"What if what we create becomes a constant companion for someone else." - Minton Sparks
Minton Sparks, internationally known as one of the world's finest spoken word artists, lives quietly in Nashville under another name. "Maybe my alias gives me more freedom to create without worrying what some others might think," she told me recently.
Minton is a member of my church. Before we met, I had heard of her work. She was a friend not yet seen.
If you order any of her books, records, or DVDs (www.mintonsparks.com) she will also become your friend unseen (unless you are lucky enough to see one of her shows.)
Liz Wessel and Minton have more close friends than anyone I know. Some of Liz's friends comment in the Journal. Their Love for her is evident. Clearly, she has become "a constant companion" in the lives of many others as well. In fact, many of her friends like Victoria Facey and others I've never met, feel like friends of mine because of the Journal.
Similarly, Minton brings her light, her wit, and her abiding Love to her many dear friends. She is also, through her published work, a lit presence in the lives of thousands she will never met.
In the weekend Journal, Liz wrote: "We can choose to live in ways that will benefit all of humanity, or not."
Each of you benefit friends seen and unseen. Because of your loving care, those you don't recall or don't know may think of you as their friend.
"We've never crossed paths, but I feel like we're friends," one woman from an Indiana hospital wrote me recently after listening to the audio version of one of my books, Radical Loving Care. "I remember the years you led Riverside Methodist as a time of Camelot," a nurse wrote me a few months ago. Every time I hear your "Blessed Baby" song I remember the birth of our child," another wrote. These are unseen friends I treasure. And similar notes could and should be coming to you.
Caregivers bring relief to unnumbered people every day. When we toss light into the world it ignites a Love that may endure as a "constant companion" to others. In this sense, all of us are caregivers.
The funny little cartoon mouse named Mickey, created from the heart of one man, illuminates the lives of hundreds of millions. Poet Emily Dickinson was a person of few friends during her life.
"This is my letter to the world,/ That never wrote to me,--" Dickinson wrote. Only seven of her poems were published while she lived. Fifteen hundred more were found after her passing. Since her death, her Beauty has touched the lives of tens of millions - all unseen friends who carry her gifts in their hearts.
Our friends are so often our caregivers, healing our hearts and brightening our lives. May we always do the same for them - whether seen or unseen.
"Sometimes we try to hold on to things that God himself is trying to tear apart." (shared by Xavier Espinosa)
Rest in God, Mandala by ~liz
Rev. Erie Chapman recently highlighted this quote by, W.A. Mathieu, "I think we basically have two fears, death and our deep selves" (Jan. 21st Journal essay).
My friend Claudia once told me, “Liz, it is not death that I fear; it is my loss of independence.” I must admit that the thought of losing my independence is scarier to me than dying is, as well. At least this is how I feel as I conceptualize but I can't be certain how I will react in the moment.
“I am not afraid of death, I just don't want to be there when it happens.”-Woody Allen
Throughout life, we experience many little deaths along the way, whether saying goodbye to a friend, losing a beloved pet, the death of a love relationship, a sought after dream, a job that defined us…and so on. These poignant life situations give us an opportunity to practice “letting go” as we feel the pain of loss. It seems that only Grace can prepare us for the ultimate letting go of our lives here on earth.
" I can't die, it would ruin my image." Jack LaLane
The most challenging aspect of loss is the agonizing pain that accompanies it. The deep emotional ache within our heart is not easy to bear. It is hard to move about in our day-to-day activities when our core is contracting in on itself. Fortunately, we are resilient and with time are likely to heal. However painful, when our heart breaks a space opens for unforeseen possibilities to unfold. Yet, before we can let go and move on, closure is necessary. This is why it is important to complete unfinished business, which may involve speaking one’s truth rather than leaving situations between people unresolved.
“I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.” –Woody Allen
As caregivers to one another, we may get the rare privilege of accompanying others through the journey of leave taking. We may bear witness to the inner struggles as well as the tremendous valor people show when faced with great difficulty. If we risk opening our hearts to another person’s burden, we too experience the “ugliness” of pain. Yet, we also discover that whether giving or receiving; both persons are equally blessed by the alchemy of the encounter.
It seems to me that the struggle to resist change or the “letting go” is subconsciously rooted in a fear of death. Gosh, if I can just grab a branch and hold on for dear life, I might avoid being swept away by the raging current into the abyss of the unknown. Maybe it is a fear of abandonment, or both.
I continually seek to understand my purpose here. I recognize my interconnectedness with all of life. We are continually evolving and God is creating a miraculous open-ended symphony. We can choose to live in ways that will benefit all of humanity, or not. It begins with a thought, and every thought that we embrace. In some ways this growing awareness helps to diminish my fear. Although my (ego-based unthinkable of unthinkable), personage of Liz is only here for a short time…my essence from which I (and thee) were born and to whom we belong is a beautiful unending source of Love. Even when we are hurting, it helps to remember that when a person lashes out at us; it is but a call for Love.
I offered a prayer and then randomly opened to a page in “A Course of Miracles,” workbook. Here is an excerpt from lesson 109.
“I rest in God”
“We ask for rest today, and quietness unshaken by the world’s appearances. We ask for peace and stillness, in the midst of all the turmoil born of clashing dreams. We ask for safety and for happiness, although we seem to look on danger and on sorrow. And we have the thought that will answer our asking with what we request.
“I rest in God.” This thought will bring to you the rest and quiet, peace and stillness, and the safety and the happiness you seek. “I rest in God.” This thought has power to wake the sleeping truth in you, whose vision sees beyond appearances to that same truth in everyone and everything there is. Here is the end of suffering for all the world, and everyone who ever came and yet will come to linger for a while.
I rest in God.” Completely undismayed this thought will carry you through storms and strife, past misery and pain, past loss and death, and onward to the certainty of God. There is no suffering it cannot heal. There is no problem, which it cannot solve. And no appearance but will turn to truth before the eyes of you who rest in God. In Him you have no cares and no concerns, no burdens, no anxiety, no pain, no fear of future and no past regrets.
Each hour that you take your rest today a tired mind is suddenly made glad, a bird with broken wings begins to sing, a stream long dry begins to flow again. The world is born again each time you rest, and hourly remember that you came to bring the peace of God into the world, that it might take its rest along with you.
We rest together here, for thus our rest is made complete, and what we give today we have received already. Time is not the guardian of what we give today. We give to those unborn and those passed by, to every Thought of God, and to the Mind in which these Thoughts were born and where they rest. And we remind them of their resting place each time we tell ourselves;
Winter never froze the California of my childhood. Snow was as rare as a single day in January, 1950. In that magic dawn, my sisters and I ran outside, turned our startled faces to the snow, put out our tongues to taste what fell from the fading moon. By evening, every flake had vanished.
On this day sixty years later, snow covers much of this country from the Sierras east to the Atlantic's gray waves. Even here in normally snowless Nashville, winter threatens to kill all hope of spring.
Down the street, patients at Nashville's Alive Hospice live their last winter with prayers for God's eternal spring. Perhaps, today you who live so close to the blood of the wounded are caring for patients in their last season - or in their first.
January can be a hard month since spring looks as far away as a desert oasis. When I fall into this winter quiet and reflect, these are some of the strange words that attach themselves to my world:
I Hear Snow Falling From the Moon
After January snow-petaled the wings of my willow oak & silenced the soil I forgot everything. Memory freezes in the crevices amid murdered lilacs, slain ferns, the crushed cries of mislaid lambs.
Today, gray slays yellow & green. Blue dies & red never lived.
Who can paint from a palette smeared with ashes?
Near noon, I stab my fingers into the snow. A surgeon, I pull apart earth’s skin, palpate limp arteries, press my ear against the soundless crust.
It’s a fact that azaleas hibernate & wolves, drawing close, can hear the faintest breath. It’s proven that sleeping bees turn & roses dream of rising.
Yesterday, I felt your blood. Today I am tired of gray.
Tomorrow, we will burn pink, inseminate the fearful moon with spring.
May your caregiver's heart plant Love's seeds amid the fields of need.
During the time I was president of Ohio's largest hospital, Riverside Methodist Hospital (left) in Columbus, part of our caregiving mission included looking after prisoners under a contract with the state. When one convict escaped and took hostages, he was quickly demonized by some of the staff.
"He's not all bad," one of the police negotiators advised. "He just wants drugs." This view enabled her to talk the hostage taker into releasing his hostages and surrendering.
The police negotiator lived one of Martin Luther King Jr's most oft-referenced quotes: "There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies."
How do we express Love to patients we don't like? How do we live lovingly while working with a supervisor we may think of as "the worst of us?" It can only be by accepting that there is "good in the worst of us" and that, good as we think we may be "there is evil in the best of us."
It is reasonable for us to be discerning about what we think is good. It is inconsistent with Love for us, as caregivers, to pass moral judgment on those for whom we care.
It's tragic that good-evil thinking sometimes emanates from our leaders, as when President George W. Bush said after September 11, 2001 that "You are either with us, or you are with the terrorists - there is no in between." What about those who disagreed with some of that President's actions? Were they "with us" or "with the terrorists" simply because they opposed the Iraq War?
It's pretty difficult to love our enemies if we think of them as all bad. For example as evil-acting as terrorists can be, we may suppose their bad actions may be grounded in sincere beliefs, however twisted they seem. We may also appreciate that some of the worst crimes are committed by those suffering from mental illness.
The dehumanizing treatment of black people in the south up until the late 1960s was not only wrong but it resulted in a lower standard of medical care for that portion of our population. In other words, biased thinking can affect the quality of our caregiving.
The same can be true of relationships. Marriages or work interactions that end badly are sometimes painted as entire failures even though the relationship may have included many loving times. Leaders who have accomplished a great deal may be branded as all bad because of something that happened at the end of long and valuable service.
It will always be easy for some people to look at the world in black and white terms. Those who live Love can never do this. For Love understands that we are neither good nor bad but simply children of God.
I’ve heard it said that the Health Care Reform bill is over 1000 pages, and it is so cumbersome that no one has read it. The following video clip is a fabulous alternative to reading the Reform law and it is well worth a few minutes of your time.
I think you will be pleasantly surprised as you discover that it is presented in a manner that it is easy to understand, highly entertaining and extremely informative.
It is my hope that, if you like this video, you will share it with friends and family members, far and wide.
"Always keep something beautiful in your mind." - Blaise Pascal
Our regular contributor, Liz Wessel, quoted Pascal in her weekend essay. She then followed Pascal's advice and put "something beautiful" in our minds by combining his words with one of her gorgeous mandalas - a gift to our hearts.
How do we "keep something beautiful in [our minds]?" We need only look within and draw from our heart's library whatever images fulfill us.
We may also look at the world with the eyes of our hearts - our sacred eyes. Through this lens Beauty will arrive because Beauty is always present. The question is whether we are present to Beauty.
For me, Beauty is the second movement of Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto. It is the memory of my three-year old granddaughter in her ballet outfit. It is, as my photo above suggests, the discovery of color in the midst of the woods . I summon Beauty to help me drive back melancholy, to endure pain, or to deal with some of the other ugliness so inevitable in life.
Music composer W.A. Mathieu wrote The Listening Book to suggest to us new ways to approach listening. "I think we basically have two fears," he writes, "death and our deep selves."
The deepest truths within us are the hardest to tell - and the most important. Religion calls us to face our deep truths. But this is so difficult that we need to nurture compassion for ourselves.
This is the gift of Beauty. If we can always hold her in our hearts, than we can find the courage to speak the truth essential to meaningful living.
This is what Beauty offers to caregivers. Radical Loving Care is so demanding that we can't continue to give it without Beauty in our hearts.
The patient down the hall calls to you. He has an ugly disease. A co-worker comes to you for help. She has an ugly problem. A friend seeks your compassion. She is facing an ugly divorce.
Amid all of this ugliness, we must have Beauty in our minds. It is her sweet secret that enables us to walk past the fear of "our deep selves" and into the light of God's Love.
"The quintessential revolution is that of the spirit..." - Burmese revolutionary Aung San Suu Kyi
Amid the painful upheaval that has rocked the country of Burma for decades, one voice has remained steady and fearless. Because of the way she expressed her spiritual strength, Aung San Sun Kyi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991.
Her work continues to this moment in a country where torture at the hands of the regime in power is a constant terror. Yet, this very regime of fear remains fearful of Aung and struggles to silence her.
The prize honored Aung San Sun Kyi's steadfast commitment to Love in the face of threats on her life and the almost constant house arrest she has endured for a great deal of her adulthood. She writes to all of us that the most precious kind of bravery is the "courage that comes from cultivating the habit of refusing to let fear dictate one's actions."
Refusing to demonize her vicious enemies she tells us that "The root of evil is ignorance." Aung Sun Sun Kyi knows her spiritual path and she insists on following it in spite of the pain this path has meant to her.
What does it mean for us to experience a "revolution of the spirit?" As we seek to answer this question for ourselves there may be a realization of how our calling is unique to each of us.
Yet, how many people do you know who are still willing to consider making the kind of decisions that would further awaken the spirit within? My experience is that, by age forty or, at the latest, age fifty, most people don't bother with these questions anymore.
After all, it can be exhausting to continue our journey to the fullest expression of our spiritual life. Most of all, the demands each day presents can make questions around spirituality seem almost irrelevant.
The most vital people I know question their spirituality right up the last moments of their lives. This was so of giants like Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King and Saint Augustine. It is also true of the countless unknown saints who refuse to give up on their lives.
The path to a higher spirituality is noble. It leades to the highest levels of anyone's religious faith and beyond.
All of us who seek to live Love know that we have the chance to be Love's beacon each day.
And here is perhaps the truth about our own, deeply personal, spiritual revolution: We do not need to trod the grand, prize-winning path followed by the courageous Aung San Suu Kyi. But we do need to understand the the most important revolution has nothing to do with guns and power.
Instead, the integrity of our spirituality depends upon our willingness to live the Truth within us. How can we walk own true and honest path - the one designed only for the one life we have to live?
“Our bodies are mere outlines of a vast and complex interior world, a landscape of contradiction and immense mystery.”~ Krista Tippett
Recently, a friend shared John Cage's mesmerizing piano piece ''In a landscape''. It reminded me of John O'Donohue’s interview with Krista Tippett in which he, “explored themes of self-exile and hardship, and the Celtic way of welcoming paradox and finding precious light in the darkest valleys of our inner terrain.” (Tipett).
O’ Donohue began, “Instead of fearing the contradictions of the outer world, the Celtic people welcomed them. They developed special blessings for times of suffering in the belief that hardship leads to a special insight or gift of the spirit. When you learn the Celtic “secret of equilibrium”—how to see every difficulty as a threshold of possibility—you renew your life with unending possibilities.”
As you watch the beautiful images float across the screen may you be swept away by the music into the inner landscape of your being. I hope you enjoy it.
Mandala by~liz
Cage’s music is played by Beata Pincetic from a live concert, and the video by pianomusickris contains Chinese paintings (thanks to Xudong for making them available).
There is a sacred identity that lives deep within our souls, And there is the identity we project into this world. Love lives in both places.
The image at left represents one of the crucial ways we find Love in this world. It happens at birth. Love comes to us through the sensation of our skin against our mother's.
Our skin remembers. It recalls, at a level that is holy, the most meaningful times it has touched and been touched - whether by the hand of Love or by the knife of hate.
Every caregiver knows that babies not held from birth - ones that have no skin contact in their first months of life - often die. This can only reinforce the criticality of skin meeting skin.
Our maternal encounter brings us more than physical warmth and sustenance. It signals that there is someone in this world who loves us.
For the rest of our lives, we seek reinforcing signals about this. We yearn for the maternal caress we knew as infants.
As adults we are, of course, warned toward "appropriate" kinds of touch. Accordingly, we reserve our most important and vulnerable skin contact for those we love most. Yet the contact we allow most - through hands and hugging - is a key part of our humanity.
Skin contact is a signal of human recognition. We send physical energy, mostly through our hands, to all others around us. For we are not suited up like astronauts to orbit the earth but to live on it. All but the most hermit-like among us need to touch and be touched across our journey through life.
Touch is as important to the elderly as it is to infants. Tragically, wrinkled and aging skin often turns people away from touching the oldest among us. What does it tell us about depression in nursing homes?
Before they've received any training, the best potential caregivers already understand the importance of touch. After years of experience, they appreciate this even more as they learn who needs close contact and who prefers more distance.
When we are struck down by disease, we discover that it is often only caregivers who are willing to touch us. At a time when we are most fragile we may suddenly feel "untouchable" by those we care for most.
This is why one of the most important aspects of healing is not what we do with drugs or scapels, but how we heal with our hands. As his fingers stroked blind eyes and on the skin of lepers, Jesus taught us the power of skin against skin.
Love leads us out of ourselves and into intimacy with those in need. Who is more helpless and in need of Love's touch than a newborn baby?
Ah, but babies are easy to Love. What about the rest of us?
Do we ever outgrow our need for the kind of Love we experienced when our mothers held us close?
-Rev. Erie Chapman
Photograph, "Skin - Study 3" by Erie Chapman (2010)
What is the "identity" of this orchid I photographed? Is it her stem, her flowers, her shadow smeared on the wall by the sun's window-bent journey? Or does the identity of this flower lie deeper?
During the first quarter-century of my career, I thought of myself first as a husband and father, and then as a lawyer and later a hospital CEO. Perhaps, the reverse was more accurate. I was my career.
Raised in the 1950s, to be "the bread winner" when I grew up, I could only think of myself as being my job. My identity was conferred on me by my occupation, not by my heart or soul.
I discovered how mistaken my "identity" image was in 1995 when, after a dozen years as President and CEO of Ohio's largest hospital and founding president of OhioHealth System, I was replaced.
"You've done a great job," the board chair told me, "but the time has come for a change." Since both the hospital and the health system I ran were booming, this was confusing. It was as if I were an elected official that, at twelve years, had hit some kind of term limit.
For months I could not get the answer to who I really was. I had been a trial lawyer for seven years and by 1995 had been a CEO for nearly twenty more years. Now, out of a job, who was I?
This is the truth that returned to me when I read Liz Wessel's quote from John O'Donohue in the weekend edition of the Journal. He speaks to us as caregivers:
“Your identity is not equivalent to your biography. There is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there's still a sureness in you, where there's a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. I think the intention of .... love is now and again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.”
It is in this sanctuary that our true identity lies. Thank God for this.
Our worldly identity arises through our personality and the pathway we take across this earth. Naturally, our quotidian existence shapes who we and others think we are.
We may fall for the definition applied by others. When we do so, we become vulnerable to the praise or blame of the world.
When I lost that job in 1995, it felt like a murder because I was my job. When I moved into my next job with a public company, I still mourned the loss of my work in hospitals. When I regained a hospital CEO role, as President of Nashville's Baptist Hospital System in 1998, I first felt a surge of rebirth. My favorite identity had been restored!
Then I remembered the old trap. The only way we can truly live free and true is by defining ourselves as human - as children of God's Love. This is the real beauty of our identity.
This is why I love the greeting"Namaste" -The spirit in me greats the spirit in you. It is not the CEO in me greeting the nurse in you. It is not the doctor in you greeting the patient in me. It is our souls rejoicing at greeting the real beauty in each other - our truest identity.
The light of divine love longs to shine through every being open your heart and welcome that presence to rise like the sun within you
~Anon
Healing is restorative in nature and the body’s ability to heal is miraculous. In the day-to-day, we may not take notice of the extraordinary workings of our human body and instead experience ourselves as commonplace. We take for granted our ability to move freely, to think and to create in our world. Our senses enable us to enjoy simple pleasures but without much contemplation on our part. Yet, scientists fall in love with all the mystery and discoveries in the emerging beauty of life.
Events, such as illness or injury, big or small, can change our lives in a moment. It comes in the guise of a wake-up call. Abruptly, we are shook from complacency as we arrive in the “naked now” and become keenly aware of the miracle of our existence.
If you have ever had this kind of experience, it shakes you to the core; you know it is an awakening. Suddenly, our priorities shift, all that is superfluous falls away, leaving only the essentials. This can be a sobering experience as well as enlightening. Perhaps it comes as a little nudge, a warning, reminding us that our time here is precious.
The potential for healing encompasses not only physical but our emotional and spiritual well-being. We are a microcosm of our universe (the macrocosm). As an ecosystem, all parts need to work in cooperation to support the whole and to achieve a life sustaining balance. How do we counteract the daily onslaught of stress and change in our lives? Lately my work life is so intense that my weekends have become a refuge for recuperation. Yet, I wonder how can I balance my desire for participation in community with my need for rest, without risking isolation?
Meister Eckhart, once said, "There is a place in the soul that neither time, nor space, nor no created thing can touch." To this, John O’Donohue, responded, “Your identity is not equivalent to your biography. There is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there's still a sureness in you, where there's a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is now and again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.”
Caregivers are in danger of neglecting self-care. It requires diligence, paying attention and a fine-tuning of daily practices that can help us to renew and to heal. Take a moment right now to notice and feel what needs your attention; what is most in need of healing? Is it rest? Time with friends and family? A walk in nature? Expressing and receiving love? Relaxing or reenergizing activities?
Are you open to receiving a blessing of Love’s healing touch within you?
A comedienne joked on television that tests have shown we will fall in love with anyone whose eyes we gaze into silently for four straight minutes. Hopefully, blinking is allowed.
It is funny how nearly impossible it is for adults to look very long, in silence, into someone's eyes - especially if the "someone" is a stranger or someone of the opposite sex. On the other hand, eye-gazing is no problem for babies, as demonstrated by the photo I took of my friend's infant (at left.)
One of the most powerful ways we recognize the humanity of another is by "seeing" them - both literally and figuratively. One of the most powerful ways we denigrate others is by failing to "see" them.
Patients are often not seen. Prisoners are not seen and it is rare for anyone to look them in the eyes. After all, many have determined that patients are "less than" healthy people and prisoners aren't people at all but numbers.
Likewise, we often fail to see some of those who work the hardest in hospitals - housekeeping staff, maintenance employees, and patient transporters can live their days ungraced by the eyes of others who think their work is so important they can't be bothered making eye contact with "lower level" staff.
Have you ever looked into the eyes of a homeless person? When is the last time you looked into the eyes of someone you may love - a spouse or one of your children? We may have come to know these folks so well that we no longer see them - even when they are grieving or frightened.
Do we look into the eyes of those we've worked with for five or ten or twenty years? Or have we stopped looking because we think we already know everything about who they are - as if they have become like old paintings on the wall?
It is through the eyes that our heart sees the heart of another. When we can't see another, we can't see ourselves.
The way we see, the way we look into the eyes of another, says so much about who and what we value. When are hearts are filled with Love, that is when we are able to see the sacred spirit of the other.
"I have come that you may have life and have it to the full." - John 10:10
"I'm counting the days until I retire," a caregiver told me years ago.
"How soon will that be?" I asked
"Nine years and thirty-four days," she answered.
This nurse felt that until retirment's door was opened, she couldn't enter the lovely meadow of her life. Imagine regretting every day of work for more than nine years.
We've all heard people speak like this. Trapped in jobs they hate, they dread every work-day. Mondays are nightmares. Friday's are all too rare.
When retirement arrives, these folks often don't know what to do. "Free" to choose, they find they have lived as prisoners of structure for so long that they can't do without it.
John O'Donohue wrote that "The shortest distance in the world is the one between you and yourself." This may be true physically. It is often untrue spiritually.
Consider what happens in this small space within each of us?
If we are doing one thing and dreaming another, the distance between our work life and our heart's passion can be enormous - and agonizing.
An old friend, now in his sixties, wrote me that he is "finally doing what I love." Born well off, he nevertheless felt he had to sell insurance instead of dedicating himself to his dream: to be an outdoorsman. If he had died a couple years ago, he would never have experienced his fondest desire.
Too often, we split ourselves so far from our dreams that we can no longer see what they are...or were. We crush our heart's best energy by squeezing ourselves into a work attitude that traps us from living life "to the full."
The reading of the verse from John, above, won't change anyone's mind by itself. Living life in a way that is meaningful requires that we look at our brief visit to earth in an entirely new way.
It is hard to admit that I write these words to myself as much as I do to you. I regret every day that I have lived in fear rather than in love. Regret, however, taints life rather than enriches it.
The best life choice for each of us is to revel in the work we do - to choose something we find meaningful (even if it pays less money) and live our passion.
If you are one of those who lives in the half-light, how much longer will you squander your days? Why blame others for our choices. Each of us can choose how we feel.
Can we, with courage and reflection, rediscover the energy that resonates with our innermost longings? Or will we remain timid, our life's best gifts left unwrapped to the end of our lives?
Jesus opened the door to a full life for all who choose to walk through it. What are we waiting for?
"All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware."
~Martin Buber
On this New Year's Day, I like you, am reflecting on the mystery of the days ahead. I am thinking about what to take with me on the journey. I want to travel light and bring only the bare essentials. I will leave behind my insecure need for approval. I leave behind my sense of unworthiness, my need to project of image of perfection, of trying to convince the world of my worthiness. I will leave behind my need for control.
“When the inner senses are dull and blurred, you can see nothing in or of yourself; you become a respectable prisoner of received images. Now you realise that ‘eternal vigilance is the price of liberty’ and you undertake the difficult but beautiful path to freedom.” ~John O’Donohue
Loving intention: Upon awakening, I will breathe in blessings and give of gratitude. I will greet the quiet morning with reverence and listen; being still I awaken in God’s mind. I will be open to all that is, recognizing that God (or Love’s presence) is in everything. I can no longer live a life of duality in terms of "either or" polarization. For surely now, if I hold fast to “my way is the only right way” we shall never meet on common ground. Love shows us the beauty and the way to "both and." Therefore, I will not judge or reject parts of myself, or others, as good or evil. Rather, I will accept with deep compassion the light and shadow which forms the unity of the whole and that which is Holy.
With visible breath I am walking. A voice I am sending as I walk. In a sacred manner I am walking. With visible tracks I am walking. In a sacred manner I walk.
~Song of the White Bison Woman who brought the sacred pipe to men.
Relationship: I will take bread and wine from my satchel to share in communion with others. As we eat and drink, may the veil that separates us fall to reveal the light of Love’s forgiveness. May we experience our interconnectedness with all of life, understanding we are inseparable from Love's creative force. Living in a universe that is over 13 billions years old, our DNA is similar to all other forms of life. Just imagine; we are stardust! May we go forth to honor, nourish and lovingly care for one another and dear Mother Earth.
“And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being.” ~ Black Elk
Participation: Now that we have seen, we are compelled to actively engage in this great circle of life. I heard it said that Mother Teresa told her Sisters of Charity that it was not their job to preach to anyone or ever try to convert others to their religion. Their job was to BE Christ in our world. May we trust the natural rhythms of our universe as we move beyond the confines of self to be of service in our hurting world.
“Once you start to awaken, no one can ever claim you again for the old patterns. Now you realise how precious your time here is." ~John O’Donohue
Potential: All life stretches towards light with a desire for fulfillment. Life is continually evolving, and we are becoming. Amidst the heartaches and loss that accompanies living, Love overflows with the promise of a new beginning. For just as the earth turns, so do we in the great mystery of life's unfolding. May our most reverent yearnings keep us turning towards the light of our potential for the benefit of all humankind.
“We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day.” ~Edith Lovejoy Pierce
~liz Sorensen Wessel
Note: My mandala pencil drawing above is a representation of a ring galaxy called Hoag's Object that was discovered in 1950. Serendipitously, from the perspective of our solar system there appears a distant ring galaxy plainly visible within the gap between this galaxy's central body of mostly yellow stars and an outer ring of blue stars. http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/galaxy/spiral/pr2002021a/
Immediate past president of the Baptist Healing Trust (Healing Trust), Nashville. President & CEO, Erie Chapman Foundation, Chapman Health International, Inc, Dane Dakota Productions, LLC, author, Radical Loving Care, artist.
Erie Chapman, Editor, Liz Wessel, R.N., M.S. Associate Editor
