Journal of Sacred Work

Open Forum on Loving Care

    In yesterday's Journal, I wrote about the Apostle John's statement that God is love. If you accept this as true, than Loving care is Godly care.
   How does this interpretation affect the way you think of your work, if at all?
   To comment, click on Comment,below. You do not need to fill in the blank for URL.
Thank you,
Erie Chapman

God As Love

Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.   -1 John 4:8

   The last three words in the Apostle John's first letter, "God is love," are, to my mind, among the most important in all of the Bible. John tells us "who" God is. He doesn't describe God as male or female, but as an all encompassing loving energy. Earlier in the same letter, John also writes that God is light and this serves to amplify how Love shines into this world. We know this light. We have seen it's brightness and felt it's warmth.
   For America's caregivers, the majority of whom are female, it may be comforting to consider a sense of God as the power of Love rather than as simply a male father figure. Thinking of God as Love has opened a whole new way of thinking for me and I hope it will illuminate your life as well...   

Seeking Courageous Leaders

[The following post was written by Cathy Self, Sr. V.P., Baptist Healing Trust]... The higher plane of leadership is a phrase used by Ken Blanchard, known to most as the author of “The One Minute Manager.” In discussing the difference between good and great leaders, Blanchard proposes that great leadership is much more than head knowledge or even experience. Great leaders, he says, begin with a fundamental belief, a different motivation, and a sense of calling to serve. After years of study on the subject, Blanchard unapologetically affirms: the best leaders serve! Central to the idea of the serving leader is the “AND” principle. Serving leaders understand what Jim Collins, a well-respected leadership scholar calls “the genius of the AND,” expressed in the greatest companies as a focus on results AND relationships. Johnson & Johnson, American Express, Southwest Airlines, and Chick-fil-A are examples of companies that have long practiced the genius of the “AND” principle...

Culture Power

   In Boston for the Thanksgiving holiday, I was struck, as I have been before, by the contrast in culture between north easterners and southerners. The "hellos" I offered walking cold and windy streets were often ignored. Other friendly gestures, common in the south, were greeted with surprise or disdain.
   "It's a very different culture from Nashville," my Florentine son-in-law pointed out to me. I was interested by this insight on one region of American culture offered by a foreigner from sunny Tuscany. "If you buck the culture here, you're likely to be disappointed and viewed with suspicion," he said....

Love Deeply

[The following post was written by Cathy Self, Sr. V.P., Baptist Healing Trust.]

   Henry Nouwen’s work is a favorite read for me on almost any given day. His words seem to speak directly to the servant’s heart. Among the most inspiring of his work is that which he wrote in his secret journal – written during what he called the most difficult period of his life. It was during this period of life that Nouwen (left) came face to face with his own “nothingness.” This nothingness occurs to me as being much like the inner Grendel that one of the journal’s commentators, Tom Knowles-Bagwell, spoke of in a recent journal entry. As Tom pointed out, Grendel does not appear out of nowhere...

Open Forum for Caregivers

A Thanksgiving Card

From 1967...

Thanksreceiving

  There are many out there (including me) who find Thanksgiving a more appealing holiday than Christmas, at least considering how these days are celebrated in America. Christmas has become so much about buying things. Thanksgiving remains a time when we have the opportunity to celebrate the life attitude which is guaranteed to bring joy to all those who cultivate it: gratitude.
   Gratitude is described by many psychologists as the pathway to a balanced life. Yet many of us were raised feeling uncomfortable about receiving a particular kind of gift - a compliment. How often have you handed words of appreciation to a friend only to have them reject those words with a comment like: "Oh, I didn't really do anything." or, "You should be complimenting Jane, not me." Naturally, these are efforts at modesty. But these deflections of kindness can leave the complimenter feeling oddly rejected...

A Lesson for Caregivers from Beowulf

"...we can never ultimately show to others exactly how we slew the monster."  - David Whyte   

   Beowulf, considered the oldest written story in the English language (albeit in the hard-to-comprehend Old English) has now been made into a movie complete with 3-D effects. There's something amusing about the idea that our oldest adventure story would be retold fifteen centuries later via the latest technology.
   Though I haven't seen the new version, I wonder how much of the essential story will stay with viewers after they leave the theater. Beowulf has lasted this long because of the numerous layers of meaning that live below the surface story line of a warrior hired to defeat the monster, Grendel, that threatens a town....

A Different Kind of Presence

I'm not absent-minded. I'm present minded somewhere else.  - Professor William James (left, 1842-1910))

    With all of my writing about the importance of being present, I confess that my mind, like Professor James', is often present somewhere else. I have been a chronic day dreamer since the first grade. That was when I discovered that the regular way of teaching school was designed for those patient, organized little girls in the front row.
   Somehow, I managed to learn anyway. But it was mostly by unconventional pathways. And it is one of these pathways that I offer to you as something to consider as you contemplate presence to patients...

Open Forum for Caregivers

Today

[Ed. Note:Today's meditation was written by Cathy Self, Sr.V.P at the Baptist Healing Trust]

   The duality of life sometimes catches me by surprise. I recently sat by an old, glass-paned window watching the air fill with dancing leaves of many colors while listening to a quiet piano playing in the background. Suddenly the sounds of a jack hammer exploded in my ears. Beauty and beast live side by side in the world.
   I marveled at the duality experienced just this past week – the delicate cry of my newly born grandson’s waking, pierced by the blare of a car’s horn outside the window; resting under the warmth of a soft throw on my sun-lit couch, the quiet interrupted by the phone’s sharp ring; listening intently to my mother’s unspoken needs, pulled by the incessant ticking of the clock’s reminder of errands not yet completed....

The Compassionate Physician

"The good physician treats the disease. The great physician treats the patient who has the disease." - William Osler, M.D. (left,1849-1919)

   Dr. Osler's famous quote distinguishing the great physicians from the good speaks volumes about the role of compassion. When great physicians treat patients rather than diseases, they reflect the essence of Love. For when physicians see the true human being, they will want to relieve their suffering.
   Nashville physician Joseph Delozier is an example of a great doctor. For many years, he has been using his extraordinary gifts as a plastic surgeon to care for patients regardless of their ability to pay...

Expectation

   The baby my daughter holds in the photo, taken in 2004, is her nephew, my grandson. In a matter of days, she will hold her own daughter in her arms. It seems like a long time since our daughter told us she would be expecting in November. Now, her delivery date draws nigh.
   "Expecting." It's an interesting word when applied to a pregnant woman. What, really, does a mother expect? Naturally, she hopes for a child that is healthy both physically and mentally. But no one can say, at this moment, if the baby kicking around within her will meet that expectation.
   In any case, our daughter is about to begin what will likely be the most important caregiving role of her life. So much of caregiving is modeled on the example of mother's love...

What Interests Us: The Static & Kinetic

   Kinetic art moves you. Static art stops you (in your tracks.)
     -Anne Bogart, A Director Prepares

   What encounters in life truly arrest our attention? What do we experience so intensely that we are drawn into relationship with the person or thing in that moment?
   Anne Bogart writes that "Pornography...is kinetic...Advertising is kinetic - it can induce you to buy. Political art is kinetic - it can move you to political action. Static art, on the other hand, stops you. It causes arrest...it won't let you easily walk by it." Bogart says that her encounter with the painting above, Osiris and Isis, by Anselm Kiefer, was one such experience for her. She was so compelled by the painting that she stood before it for over an hour.
   These two notions offer a perfect metaphor for caregiving. All day long, America's caregivers must engage in countless kinetic encounters - applying bandages, changing them, inserting IVs, charting a patient's history and progress. But which of our encounters are "static" by Bogart's definition?...

Immaculate Immaculee

Genocide is the fruit of hatred.
   -Immaculee Illabagiza

   Each member of the coat-and-tied, finely dressed crowd was wondering the same thing about the speaker: could they have endured what she did? All of us wanted to think that we were as strong as she is. But I, for one, doubted my own strength. Immaculee was a victim of the horror of the Hutu effort to extinguish the Tutsis. In 100 days, one million were murdered. Immaculee survived by hiding, along with seven other women, in a three by four foot bathroom for ninety-one days. She is a sort of modern day Anne Frank except that, happily, she survived, whereas Anne, of course, perished in Auschwitz.
    "There's a way for each of us to reach God," she told us. And in her telling, we sensed that she had found that pathway herself...

Recognizing Value

   On Monday evenings, my wife and I often watch a program on PBS called Antiques Roadshow. Folks bring in stuff from the attic, things they've found along the road, items purchased at garage sales or passed down from relatives and ask the experts what they're worth. There are nice surprises. This Monday, for example, a pair of vases purchased at a garage sale for $10 turn out to be worth $20,000. A partly broken container found along a roadside turns out to be a Zuni creation worth $15,000.
   How do we know what is valuable? The things you might love, I might hate. The thing I might treasure may be worth nothing to you.
   Experts tell us things we might never have imagined: that a given piece of curved glass that may look like junk is actually something crafted by Lewis Comfort Tiffany in the late nineteenth century...

A Post Christian Era?

   The idea that we may be living in a post-Christian era is startling to some, a news bulletin to others. But the evidence is mounting that some of the older forms of Christians expression are moribund. The Catholic Church, riven by recent scandals, has seen hundreds of thousands abandon its ranks. Mainstream Protestants are staying away from church in droves. The numbers who follow the Jewish faith, the original source of both Christianity and Islam, may not yet have recovered from the horrible devastation of the holocaust. Church attendance in Europe and America is reported to be half what it was fifty years ago.
   Meanwhile, faith-based universities have, in many cases, cut themselves loose from their religious moorings. And faith-based hospitals, as we have often lamented here in these pages, are, for the most part, engaged in various forms of mission fraud....

Open Forum

Memory

(The following entry was written by Cathy Self, Sr. V.P. of the Baptist Healing Trust)

“…I do not want any one to read my book carelessly. I have suffered too much grief in setting down these memories. Six years have already passed since my friend went away from me, with his sheep. If I try to describe him here, it is to make sure that I shall not forget him. To forget a friend is sad. Not every one has had a friend. And if I forget him, I may become like the grown-ups who are no longer interested in anything but figures…” from The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint Exupéry.

   To sit and listen to anyone who is living into their 7^th, 8^th, or 9^th decade is to receive a most precious gift of immeasurable memories. Among our board members is one who served in WWW II and who speaks of the memories of landing at Peleliu as though it were yesterday. He recalls with vivid description the feeling of the concussion of the howitzer as he fired back in defense on the rugged beach that early morning so long ago...