Journal of Sacred Work

Day 213 - Living Our Way Into The Answer

Today's meditation was written by Cathy Self, Senior Vice President for the Baptist Healing Trust.

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves....Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer." - Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

     In a wonderful book titled A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life, author Parker Palmer talks about finding the truth our soul wants to speak. The questions in our lives may create anxiety and fear, even though truth itself lies just beneath our fear. Seeing and hearing that truth comes when we are willing to "live the questions now" as Rilke so beautifully writes in the quote above. Living the question asks ego and intellect to stand aside for a moment, and gives our soul the chance to speak. Soul work, much like discovering the deep reaching beauty of a rose, is quiet and sometimes difficult to put into words.

Day 212 - Revisiting June 7, 2006

 [Below is the piece I wrote for the very first edition of the Journal of Sacred Work. I hope it will encourage you to search other previous essays as I take some days of vacation with family. - Erie]

A Mountain Lake Experience

Consider the difficulty of looking at a painting like Turner's Lake of Zug (viewable by entering in Google the phrase: "William Turner, Lake of Zug.") The first question in the mind of the average westerner is: What is it? The obvious answer comes – mountains, a lake, people. Now the heartbreaking part: Art museum studies show that the average viewer spends about seven seconds in front of a great art work. How hard it is to appreciate the gift of beauty in seven seconds.

What kinds of noise circle about you now? How is your attention, your presence to the deepest needs of others, your ability to hear the music of your own soul?

The forces of the world - schedules, agendas, lists - yank us from our center and toss us about so that we may feel like flotsam riding ocean cross-currents. Radios play, televisions sell their messages, e-mail asks for answers, cell phones shout, video games dance. Each calls like a siren for our attention. Your own thoughts may shout louder than all the other noise so that you are frightened to take the minutes of silent meditation your soul needs to help you thrive in this world.

Consider the difficulty of looking at a painting like Turner's Lake of Zug (viewable by entering in Google the phrase: "William Turner, Lake of Zug.") The first question in the mind of the average westerner is: What is it? The obvious answer comes – mountains, a lake, people. Now the heartbreaking part: Art museum studies show that the average viewer spends about seven seconds in front of a great art work. How hard it is to appreciate the gift of beauty in seven seconds.

What kinds of noise circle about you now? How is your attention, your presence to the deepest needs of others, your ability to hear the music of your own soul?

The forces of the world - schedules, agendas, lists - yank us from our center and toss us about so that we may feel like flotsam riding ocean cross-currents. Radios play, televisions sell their messages, e-mail asks for answers, cell phones shout, video games dance. Each calls like a siren for our attention. Your own thoughts may shout louder than all the other noise so that you are frightened to take the minutes of silent meditation your soul needs to help you thrive in this world.

Day 211 - How Do We Hear Beauty?

  The rose speaks when we are silent. It's difficult for us to hear her song when we're making noise about ourselves. 
    Anything or anyone can speak beauty to us. Or, if we are doing what I'm doing now: offering analytical comments, we may be deaf to beauty's voice. 
   The refusal of most people to open to true beauty in the ordinary is the same problem that afflicts many caregivers. Opening to the sacred experience of caregiving can feel, to some, more exhausting rather than enriching. To sit silent by the bedside of an Alzheimer's patient, listening with respect and love to someone we know will forget, can feel useless and draining. But it also holds the potential for love.
   The person with Alzheimer's may seem to be someone whose personality has been stolen. Family no longer see the mother, father or other loved one they thought they knew. How does a daughter show love to a mother who has forgotten who she is?
   The caregiver who sits with full presence and love for a patient with dementia is alone with God. There, in those moments unseen by anyone else, Love's light shines as quiet as an unnoticed star.
   The rose speaks when we are silent. Stop. How would you describe what you hear from this rose?

-Erie Chapman

Day 210 - First Encounters

   The key moment happened at 7:56 a.m., July 28, 1968. Down the hallway from this moment, I lay back, eyes closed, catching a little rest after being with my wife all night in the hospital. I was alone. It was a time (at least in Toledo, Ohio) before doctors allowed fathers into the delivery room.
   Nurse's shoes brushed the floor to my left, soft as an Indian stalking game. The next sentence I heard will always endure in my memory: "Mr. Chapman, would you like to meet your son?"
   As you read this story, you must have instantly thought back to your own, initial sacred encounters. Perhaps the first time you saw your spouse or your newborn; your first kiss, the first time you met someone who is now your best friend.   
   What's striking is that I feel confident that the caregiver who held my son that bright Sunday morning in 1968 had a very different experience than did I. Although the nurse was very nice, I doubt that this was a sacred moment for her. She was a witness to a father's encounter with a special being (above left) who turns forty today. But she must have been present for hundreds of such encounters. How could each of them be sacred? And yet, they can.
   Moments of birth and death, suffering and joy always hold the potential to be sacred for caregivers who choose loving presence.
   What I could not see in 1968, I have seen since that day: thousands of special moments with the only person in the world I can call my son. He is a special and sacred being - even more special to me today than when we encountered each other for the first time. I not only love him. I am grateful for the fact that he is such a kind, loving and gifted human being who is now, himself, a father who was able to celebrate his own first encounter with his son at the moment of his son's birth.
   What we learn from any sacred encounter is how to live any moment in a sacred way. What is it about your first encounters that made them special and how does this help you as a caregiver?

-Erie Chapman

Days 207-209 - Open Forum

Share your thoughts with other caregivers by clicking on Comments, below.
Thank you.

Day 206 - Come out, where ever you are!

Today's meditation was written by Cathy Self, Senior Vice President for the Baptist Healing Trust.

     This week a group of 16 leaders spent time together in circle. This was not the first time this group had met together, but this time something magical occurred. In the past the gathering has been about the doings, getting tasks accomplished, business decisions made, plans for the future begun. This time was meant solely for the being, and in that time some in the group came out of hiding, perhaps for the first time.

    Rachel Remen, a revered author and healer, has written about the sacredness of sharing our lives with each other. Her words echoed in my heart as I witnessed a holy moment unfold - one by one, hearts were bared as some who have spent most of their professional lives in hiding found the courage to come out into the light. Rachel Remen calls her story One Little Candle...

Day 205 - Hiding Places

   It lived between the stucco hides where two garages backed up against each other. The builders of those garages had left a space between the two back walls too small for any adult to enter. The six-year old me found that space and hid there from the world. Just now, the sixty-four year old me finds that place again. Walking a pathway of memory, I watch as the mane of a eucalyptus feather a slice of sky. Since it's southern California, it's sunny and blue and white and the stucco scratches the back of my Hopalong Cassidy tee-shirt. The ground crunches beneath my U.S. Keds. I am safe daydreaming here, free of interruptions from school teachers or parents or siblings.
    Our first hiding place was probably our mother's lap. I think of that when I see a shy two year-old shrink against her mom when a stranger like me approaches. There is safety and comfort in a mother's lap.
   Where do you go when you want to hide? I have a friend, an accountant by training, who is so good at self-hypnosis that he never needs an anesthetic from the dentist. "I just walk a Florida beach while the dentist is drilling," he tells me, "and I'm never bothered by discomfort or boredom."
   This kind of hypnosis must represent the ultimate in non-presence. When the now seems too painful or monotonous, some of us find a hiding place. What's amazing about this practice among adults is that we're all gifted at disguising our thoughts. How can the person talking to us know if we are present, or if we're "walking a Florida beach?" 
   Presence is so important in the lives of caregivers that those who practice it with intensity may feel the need to escape sometimes - to hide, to rest.  Where do you hide when the life before you grows heavy?

-Erie Chapman

Days 203 & 204 - The Language Outside Language

     Beauty lives in the language outside language. Where is the language that exists outside itself? It lives in the territory we call "indescribable." We sense that any language, even that of the most gifted poets, can never adequately communicate the beauty we may experience.
   This does not mean we shouldn't try. In fact, the more we try, the more we find the energy to educate ourselves to see beauty. And the more we try to express our own versions of her, the more we are likely to appreciate the language that lives in the indescribable.
   Painters, photo artists, and musicians, to pick three examples, speak to us with a different language. What does photo artist Alfred Steiglitz tell us about beauty in his famous image below? What does the pianist tell us when she plays Chopin? What does Cezanne tell us about pears in his paintings that feature them? (see left)
   Love lives in the language outside language. We try to describe her. But since Love is God, she cannot be captured except in the language outside words - the place where we feel something we cannot speak. The touch lovers give each other can speak ecstasy without words. When the lovers add words, like "I love you" those words can take on a meaning beyond the language used.
   Agony also lives in the language outside language. This is why it is so critical that caregivers come to understand the language of pain...

Days 200-202 - Open Forum

Just like that we're 200 days into 2008. Today is an opportunity for you to share your thoughts with other caregivers in an open forum.
Click on Comments, below, to post your contribution.(You don't need to enter the URL)

Day 199 - Habits of a Loving Heart

Today's meditation was written by Cathy Self, Senior Vice-President for the Baptist Healing Trust.

The Dark Side of the Moon.

Hate is the dark side of the moon of love./ And I stood, shivering in the cold,/ Looking for hope./ I loved my brother amidst the bleak ruins,/ And the light from within me/ Illumined us both.

     The words of the poem above were written by my 80 year-old mother, Dr. Norma Stevens - a discovery I made just recently as we labored through piles of paper, sorting and cleaning. Her words resonated with my spirit's recognition that we all have the potential to stand, at times, in the dark of the moon until the heart remembers to draw from Love's light. I wondered why I find myself all too often and too easily out of touch with Love's light. What distracts me from the well of immeasurable Love? I suspect that my lack of tapping into Love's waters rises from habits of refreshment and replenishment too little engrained and infrequently exercised.

Day 198 - How Friendship Heals

   As I have reflected on "Wounds" and "Wounding" these past few days, I found myself looking for a poem about the way art can heal. Instead, I came across this 19th century poem by George Eliot (nee: Mary Ann Evans - 1819-1880) about friendship. The author of classics like MiddleMarch, Eliot had a sweet understanding of the power of friendship and, important for us, she had the gift for how to express it! Eliot's writing must have been very healing for her. She lived in a time and place when some women needed to hide behind male pen names. Beyond her art, it must have been friends that brought her the healing she sought.

Friendship is the comfort, the inexpressible comfort,
Of feeling safe with a person,
Neither having to weigh thoughts, nor measure words,
But pouring all right out just as they are
Chaff and grain together
Certain that a faithful friendly hand
Will take and sift them
Keep what is worth keeping
And with a breath of comfort, blow the rest away.

I hope this poem brings you comfort and healing today.

-Erie Chapman

Day 197 - Accidental Harm

   The unusually low response to Monday's Journal essay suggests that perhaps I missed something. A meditation with a title like "Wounds" is certainly not very inviting. Maybe there is also anxiety over the challenge which wounds represent. They call us to look at something we think of as ugly.
   This works in both directions. Our own wounds are painful. What about the wounds we may accidentally (or intentionally) inflict on others?
   Patients come to us already in some kind of pain. When we fail to respect their humanity, we inflict a second wound. It is the wound of failing to see or hear the deeper needs of the person before us.
   The hope of Radical Loving Care is support for those caregivers who seek to approach healing in a holistic sense, to bring the presence of all of themselves to help heal another.
   Chuang-Tzu expresses a precious understanding of this in this short poem:
     The hearing that is only in the ears is one thing. The hearing of the understanding is another.
        But the hearing of the spirit is not limited to anyone faculty, to the ear, or to the mind. Hence,
     it demands the emptiness of all the faculties. And when the faculties are empty, then the whole
        being listens. There is then a direct grasp of what is right there before you that can never
     be heard with the ear or understood with the mind.
   How do you stay present to the needs of another? How do you heal wounds you may have caused?

-Erie Chapman

Day 196 - Wounds

Wounds

They arrive early,
piercing childhood
the way arrows strike the sides
of deer as they raise
their necks from a forest pond:
The stare, the arrow only deep
enough to wound, the zag,
the stumble, the escape,
the emerging scar.

Wounds fold inside
us in jagged rows
the way skin gathers at the bleed,
or ground seams where
grave diggers have shoveled.

Days 193-195 - Open Forum

During these days, please offer whatever comments you would like on caregiver relationships for the benefit of your fellow caregivers. Click on Comments, below, to offer your thoughts.

Day 192 - Relationship Matters!

Today's meditation was written by Cathy Self, Senior Vice President for the Baptist Healing Trust.

"What we do inside relationships matters more than any other aspect of human life." (From A General Theory of Love).

     The work of three psychiatrists who have labored together for more than a decade is captured in the work A General Theory of Love. Their insights are extraordinary and based in the world of neurophysiology. As physicians and researchers, these individuals suggest we each carry within the capacity of what they call "limbic resonance" - a symphony of mutual exchange and internal adaptation whereby we become attuned to each other's inner states. As surely as some insects are attracted to light, the human soul is drawn to relatedness and in that relationship finds balance and restoration through the ebb and flow of our being-ness. Human physiology finds a hub not only in light (referred to by these authors as being "circumlucent"), but also in the harmonizing activity of nearby limbic brains - relationships, it appears, are at the crux of our lives where they have the power to stabilize.When people are hurting and out of balance, they turn to regulating affiliations - marriage, friendship, groups, pets, therapist, Love. All carry at least the potential for emotional connection. We understand, of course, therein lies the potential for healing.

Days 190-191 - Love, Danger & Chastity

Yes, art is dangerous. Where it is chaste, it is not art.  - Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

   When I came across Picasso's line, I wondered a long time about it. Is a straightforward painting of a tree, like the one at left, too "chaste" to be art? At the same time, is Picasso's own painting, entitled, "Dead Tree" below, left, great art because it is dangerous? What is dangerous about that painting?
   Perhaps Picasso himself would say his own painting did not become great until he began to paint with more danger - things like the third image, below, entitled, "Nude Under a Pine Tree" which he painted forty years after "Dead Tree." No doubt, his goal was to "provoke" us to see in new and deeper ways. For that, the viewer needs to take risks as well as the artist. For great art to reach us, we must be in dialogue with it. If we dismiss it too abruptly, we will never hear what the artist has to say to us.
      Had Picasso passed away in 1919, shortly after the "Dead Tree" painting, it is unlikely he would have achieved the greatness that has made him a household name. What do you think?
   What seems most important for caregivers is whether we can exchange the word "Love" for the word "art" in Picasso's quote. Must love be dangerous in order to be Love? Perhaps, there is no such thing as safe Love. For the expression of Love requires that we walk away from something so dear to us it seems impossible to set aside: our own egos.
   In our continuing effort to understand Love, the recent and controversial work of Eckhart Tolle may be illuminating...

Day 189 - The Mystery of the Hugging Saint

Only when human beings are able to perceive and acknowledge the Self in each other can there be real peace.—Amma (Mata Amritanandamayi -"Mother of immortal bliss".)

   Like so many areas of the upper Midwest, the town of Coralville, Iowa has been terrorized by summer flooding that has reached almost Biblical proportions. Although government forces and armies of volunteers have struggled to bring food, medical aid, clothing and shelter to thousands, despair has also settled in with the grime and the muck.
   So many have lost so much. After initial relief efforts, the shock has given why to a prolonged grief  that has shrouded countless citizens.  Encouragement from political leaders is of limited value to people living for the second straight month in temporary housing, rising each morning to the depressing reality of destroyed homes and lost relatives and friends.
   Some other kind of healing has been needed. It arrived in the form of an unlikely looking caregiver. She came without stethoscope. She brought no pharmaceuticals. She simply offered hugs.
   What is the value of a loving hug? A nice thing, perhaps. But, who would think it would make much difference? After all, a hug is not a new house.
   Something seems to be radically different about the embrace of Amma, the shortened name of Mata Amritanandamayi ("Mother of immortal bliss".) This lovely woman from India, the red dot of her faith in the middle of her forehead, seems as unlikely a sight in Iowa as a palm tree in the Arctic.
   Yet her presence has provided powerful healing and a sense of deep peace for the literally millions around the world who have received her mysteriously healing hug (over 25 million by conservative estimates.) How does this caregiver do it?...

Days 186-188 - Independence and Open Forum

   What myriad gifts bless all of us that live in a country where freedom reigns. In so many parts of the world, even blogs like this about Love would be subject to review and censorship. Instead, you may feel free to share any thoughts you have with your fellow caregivers by clicking on Comments, below. Have a Happy Fourth of July weekend!

With love,
Erie 

Day 185 - Story of a Lifetime

Today's meditation was written by Cathy Self, Senior Vice President for the Baptist Healing Trust.

     Storytelling is believed to be one of the earliest forms of folk art. In its earliest appearing, storytelling was a way to manage long journeys and longer dark nights. For many, storytelling was the purest form of history keeping, a way to pass along the beliefs and traditions of the ancestors and elders. In the Middle Ages, storytelling became the gift of the traveling troubadour who moved from town to town, welcomed in castle and market place alike. As they traveled they gathered new tales and spread them to villages and people who could only imagine what lay beyond the stone walls of their homes. With the invention of the printing press, reading took the place of listening and story telling became an almost lost art. Some of us are blessed to live near places where storytelling is still revered through festivals and fairs. Great storytellers sometimes speak from imagination, while others tell stories from history, and many talk of myths and legends and fables. The best storyteller I've known simply speaks from her life.

   

Day 184 - The Hidden Bible

"Jesus says...God is inside you. Whoever knows [oneself] will find this."  The Gospel of Thomas

   One of the great mysteries of the Bible that many of us grew up with is not what is there, but what is not. In the 4th century, the Council of Nicea made decisions, some of which seem quite arbitrary, about which gospels and books and letters to include in the Bible and which to expel. The Gospel of Thomas, like the Gospel of Judas, was one of the many books of wisdom that was, unfortunately, left out. As a result, it's insights from the lips of Jesus have not been read by many.
   Modern insight restores to us the gifts that these gospels and books bring.  The Gospel of Thomas is filled with wisdom. The Gospel of Judas, brought to light recently by the unlikely but reliable National Geographic Magazine, brings us truths. Judas, for example, was only a betrayer because of Jesus' instructions.
   Listen to the echo of truth in the Gospel of Thomas. Do you find yourself, as a caregiver, looking up to pray to God? Do you think of God as outside of you instead of within?
   Surprise! God lives within as well as without. You and I are homes to the divine. All that Love asks is that we let her flow through us and into the lives of others - especially those in need.
   Celebrate the Love that abides in you and travels through you (if your ego doesn't get in the way.) Celebrate your gifts of healing as you reach to free another from pain with your loving touch. Behold the God that lives within. Know yourself and you will know that this is true.
   How do these words come to you? Do they sound true? How does love travel through you to others?

-Erie Chapman