Journal of Sacred Work

Day 331 - Thought-Prisons

"Make not your thoughts your prisons." - Shakespeare

    "I don't want to go back to work," my younger sister groaned in the wake of Thanksgiving. After more than forty years of caregiving - both at work and at home - it's no wonder she seeks more rest than the last four days could offer. In addition, she is recovering from back surgery. Even as my sister struggled to regain her strength, my ninety-seven-year old mother continues to lean on her youngest daughter - both figuratively and literally. 

    Mondays are hard days for people who have begun to tire of their work. The very thought of a Monday can be a prison of its own. As I have often said, the key out of this prison is quite easy, yet few put it in the lock and turn it. Obviously, Monday's come every seven days so why waste Sunday dreading it's inevitable sequel?

   One of the worst "thought-prisons" is dread. We dread certain events and thus steal joy from the present. 

   Self-evident as these thoughts may be, it's so difficult to shake them. So many of our life patterns seem to exist within walls that blocks joy's gifts. 

   I wonder how much it would help caregivers along their journey if they could begin to notice that "thought prisons" can drain energy. The way out is to notice that dread is not more, or less, than a thought. Becoming conscious that we have built these prisons around ourselves can be freeing.

  Noticing and changing our negative thoughts frees us from their prison. The way to change a negative thought is not to ban it but to replace it with a more constructive thought. And one of the most constructive thoughts I know is for us to continue the practice of thanksgiving we were trying out again just a few days ago.

-Erie Chapman

Days 328-330 - Personal Gratitude

 "I wish I were Nicole Kidman," I heard a woman say recently. "Why?" I asked. "She is rich, beautiful and famous," she replied. "Why wouldn't I want to be her?"  

    How much of our lives have we spent wishing we were someone we are not? It's a common and very understandable fantasy. Yet, this kind of thinking represents a double mistake. First, wanting to be someone else is obviously seeking the impossible. More important, though, is that every time we wish we were someone else, we may be simultaneously degrading our own existence.

   The "day after" certain holidays creates an interesting phenomenon. How personally happy do we feel the day after Christmas? How romantic do we feel the day after Valentine's Day? Today, how thankful do we feel in our first hours after Thanksgiving?

   Perhaps, today is a day for us to express a kind of personal gratitude for the fact that we are who we are. The typical caregiver may not live as glamorously as Nicole Kidman. Yet, many caregivers may be living lives that are more meaningful in terms of the way they heal others.

    We can wile away our lives wishing for the impossible - that we were someone else, that we lived someplace else, that we were younger, that we were healthier. Or we can practice gratitude for who we are and for the life that we have. And we can practice this gratitude not by comparing ourselves to those who are less fortunate, but simply by thanking God for our existence. 

   It's our life choice, isn't it?

-Rev. Erie Chapman  

   

Day 327 - Thanks

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

 Fleda Brown, a local columnist for a small paper in Northern Michigan introduced me to the poetry of W. S. Merwin. Born in New York City in the late 1920's, this Pulitzer prize winning poet offers words that seem simultaneously startling and soothing. Somehow in these, his words, is a knowing of both grief and gratitude. It strikes me that is the life we live - at the bedside, on the streets, in boardrooms and living rooms - a life filled with moments of simultaneous grief and gratitude. And if we listen, just listen, maybe we will hear, even so, words of thanksgiving.

Thanks

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

-- W.S. Merwin

From "Migration: New & Selected Poems" (Copper Canyon Press, 2005). Copyright 1988 by W. S. Merwin

Perhaps most of all when we feel that nobody is listening, may we lift up our gratitude nonetheless. And today we do lift up our gratitude. We give our thanks to you. Thank you, thank you dear caregiver, for your gifts of Love.

Day 326 - "Blessed"

   Thanksgiving could well serve as the model for how to live all our days. Every moment we live in gratitude is a moment informed by God's Love. 

   We all know we are blessed. We know that our lives were touched by angels at the moment of our birth. Why is it so difficult for us to practice gratitude for the Love we receive? 

   When someone asks how he is doing, my friend, Dr. Keith Hagan, is fond of saying, "I'm blessed." Dr. Hagan clearly practices gratitude. I believe that, as he does this - as he tells others that he feels blessed - his very statement seems to enrich the quality of his life and those around him. 

   As a physician specializing in urology, Dr. Hagan sees people in trouble every day. He treats more than his share of patients with cancer. He knows the look in a patient's eyes when they receive the news that their condition is terminal. And yet, each day, he tells others he feels blessed. Instead of complaining about the challenges of caregiving, he revels in the privilege of being able to help and, sometimes, to heal. 

   What would Monday morning look like if we thought of ourselves as blessed? What would each of our hours be like if we were grateful for our jobs instead of resentful?

   Thanksgiving arrives and departs as any day. We have the chance to treat each day as a day of Thanksgiving. Perhaps this begins when we follow Dr. Hagan's example and think of our lives as blessed.

-Rev. Erie Chapman

Days 324-325 - Silence

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

   I reflect, just now, on the millions of patients lying in silence in hospitals, hospices and nursing homes. We are born into the company of our mothers. We may well die alone. 

   Yet, whether we are surrounded with legions or attended by a single caregiver, silence will still, as Emerson writes, "wrap much of our life." And most of us don't know words that can begin to describe the texture of our innermost selves.  

   What is the quality of your silence? How much of your thought-life centers on lists of things to do and how much of your mind floats towards reflection and ideas?

   Caregivers offer some of their best healing through silent presence. It is often not our words that heal but the love in our eyes, the kindness in our hands, and the way we stay near to a person in pain.

   What is the color of your silence?

-Erie Chapman

Days 321-323 - Open Forum for Caregivers

Day 320 - Tender Heroes of Love

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

"The holiest spot on earth is one where an ancient hatred has become a present love" - anonymous street graffiti

  In awakened awareness, silence helps us connect to the common heart we all long to share and experience. In silence we share the language of the heart rather than language that is spoken. Most of us respond to a loving and quiet presence. In practicing meditation I have been struck by how often, as I begin to move out of my place of stillness and quiet, I'll find my neighbor's cat curled up quietly at my feet. Some teachers of meditation have suggested that all of creation responds to heart language.

Author and journalist Catherine Ingram believes that within heart language is "the quiet offering of understanding to others without the demand for being understood." Real love, radical love, doesn't seek to acquire, to be understood but naturally seeks to serve with generosity of heart and hands. When we approach life with awakened awareness, with a passionate presence, Ingram suggests we wear our tenderness on our sleeves, "keeping company with the brokenhearted because they are the ones who meet in love." Passionate presence invites us into awareness of the brokenness in our own lives, not to dwell there in sorrow and loss but to fully live and love in the light of empathy for every one we encounter. "Suffering," suggests Ingram, "does the great work of softening our hearts."

All have suffered, whether through physical pain, emotional harm, the harshly spoken word, or presence of oppressive power. Caregivers are not exempt, yet Love calls us to give tender mercy in response to the patient in pain, the angry physician, the supervisor who needs power and control. It may be our nature to return anger for anger, but Gandhi gently reminds us of the folly of our nature when he noted "an eye for eye makes the whole world blind."

Passionate presence invites us to wear our tenderness on our sleeve, to show love and understanding to those lost in hurt, anger, pain, and loss. Ingram writes "There are possibilities for tender mercies for each one of us throughout our day. These small kindness to friends, family, or strangers may go unnoticed by the world. We may not win any awards for heroism or be written up in the newspaper for altruistic deeds, but we will exist in a self-generated field of sacredness by letting love flow through us. It is its own reward."

Today Love may show itself most of all through the quiet and most likely unnoticed acts of tenderness at the bedside or around the meeting table. We salute you today, you who are the quiet and tender heroes of Love.

Days 317-319 - Quiet

   When any one of us is dragged into the prison of illness and hospitalized, the surroundings can feel so cold and noisy. Lying amid our pain, we may conjure images of softness, of being comforted by a caregiver with the gift of Love in her hands.  We may yearn for something rare in a hospital - quiet.                                                                

                                    Quiet  

Still,

in the forest’s still air,

a leaf comes to me without the wind’s nudging, 

as if I have summoned her 

to soft onto my hair, shift to my shoulders 

before she falls to her rest. 

In the quiet autumn, I watch another leaf take flight. 

Swinging side to side she skates around threads of a spider web, 

startles a mockingbird, dodges the serrated hands of a holly bush.

In the still air, the oak’s dying offspring arrive gentle. They know 

I need the kind touch of their fingertips & yours.  

In the pain of my illness, I want this quiet.

I want you to hold me still

as the still day, the sun

warming me, the sounds

of the world silenced. 

-Erie Chapman

Days 314-316 - Within

"The bud/ stands for all things,/ even for those things that don't flower,/ for everything flowers, from within,/ of self-blessing." - Galway Kinnell

    Today, the Buddhist monk meditates his way along his inner path. The Catholic nun prays a bridge between her and God. The Wall Street trader seeks meaning in numbers flashing across the electronic ticker tape. The school teacher studies the yearning eyes of her students. What does the caregiver do?

   How are you feeling just now? What has determined your present state of mind and body and spirit?

   Amid all the seductive noise of the world beyond the borders of our skin, it can be very difficult to remember that all strength comes from within. We are the ones that choose whether to listen to the voice of Love and to let Love inform our every encounter.

   Instead, I often let my moods move as if they were subject to the weather. I leave the question of my happiness up to the whims of how I am treated by others, whether the sun is shinning, whether my favorite team wins, whether I get good news or bad from the the world.

   The news that matters comes from inside. If we can learn to let Love shape our world view all of our encounters will be fulfilling. This does not, of course, mean that all will be happy. Instead, it means that our lives will be infused with the rich spectrum of Love's light.

    What matters most lies within. Our "within" determines how we meet the world.

   We don't need to retreat from the world in order to engage Love's energy. Instead, as we encounter the needs of those before us, we can let our fear fall away so that Love can find a pathway through us to others. As Love passes through the bud that lives within each of us, it nourishes what matters most - the garden that lies within.

Rev. Erie Chapman 

Day 313 - The Common Heart

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

 I grew up with a wonderful toy called "Chatty Cathy." Pull her magic ring on the back of her neck and she and I could exchange words in play conversation. I most of all remember her saying "I love you," and then asking of me "Do you love me?" At times her words reflected my own sensibilities "I'm so tired," or "I'd like a cookie." It seems that even as a child, conversation is important. It turns out conversation for us all is about connecting with, as Emerson once wrote, "that common heart of which all sincere conversation is the worship." How is it that we yearn for and yet so often miss the sharing of this common heart?

At times, in our efforts to connect, words can actually get in the way of the moment of shared experience. Although we use words to connect, they often have the opposite effect. Some of us use words to fill the quiet. There may be a discomfort with silence, and so we chatter. We may want most of all to connect with others, but "chatty Cathy" cannot get past the banter to find a way into meaningful conversation.

Lately I've noticed, when watching my 3 year-old granddaughter prepare herself when the time comes to leave our home, how she asks for some play moment "just one more time." It's as if she is trying to grasp and hold, perhaps for her future remembering, the shared moment of play and laughter. I've experienced that same effort in my travels, at times missing the moment focusing instead on what is before me through a tiny lens in an effort to grasp and hold for future remembering. I wonder what I've missed in the meantime.

It has been suggested that all we need is already available to us, and yet we search on and on. One teacher likened this quest to searching for one's glasses while wearing them. Why is it so hard to hold in silence the moment, to take in the magnificence of being? Why do we feel the need to rush in and fill the void at the bedside with words and activity?

While silence seems to often cause us dismay, on occasion she surprises us with her gifts. Author and journalist Catherine Ingram offers the possibility of awakened awareness, silent witnessing not bathed "in brilliance of thought but the brilliance of pure perception." In silence with awakened awareness, "we are willing to gaze into the eyes of another without fear or desire - without stories about who I am or who she is - and sense there only the light of existence shining in a particular pair of eyes."

This is the awareness that exists beyond words and wherein the potential for a sacred encounter lies, but that all too often we rush in with need to fill the silence. This awakened awareness, this willingness to rest and joy in the moment of simply being, is among the gifts we may offer in our care giving. We invite you today to notice the one before you with simple awakened awareness, to experience the light shining there, to share the common heart. That is radical and love, indeed.

Day 312 - Life's Most Expensive Gift

   "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes." Marcel Proust

   One of the mysterious things about sleep is that eight hours of it can seem like an instant if uninterrupted. Eight hours in a body laced with pain across any given night can feel like a year. Dawn greets our exhausted selves and we question our survival. 

   But, pain does not make us question our existence. It is too vivid an experience for us to doubt its reality.

   Crohn's disease has attacked me in many different ways across the past four and a half decades. Beyond its numerous body blows, the disease has done its best to destroy my emotional balance. Instead, it has served to strengthen me. 

   Anyone with a chronic illness knows the deep connection between pain and the way the mind and spirit receive it. Chronic illnesses always have their acute phases as well and they can cause us to fear their revisits instead of appreciating the time when they leave us alone. 

   My experience with severe illness and other kinds of pain has given me the gift of new eyes. On the other side of agony, I saw a different world. I felt a new communion with those traveling their own hard chapters. And I began to understand, appreciate and savor the most beautiful things life offers. 

   At the same time, I saw many others blocking their painful experiences, refusing to recollect them and sometimes choosing to anesthetize themselves from future discomfort by drinking and drug use. In so doing, they threw away pain's gift. 

   To be human is to know pain. Can you think of anything more expensive than pain - physical, emotional, spiritual or all three? In the middle of it, we would pay almost any price to escape its grip.

   When pain finally departs, the backwash of relief can deliver its dose of amnesia. Pretty soon, we may have forgotten our own pain and thus diluted our ability to connect with the pain of others.

   Pain is so costly to us. Therefore, why would we want to dismiss pain's expensive teachings? Why wouldn't we want to unwrap the strangely beautiful gift it presents to us?

   What did Job learn after his legendary bouts of suffering? What do Job's tribulations teach us? 

   Inside joy, we may see God's Love. Inside deep pain we may also discover God's Love. This is one of the teachings of Jesus' suffering on the cross. 

   For caregivers, there is no more important lesson than learning what pain tells us about compassion. To ignore our experience of pain is to turn our backs on something that is both universal and yet unique. 

   One of the worst things a caregiver can say to someone in pain is: "I know exactly how you feel." For this kind of statement will never sound true to the sufferer. 

   One of the best things a caregiver can do is the one good thing Job's friends did: They stayed nearby. 

   Pain is isolating.

   We cannot know joy unless we have experienced our own agony and held it in our memory.

   We cannot deliver God's Love unless we have traveled our own dark path through the forest and followed Love's light to the other side. When we reach the land of relief, it is then that we need to turn back to help those who still suffer. 

-Rev. Erie Chapman   

Days 310-311 - The Last Butterfly

   What must be the last butterfly of the year falls from the sky like a rose pedal. He flaps his white wings around the row of evergreens that line our little backyard. He's probably a moth, but I'll make him a butterfly for now. After all, he's the last one of the season. I've never seen a November butterfly in a four-season climate.

   Opposite the evergreens, a thousand berries bead a holly bush. Platoons of leaves do their best to copy the butterfly, launching themselves one by one from the Willow Oak, navigating the breeze until they reach their burial ground.

   A chorus of chickadees and an anxious cardinal sing through this autumn afternoon, jumping from branch to branch past squirrel nests, never once stopping to notice the bluing sky or the faint, half-carved moon.

   I was going to write to you today about spirituality and religion - how, for caregivers, the first one seems a lot more important to me than the second; how religion seems to divide us and spirituality seems to unite us; how we all share the same soul when we're carrying Love to heal someone in pain.

   As you sit a moment, the computer screen glowing into your perhaps-tired eyes, I wanted you to know that I intended to write to you about what the writer Karen Armstrong said on NPR on Sunday. "Feeling with someone in pain is better than feeling sorry for them." 

   But then those winter-white butterfly wings caught my eye.

 Rev. Erie Chapman

(Note: The photo, above, is by Frank Kirchner)

Days 307-309 - Love's Capacity - An Open Forum for Caregivers

Love’s Capacity

The November sunrise

strokes a strip of frozen grass

as the rest of the ground

waits her turn.

 

A newspaper, folded & cold

meets the hand of one of my

neighbors who lifts the world 

from his front step & retreats to his

home.

 

What is the ability of the grass

to adore the sun's warming

fingers?

 

Does the newspaper admire the man 

for rescuing him?

 

What is the capacity of my neighbor

to love the woman who waits for him by

the kitchen window, peaking out at me over 

the rim of her teacup, steam curling across

her eyes? 

 

Where is the heart of the nurse

who steps across this morning’s threshold

into the room of suffering?

 

-Erie Chapman

Day 306 - In All Things Live Love!

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

  Frances Bernardone (1182-1226) is best known to us as St. Francis of Assisi, a man who experienced the Love of God in a deeply personal and lived reality. Once he stepped into the realm of God's infinite Love, Francis never turned away. His life became devoted to making Love manifest in this world, giving up for himself any privilege or possession. He gave to others what they needed most, the presence of Love. He once wrote, "I would not leave this earth until God promised me that my hands could always touch the face of anyone who suffered."

We are called to that same giving, the gift of the touch of Love for those who suffer. Yet we as caregivers may also suffer at the hand of fatigue, the unrelenting call of others for our time and attention, the loss of expectations unfulfilled. It is so tempting to long for ease, to look toward the end of the shift, the end of the day, the end of the week. St. Francis once said that within each of us are "wild forces," capable of turning the mills inside and filling the sacks "that feed even heaven." Love is persistent, will not let go. And don't those we serve need that most of all?

Today may be a day filled with challenges, inexorable cries, one more hand reaching out. If we pay attention we may feel the grip of fatigue in our faltering steps, the terror of fear holding us back. I leave you with the simple words of St. Francis as a place for quiet meditation. May his words remind us all to live Love, not fear!

IN ALL THINGS

It was easy to love God in all that

was beautiful.

The lessons of deeper knowledge, though, instructed me

to embrace God in all

things.

Days 304-305 - States of Consciousness

"Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream?" - John Keats

   Long before Keats wrote the above line, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle all posed the notion that all of life is a dream. After all, how can we truly tell whether we are awake or asleep or in some other state of consciousness if, in each state, we think we are living in reality?

   Caregivers have more of an opportunity to observe this than perhaps any other group. Patients enter hospitals, hospices and nursing homes with widely different states of consciousness. The experience of institutionalization is likely to send them through an even wider ranging journey. 

   Drugs that relieve pain also bend our perceptions. Pain itself fogs the lens through which we view the world. Patients nearing death frequently describe seeing people who "aren't there."

   The power of this point for caregivers is the need to respect these varying states of consciousness and to honor them as true for each patient. Unfortunately, many are frightened by the unusual states exhibited by people in altered states. Their fear may cause them to ridicule the schizophrenic hearing voices and to demean the demented.

   Perhaps the most crucial gift of the caregiver is to honor the continuing humanity of the patient in their care, regardless of that patient's state of consciousness. When the patient is degraded, so is the caregiver. When the patient is honored and respected, so is the caregiver.

   There are way too many times in my long career when I have failed to follow my own advice. I have caught myself sitting in judgment on a man suffering from alcoholism or a four hundred pound patient struggling to move in her hospital bed. As children, we grow up in environments where being different is ridiculed. 

   It takes God's Love to remind us that we are all children of Love. It takes this same Love to help us understand that life may, in fact, be a dream. 

   All of us will arrive in a different consciousness tonight as we enter sleep. For all we know, we may wake up in a hospital bed with a stroke, suddenly shaping a prayer that the person caring for us will appreciate that we may have lost our speech, but not our humanity. 

-Rev. Erie Chapman 

Day 303 - Geniuses of Change

   Society only pays heed to two groups. The first group includes people who are brilliant at following the rules and supporting the status quo. The second group are the geniuses who know how to break the rules to establish new standards of excellence. The rest of us, of course, are cast into the giant corral of the ordinary.

   The first group is made up of successful judges, lawyers, doctors, businessmen, community leaders and some politicians. They uphold society's standards. By definition, most of the contemporary world admires the peak performers in this category. The second group are those who see the world differently and are therefore typically scorned by their contemporaries. They include inventors, artists. and any leader who advances meaningful change against the status quo. 

   It is the second group that may most interest caregivers. Great religious leaders, including Jesus, fit in this category because they advanced change even at the risk of their lives. In this group are also the great pioneers of medicine and charity: Albert Schweitzer, Mother Theresa, Madame Curie, Florence 
Nightingale, Clara Barton. And there's one more you may not know. 

   In 1847, Elizabeth Blackwell decided she wanted to go to become a physician. She was rejected by virtually every medical school in the country. Finally, she applied to Geneva Medical College in New York. Since admitting women to medical practice was unheard of, the administration asked the students to vote. The only reason Blackwell was accepted was because the students thought the vote was a practical joke! Upon learning the application was serious, horrified students and faculty initially refused to allow her to participate in classroom medical demonstrations.

   It requires not only genius but persistence to break through the roles to establish real change. Elizabeth Blackwell was a pioneer who went on to be not only a successful doctor but a model advocate for women's rights. 

   Yet, as odd as the discrimination against her may seem, a century later, female physicians (as well as lawyers) were still rare. In 1965, in my class of nearly three hundred at George Washington Law School, there were only eight women in our class.

   Finally, this injustice has been corrected so that most professional schools run about even numbers of each gender. The rule followers of the 19th century rejected women. The geniuses of change, like Elizabeth Blackwell, found the courage and the intelligence to establish an environment where all could serve. Imagine the reservoir of gifted women that were blocked from practicing physician caregiving before Dr. Blackwell finally knocked down the barriers that kept half of humankind from choosing a particular profession.

   Is there a way that this can help all of us today? Does each new generation need to discover that sometimes we need to hear the folks who are trying to blaze new pathways?

   Caregivers who practice Radical Loving Care will often find themselves shunned and rebuffed. Loving care often calls us to step outside the rules to meet human needs. May this week be a time when you can come to know even more clearly that the call of Love is more important than the call of the world's rules. 

-Rev. Erie Chapman