacred Work

Gnosis

Consider the lilies is the only commandment I ever obeyed. - Emily Dickinson

   At first glance, it sounds a bit heretical. "Consider the lilies" is the only commandment she ever obeyed? Yet Emily Dickinson's life is a stunning tribute to the beauty of her solitary and poetic commitment to this counsel from Jesus, reported in the Gospel of Matthew.
   In all our efforts to understand and decipher the ineffable around us, there is a chance we may underestimate our gift for what the Greeks called gnosis. Gnosis is a kind of knowing that has no explanation. It is our intuitive sense that something is true whether our cognitive mind can prove it or not.
   This was the surprise I got this morning as I drove to work. On a CD, Wayne Dyer lectured me on the power of intention. My mind was at work analyzing the challenges of the day. And then, suddenly...

The Temperature of Secrets

   We all harbor secrets. Caregivers harbor more than most for they hold the secrets of patients as well as their own. Caregivers are present to others at their most vulnerable times. Whether under the influence of pain, drugs, loneliness, childbirth or imminent death, caregivers are the keepers of intimate sharing.
   Secrets have a kind of temperature. Some are trapped in the caves where we have tried to bury them. Others, the happier ones, bloom within like flowers in our own secret garden - private memories we visit when the world without looks barren.
   Still other secrets rage within us like wild animals. They eat away at our souls until finally we may feel we need to open the cage door to release them. This is the phenomenon that has given birth to the modern talk show - Oprah Winfrey at the gracious end of the spectrum, Jerry Springer at the circus end....

An Inconvenient Love

  It certainly wasn't the centerpiece of the evening. Even if the right picture won, who cares about the Academy Award for best documentary? It's the best actor and actress awards that count. It's the best director and the best picture that we wonder about. The focus is on the red carpet and the women in the breath-taking, low-cut gowns, and the glory of victory - winning the game. That's what the Academy Awards are about, right? That's really what all the bright lights are about with respect to any acclaim, be it Superbowl or Grammy or World Series or Tony Awards.
   When the man who won the most votes for President of the United States in 2000 crossed the red carpet on the evening before the 79th Academy Awards there was only a smattering of applause. After all, he's not Brad Pitt or George Clooney. He's just Al Gore, the wooden man, the man who is calling us, relentlessly, to wake up to a crisis. And he is the star of the Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.      
   Al Gore is a caregiver for the environment. He's someone who cares about where we live and how we care for the world around us. Most ignore him. Some ridicule him as he continues to warn us...

Love & Sacrifice

For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him. - Romans 10:12

   The sacrifices most of us make for Lent are so small they could be jokes. People like me talk about giving up deserts or skipping lunch on Saturday as if these acts were a hardship.
  Jesus time in the wilderness called for every kind of sacrifice short of life itself. Beyond declining food, he emerged to face great temptations: making bread from stone, worldly power and the chance to prove his divinity by leaping off the pinnacle of a temple. Jesus' refused each of these temptations with a set of messages passed down to us about the meaning of sacrifice in the face of temptation...

Potential - A Piece of Good News

Note: Today's Meditation was written and edited by Catherine Self based on the writings of Erie Chapman (in quotes) on High Purpose Leadership and on her own reflections.

“We are all so much stronger than we think we are.” – Norman Cousins

  What is the potential of one adolescent girl to influence the world? According to the dictionary, potential is “that which is possible, as opposed to actual; capable of being or becoming, a possibility” (http://www.dictionary.reference.com). Playing with a thesaurus suggests the word latent, meaning “existing but not presently evident or realized” (http://www.visualthesaurus.com). Erie Chapman once asked me what I thought my potential in life might be. No one had ever asked that of me before, well at least not so directly. I was not sure how to even begin to answer!...

Mystery

...there is nothing but mystery in the world, how it hides behind the fabric of our poor, browbeat days, shining brightly, and we don't even know it.         
- The Secret Life of Bees - Sue Monk Kidd

   It's a persistent theme of these meditations - how mystery is always present if we will only pause long enough to notice her. We work with what we think we know: the path we take to work, the patterns of our co-workers, the rhythms of our evenings. And all the while, mystery shadows us as surely as the echo of our footsteps.
   What secrets lie in the hearts of the patients for whom we care? What are the stories circling beneath the aged faces of people who pass us in wheelchairs?
   We all have our stories. How we tell them and how we listen to others telling theirs is a powerful commentary on the quality of our lives...

Special Life

"Don't sort-of-maybe live, but live like you're going all out, like you're not afraid." - from The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

"Fossil remains of manatee ancestors show they have inhabited Florida for about 45 million years. Modern manatees have been in Florida for over one million years."  http://www.homesafe.com/manatee/ 

   By 7 p.m. February 20, the moon had cut itself into a thin slice of sky etched low in night's dome. Hanging below it, Venus flickered, a distant campfire. When two powerful things are arranged like that, you look for a third to complete the alignment. The last part of the trinity appeared a few minutes later, breaking the surface of south Florida's Intra-coastal waterway like a submarine's periscope ...

Meditation: Your Best Day

We can choose our best day and it can be today - and every day thereafter.  - Erie Chapman   

   If you could design your best day, What would it look like? Several friends have answered my question by describing people they would want to be present, the place they want to be, the kind of food they'd like to have, what they would want to do, what the weather would be like.
   It's like that old question posed to prisoners on the night before they're executed. What would you like to have for your last dinner?
   But when we come up with our answers to questions like these, do we then live them out?
   An energy bar maker designed a commercial around the idea of a best day (left). They came up with an obvious that is nevertheless worth considering. Have we been showing up for the mornings of our lives?   
   It's hard to think of a hospital or clinic as a place to have a best day or a best dinner. My dear old friend, Marian Hamm, Chief Nursing Officer at two of the hospitals I was privileged to lead, was fond of pointing out "there has never been a good day in a hospital. People are sick and often in pain." Except for the births, there's often not a lot of happiness in hospitals...

Monday Guest - From My Room

(Today's Meditation was written by Karen York, a Vice President at Nashville's Alive Hospice and a regular reader who often comments on Journal essays.)

    In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. -Julia Cameron - The Artist’s Way

   As much as I think I am grateful for my health, I seem to forget about it until I’m not feeling well. Recently I was under the weather for a few days. It wasn’t anything serious, but enough to keep me confined to my house, shuffling around in robe and slippers, tissue boxes at every turn. A large amount of time was spent in my bedroom resting, reading, and napping. Lying in silence, I became more acutely aware of the world of life buzzing along around me - in spite of me. Nothing stopped... 

Transfiguration & Presence

Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God. 
- Exodus 34:29

   On the Christian calendar, today is Transfiguration Sunday. It reflects a time when the Holy Spirit entered and transformed Biblical figures from Moses to Jesus. And it marks a time when Moses and Elijah appeared to Jesus. It is also a chance to consider how this spirit may enter any one of us as we turn our faces to God.
   One of the perplexing truths of human existence is the way ordinary people can become transformed through spiritual experience. Movies love to portray this phenomenon by ascribing it to characters from saints to Superman. We encounter a presence like Mozart, Mother Theresa, or Martin Luther King and we see something different.
   Often, however, the person "transformed" seems to understand that it is not them, but some force coming through them...

Guest Meditation: Living Passion

(Today's Meditation is a written and edited by Catherine Self based on the writings of Erie Chapman on High Purpose Leadership and her own reflections.)

We listen to the words of the wise, because the wise are explorers who have discovered lands we have not seen:

“Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable…
Every step toward the goal…requires the passionate concern of dedicated individuals…
This is the time for vigorous and positive action.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.   

Astonishing Facts

 …the Moon's gravity tugs on the ocean enough to make a small bulge form in the sea below the Moon. As Earth turns, ocean shores pass through the bulge, and we observe tides. – Bill Nye, scientist. (click on photo at left to see tide advance & recede)

    It's sort of a strange thing that we don't have to know things to live them. We drive cars without knowing how they run, live in bodies without knowing how they work, live in the world unconscious of the fact that the surface we stand on is orbiting at a thousand miles per hour. And we love without ever understanding all the reasons. If we did, it wouldn't be love, but some logical process disconnected from true feeling.
   I grew up a few miles from the Pacific and also spent several years living in sight of the Atlantic. Like you, I've watched the ocean tides advance and recede never knowing, until a couple days ago, that the Moon's energy actually pulls the ocean enough enough to create "a small bulge."...

A Valentine For You

   Happy Valentine's Day! Is there anything more original we have to offer on Valentine's Day than our own experience of this occasion - and our own way of sharing with someone we love?
   For those of you that will celebrate most of this day looking after others, God bless you!
   Today, many of us will see and taste those little candy hearts that made their appearance early in our lives through the rituals of family and elementary school. Those are the hearts that say corny things like: "Love ya'" or "You're Special" or "My Sweetheart."
   At my grammar school, we created shoe boxes with slots in them and made Valentines to give away to each other. This resulted in the awkward phenomenon of some kids getting lots of Valentines while others, Charlie Brown-like, received almost none. In the fourth grade, I made three separate Valentines for Claudia Martin. I thought she was the cutest girl I'd ever seen and, at age nine, I wanted to be sure she knew of my affection (yes, I liked girls even that early.).... 

Ode to Memory

   It was only a tree. Just as I am only me. And only I remember how her arms were spangled with yellow opals that sang to me in my childhood. She stood outside my bedroom window which, because it was California, was often open. She sang to me with her scent, a quiet thing when she was first in flower, louder when her fruit was full.
   My father said I almost died one day when I fell backwards off my bedroom window sill at the age of two. By the time he reached me, I was fine. Lemon trees love to catch falling children.
   If you have been lucky enough to have a warm childhood and an imagination, you will remember favorite images your youth. With a little bit of nurturing, these very personal pictures can inform our darker moments, bring us peace in the midst of the hard work of caregiving...

Money

   After sex, money may be the most attention-getting word in the western world. If you ask college students today about their measure of success, most will tell you success and money are interchangeable. Homer Simpson, with his unerring ability to articulate human appetite, describes our quest for money in this 30 second clip from YouTube.
Click on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J028fEF0xbE&NR
   The luck of the stock market, or the lottery or a chance at American Idol - it's all about money and fame.
   Over the past generation, has money become more or less important in our society? According to one poll, 85% of college students graduating in 1967 said the most important thing to them was finding a job that gave them a sense of meaning and purpose. By 2005, that percentage had dropped sharply to only 45%.
   The drop may be understandable if you consider the rising cost of advanced education and the need to pay off college loans. But what does this study tell us about the caregiving professions?...   

Your Image of God

Blessed are those who trust in the LORD, whose trust is the LORD. - Jeremiah 17:7

Everybody needs a God who looks like them, Lily.    - from The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd

    What does your God look like? This Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany is an opportunity for us to examine our personal picture.
   One of my favorite stories of a child's picture of God comes from a friend who told me recently that when he was a kid, he thought God was the portrayed in the magnificent statue of a man on a horse in front of the downtown courthouse. Images like this may stay with us unless we replace them with a new understanding.
   I used to imagine a God who looked like the old white man in the Sistine Chapel painting with his flowing beard, and his band of angels. This picture remained in the back of my mind for a long time.
   The Bible tells us no one has seen God, so how could anyone know what God looks like?  But we are likely to form an impression anyway. And our image of God may influence our work as caregivers...

Guest Meditation: Care, the Source of All Cure

(Note: Today's meditation is a brief thought from Henri Nouwen's Bread for the Journey. Catherine Self's regular contribution will return next Friday)

 

Care is something other than cure. Cure means "change." A doctor, a lawyer, a minister, a social worker-they all want to use their professional skills to bring about changes in people's lives. They get paid for whatever kind of cure they can bring about. But cure, desirable as it may be, can easily become violent, manipulative, and even destructive if it does not grow out of care. Care is being with, crying out with, suffering with, feeling with. Care is compassion. It is claiming the truth that the other person is my brother or sister, human, mortal, vulnerable, like I am.

When care is our first concern, cure can be received as a gift. Often we are not able to cure, but we are always able to care. To care is to be human.

 

Pain & Grace

After great pain a formal feeling comes. - Emily Dickinson

   I always think first of childbirth when I see Dickinson's line. I remember my wife's long and challenging labor leading to the birth of our son, the relief when pain finally released his grip, the joy of that birth. But we have all known the weight of personal pain in our lives. There's no avoiding it. And it is not always followed by "a formal feeling." To live is to face some time of suffering.
   In western culture, the increasingly aggressive use of pain relievers seems to be creating the illusion that we may live our lives pain-free. But no drug can take away the agony of some losses. For to love is also to face some season of suffering. To seek to escape this pain with indifference is to stop living...

The Caregivers Love Triangle

   Sometimes I tell audiences I've got an embarrasing topic to raise. The topic will probably make them blush and wonder if they are in the right place. Here is the topic: Love. Of course, they expect me to talk about loving care, not about romance. And that is what I address.  But, sometimes I'm told by the leaders of some organizations that they are uncomfortable using the "love-word" in their work. It makes one wonder about the attitude caregivers have toward love and how that perception informs our work.

  In the Western world, it's hard not to think about romance when we think about love. Yet, I am invited to speak about loving care, not romance. Romantic love is exemplified in two of the greatest films of all time. The first is Casablanca. If you are from planet earth, you know the final scene in this classic. I pulled it from the world of youtube for you to watch. Click on this link too see it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pa-dGYjSq5k&mode=related&search=...

Stories As Teaching

Stories, poetry, art, music, all help us to understand our place in the world.  - Erie Chapman

   "Once upon a time..." It's one of the earliest and happiest ways we learn about our world. Perhaps that is why of the four things listed above, stories seem to be easiest as a way to communicate meaning. This explains the enormous power of movies, books, television dramas, and situation comedies.

   In spite of the power of stories, many leaders, teachers and sometimes doctors insist on communicating primarily through stiff instruction. We all need the basic tools of learning. Once the tools are clear, we need to appreciate the power of story-telling. The most important things we learn about our families are through stories. And loving caregivers always appreciate that every patient hold many stories in their heart...