Journal of Sacred Work

Days 180-181 - Love That Surpasses Understanding

"Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love." – Monet

 

   The eyes of the nurse meet the eyes of the patient in pain. "I feel so terrible," the patient says.

   "I understand," the nurse replies. But, does she? Can we truly understand the complex pain of another when we are not experiencing it ourselves?

   When deep pain is an agony of body, mind and spirit it is difficult to reach through simple analysis. Heartbreak does not appear on any EKG. Fear does not register on an MRI. It may be easier to meet pain with understanding than it is with Love. For Love asks something beyond understanding.

   Doctors try to fix pain by diagnosing it and relieving it with various kinds of treatment including medication. Yet, pain often creates another kind of attack on the spirit. The agony of heartbreak and melancholia can generate a kind of isolation and loneliness that lives in some deeper part of the forest.

   Claude Monet invited us to the image on the canvas. Others ask us to love the words shaped as poetry, or plays, or novels. This love seems to mean accepting, appreciating and embracing. Most of all, it may mean loving what we do NOT understand.

   Do we truly understand why we feel love for some person or some experience with art? Indeed, reducing an encounter to something we need to "understand" may mean that intellect can sometimes dilute love. Think of the way most medical school professors describe doctor-patient relationships by warning doctors to maintain "professional distance" from patients. To maintain such a distance may imply to medical students that they will need to objectify patients - to treat the disease, not the person.

   Similarly, converting a painting to an analytical model may be like dissecting a joke. Jokes that are explained, analyzed and "understood" have been drained of their ability to make us laugh. Think of the response you hear when you explain a joke someone else doesn't "get." After the other person undestands your explanation, do they laugh at the joke or do they say, "Guess you had to be there."

   Love does not ask us to understand every aspect of someone else's agony or sadness. It asks us to love the sufferer even more because they are experiencing deep pain.

   When we can do this, when we love beyond understanding, we have given the gift of healing.

 

-Erie Chapman

Days 177-179 - Open Forum

Day 176 - Doctor Woman

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

      She was twenty-eight and her engagement to be married dissolved. In a "fever of decision," she abruply announced "I'm going to be a doctor." Four years later, Dr. May emerged ready to settle into a private practice deep in the South, in Atlanta. And then she met, married, and followed Professor Wharton first to New England and then to the rural area of Pleasant Hill nestled in the Appalachian foothills of Middle Tennessee.

     The story might not surprise us today, but in 1922 the presence of a doctor in the foothills was rare, even more so as a woman. Too often Dr. May Wharton was called in to help the people of the mountains when it was too late - when the herbal concoctions had failed, when prayers seemed of no use, and only then "Doctor Woman" would be called. Long treks by mule and wagon were required for every call, her payment almost always what few pennies could be spared; heavy tiredness became her constant companion. Yet she committed to making a difference, to help the mountain people to better health and better lives.

     When her husband died suddenly and unexpectedly, friends and family members tempted Dr. May to brighter places of health and healing--a clinic in New Hampshire filled with supplies, a hospital newly built and standing ready in Phoenix. She faced a reality of no money, no house, no supplies, "no anything," supported it seemed only by a faithful nurse who remained by her side. And then the knock at the door, neighbors appearing--"We come to tell you how sorry we are, Dr. May. We'd all be proud to he'p you with your movin'." He paused and fished in his pocket. "We brung you this paper to read," he said, handing her a crumpled sheet:

"Dr. May Wharton, In behalf of the town and surrounding community we wish to express our sympathy for you in your trouble and we feel we have suffered a great loss in the death of Professor Wharton. The people here wants you to stay here as their Dr. and pay you monthly and also help you with your hospital. We feel we cannot do without you."

At the bottom of the letter were the signatures of fifty heads of families. Dr. May writes of the personal response she had to the letter: "That night I resolved solemnly to do as much for them as they had this day done for me. I resolved that mothers should be saved; that little children should be given a fair start in life; that pneumonia, pellagra, diabetes, anemia and all the rest should not go on and on until no medical skill could cure them; that the old and invalided should have some comfort and care even when they could not be mended; that those far from doctors should have medical aid brought within reach--of their homes and their thin pocketbooks."

     One doctor woman and a faithful helper could not do all this. But they could make a beginning. And they did, serving their community well into their 80's. Today the Pleasant Hill community is blessed by the presence of Uplands Retirement Village and the Wharton Long Term Care facility, both graced with caregivers committed to compassionate, loving care. No one of us can do it all, but each one of us holds in our hands the Golden Thread of legacy and hope for those we serve now and for those caregivers who will walk in our footprints. Dr. May's heart and words seem reminiscent of the hearts and words shared in these pages by so many of you: "perhaps in time there will be no forgotten ones among us . . . and even the least of God's children scatted over our hills are no longer in danger of being passed by." We still have much to do, yet hope calls us by name. When your constant companion is heavy tiredness, and the need is so great, how do you find the strength and resolve to continue so there will be no forgotten ones among us?

Excerpts taken from Doctor Woman of the Cumberlands (1953), May Cravath Wharton, M.D. Published by

Uplands

Retirement

Village

,

P. O. Box 168

,

Pleasant Hill

,

TN

38578

.

Day 175 - Who the Adviser Can't Advise

   I was reminded recently by my son about how much advice I've given him over the years. He's been astoundingly effective at following the best advice he's received from everyone around him and now he is, quite literally, a counselor himself, advising people as an attorney in Boston.
   But, he has correctly zeroed in on a problem I have which many advisers share. I have terrible trouble following my own advice.
   Why is it that preachers so often fall, why preacher's kids so often break the rules, why politicians often have affairs, why cops sometimes end up as criminals?
   We know what we're supposed to do, so why don't we do that - especially those of us who, like me are tossing out free advice every day?
   The "Love Police" who are near to me delight in pointing out any time I fail to follow my own counsel. "Nice job, Mr. Radical Loving Care," one of them will say if I make some caddy comment about another leader or otherwise depart from the rules of Christian kindness. They're right of course. And perhaps this leads to whatever wisdom may exist for all of us who, as caregivers, are called to dole out words of wisdom.
   Advisers are NOT any better at being examples of the things they advise about than anyone else. They simply understand, sometimes, better ways to articulate the advice.
    Whether you agree with his religious views or not, Jimmy Swaggart was a powerful orator from the pulpit. He was even eloquent, in the eyes of some, when he gave his well publicized apology for straying from the moral path he was telling everyone to stay on.
   Elliot Spitzer was an effective Attorney General of New York who prosecuted criminals, including many on Wall Street. He was also an effective state governor. One day his credibility took a fatal blow when New Yorkers learned he was patronizing the very kind of establishment he had once prosecuted.
   Of course, millions of us are better at telling other people how to be good parents than we are at being one ourselves. We know the right points. But, man, can they ever be hard to live in real life.
   The Greeks built flaws into their heroes. We expect our heroes to be flawless - especially if they are so bold as to advise us on how we should behave.
   My son's implied criticism makes me doubt very much if I should keep offering any advice to anyone else. I've already done plenty of that.
   At the same time, if what we write, here, helps energize and illuminate some aspect of life for others, perhaps it's still worth it - maybe.

-Erie Chapman 

Day 174 - "To whoever is not listening..."

To whoever is not listening to the sea
this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up
in house, office, factory...
or street or mine or harsh prison cell:
to that person I come, and, without
   speaking or looking,
I arrive and open the door of the prison,...
...through me, freedom and the sea
Will call in answer to the shrouded heart.

-Pablo Neruda - from The Poet's Obligation

Day 173 - The Right Words

"If I speak in the tongues of mortals...but do not have love, I am a noisy gong..." - 1 Corinthians 13:1 (NRSV)

   One of the first word combinations my 18-month year old grandaughter has learned is a powerful two-word phrase. "My turn," she said to me on the phone a couple days ago. Her mother taught her words about taking turns in the milieu of the playground to minimize the customary squabbles with other children.

   No sooner do we learn, as small children, to say words than we discover that we are not free to speak as we wish. If we don't find the "right" words to use and the "right" way to say them, we may well find ourselves shunned.

   Within the small circle of my extended family, I have loved ones who sometimes have trouble finding the right words for a variety of reasons. Perhaps we all have moments like this. I know I do. Yet, each of these people have special challenges.

   In talking with her mother, one family member, Eri, struggling with personal issues, has often chosen words of resentment that have rung in her mother's ears like Paul's "noisy gong." Kathy, an in-law's sister, hears words no one else can hear from people no one else can see. Schizophrenia creates another consciousness, often isolating her from those nearby. 

   My cousin, Doug, speaks kind words, yet still sometimes finds himself distanced from those who can hear the sound of his brain injury in his pronounciation. My cousin Ronnie, born deaf and brain damaged (the day before me) can say no words at all. My late cousin, Johnny, found himself separated from parts of society because some felt they could "hear" that he was gay.

   Society expects us to walk a narrow pathway along which we need to be very careful not only to choose the right words, but to say them in just the right manner: not too loud, not too sarcastic, never angry.

   It can be a treacherous journey. If we stray, society's punishment is great. 

   In the workplace, the burden on caregivers to choose the right words is heavy. Professional language requires not just the right diagnosis, but the right way of delivering it; it requires not just delivering instructions, but being careful to frame them clearly and thoughtfully. 

   How do we find the right words? It turns out, the Apostle Paul offers the answer. When our words are informed by Love, they will always be the right words. Whether the words sound right to others is another matter. For example, when caregivers speak up for justice, they may not always choose words that create happiness. Yet, the words of Love provide their own comfort for the speaker.

   There is a second side to Paul's injunction. It has to do with how we hear the words of others like the family members I described above. When I hear the speech of the developmentally disabled or the mentaily ill, can I respond with respect and compassion or will I default to pity and disdain?

   When others use harsh words to me, can I find the Love to hear their pain rather than to dwell on my own hurt? Can I listen with Love as well as speak with her guidance?

   How do you encounter the impact of words in your work as a caregiver?

-Erie Chapman  

Days 170-172 - The Wisdom of Imperfection

Caregivers are so often expected to be perfect: to make sure each medication is counted correctly, that each chart is filled out accurately, that each person's needs are met.
This may lead to caregivers being very hard on themselves. Thus, the first part of this poem from Elizabeth Carlson, called "Imperfection," may be helpful:

I am falling in love
   with my imperfections
The way I never get the sink really clean,
forget to check my oil,
lose my car in parking lots,
miss appointments I have written down,
am just a little late.

I am learning to love
   the small bumps on my face
   the big bump of my nose,
   my hairless scalp,
chipped nail polish
toes that overlap.
Learning to love
   the open-ended mystery
     of not knowing why...

Is there wisdom in accepting our imperfections so that we may turn our attention what is beautiful in the world?

Erie Chapman

Day 169 - Sitting With Illness

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

     I spent the evening sitting with a friend who is enduring unspeakable pain and deep sadness. When she spoke, though it was not often, she noted how helpless she feels, how out of control life had become. "It's hard to be cared for," she quietly noted, "and I can't find the words I need." My thoughts later that night drifted to words written years ago by author Virginia Woolf.

     In  1925, wanting to begin work on a dreamed-of autobiographical novel, Woolf instead lay ill for several months, producing an essay on illness itself. It first appeared in T. S. Elliots New Criterion. She began her essay with these words:

"Considering how common illeness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and desets of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to light, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us in the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers--when we think of this and infinitely more, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature" (Essays 4:317).

     One barrier to the inclusion of illness as a part of life and as reflected in literature may be, as my friend struggled to articulate, the very limitations of language needed to truly describe the experience. Woolf goes on to write:

"English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. . . . The merest school-girl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare, Donne, Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. . . . In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality . . . In health meaning has encroached upon sound. Our intelligence domineers over our senses. But in illness, with the ploci off duty, we creep beneath some obscure poem . . . some phrase in Latin or Greek, and the words give out their scent, and ripple like leaves, and chequer us with light and shadow, and then, if we at last grasp the meaning, it is all the richer for having traveled slowly up with the bloom upon the wings" (Essays 4:196).

     What startles me most in Woolf's words is how she identified illness with a needed and desired solitary realm: "Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snow field where even the print of birds' feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable."

     Stopping to consider the inner life of the one in our care gives rise to so many questions--how does this person experience life now? How might she feel about being dependant on me for her care? What words does she need to express her pain or her experience of this moment? Does she, like Woolf, desperately wish she could just be alone again with times in the virgin forest? How does Love respond to these questions?

Day 168 - A Few Bouquets

"I just want to leave a few bouquets behind to be remembered by." Erroll Flynn in The Desperate Hours (1942.)

   When the great, swashbuckling, Erroll Flynn (above) spoke those lines, the world was at war. With thousands of young soldiers dying every day, many must have wondered, in their last moments, how they might be remembered, if at all.

   In the moments we have on this earth, are we creating bouquets or thorns? Most of us create a little of both.

   I remember my daughter teaching me a lesson about this. I was feeling angry one day because a neighborhood teen had squealed his tires by our house. I thought of the little children who might be playing nearby. "Don't shout at him, Dad" she warned. "This may be the only time you talk to him. Do you want him to always think of you as 'the angry man?'"

   She was right, of course, and her words have come back to me often as I've considered, in a given exchange, whether to use the tough tools I learned in the courtroom or the kinder tools I learned in church. I wish I could say that the church-learned tools always won out.

   When and how do we create "bouquets' for others? Is today a day when you and I might fashion something that would brighten the life of someone around us?

-Erie Chapman 

Days 166-167 - One Foot In Front of the Other

For many of us, our mothers were our first caregivers. I speak to mine at least once a week and feel lucky to have the chance. Here is a very short story about one encounter that was, for me, particularly sacred.

Under the Water  

  The backyard doesn't need watering. I water it, uncoiling the hose and snaking it toward the base of the giant willow oak whose torso still weeps from earlier rain.
            I phone my 96-year old mother (above, with me and my older sister Ann in 1944.) She lives in Ohio. As always, her voice smiles as she describes the three ducks pedaling across the pond four stories below.
            My oak leaf hydrangea is not thirsty. Neither is the boxwood nor the new purple flowers that lack a name I know. I spray them, the hose in my right hand, the phone in my left.
            "What are you doing today, Chip?" she asks, calling me by the nickname my father gave me because of my odd first name. "Are you playing golf?"
            I'm not, but I tell her I am because this makes her even happier.
            The magnolia, especially the sweet bay, has noticed the end of spring. Blooms brown at the edges.
            I tell Mom stories about two of her great grand children. She laughs.
            "What are you doing today, Chip?" she asks. "Playing a little golf?
            "Yep," I say. "My regular tee-time is 12:45…the usual foursome." I've only played golf twice in two years. I have no foursome. I am not playing today.
            I notice four rows of white-faced begonias smiling satisfied as ladies at tea. I water them.
            Mom reports that there are eight blooms on the orchid in her living room. "They don't need much water," she says. 
            I think about watering them.
            "What are you doing today, Chip?"
            "I'm going deer-hunting, Mom. I'll be taking Dad's 20-gauge with me."
            "Oh, that's nice," she says. "Be careful."
            I haven't been hunting since I was twelve. I killed a rabbit that day with a .410 gauge shotgun. After I watched him squirm toward death, I never hunted another animal.
            The morning sun doesn't need me, but winter has bleached my skin. I take off my shirt. Maybe the sun will burn away my dark.

“What are you doing today, Chip?”

Mom has listened to classical music almost every day of her life. “I think we’re going to the orchestra,” I tell her. “They’ll be playing Brahms 2^nd Symphony.”

 

“Wonderful,” she exclaims. “Let’s see…” She begins to hum. I hear her thin voice searching the sagging shelves of her memory for the melody. For a moment, I can’t recall it either. Finally, she pours forth the first four notes. I scoop up the rest and hum them back to the woman who first taught them to me.

“Great,” I tell her. “You remember it so well.”

In the half-note rest that follows, Mom starts her personal refrain, "So…what are you…” Before she can finish, I interrupt the woman who was my first caregiver.

"Mom, do you ever feel sad?”
            "No," she says. In more than sixty years, I've only seen her cry three times, never for long. Her sense of grace will not permit it.
            "I feel sad," I told my mother.
            "What happened?" she asks.
            "Nothing."
            "Well, you just have to put one foot in front of the other," she says.
            I watch as water from the garden hose chandeliers the emerald points of the evergreen.
            "So what are you and your lovely wife doing today?" 
            "I don't know," I say.
            Tears born in my throat reach my face. Mom is too far away to dry them as she once did. I say goodbye.

Mom tells me to have a nice day and that she loves me. I tell her the same, hang up the phone, walk toward my house, one foot in front of the other.

 

-Erie Chapman

Days 163-165 - Open Forum

"...the best word that I wanted to say to you/ is the word that I have not yet said."  - from Poems to Piraye from Prison - 1945 - Nasim Hikmet

   Today is a chance for you to share words not yet said.

-Erie Chapman

Day 162 - Care-Actors for the World

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

     At first glance, my thoughts were "oh-no!" The title of the article caught my eye and gripped my heart: "Re-Designing the Character of the Care-Actor."

     Unlike the wonderful cast of Disney character-actors who step "on stage" as they move from the background to the public's eye in those magical lands of fantasy and fun, we hope those who give care in our organizations will never feel compelled to act loving, caring, and compassionate. Sadly, we have all been around some who move through their days as though actors on a stage, waiting for the final curtain of the day to fall so they can remove their masks and go home. I can't imagine the energy and emotional labor it must take to sustain one's efforts day in and day out when acting, moving in reaction to the strings being pulled by the system, the task-driven supervisor, or someone's ideas of what it means to be professional. Care-actor?

     Gratefully, I continued reading and discovered the true possibility of 'care-actors': people who take action so that care is made possible, moving into the 21st century as a positive force towards changing the system as we want it to be, "not just benchwarmers for the healthcare system as is." The author of the eye-catching article is Dr. Susan Parenti, a member of the School for Designing a Society, under the umbrella of the Gesundheit! Institute. The name alone makes me smile - the founder, Dr. Patch Adams (portrayed by Robin Williams in the movie scene above), moves through life with great intentionality in bringing joy, hope, and healing to individuals as well as to our health system.

     Among many other thoughts, Dr. Parenti notes "competent know-how in the 21st century has been reduced to efficient performance around technology, to the exclusion of loving performance around patients. It takes effort," suggests Dr. Parenti, "to distinguish the caring relationship from the uncaring system that surrounds us." She uses humor by suggesting a sign in the waiting room that might read: MEDICAL SYSTEM UNDER CONSTRUCTION: WE'RE SORRY FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE THE MEDICAL SYSTEM IS CAUSING YOU. THIS IS NOT HOW WE WANT IT TO BE. WE'RE TRYING TO CHANGE IT. PLEASE HELP, signed, your nurses, lab technicians, receptionists, and doctors.

     The premise of Dr. Parenti's paper seems to be that to bring about desirable change for the health care system of our nation, we need to focus on the character of those who act to make care possible, the care-actor. Added to the long and already well-developed list of needed attentivenesses (diagnostic, commiserating, technical, bureaucratic), the Gensundheit! Institute advocates for playful attentiveness to unleash the power of direct human relationship and healing.

     As hard as it is to image in the hallways of most of our organizations, Dr. Patch Adams has for decades advocated for fun and play as gifts of healing. Clowning at the Institute is about "bringing peace to those who have lost trust in life's joy and fun. Healing the body, the mind, the spirit, the community, the world." Maybe what our Care-actors need today is to be in touch with the child within, the one who knows laughter, and joy, and play. Not out of pretending, or acting, but with intention taking action on behalf of those we serve, extending Love's delight. What do you think? Do you see yourself as a Care-actor?

Day 161 - Third Anniversary!

    The anniversary of the Journal of Sacred Work was actually a few days ago, on June 7. Even though regular contributor Liz Wessel reminded me last week, the anniversary slipped by so quietly on Sunday that I forgot.
   Anniversaries offer a terrific opportunity for gratitude and reflection. These are also moments when people make predictable comments about how fast time flies. Time always seems to have passed rapidly when we look back because, through our retroscope, we don't experience each individual moment. Everything is compressed.
   The purpose of the Journal has always been to provide a place of rest, inspiration and, sometimes, provocation, for caregivers. We are far closer to change in our national health care system then we were in 2006 when the Journal began. What do you think about the changes that are likely to come?
   Whatever change occurs, we hope the we can be a steady place for you to visit. I am thankful that the responsibility for writing daily essays has been shared for some time now by Cathy Self, who writes so eloquently for the Thursday edition. Without her help and encouragement, this publication might well have fallen by the wayside.
   Cathy and I both want to thank the hundreds of loyal folks who come to visit the Journal - particularly those who are kind enough to offer specific comments. These responses are energy-giving for Cathy and for me and we appreciate your presence. We will continue to try and provide fresh commentaries each weekday and, sometimes, through the weekend. Some days, it's hard for either one of us to imagine writing something we haven't written before. And then we realize that we never actually address any new subjects. We just seek to cast a little light on some area of the heart that may need rejuvenation.
   According to the systems that track these things, about 115,000 visits have been made to the Journal since our beginning. I am glad to imagine legions of caregivers who have come to this site and found, quietly, some meaningful support and encouragement for the hard work they do.
   Thank you for your dedication. We hope to be with you many more years.
With love,
Erie

Day 160 - The Miracle of Presence

“The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.” - Thich Nhat Hanh

    He's one of the most revered spiritual leaders in the world, yet millions of Americans have never heard of him. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. nominated this monk for a Nobel Peace Prize. He was banned from his native Viet Nam by both sides because he sought to bring peace in the middle of a horrible and tragic war.
   Thich Nhat Hanh (above, pronounced tik not hahn) suggests to us that our full presence creates a miracle. He offers the notion that,  “The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive.”
   It can be very difficult for caregivers to be fully present in any given moment. Across this day, ask yourself that question as to tend to the needs of others. Daydreaming is where I spend a lot of my waking hours (the rest are, of course, spent in night dreams.) This means that I am someplace else other than present to the life and the person before me.
   Consider presence to a person in pain. What a gift this is when it occurs. The full presence of a loving caregiver is one of the things that brings healing to those who suffer.
   Prayer, meditation, art appreciation, attention to our breathing, nurturing loving thoughts, all of these practices support us in our goal to be present.
   What do you do that helps you bring your presence to this world and those whom you encounter along your caregiving journey?

-Erie Chapman

Day 159 - The Miracle of Radical Loving Care

In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down...you will find what our sciences cannot locate or name...the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here.  -From Teaching a Stone to Talk, by Annie Dillard.

   Across the Atlantic in a town north of London, 33-year-old Lorraine Allard and her husband Martyn (above left, with their son, Liam) were excited about the forthcoming birth of their third child in the summer of 2008. After two girls, a boy was predicted.
   Four months into her pregnancy, the couple received devastating news. Lorraine was in the advanced stages of cancer and needed immediate chemotherapy.
   What should Lorraine do? If she was to have a chance at survival, doctors said she would first need an immediate abortion and then the rapid initiation of aggressive chemotherapy.
   It's hardly an easy decision. Lorraine had her other two children to think of as well. Starting chemotherapy right away would giver her the best chance of continuing as their mother.
   This turned out not to be a story involving the politics of pro-life or pro-choice but of pro-Love - the Radical Loving Care of a courageous woman.
   Lorraine insisted on delaying her chemotherapy far enough into her pregnancy to give her unborn son a chance to survive. "If I am going to die, my baby is going to live," Lorraine told her husband.
   Most of us learn about Love from our first caregiver, our mother. One day little Liam Allard, born weighing less than 2 lbs and now over a year old, will know that he was born from Love.
   Although Lorraine got to see her son, she died two weeks after his birth. She told her husband that when Liam was older, she hoped he wouldn't tell him about her sacrifice. "She told me she didn't want him to feel bad," her husband reported.
   From whence does such Radical Loving Care arise? Dillard says that it is born somewhere in "the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil." This is, according to Dillard, the great unified field.
   In a town north of England, Love found expression in the miracle of a mother's gift to her son. 

   When have you seen miracles of Radical Loving Care in your work? If you haven't seen any yet, please keep looking, for they are surely there, happening every day within the gaze of sacred eyes.

-Erie Chapman

Days 156-158 - Our Childhood Vision

"...somewhere inside us, the child is still running enthusiastically toward a horizon it once glimpsed. Our future depends on finding this original directional movement in our lives...It calls for a reinvestigation of the way we physically inhabit the world." - David Whyte - Crossing the Unknown Sea

   As a child, what horizon did you glimpse? When did you first imagine yourself as a caregiver? In our adulthood, there is always the threat that our brightest life hopes will grow dim. It takes great persistence to hold fast to dreams. And it takes energy and courage to choose to renew the best of our dreams as we live through our one lifetime.
   In his gorgeous poem, "Intimations of Immortality," Wordsworth wrote: "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:/the Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,..."
   What do you yet hope for in your life as a caregiver?

-Erie Chapman

Day 155 - A Single Treasure

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

     The thoughts shared and explored this week open the possibility of recognition of beauty in the singular act, the solitary figure, the lone caregiver. So many individual acts of courage and love are expressed day in and day out in the hallways and rooms of charities around the world. But most remain hidden, perhaps lost in the vastness of the many like the thousands of shells crowded onto the sands.

     The words of Anne Morrow Lindbergh drew me back in again this week as I reflected on how easily we cannot "see" the one hidden in plain view because, like the color-dripped, singular shell, it has become lost in the crowd. Lindbergh's thoughts focus on gifts from the sea, sometimes broken, often overlooked, but treasures nonetheless. In her desire to collect them all, the author recognizes the beauty of setting the one special one apart, ringed by space:

 "For it is only framed in space that beauty blooms. Only in space are events and objects and people unique and significant - and therefore beautiful. A tree has significance if one sees it against the empty face of sky. A note in music gains significance from the silences on either side. A candle flowers in the space of night. Even small and casual things take on significance if they are washed in space, like a few autumn grasses in one corner of an Oriental painting, the rest of the page bare."

     We of course understand that beauty and significance are not dependent on being set apart, and maybe space simply helps focus our attention. The pages of this journal seem to create that space, surrounding and focusing on the one moment, the one encounter that meets need with Love. Much like in her pages as Lindbergh frames her thoughts, this place gives us time and space "to be quiet...to think...to see friends...to talk, [and] even to not talk...space for significance and beauty." She speaks of wanting to remember to "see with island eyes" looking for that one shell, setting it apart to appreciate its beauty and significance.  Perhaps our call is to remember to always, only see with eyes of Love. Our world is full of treasures, and we must not let one go by unnoticed. As you look in the hallways and rooms of your place of giving care, what treasures do you find? How will you set them apart so they will know of their own significance and beauty?

Days 154 - Who Cleans Up?

   During my twelve years as CEO of OhioHealth & Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus, I often worked alongside employees. One day, I was allowed to help our nursing staff and a physician with the birth of a baby.
   Afterward, a member of the housekeeping staff approached me. "What did you think," she asked. "Oh, I think being present at birth is a wonderful honor," I responded. I was still caught in the awe of it all when she gave me a dose of another reality.
   "Well," she said with a mischievous smile, "are you ready to help me with my part?" She gestured toward the delivery room. The mother and baby were gone. The doctor and nurses had left. Now it was time for someone to clean up. Predictably, I was filled with revulsion as what I imagined was left in that room. The housekeeper saw this.
   "That's what I thought," she said. "Never mind, I'm used to this." She headed off into the room with her mop and pail.
   After the drama of surgery, who cleans up? After the delivery is done, who comes to make the room read for the next patient? We kind of know the answer to these questions. But, we don't want to give it too much of our attention because, after all, it's just clean up. Housekeepers see what we think of them in their miserable pay-checks.
   The people who clean up have difficult work and low pay. What we can do, at least, is find some time to thank them for their work - to actually stop a housekeeper in the hall and express your appreciation.
   I wasn't too sure I wanted to write about this because, all these years later, I still feel guilty that I didn't have the courage to help that housekeeper. I admire her. And I admire all the others like her who clean up when all the "important" work is done.

-Erie Chapman

Day 153 - Happy Mysteries

"I had already learned that everything I did not understand probably had something to it." - from A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway.(1899-1961)

   I have spent a lot of time over my life with people I've never met who lived during a time I never saw. I encountered these people and places in the course of what used to be called a liberal education. I think about them a lot. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda, Ernest Hemingway (at far left, with friends) and Mary, his wife at the time; Gertrude Stein and her impressive salon, all of these became part of the mythology of my youth, introduced to me through novels and by high school English teachers and college professors. These were the creators of some of the greatest literature of the 20th century.
   These characters inhabited an environment in the 1920s and '30s that I didn't understand, but seemed to have "something to it." They remain comfortable friends in my imagination. As a romantic, I picture these folks spending long, sweet hours at tables along the Left Bank drinking coffee in the morning, wine in the afternoon, and absinthe in the evening, meanwhile discussing the great issues of the day including the literature and art of the world. In truth, the days may have often been painful since all of them were short of money. But they were, themselves, great artists. Even their discomfort seems, somehow, comfortable because of how eloquently they describe their lives. I don't have to walk up dark stairways with them into insect-infested flats. I can just imagine them swapping stories and looking grand in their berets.
   In real life, I've spent countless hours with another group of artists. I've watched caregivers shepherd babies into the world, hoisting them into the bright light of the world and into their mother's arms. I've been with nurses as they heal and comfort the terminally ill in their last moments. I've stood by physicians as they have healed broken bones, repaired damaged hearts and offered the mysterious power of their presence to patients with cancer.
   The truth is, I don't real understand any of this. As Renoir wrote: "Great art is inimitable and indescribable." It is the mysteries that matter most. I don't know why some caregivers are able to bring healing with actions as subtle as a soft voice or the strength of a firm hand. I can't tell you why the encounters of patients and caregivers so often seem to me like they should be captured, framed and hung on the wall.
   Somehow, beauty often lives in the most unlikely surroundings. Hospitals are not perceived like art museums. Yet, masterpieces are created in them every day. I don't quite understand this, so there's probably "something to it."
   What do you think?

-Erie Chapman

Day 152 - Revealing the Light in Others

"Berenice Abbot was the key that unlocked Atget's Paris for the rest of the world." (Wikipedia)

   Eugene Atget (1857-1927) is recognized in art circles as one of the foremost photographers of the early 20th century. Atget spent most of his adult life wandering the streets of Paris photographing her architecture and capturing, with his artist's eye, images which today live in art museums around the world. But, Atget was exceptionally shy and retiring. It took another photographer, Berenice Abbot (1898-1991), to realize the genius in Atget's images and to persistently promote them until the art world finally realized the beauty inside the albumin prints Atget and Abbott made.
   Without Abbott's work, we would probably know nothing of Atget. Without Theo Van Gogh's selfless and consistent support, we would not know of the work of his brother Vincent. Such stories of one person revealing the light in another are endless - and important to the lives of caregivers.
   What every great charity leader does is to reveal the light in co-workers so that others may see it. They do this by recognizing the gifts of others, affirming them, and trumpeting this music into the broader world.
   My wife is quite gifted at this. She is forever championing the creative efforts of friends and family members. I credit her encouragement as being one of the big reasons our children have turned out so well.
   It is the affirmation of charity leaders that is so crucial to the development of loving cultures. Most caregivers are like Eugene Atget, shy people who avoid the spotlight. They may not need the spotlight. But we need to see their example. It needs to shine as a beacon for other caregivers who may be feeling discouraged. That is the power of the film, Sacred Work, that Van Grafton and I made in the early part of the century. What caregivers at hundreds of hospitals around America see when they view this film is the light of other caregivers revealed in the most loving way.
   How do you bring out the light in others?

-Erie Chapman