Journal of Sacred Work

Open Forum

Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free.            -Star Hawk

   In yesterday's Journal, Liz Wessel offered a lovely observation about community from someone named Star Hawk. The Journal subject was about ways in which we feel welcomed (or not.) Dr. Thomas Knowles-Bagwell evoked the ancient idea of hospitality in another excellent comment.
   I think I have felt most welcome coming into my childhood home and into the enveloping arms of loving family. What about you? When have you felt most welcomed in your life and why do you think this was? Click on Comment, below, to share your thoughts...

Feeling Welcome

It was probably the first time in his adult life that he had ever cried.
- from the short story "The Swimmer" by John Cheever.

   Cheever's story (which I read and saw in movie form many years ago) has a strange opening premise. In the movie version (click on scenes from the film, left and below) a man who lives in Beverly Hills decides one sunny day that he would like to swim home through a chain of backyard pools owned by his rich friends. At each home, and in each setting, he finds himself progressively more unwelcome. By the end of the story we encounter him in the midst of a thunder storm pounding on the doors of his own mansion. Chillingly, the mansion turns out to be empty and foreboding.   
   It's a depressing and powerful story. Among other things, I have always been haunted by this story as a metaphor for our desperate need to feel welcome and loved in the different communities of our lives...

Love's Genius

Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.   - Mozart

    Perhaps it takes a certain courage and genius on our parts to appreciate and live out the truth of Mozart's statement. For the world doesn't appear to place much stock in Mozart's comment about love. Instead, everyday energy respects money, power, brains and physical beauty. Look at the covers of America's magazines and the headlines in the news? Where are the images of real Lovers?
   If you're seeking fame in this world, love may impede your achievement of it. For fame and love are antithetical. The great Lovers who we know about, Jesus, Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, and artists like Mozart himself, did not seek fame. It simply came to them as they lived their beliefs and their gifts with passion. And these Lovers who are also famous are, of course, the exceptions...

Snap of Fingers

[Since this entry was posted late on Monday, it will cover Tuesday as well]

Time travels at the same speed, but our experience of it never does. - Erie Chapman

   Why are some moments in our lives, insignificant at the time, etched in our memories? On one other occasion, I've written about one such encounter with the clock that I had during my high school years. That experience bounded back into my life on Sunday with one phone call. 
   The original experience happened in 1960 in Adrian, Michigan. Tom Handwork, a teammate, and I were sitting in the stands in a basketball arena watching a freshman game before we (juniors at the time) went into the locker room to suit up for the varsity game. There was nothing special about that moment except for one thing...   

Friday Forum - Our Mistakes

   Each of us makes mistakes. Most are minor. Occasionally, we make a significant error. In nearly forty years as a lawyer, judge and healthcare leader, I have lived in worlds where mistakes can mean loss of freedom, life, health, and death. Most tragically, accidents typically happen in the most innocent and harmless seeming ways. A glance away from the road may lead to a paralyzing accident. A moment's distraction may lead to a lifetime of misery.
   My experience in courtrooms has taught me that litigants rarely emerge satisfied with court verdicts, no matter which side they are on. My experience in hospitals teaches that the best solution to medical mistakes is honesty. My experience with email teaches the importance of being careful before hitting the "Send" button. Still, with all my experience, I continue to err too often and in too many ways....

Are You Half-Living?

[Note: The following meditation was written by Cathy Self, Sr. V.P. of the Baptist Healing Trust]

   This space is dedicated to you, the caregiver, hoping that you will be refreshed, renewed, and sometimes, re-awakened. I remember how easily it was to awaken our daughter in the early mornings with a quiet word or gentle touch. Our son, on the other hand, needed far more dramatic actions to ensure a fully awakened state. In the meditations offered in the Journal, I am often able to experience full engagement in response to the quiet word and gentle imagery. Occasionally, however, my soul has retreated or become so distracted that what may appear to others to be harsh or jolting is exactly what I need to be fully re-awakened and engaged. I found myself both surprised and jolted recently as I read a meditation written by Dr. Wayne Dyer...*(above photo) 

Relearning Loveliness

...sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness...
-Galway Kinnell (left, 1927-  )

   You were beautiful at your birth. And you are beautiful still. Yet, there is a good chance you have forgotten how lovely you are.
   It is society that makes you forget. I see it already in the life of my little grandson. Perfect as a rose at his birth, his three-year-old body has already begun to accumulate scars. The petals of his heart have already been stained by fear and hurt. As he lives his way toward four, more wounds will come. Hopefully, inner strength will arrive as well...

William Osler - The Founder of Modern Medicine

    "If you listen carefully to the patient they will tell you the diagnosis."   
-Sir William Osler (1849-1919)

   The millions of doctors who have traveled the hard but crucial pathway through residency training may thank (or curse) Dr. William Osler (left) for their experience. It was Osler who taught that direct experience with the patient was crucial to medical education. You can't learn it in laboratories or books alone, he preached. You have to be present to the patient. The founder of modern medicine was born in the summer of 1849. His life in medicine is iconic to all western-trained doctors. What was so important about his work?...

The Dark Night - A Spiritual Exercise

On a dark secret night,
starving for love and deep in flame...

St. John of the Cross (1542-1591)

   For more than a year now, a dear friend of mine has been "starving for love and deep in flame." For he has been enduring, simultaneously, the pain of a divorce and the threat of financial ruin. His wife has left him for another. He has been struggling to deal with this loss while facing the risk of bankruptcy.
   Finally, he says he is emerging from his darkness. I asked him how he saw the world now compared to before his time of trial. I wondered if he had become bitter. His answer was deeply illuminating...

Friday Open Forum: The Quality of the Day

"To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of the arts."  - Henry David Thoreau

   Thoreau's lines give us the chance to consider how we may affect the quality of the day through our thoughts and actions. Each of us has the opportunity to illuminate beauty for others by how we awaken Love. Consider how Thoreau (left - 1817-1862) has affected the thoughts of so many through his beautiful and provocative journal, Walden - Life in the Woods and through his marvelous treatise: Civil Disobedience.      
   What is you it you plan to do to affect the quality of this day? Click on "Comment" (below) to offer you thoughts.
   Thank you.
     -Erie Chapman

The National Pastime

“Thanks to Base Ball…we have been transformed into quite another people.” - Harry Wright, manager, Boston Red Stockings (1871-75)

   I didn't get my son hooked on baseball. Instead, he got me focused on the game or, more specifically, on the Boston Red Sox. As the result of his influence, I find myself spending a part of each day not only watching the games but checking the box scores. This kind of behavior didn't make much sense to me before I became a fan. In fact, any pastime can be made to look foolish by people uninterested in that particular avocation. How many times have we heard non-fans of sports say things like (about golf) "I can't imagine why anyone would want to waste time trying to get a little ball to go into a hole...

The Space Between Us

A man paints with his mind and not with his hands...Genius is eternal patience  - Michelangelo

   Every educated adult in western civilization knows the image. It is Michelangelo's exquisite depiction on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It is interpreted as the ultimate portrayal of the moment when God reached out to hand the gift of life to we beings - the instant when, as some believe, God created Adam.
   What a strange gift we have in our hands. Caregivers see this gift of life at times when many, writhing in pain, may wish they had never received it. But consider the genius that lives at the center of the painting...

Interruption & Presence

Why do we keep bypassing each other always on the way to something or someone more important?  - Henri Nouwen

   I'm seated in conversation with a friend. To me, the conversation is important. Suddenly, my friend's cell phone rings. Without hesitation, he draws the phone from his side like a gunslinger quick-drawing his pistol. I'm left sitting there while he talks on the phone for five minutes.
   At this stage in our lives, in our particular society, it is very likely you've had this happen many times. Perhaps, you've even been the one answering the phone...

Hidden Compassion

Every human being has a great, yet often unknown, gift to be compassionate, to become present to the other...If that gift would be set free...miracles could take place.   -Henri Nouwen

    Why does Nouwen (left) need to remind us of our potential to offer compassion? Perhaps it is because we have spent too much of life holding back. Sometimes, people seem to hold back out of fear, as if worried that to offer compassion might be to expose one's heart to harm. Yet I have never seen anyone hurt by offering compassion. And I have seen many people harmed by their refusal to offer it...

Friday Open Forum: Your Best Caregiver

   The best physician I've ever encountered is named Mellar Davis (left). He is such a fine oncologist that he was recruited away from the hospital I used to run, Riverside Methodist, to go to the Cleveland Clinic. His devotion to his patients was stunning. His compassion was saintly.
   The most caring nurse I've every encountered is named Deadre Hall. For more than thirty years, she has started her day with prayers asking God to help her be a vehicle of Love. Her prayers have been answered. You can see Deadre's love in action in our film, The Servant's Heart.
   Who is the finest caregiver you ever encountered? Describe what makes them such a marvelous expression of Love. Click on the Comment section (below) to share your description. Your comment is sure to brighten someone's day!...

Quotes - Erie Chapman

   Like lots of people, I've relied mostly on the quotes of others to describe my life philosophy. I decided to frame my life philosophy in terms of my own language. I encourage you do do the same as a spiritual exercise.
   Here are some of the things I believe as expressed in ten principles:

• On Love: Live love, not fear. Love is everything. If I fill my cup with Love, there is no room for anything else. Accordingly, all my principles are informed by my belief in Radical Loving Care.
• On Leadership: The most important job of a healthcare leader is to take care of the people who take care of people. This means living by principles not rules. Principles are for people. Rules are for robots.
• On Self-Care: Take care of yourself so you can take care of others...

Which Headlines Matter?

South Asia’s worst monsoon flooding in recent memory has affected 30 million people in India, Bangladesh and Nepal, destroying croplands, livestock and property and raising fears of a health crisis in the densely-populated region. - MSNBC - August 7, 2007

[Click on this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYQXH0Ut4OM&NR=1]
   If you didn't know about the above ongoing disaster, it's not surprising. American news media have offered very little coverage of this horrendous tragedy. At least two million people in India and Bangladesh have lost their homes. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, have drowned.
   Imagine how we would react if the entire population of California was affected instead of Indians and Bangladeshis? Imagine if two million New Yorkers had lost their homes? Imagine if the entire U.S. Congress had drowned in a flood?...

A Safe Bed

[Photo - left - Unmade Bed, 1957, By Imogen Cunningham]

   Sunday night, as I entered our comfortable bed, my wife already asleep, I found myself thinking of people around our community climbing into their beds.  I thought of the children who wish the sheets under which they slept would somehow protect them from being beaten in the middle of the night; of the women who enter uncertain sleep with the same kind of fear - the terror of never knowing when their journey will be interrupted by sudden cruelty; of the mentally ill, invisible voices shaking their rest, wolf-shadows circling in and out of their consciousness.
   I thought of people who climb into no bed at all, but simply fall to the ground beneath a highway overpass, in the shallow woods behind a gas station, or on the edges of a park....

Anniversaries

   We mark special times in our lives with various kinds of anniversaries, some happy, some sad. We mark the days when people important to us were born and died; when important things have happened: weddings, graduation days, the date we first started a job, the day we started chemotherapy or stopped drinking, the end of a war.
   Anniversaries can be celebrations of the sacred.
   Forty-one years ago today my wife and I were married. The day doesn't matter to anyone else but the two of us, and maybe to our children. I remember some of our previous anniversaries, like our twenty-second, partly because it marked the year when we had lived with each other longer than we had lived alone.... 

Friday Open Forum - Rituals of Love

Part of the reason religious rituals were established was to help engage believers in the practice of love in the context of community. Some practices are approached resentfully as chores. Others may approach rituals with joy. The daily ritual that helps me the most is thirty minutes of running followed by twenty minutes of meditation. How about you?
Do daily rituals succeed in advancing loving care?
What are daily practices you engage that help you stay focused on Love?

Click on Comment, below, to post your thoughts.