Journal of Sacred Work

Safety

Child abuse casts a shadow the length of a lifetime.         - Herbert Ward

   I was a small child. It was the darkest hour of night. Suddenly, a man burst into my room and attacked me. I awoke in terror.
   Fortunately, it was just a dream. But, planted forever in me is the memory of how I felt after I re-entered reality, my heart racing, my body shaking. Then, the sweet blanket of relief that settled upon me as I recognized I lived in a home with loving parents, that I lived in an environment where I could feel safe from such horrible attacks. I have never forgotten the terror of that moment nor the relief that followed. How must it feel to go to bed never knowing if you will be yanked into a violent reality?
   It is a great gift to grow up feeling safe. All of our children need this gift...

The Wisdom of Doing Nothing

Time is free, but it isn't cheap.   
                               - Erie Chapman

   A friend, who lives in a small Tennessee town north of Nashville, likes to whittle with some of his companions. "We don't try to make anything," he told me. "We just sit and whittle for two or three hours. Sometimes we talk. Lots of the time, we say nothing. I don't know if it's a meditation or not but it's very restful.
   Conscientious people sometimes feel that free time is wasted unless it's filled with completing tasks. I don't know if I'm conscientious, but I sure find it hard to sit and do nothing. It seems as though there are always so many things to do!
   Yet, task-free time can be essential to balance...   

New Thinking About Love?

The task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think as nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.  - Arthur Schopenhauer

   One of the fascinating things about Love is that everybody sees it, most feel they know about it, but so few think of it in anything but conventional ways. As I travel the country speaking about the need for loving care in health care, I often experience a polite but indifferent response. "Yes, we know about love," many hospital executives say, "Of course, we agree with Love." And then there is the powerful, toxic backwash of the status quo and its companion, heartbreaking inaction. 
   The idea that Love might require a way of thinking that "nobody yet has thought" seems like a waste of time to many. Yet, what subject is more important than Love?...

Soul & Body

Will I miss you
uncanny other
in the next life?
   -From "To My Soul" by Jean Valentine

   Only poets like Valentine can frame for us a question that provokes a particular inquiry into the relation of soul and body. "Will I miss you/ uncanny other...?" Until reading these lines, I never wondered if my soul, when it takes wing and my body falls away, might someday miss this body.
   The notion of the soul is confusing. Does the soul have a consciousness separate from the mind? If so, what kind of awareness would that be?...

Listening to the Sacred

The dialect of the scrub in the dry season
withers the flow of English...
-Derek Walcott

   I know people who talk with paintings and others who listen to sculpture. I don't mean that they speak out loud to the canvas or that the sculpture speaks back in clear words. I mean that these wise individuals approach great art with the appreciation that any sacred encounter involves a dialogue. Artists work hard to create that which will speak to some mystical part of us not easily reached by words alone. Our job is to work just as hard to listen a deeply as we can.
   Caregivers experience this kind of opportunity every day...

The Arc of Excellence

When it looked like the sun wasn't gon' shine anymore, God put a rainbow in the clouds.  - Maya Angelou

   The only people who really seem to appreciate a line like Angelou's are people who pursue excellence. These are the people who know the power of persistence married to skill. These are the ones who strive and seek and, in their refusal to yield, find the rainbow in the clouds after everyone else has given up and gone away.
   Sunday night, the Boston Red Sox took on their hated rival, The New York Yankees. In the top of the ninth, the score 7-6 in favor of the home team Sox, the Red Sox closer, Jonathan Papelbon (left), faced the hottest player in the game today, Alex Rodriguez. If you're wondering what this has to do with caregiving, hang on...

Living As If About to Die

Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today.   - actor James Dean

   He lived only twenty-four years. September 30, 1955 was a day of which James Dean lived only a part. By 6 p.m. that evening, he was dead, killed in a car crash. "I'm trying to find the courage to be tender in my life," he said once. "Only the gentle are truly strong."
   I wonder if he was thinking that as he raced his car to his death. If you watch James Dean in the classic film, "Rebel Without A Cause," you can see conflict in his face. His ability to portray human angst was perhaps what marked him as the genius actor that he was. The rest of us, including most caregivers, develop professional masks to hide the conflict we feel below the surface...

More on Happiness & Success

For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the byproduct of one's surrender to a person other than oneself.  - Victor Frankl

   What is the difference between pursuing success and having it ensue? Around 1984, the Board Chair at giant Riverside Methodist Hospital, where I was CEO, gave me a set of audio tapes on goal-setting. I devoured them, excited by the energy I felt from the notion that if I focused hard enough on a single, specific goal, the way the tape said, then I would reach my target. Did success result?...

Spirtuality - What Matters Most

Note: The following meditation was written by Dr. Thomas Knowles-Bagwell. Dr. Bagwell is Executive Director of the Pastoral Counseling Centers of Tennessee. - Erie Chapman

   Twenty years ago, in July of 1987, I was invited to join the staff of a private psychiatric hospital. One of my initial responsibilities was to develop and implement a “spirituality component” for the adolescent chemical dependency treatment program. I still remember the panic I experienced when this particular responsibility was explained to me. I asked, “What do you mean by ‘spirituality?’” The response to me was not comforting. “Well, you’re the expert on that. You tell us what it means.”...

Educating the Heart

We can never obtain peace in the world if we neglect the inner world and don't make peace with ourselves.
        - Dalai Lama

   A headache can shake our concentration. We may sometimes think of our stomach as "tied in knots." Our heart can race even though we are sitting still. How do we make peace with ourselves? The question has a strange sound to those who think the enemy is always outside of them. Others see immediately that some of our voices are discordant with each other. Many of our physical headaches arise from an inner battle we call stress. Much of this trouble may resolve is we can better educate our hearts rather than focusing all our energy on trying to solve every issue with our minds. Success requires a special kind of education...

Why Context is Critical

If we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that -- then what else are we missing? - Gene Weingarten, Washington Post

   The violinist stood there in Washington's Metro subway station like any other street musician. As he played Bach, Schubert and Massenet, commuters ignored him as they might most of the wandering minstrels who haunt the ground below ground. After all, they didn't come to listen to music. They are on their way to other things, carried along by "the surge of modern life"...

Time As A Spiritual Practice

Time slows down when you're moving really fast.
-Author Walter Isaacson discussing Einstein's theory of relativity.

   From the moment we learn to tell time, we may form a false notion: That time moves at a fixed pace measured by clocks. An hour takes exactly sixty minutes. A minute lasts exactly sixty seconds.
   As we learned to tell time in our childhood, we may have lost our understanding of its relativity. For example, we encounter the confusion of wondering why the minute hand toward the end of the school day seems to take so long to reach the "12" while that same minute hand becomes like a second hand when we are enjoying ourselves...   

Into The Night

Note: The following meditation is by Karen York, a Vice President with Nashville's Alive Hospice.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

In the middle of the road of my life
I awoke in a dark wood
where the true way was wholly lost. ---Dante Alighieri “The Commedia”

   Upon reading these words for the first time, I imagined being lost in the dark woods and became fearful. I remember as a child losing sight of my mother in a department store.  I was afraid because all that was safe and secure and love in my world was not in sight. What if she never found me?  The sense of being totally lost is perhaps one of the loneliest and most frightening feelings we can experience.  None of us likes to be lost...

Spiritual Work?

   Part of the role of the Journal is to encourage caregivers to engage the spiritual in their work. This is spiritual with a small "s" as well as the more religious expression.
   Many caregivers seem to wonder about how they can do this in ways consistent with their faith. The question they ask me is: "If work and religion are to be kept separate, how can I live my faith in my work?" The answer to this becomes easier if we let go of the notion that we are supposed to evangelize our particular version of faith onto others in a workplace setting. Spirituality, here, is about living the message of Love, not promoting religion.
   A fascinating question arises when we imagine what it is like to do our work without engaging the spiritual. What would this be like?...

Celebration!

This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. Psalm 118:24

   Christians have odd ways of celebrating our religious holidays. Although Christmas is a time to honor the birth of Christ, it has also become a time to carry fir trees into our homes, festoon them with lights and ornaments, and spread presents among our family and friends. Easter celebrates the resurrection of Christ, but along with that comes Easter eggs, the Easter bunny, and lot of candy.
   Rabbits and the eggs are long time staples of springtime celebration. The pagan festival of Eastre began centuries before the initiation of the Christian event. Christians began celebrating Easter as a time of Christ's resurrection on different days starting as early as the second century...

Polishing the Heart

Editor's Note: The following meditation was written by Diana Gallaher. Diana works for the Tennessee Justice Center - Erie Chapman

When one piece of china hits another piece of china, they easily break.
If one of the pieces were soft, both would be all right.
Let’s keep hearts soft.
-Poem by Aida Mitsuo, quoted in Women Living Zen by Paula Arai 

While I was in Divinity School at Vanderbilt from 1999-2001, I lived with my 90+ year old aunt. Margaret was an amazing woman, having attended Vanderbilt University in the days when they had a quota on the number of women that could be enrolled in the school. She taught history in the public school system in Nashville for years – North Nashville High School is where she taught most of her career. I loved and respected her. But after living with her a couple of months, I said to a friend, only half-joking, “I understand now why some caregivers get impatient with elderly people.” It can be difficult...

Spring's Breath

   What does Love look like?
   Today, she looks like spring. Even more, I’ve discovered that, here in the south more than any place I've lived, spring is something you smell. I walked out my front door Tuesday morning at 6:30 and was immediately drenched in her fragrance. So many fragrances gathered about me that I couldn’t identify any one of them. They cascaded over me the way a sudden rainstorm douses you with all of its drops merged. You can’t pick out a single one. They all come at once. And then, there is spring’s song...

Dinner Table Wisdom

Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time. It is the way wisdom gets passed along. The stuff that helps us live a life worth remembering. - Rachel Remen, M.D.

  Dr. Remen might have added, although she implies it, that sitting around the table at dinner time is a way families signal they care about each other. But which families are eating together these days? I wrote about this subject once before and I visit it again here because of a statistic I read about the state in which I live. In 2005, most of the country saw a significant drop in teen violence - upwards of 18% lower than the previous year. In Tennessee, teen violence rose 3%.
  Is there a relationship between sitting down with your family for dinner and violence among teens? What do you think? Why are teens, or any of the rest of us, violent?...

The Cruelest Month?

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain                                           -T.S. Eliot, from The Waste Land (1922)

   Eliot's "cruelest month" is also, as of 1996, Poetry Month. You have to live in a cold climate to know April as cruel. Those who live spring in Boston or Cleveland or Minneapolis or Eliot's England know how spring can invite you to open your heart and then, with a late winter slap, make you wish you hadn't.
   In the south, April is kind, offering more hints of summer than of winter. Love's wisdom teaches the appreciation of all days, all weather, and all seasons. Yet appreciation is not the same as affection....