Journal of Sacred Work

Open Forum - Favorite of the Week

   In an effort to listen to readers, we would like to know which of the four essays from this week were of most interest to you. The choices are:
Monday: Comfort Movies
Tuesday: A Dying Professor's Last Message
Wednesday: Early Autumn
Thursday: Avoiding Love
   To share your opinion, click on Comment below.
   Thank you for reading the Journal and for your work as a caregiver.

Avoiding Love

...compassion means a radical understanding of the essential unity between one's own suffering and the suffering of another. - Daniel P. Sulmasy, M.D., PhD

   "You need to stay busy," a friend once told me when I was feeling melancholy. Frenetic activity is an interesting way to escape suffering. Sometimes, it is also a way to avoid Love. Lots of us seem to be afraid of silence. Dr. Sulmasy (left) offers a reason for this: "In silence before God, there is no place to hide." And, he says, this means pain will surface.
   I have seen this phenomenon many times when I ask large groups to sit with their eyes closed for five minutes. There are many who are unable to do this...

Early Autumn

The trees on the hospital lawn
are lush and thriving. They too
are getting the best of care...
-Mary Oliver   

     You can feel the light, as well as see it. It crosses away from us leaving us in colder shadows. Summer trails in the distance like an old dog left to slink off where he can die in his own way.
   Spring is not the most dramatic change of season. It's fall. The dying time. The light begins to depart early. The lights in the hospital parking lot ostrich their plumed heads into the dark. Nurses departing at the evening shift change walk more carefully to their cars. There are too many shadows to feel safe.....

A Dying Professor's Last Message - Have Fun!

We have a finite amount of time. Whether short or long, it doesn't matter. Life is to be lived.    -Professor Randy Pausch

   It's a strange sight. There he is on the stage, young, vital looking, laughing. And he is laughing about the fact that he is dying. Professor Pausch has pancreatic cancer and is given just a few months to live. Still feeling well, he decided to give one last lecture.
   The lecture is making the internet rounds and was forwarded to me by my friend, Toni Carter. You can see the beginning 18 minute segment at www.abcnews.com or the whole thing (in 10 minute pieces) on YouTube via www.cmu.edu (Carnegie Mellon's website - see table of contents on the left side of page) The messages Professor Pausch shares with us may not be as powerful as the experience of watching him deliver them...

Comfort Movies

Whatever happens tomorrow, or for the rest of my life, I'm happy now...because I love you.  - Bill Murray as Phil in Groundhog Day.

   Caregivers seeking rest from the challenges of work have an appealing option. I call them comfort movies. These are the films that wrap us in the peculiar enchantment of their story-telling thereby offering respite from the hard realities of our work. We all have our favorites. And the way you know which are yours is to consider how many times you can see a given film and still enjoy it.
   Some of my top choices include classics like Hitchcock's "Rear Window" (see photo) or Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life," both of them starring Jimmy Stewart.  Sure, Jimmy's got a broken leg in "Rear Window"...

Open Forum - Group Relationships

  I've been surprised, recently, to rediscover the degree to which our lives are defined by our relationships not to people, but to groups. We start life in the context of family. Soon, we determine who we are in the milieu of neighborhoods, schools, teams. Churches, temples or synagogues may further describe for us how (or even whether) we are accepted by God. And, of course, our jobs are a daily signal to us of who we are.
   Psychologists might tell us that none of these groups should define us. Instead, we need to define ourselves with enough strength to be able to survive being shunned from a group or fired from a job. But it's a rare person who can experience, unscathed, the rejection of a group that has felt important.
   To what degree do you feel your life is defined by the groups of which you are a part? If you were rejected by any one of your groups, how well do you think you would respond? Click on "Comment" below, to share your thoughts...   

On Despair

[Today's meditation was written by Cathy Self, Sr. V.P. of the Baptist Healing Trust.)

  This week a small new life was born into this world, one who will be with us for only a few hours, maybe days. Her name is Copeland and she has Trisomy-18. That she lived to be delivered is a small miracle. How long she will be able to rest in her parents’ arms is not known. In the midst of a bittersweet journey, Copeland’s parents have courageously and transparently shared their journey. In the shadow of deep joy and anticipation, these parents have also felt despair. Copeland’s young mother describes her experience of despair with these words:...

Which Wolf Do We Feed?

   The old story goes that a man was walking through the woods with a great sage. "I feel as though I have two wolves within me," the man told the sage. "One wolf thrives on my anger and frustration. This desiring wolf needs endless food and drink from me. The other wolf is kind and loving and asks only that I share. Which wolf will prevail?"
   The sage stopped, turned to the man and said, "The wolf that wins will be the one you feed."
   It's easy to say, in the abstract, that we will, of course, feed the loving wolf. But the wolf of desire is very strong and very seductive. If it were easy to feed the loving wolf, we should all be very happy and the world would be such a marvelous place. Instead, we give the loving wolf crumbs and fatten the desiring wolf with endless food and drink. As a result, the desiring world grows stronger and stronger...

Live Love

Live Love, not fear. - Erie Chapman

   My wife asked me recently whether I thought people understand this phrase when I say it. I heard myself tell her no. I think that's because love is a word that falls from our lips so casually that we may have lost our understanding of its power. Do we really understand Jesus' teaching? Do we really know a love free of fear?
   It seems that Love is partly understood in the context of fear. How much of life do we live afraid? How many of our decisions are motivated by fear?...

Presence Beyond Our Senses

Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived.   Helen Keller

   Helen Keller sent a powerful message to us. Most of us never comprehended it. It's hard to understand a life experience we haven't lived. What Keller shared with us is the miracle of what happens when we are fully and intensely present to a single one of our five senses. What happens if we focus all of our energy, for a set of moments, on, for example, our sense of smell or our sense of touch?...

Open Forum - Presence

   This week's extra focus on presence raises questions about what it is that brings us to a special consciousness of our now. I confess to being a chronic daydreamer. I suppose that when I daydream, it is to escape aspects of the present that seem less interesting than what I can conjure in my imagination. Often, my daydreams turn to childhood, a time when I was less flooded with memories and more inclined to create them by the way I showed up for my life. Traumatic events sit in our memories because they are times of intense presence for us.
   The practice which most helps me find presence to everyday life is meditation. What helps you? To share your thoughts with other caregivers, click on Comment, (below)...

Roadside Flowers

Former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins, like all great poets. helps us appreciate that presence to roadside flowers teaches presence to life and to Love. Thanks to Karen York of Alive Hospice for bringing this poem to our attention.

Roadside Flowers

These are the kind you are supposed
To stop to look at as I do this morning,
But just long enough
So as not to carry my non-stopping
Around with me all day,
A big medicine ball of neglect and disregard....

The Shared Presence of Love

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

   In an internet missive that has probably circulated the globe several times, the innocence of Love is shared through the eyes and hearts of 4 – 8 year olds who were asked “What does love mean?” A couple of comments really caught my eye:
“When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You just know that you name is safe in their mouth.” – Billy, age 4. 

“Love is when your puppy licks your face even after you left him alone all day.” Mary Ann – age 4.

Silent Presence

They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.  - Job 2:13 (image, left, by William Blake)

  Silent presence. It's one of the hardest practices of spiritual care. Only the most loving caregivers understand the need of those who suffer that we provide them with presence that speaks through quiet respect. I have not always known to offer this gift. Yet I have certainly known when I wanted to receive it.
  So often, I've witnessed the noisy intrusion of a well-meaning, beleaguered, but clumsy nurse into the room of a sleeping patient. Without so much as a knock, some will barge into the room at their own convenience with no regard to the patient's fragile condition...

Soul Work

The soul of our work is the work of our soul.
- Robert Eaton, Director of Mission & Spiritual Care, Saint Anthony Central Hospital, Denver

   Mr. Eaton's lovely quote highlights an important truth for each of us. When we treat our job as a series of transactions, we are working out of the mechanical side of our personalities. There is little reward for the soul if our work is robotic. It is when we live Love that we are engaging the holy within us. It is then that "the soul of our work is the work of our soul."
   How do we do soul work? A lot of it has to do with how we feel about our work. If we pursue an occupation merely to make money, it is likely our jobs will satisfy only at the superficial and material level. Robotic-style thinking is the thought process that can most easily lead to burnout because it fails to satisfy the most human part of us. Mechanical thinking never feeds the soul....

Open Forum - A Precious Sense of Life

    On Thursday, the Journal essay discussed the way we die. It sounds like a morbid subject, but it doesn't need to be.
    I developed a somewhat precious sense of life when I was diagnosed with a chronic illness at the age of nineteen. I started thinking I wouldn't make it to age forty. It got me trying all kinds of things I might not have done - particularly in the arts.   
   Terminal illness focuses our minds on what counts. Otherwise, we run the risk of squandering what time we have.
   When and how would you like to die? Post your thoughts by clicking on "Comment" below.

A Good Death

   Michelangelo. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. God reaches out to hand the gift of life to Adam. We took our own first breath, probably a cry, and entered this world kicking and screaming. But how long will our journey last? And when will it end?
   How would you like to die? Perhaps you played the ghoulish game as a child? I did. My friends and I argued about which would be less painful - freezing to death or burning to death? What about drowning, a firing squad, the electric chair, falling off a cliff?
   There really is no good way, is there? Actually, everyone I've asked agrees that there is. All ten respondents in my informal questionnaire said about the same thing: They'd all like to die peacefully, in their sleep, at an old age. And they'd like their loved ones nearby...

Writing History

    Almost every American grew up with a certain pattern of myths that were taught to us as facts. Some myths are created to advance certain agendas. Although there were plenty of good, true stories about George Washington, some felt it necessary to make up the one about him chopping down the cherry tree so they could hold up our first President as a model of truth.
   Who "invented' baseball? An early baseball leader, A.G. Spaulding, was so anxious that it be an American game that he created the myth that Abner Doubleday had invented the game. Doubleday, it turns out, had nothing to do with the founding of the game.
   And there is another sort of insidious myth many of us still harbor as accurate. It is that Christopher Columbus discovered America. The first correction is that some Vikings, under the leadership of Leif Erickson, actually found North America about five hundred years earlier. But there is a bigger truth...

Remembering Prisoners

Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured.   - Hebrews 13:3

  One of the great spiritual practices for caregivers is to remember those we may have ignored. Prisoners are among the great forgotten. Shunned from society, they are caged away from the rest of us. Many shun the convicted from their thoughts as well as their presence in society.
   As a federal prosecutor and night court judge, I have participated in the imprisonment of many people. What always struck me as unfair was not their imprisonment, but the way many were treated behind bars. Felons are sentenced to be segregated from the rest of society. But no court sentences a person to be raped, beaten or tortured. Yet this is what happens to many both here and around the world...