Journal of Sacred Work

Days 300-302 - The House of God

"In silence we must wrap much of our life, because it is too fine for speech." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

   Where is the house of God? Different religions might seek to answer this differently. I have often heard clerics refer to churches or synagogues or temples as houses of God. Perhaps you will enter one this weekend. When you go, you may ask yourself: Does this feel like a house of God?

   I suggest that the house of God exists whenever and wherever we recognize a space as sacred and treat it as such. When we welcome God's Love into our own home, it has become a house of God. A hospital may become a house of God if its occupants are living Love. 

   Sacredness may be born in our own silence. In our inner solitude we may create sanctuary. This can be true even as we are surrounded by noise. 

   When Emerson suggests that much of life is "too fine for speech" he is highlighting the pathetic inability of human speech to truly describe our human experience. Caregivers are present for the birth of new life or it's departure in the moment of death. How can speech capture such a thing? What words adequately describe the mean texture of pain?

   Similarly, you and I experience our private thoughts and most personal secrets in silence. As John O'Donohue writes: "In our desperate search for meaning and healing, we rush through our towns and cities on our way to work, therapy or doctors." 

   Sacredness is rarely found in velocity. Yet, we chronically find ourselves rushing so we can "accomplish more." The accomplishments of speed are often among the least important of life's experiences.

   How do you experience the rich sanctuary of your own silences? How do you honor the silences of your patients? Do you ever experience a patient's room as a "house of God?"

-Rev. Erie Chapman  

Day 299 - Wounded Gifts

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

 John O'Donohue, in his work titled "Anam Cara" suggests that when two people come together "an ancient circle closes between them. They also come to each other," he writes, "not with empty hands, but with hands full of gifts for each other. Often these are wounded gifts; this awakens the dimension of healing within love." [italics added].

In the Celtic tradition, the understanding of love and friendship is captured in an old Gaelic term - anam ċara. Anam is the Celtic word for soul and ċara is the word for friend. In the early Celtic church, a person who acted as a spiritual guide or teacher was called an anam ċara. It was in this relationship that the deepest sharing, recognition, and belonging was experienced. O'Donohue wonders if many of us are graced with an anam ċara of whom we are simply not truly aware. A friend or companion whose presence is cloaked by a lack of awareness from within us, and so distance and absence becomes the experience. It is the sadness of loss that seems to awaken that awareness, and all too late.

When we love deeply and truly, the light of our soul shines on the beloved. This love is ours to send to those who are in desperate pain, to the hungry, the imprisioned, those lying on death's bed, or living lives of quiet desperation going to the grave "with the song still in them" (Henry David Thoreau). These are the people that O'Donohue described as having been "pushed to the very edge of life." Even though our hands may be filled with wounded gifts, we nonetheless awaken the dimension of "healing within love" in each other when we open ourselves to Love. For some, an anam ċara will appear for only a few hours or maybe a few days in the form of a caregiver. As caregivers, we need an anam ċara as well.

The Celtic tradition further gives us a Blessing for Friendship, which I share here with you today. May you each find in Love your truest anam ċara.

May you be blessed with good friends.

May you learn to be a good friend to yourself.

May you be able to journey to that place in your soul where

     there  is great love, warmth, feeling, and forgiveness.

May this change you.

May it transfigure that which is negative, distant, or cold

     in you.

May you be brought in to the real passion, kinship, and

     affinity of belonging.

May you treasure your friends.

May you be good to them and may you be there for them;

may they bring you all the blessings, challenges, truth,

and light that you need for your journey,

May you never be isolated.

May you always be in the gentle nest of belonging with your

anam ċara.

 

Day 298 - The Individuality of Healing

"The heart of all creativity is the awakening and flowering of individuality." John O'Donohue

   O'Donohue's language can be easily adapted to loving care. The heart of healing others depends upon our ability to awaken our individual gifts. We need to engage the Love that flows through us, not simply copy the approaches dictated by others or administer the cold rules of protocols. 

   Every caregiver is taught a set of skills that support effective physical treatment. But, once pills have been given to treat a digestive disorder, or surgery has been administered to remove a diseased gall bladder, or counseling has been offered to a victim of violence, what else can caregiver's do?

   Patients and special caregivers know the answer to this. Even though it's part of the treatment protocol, it's not much comfort to a rape victim to have a doctor read her a set of warnings about sexually transmitted diseases and then leave the room. The gift of healing flows from the caregiver's ability to engage his or her individual gifts of Love.

   The power of caregiver presence is chronically underestimated. The more technology that arrives, the more the human role seems to diminish. A right balance must be restored. 

   Obviously, only humans can engage loving relationships of the kind that help those who suffer. Our individual humanity is affirmed when we engage it to help heal need.

   How do you transcend rules to engage your gifts of healing?

-Erie Chapman 

Day 297 - Sympathetic Pain

   On Monday morning, my younger sister Martha, plagued with the kind of spinal trouble common with dwarfism, entered a Toledo hospital for back surgery. Down in Nashville, at almost the same moment she was being wheeled into the operating room, I was struck with an excruciating back spasm that left me immobilized on my office floor for several hours.

   Is there such a thing as true sympathetic pain? Probably. We wince when we see someone else in pain. We may cry when we see the sadness of others. The most unusual case of sympathetic pain I've heard of personally happened when a friend of mine, Dan Wilford, was refereeing a football game in Texas and broke his leg. His twin brother, living in Florida and unaware of Dan's injury, called Dan's wife. "I'm having a terrific pain in my leg. Has anything happened to Dan's leg?" he asked. 

   These kinds of cases are interesting, but what, if anything, do they tell us? We want caregivers to identify with the pain of their patients so that they can demonstrate compassion. But, we don't want their caring hearts to disable them from helping.

   Apathy is, of course, another issue with caregiving. The woman, above, is Zainabu Sesay. At the time this image was made, she was dying in a Sierra Leone hospice. Morphine could have relived much of her pain. But, none was available. This can only happen when those in power choose not to care. The little chick pulling on her sheet appears to care about her more than the world community. 

   Love can feel like a very mixed blessing. During my ordination service, one of the men laying hands on me whispered into my ear: "Love is a dirty business." As the case of Ms. Sesay shows, he's right. 

   We like to think of Love in romantic terms. We like to imagine Love delivered by saint-like people crowned with halos. But we know the truth. For example, ministering to the homeless and the imprisoned, as I plan to do in answer to my own calling, means engaging people in "dirty" settings.

   During my years as a prosecuting attorney, I used to lie awake at night wondering about the lives of those I'd helped to imprison. Criminals are sentenced to places that keep them from harming "law-abiding" society. But, they are not sentenced to be raped in their bunks in the middle of the night. And they law does not instruct that prisoners be treated like animals. Don't we want them to emerge from prison humanized rather than demeaned? 

   Perhaps the best way to inform our healing efforts is to accept the pain which comes from identifying with the pain of others. After all, the weakened depend upon our strength to help them rise from the depths of their darkness. They need our compassion as well as our skill. 

   How can we ordain those in need with our Love? Do we need to be concerned about our ability to experience "sympathetic pain? " or should we nurture it?

-Erie Chapman

Day 296 - A Strange & Beautiful Place

   On Sunday, I was fortunate to be on the receiving end of a rainbow. Nothing in my previous experience prepared me for the transcendent feeling of the event.

  
  After graduating from Vanderbilt Divinity School in 2002, a long period of reflection, and a year of guided discernment with a church committee, I was ordained a minister. 

   What does that really mean. Everyone who believes in Love can be her minister. Ordination is only a formalization, a specific charge to carry God's light in a conscious way. Yet, something else happened for me on that Sunday morning. 

   As I shared with one friend, the total experience was transcendent in a way that seemed beautifully independent of me and, instead, shared by all. There was a strange confluence of light in the room. For a period of over an hour, every single person in the congregation seemed happy, hopeful, and full of Love for themselves and each other. It seemed coincidental that I happened to be a recipient of a random cascade of light.  

   In my church, the ordination practice of the laying on of hands is done differently than some other Christian churches. Every person in the place, whether a member or not, adult, teenager, or child, is invited, one at a time, to touch the ordinand and speak something personal to him. 

   I've been through an awful lot of ceremonies in my life. Yet, I was overwhelmed by this one as person after person (including many I didn't know) filed by me to share some of their most personal and loving hopes. Somehow, I became, for a moment, everyone's brother, father, son, uncle, friend and trusted pastor. For me, it went even further as I felt Love moving through the room in a way that reminded me of the first time that, as a child, I saw the sun shine through a huge, stained glass window. 

   On Sunday, instead of ministering, I was ministered to.

   All of this may sound melodramatic and exaggerated. Yet, those in the congregation affirmed the experience with wondrous comments afterwards, "I've been a member of this church for forty years and I've never saw anything like it," one woman said to me. "Something happened in there," another friend told me with tears in her eyes. Two Catholic women, a friend from South Carolina, and a Jewish woman made separate comments about the magical nature of the service. None of them were talking about me. Instead, some part of their heart recognized that mystery had visited a place designated to be holy. 

   But, there's no adequate way to describe such experiences, is there? Every so often, we enter a strange and beautiful place where Love unexpectedly and suddenly breathes meaning into our world. This can be in a forest, at the kitchen table with family, in the bedroom with someone you love, or walking alone along a city street. 

   I wish that everyone could be the recipient of the Love I received this past Sunday. I wish there was a life ceremony in our society in which each of us, apart from any ministerial ordination, could kneel before a hundred others and have each of those hundred tell us that we are loved. 

   I wish that each of us, especially caregivers who toil to meet titanic needs each day, could feel the ordination of God's Love each morning and across the days.

-Erie Chapman

Days 293-295 - Beauty & Suffering

Beauty triumphs over the inherent suffering in life.  Nietzsche

   Someone dear to me is suffering deeply at this moment. His suffering is so great that he has chosen a pathway often walked by those in agony. He has shut down. The shell around him has thickened as he seeks to heal inside the barriers he has created. It is impossible for him to know, at this moment, that his suffering is more likely to be healed by opening than by closing.

   The nature of caregiving is to encounter suffering at every turn. Some are trained to heal the body, some the heart. Who heals the spirit?

   Can suffering be beautiful? Can it lead to healing on the other side? The image of a pregnant woman reminds us that new life is often born through pain. The foolish seek to forget their pain as soon as it ends. The wise understand that pain is so expensive, they might as well learn what it has to teach.

   Yet, in the middle of our own suffering, it is very difficult to hear anyone's advice that "you'll be stronger after this." Indeed, Nietzsche is the one who first wrote: "Whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger." But, who wants to hear this?

   When I feel depressed, advice about how my suffering will be good for me makes me want to toss aside all my beliefs about Love so I can slug the unwelcome adviser. Indeed, when I made the mistake of offering a line of counsel to the one who is in pain, he basically told me: "If I want your advice, I'll ask for it."

   Hurt is difficult not only for the individual who is suffering directly but for all those who care about him. It is a rare caregiver and even rarer patient who understands that there can be beauty in suffering as well as on the other side of it.

    Perhaps, suffering's beauty looks different than the pretty beauty of a flower. Maybe suffering's beauty is more clearly what Christians see in the upturned eyes of Jesus on the cross. 

     As a caregiver, are you able to find any kind of "beauty" in suffering? How does this help you give care?

   -Erie Chapman

Day 292 - Don't Turn Your Head

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

  Dr. Saki Santorelli has captured the wonderful movement of the wounded healer in his book titled "Heal Thy Self - Lessons on Mindfulness in Medicine." The archetype of the wounded healer has been used by a number of well known authors, but its origins may not be so familiar. Like so many others, this archetype emerges from ancient Greece and the myth of Chiron. Chiron is told to have been a wise and beneficent centaur and a great master of healing. Wounded by a poison tipped arrow, Chiron - an immortal being - lived as the greatest of healers but was unable to completely heal himself. The myth is told that Chiron recieved into his watch care and trained thousands of students, one being Asclepius who is believed to be in the lineage from which came Hippocrates. Each of us, asserts Dr. Santorelli, is a living myth encompassing both the woundedness of Chiron and the innate capacity to take advantage of adversity and be transformed. The virtue of being human ascribes to us the path of the universal, mythological journey of the hero on quest to forever more "heal thy self."

 The myth of the wounded healer is quite real and captures the interrelatedness of patient and practitioner. On the surface, this relationship appears as seeker and giver, of the helped and the helper. Dr. Santorelli suggests there is no polarity among the two but that one is the reflection of the other: "Within every health care practitioner lives the Wounded One; in every patient, every sick and suffering human being, abides a powerful Inner Healer. These are the gifts of being born into this world."

Dr. Santorelli then makes an audacious claim: "For too long care has been conceived of as either practioner-centered or patient-centered. In actuality, the healing relationship has always been a crucible for mutual transformation. The bare willingness of human beings to encounter one another in the midst of our weaknesses and strengths is the quintessential transformative agent. But my experience tells me that it is nearly impossible for us to relate to another human being in this way if we do not begin to relate to ourselves in the same manner." And what manner he calls us to is in that encounter that we call sacred, where Love meets need, with mindfulness. It is an act of love to willingly see ourselves closely just as we are. Rumi reminds us of an entryway into that place of seeing and knowing in his poem "Childhood Friends:"

Trust your wound to a Teacher’s surgry.

Flies collect on a wound. They cover it,

those flies of your self-protecting feelings,

your love for what you think is yours.

Let a Teacher wave away the flies

and put a plaster on the wound.

Don’t turn your head. Keep looking

at the bandaged place. That’s where

the Light enters you.

    And don’t believe for a moment

that you’re healing yourself.

Perhaps our best teachers are those we seek to serve. When with great Love I am willing to be still, to listen, to relate to the person before me, perhaps they will wave away those flies and healing will begin for us both. Don't turn your head. Keep looking. Let Love and Light enter in.

Day 292 - Beyond Work & Relationships

"Beyond work, survival, relationships, even family, we become aware of our own profound duty to our own life." - John O'Donohue

   The first part of the above sentence made sense to me. The rest of it startled me. It doesn't seem right to me that I would place a duty to my own life ahead of other relationships. For someone like me, everything is relationships.

   Then I remembered my own writing that in order to live the most sacred relationships with others, we need to first tend our relationship with ourselves. 

   O'Donohue's list is not exclusive. The richest lives live out each of the elements he describes.

   Our life in this world consists of encounters. Whether they are sacred or not depends heavily on what we bring to each encounter.

   If we are fully present to ourselves when we are alone, we will discover the Love that lives within. In this way, we are empowered to be present to every other encounter - whether with another person, with the sea, or with the forest. 

   The quality of every other relationship we have depends upon accepting ourselves and others as carriers of God's light.

-Erie Chapman

  

Day 291 - The Bridge to Our Soul?

"What is great in man (sic) is that he is a bridge and not a goal." - Nietzsche  

   How do we cross the bridge that leads to our soul? Perhaps, part of the answer lies in recognizing that we are not goals, we are, ourselves, bridges. 

   Is our role on earth to be a bridge over which Love travels into the hearts of others? If so, than Love comes through us, not from us. 

   That is why the idea of using an image such as a bridge may be a misleading. The soul may not be a place we "walk toward" or "bridge to." If not, then how to we travel there, if at all? Do we need to travel to something that is already within us?

   My recent sense is that our soul is God's Love living within each of us and all of us. If this is true, then the soul is always present. But our Love may exist in many of us unlit, smothered by the some darkness we have experienced. Meanwhile, our love lives in us as potential, as kindling waiting to be ignited so that we may warm the hearts of others. 

   Our work may be to let go of "work." Perhaps it is unwise to use the world's tools (such as logic, reason and analysis) to solve a mystery that is other-worldly. Instead, the inward pathway to the soul involves letting ourselves fall open so that the soul's love may enter.

   What is "soul" music? Is it something we create or is it simply listening to music that is already there? If this is so, then all great caregivers, like all musicians, artists, writers and leaders are engaging energy other than what comes merely from the world.

   When religion understands Love's energy, it posits that surrender (of ego) is the only way to engage God. We need not yield to some authoritarian power figure. We may instead perceive ourselves as yielding to the warmth and compassion of Love.

   This thinking, engaging the heart's wisdom, may be the single most important gift caregivers can give themselves, and therefore their patients. 

   What I wonder is whether this notion appeals to you. Does this image of yourself as a bridge, or as carrying an unlit fire that can only be ignited by Love, help you or confuse you as you go about healing those who come to you?

-Erie Chapman

Day 290 - Our Soul's Voice & Ego's Noise

"All holiness is about learning to hear the voice of your own soul." - John O'Donohue

    On many occasions, I experience myself speaking and writing as if I knew more than what I know. Perhaps, what is going on is a desire, shared by all who try to remain open and alive, to discover more by seeking to express the inexpressible. The act of trying appears to nudge the door ajar. But, what of the act of listening?

    This is the challenge of understanding the soul. O'Donohue, whose writing has suddenly riveted my attention, writes that the voice of the soul is "deeper and surer than all the other voices of disappointment, unease, self-criticism and bleakness." Why wouldn't we want to listen primarily to this voice?

   The difficulty appears to come from the noise that arrives from the everyday world. This noise appeals to our egos. Our ego (personality) is formed in the world and may block us from appreciating the soul's voice that speaks with more serenity. 

   Our ego is flooded with the world's rules. Our soul is shaped and informed only by Love. Our ego demands performance and raise. Our soul lives free of fear.

   Does our soul speak "surer" because it lives free from our ego's noise? 

   For caregivers, everyday work life is drenched in clatter. We can make sense of our daily storms only if our consciousness is informed by our souls. The soul provides serenity. To ignore the wisdom of the soul risks living a passionless and meaningless life. 

   The most healing caregivers sustain their focus on the needs of the patient before them. In doing this, the window to Love slides open allowing the richest light to enter and to heal.

   As O'Donohue writes, "The voice of compassion is not absorbed with itself...it is imbued...with healing." This is the voice the vulnerable need to hear through us. This is the voice of Love.

-Erie Chapman

Days 287-289 - The Color of Beauty

   Since each of us is born with beauty, our life questions become: Will we express it? How will our inner beauty find expression, if at all?

   Consider the actions of the hospital housekeeper about whom I have written (including at the outset of Radical Loving Care.) She is the good Samaritan who puts down her mop, steps outside her job description, and literally has to risk her livelihood to respond to the plaintive cry of a disoriented old man calling out for his absent daughter. In these moments, she releases her beauty into the world, coloring a patient's fragile life with hope. 

   Caregivers have the privilege of expressing their gifts by the texture of the love they express. To pick up on one of the metaphors of this week, they can (as did saints like Mother Theresa) paint their lives with rainbows of healing grace. Or they can jail their beauty, sketching their lives with gun metal gray. 

   So many caregivers seem frightened to express healing love to patients. After all, there are the myriad restrictions of policies, regulations, and the commands of supervisors. We may honor beauty in the abstract. But, when it is actually expressed in real life, we may see it as strange. The housekeeper who puts down her mop to offer the touch of her hand has a better chance of being fired then being rewarded.

   What color is your life right now? How can each of us find the courage to release the beauty within so that it may help heal those in need?

-Erie Chapman

Day 286 - Love In Full Living Color

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

    Vincent Van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter whose work has had a far reaching influence on 20th century art with its vivid colors and emotional impact.  In his paintings, Van Gogh invites us to see the light we dwell in.  Yet, over time, writes poet Marilyn McEntyre, "something in the light Van Gogh saw became unbearable." He seemd compelled in his later years to share his truth "slant," as Emily Dickison noted that with truth one must "dazzle gradually, or every man be blind."  The sorrows of Van Gogh's solitude, the episodes of derangement, and finally his suicide infuse his story with what some have called a tragic sense of life. McEntyre has shared reflections on the work of Van Gogh. In her thoughts on his painting "Entrance to the Public Gardens in Arles (Van Gogh, 1888), she writes:

We do what we can to domesticate

the rioting color, sweep the walkways

down to a uniform yellow and circle

flower and foliage with iron wrought

in their image.  We make spaces for sitting,

paths for solitude, gateways that mark what we leave,

what we enter.  We shape the wide that stirs us despite

ourselves into troubling confluent memories of

something older and darker where once we were lost

in the middle of life’s way.

McEntyre suggets something mighty and rich with spiritual vitality fell when Van Gogh died.  What he left us cost him "not less than everything."  McEntyre writes "Van Gogh's story still has a place in the linage of seers, mystics, poets, and priests who have attempted to mediate what comes to them in moments of greatest attunedness and make it available to the eyes and ears of others who are finding their way out of Plato's care. We are called by the Light into the light we can't yet bear without the shades and protections of mud, mortar, wood, canvas, and color." But isn't this true of every one of us?  Doesn't every life lived cost us "not less than everything?" Don't we each hold a mighty and rich spiritual vitatlity? 
 

Van Gogh's eyes, his heart, like those of the patients we serve and the ones we give care to, give us the opportunity to look again and see in a new light.  Each of us touches the other in ways that bend light and offer the possibility of healing, hope, Light, and Love.  May we see today the color of light, of love, of double rainbows in our every encounter.

Day 285 - Bumping Into Rainbows

"When a ray of light hits the natural vibrational note of an object, it alters the vibration; it becomes absorbed itself in this alteration and what is reflected outwards is the object's colour." John O'Donahue

   My five-year-old grandson asked me during a recent visit: "What happens if a rainbow bumps into another rainbow?" Dumbfounded by the beauty of his question (one which only a five-year-old could imagine) I couldn't think of an answer. So I asked him what he thought. "I guess it would be an even better rainbow," he said.  

   During his life in Ireland, John O'Donahue developed a deep appreciation of the land with forty shades of green and endless rainbows rising almost daily along the coast of the Irish Sea. His writing demonstrates remarkable insight into the nature of beauty and the colors our own vibrations reflect.

   Light enters us and, changed by its arrival in us, flies back out with a different hue, texture and shape. How does our spirit affect the light that travels through us? 

   A patient's agony delivers some mean shade of Dante's hell into a caregiver's eyes. What happens to this hard light after its encounter with a caregiver? When we are effective as healers, when we offer Love, the light softens and begins to change, even if the patient's pain has not yet vanished. 

   Pain is no more permanent than happiness. One day, all of us will be relieved of whatever pain this earth has laid upon us. Life's transitory happiness will also disappear, hopefully replaced by the beautiful eternity for which we pray. 

 
  Meanwhile, we have a chance to color the light that travels through us. When white light "bumps into" a prism, it travels out the other side as a rainbow. When light strikes the face of hatred, it reflects a terrible darkness.  

   Best of all, when Love's rainbow "bumps into our inner light," the magic of healing appears in the form of "a better rainbow." If we're lucky, we may even reflect back that rare sight known as a double rainbow.

-Erie Chapman 

Day 284 - The Color of Life

"...the colour we perceive is the remains of the other colours which have been absorbed." - John O'Donahue

   I recall a conversation I had awhile back with the CEO of a large hospital system about the concept of Radical Loving Care. I described to him the way in which work cultures can be reshaped. 

   "People don't change," he said disdainfully. The opposite may be true. We are someone a little different each dawn, and perhaps each hour as our expressions and personality shape-shift across our days. Leaders, in particular, need to understand this so they may appreciate the vast potential within the places they guide. 

   The truth about color change lives in O'Donahue's line, above, from his book, Beauty - Rediscovering the Sources of Compassion, Serenity and Hope. Each of us carries within us the full spectrum of light and dark. Every caregiver has the ability to pick from the palette of their personality the hue they will present to their world.

   Equally important, each patient before us represents multiple colors. No patient exists only as the gray illness we may perceive. Can we see, in the image of the old man, the baby, the teenager, and the young adult he once was? Can our Love help us change our perception enough to recognize elegance in the aged form before us?

   For example, it is a great sadness to see the way in which so many elderly patients are treated in hospitals and nursing homes - as if they were a single dull color barely worth a glance from the eyes of youth. Every person of age holds a particularly rich life-painting within. It is up to caregivers to respect each patient as holding "the remains of other colours which have been absorbed" within the fabric of their illness.

   The classification system hospitals often use can steal our color and demean our humanity. No patient's life is one color. No patient is just "a gallbladder" or "a knee" or "the diabetic."  We are all rainbows waiting to be seen. Can we flex our spirits enough to see the rainbows in each other person?

-Erie Chapman   

Days 280-283 - The Rich Gift of Twilight

"When we befriend the twilight side of the heart, we discover a surer tranquility where the darkness and the brightness of our lives dwell together." - John O'Donahue

   Someone very dear to me has been experiencing an extremely difficult time. When I asked his best friend how he was doing, she said, "I just want him to be happy." I felt better when I heard this because it sounded simple, non-judgmental and hopeful. "I want him to be happy too," I said. 

   Then I came upon O'Donahue's line (above) in his book Beauty (The Invisible Embrace.) O'Donahue's insight runs deeper and offers something better, richer, and far more realistic than plain happines. The truth is, we simply cannot be forever "happy" if we are to experience the rich gifts of life. 

   The painting by Frederic Church (above, 1860) is appealing to us because of the range of colors it displays. Pure sunshine, totally free of shadow and shape, is white and devoid of life. 

   "The twilight side of the heart" is the place where tranquility and Love reside. Twilight is the home of truth. After all, how can caregivers be perpetually "happy" in the midst of all the pain they experience?

   What I love about the gift of O'Donahue's words is that accepting them enables us to embrace every experience of life. It empowers us to accept and observe the darkness, to drink from the better as well as the sweet, to stop beating up ourselves (and our lives.) 

   We don't have to be "happy" in every moment. We don't have to waste moments ruing our darkness. Instead, we can "befriend the twilight side of the heart." Indeed, we are all "twilight people." How would we know compassion for others if we had never seen the dark? In the twilight, we can live Love. 

   I wonder if these words make sense to you in your life? Do you find yourself able to befriend darkness?

-Erie Chapman

Day 279 - Respite and a Breathing Place

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

   The concept of respite is known but not well practiced among many caregivers. Several dictionary definitions suggest its meaning: "a brief interval of rest or relief; a pause from doing something (as work); an interruption in the intensity or amount of something; a breather, breathing place, or breathing space." Merriam-Webster Dictionary notes the word originates from Middle English respit and Medieval Latin respectus, and refers to "the act of looking back."

For the caregiver, respite may offer an opportunity for a short rest, for time away from the responsibilities related to those being served. Time away can refresh, but as the origins of the word suggest, it can also offer the opportunity for renewed perspective, for a renewal of one's sense of grounding and stability in a world of chaos and turmoil. For caregivers, respite is not an occasional luxury to be savored but a necessity as vital as the air we breathe.

Some researchers believe that respite is best when it is regularly planned and experienced. Respite should provide enough time to do something that replenishes and renews, although the what, where, when, and how will be deeply personal. Researchers believe respite is most renewing when anticipated and planned for. Yet for many caregivers, time away from one's called work is still filled with giving care to others - our families, our friends, our communities, our homes.

Every caregiver needs intervals of rest, a pause from caring for someone else no matter how much we love and seek to serve. On a recent silent retreat, I was encouraged to "come away" and enjoy my time, not use it. I experienced the freedom of sitting idly, soaking in the colors of the sun's setting. I sat quietly with colored pencils in my lap, at times drawing, at times just looking at the edge where wood meets wax and wondering. Sitting apart gives voice to the call of my heart, where with candor and leisure I can soak in the sounds of Love. And each time I "come away", I return with more clarity, more surety, more care to give.

So, dear care giver, how will you make time apart today? Will you "come away"? Where will you make a place to breathe, to rest, to refresh, to soak in the sounds of Love?

Day 278 - Trusting the Soul

"We should never allow our fears or the expectations of others to set the frontiers of our destiny." - John O'Donahue (below, 1956-2008)

 
  I know of no advice harder to follow than that offered by O'Donahue. Yet, his counsel could not be wiser. As I often write here (and speak elsewhere) the wisest path for all of our lives is to live Love, not fear.

   Why is this so hard? We are born with only two fears: falling and the startle reflex to noise. All other fears are learned. As very small children, we have relatively clear and simple ideas of what we want and little worry about the opinion of others. 

   We are then introduced to the astounding power of parental and other adult influence. As three-year-olds, people triple our size tell us what's expected of us. In order to live in the world, we need to adapt our behavior to others, we are advised. For most, this means learning to meet expectations: of parents, teachers, friends and others who pass judgment over us every day. 

   Now comes Donahue to tell us we must not let others determine our success. Isn't it your supervisor who decides if you get a raise? Isn't it our families and friends who determine if we are loved? Partly. But what about the guidance of our souls? 

   Donahue also writes: "When you are compassionate with yourself, you trust in your soul...Your soul knows the geography of your destiny better than you do." 

   I love this advice. But, how do we follow it? How do we go about listening to our souls? 

   Perhaps, all listening begins with our silence. In this silence, we have the chance to ask ourselves the question of how much of our lives is governed by fear - fear of mistakes, of punishment, of complaints from patients or bosses, of loss or possible loss. 

   All of these fears lead us into a terrible trap - the one that tells us that is we can just find the right levers, we can use them to control the behavior of others and manipulate our own destiny.

   The soul knows better. The soul is filled with Love and fears nothing. The question is not what do we fear but who do we love?

   How does love find expression in your life as a caregiver? How does your expression of Love open the door to your soul's wisdom and strength? 

-Erie Chapman

Day 277 - Sustaining Compassion

   I sat in a peace circle recently with a group of six people who serve as CEO's of Nashville charities. As the "talking piece" (a hawk feather) passed from hand to hand it came to rest amid on the worn fingers of one of the most esteemed senior members of the non-profit community. 

  "It's amazing to me how the homeless people in our area survive at all," he said. "I look into their eyes every day and I can see the tragedy they have experienced..." 

   With that, his own eyes filled with tears and he could not continue, quickly passing the feather to the next person. For decades, this man has been overseeing one of Nashville's most successful efforts to provide transition housing for the poor. He has heard their sorrows and he has helped them regain their balance in this hard life. 

   Isn't he sick of it all? Doesn't he find the stories of trouble tiresome after all these years?

   The answer is "no." I am sure he is tired and often heartbroken. But, his answer to need is a soft and continuous and life-affirming "yes."

   Through all of the hard trouble he has seen, this strong and kind man has never lost his love fo those in need because he always sees every client as a person, never as a number.

   How do your sustain your compassion day after day?

-Erie Chapman 

Day 276 - The Teeter Totter

   My twenty-one month old granddaughter has discovered the teeter-totter. "Teeter totter goes up down, up down," she chirps happily. 

   My five-year old grandson has a more advanced philosophical view of the same piece of playground apparatus. "When you get on a teeter totter, Baba," he advised me recently, "be sure someone bigger doesn't get on the other end." You can imagine how he arrived at that conclusion. 

   At the risk of raising a too-obvious parallel: What does our "teeter totter" look like? We run our daily checks to find out: Are my patients up or down? Is my job going well? Is my family doing okay? How does my hair look? How is my health? Am I exercising enough?

   Up down, up down. 

   We spend a big part of our lives attempting to hold our balance as the physics of our the teeter totter shift in and out of our control. Indeed, are we ever really in control of anything or is control simply an illusion? 

   It's easy to discuss the concept of balance when all the arrows of our lives appear to be aligned in the same direction. What happens when some unexpected tragedy destroys the carefully arranged furniture of our world? 

   Like you, I have experienced my share of life tragedies and unexpected events: from auto accidents to deaths, from fake hospital bomb threats to tragic hospital murders, from tripping down the stairs (which I did yesterday) to acquiring a chronic illness (which I did more than four decades ago.)

   To survive, we learn to cope. As caregivers, can the pain of our own trouble inform our hearts with the compassion our patients need from us? 

   One of the most compassionate caregivers I ever met, Neuro-ICU nurse Deadre Hall, says at the beginning of our film, Sacred Work, "People get up in the morning, just like you and me, and they get into their car to drive to work, and they don't know that they're going to end up here in a bed paralyzed."

   Deadre's ability, after more than thirty years as a caregiver, to stay in touch with the pain of others is one of the things that makes her the kind of nurse you would want caring for your mother - or you. 

   The teeter totter of our lives will always move up and down, even if we do everything just right. How do you hold your balance when something that seems too big climbs on the other end?

-Erie Chapman 

Day 274-275 - Open Forum for Caregivers