Journal of Sacred Work

Days 119-120 Finding Calm amidst Chaos

 “You will be faithful to your trust today, forgetting no one, bringing everyone into the boundless circle of your peace, the holy sanctuary where you rest.” ~A Course in Miracles Workbook, Lesson 109

The days are spinning faster and in the busyness I feel myself being swept up, but I do not wish to be carried away. Work is intense, the stress high. There is a tension that exists between need and capacity and the pull is fully palpable. I realize it is the nature of the “beast.” The need is always so much greater than what is humanly possible. Yet, if  you let it, it will eat you up and spit you out.

So how do we reckon with this ever looming, ever growing monster? I used to think the answer could be found in peddling faster, working harder with increasingly longer hours. Yes, some days that is exactly what is called for and we push the bounds to get it done. There are deadlines to meet, there are human beings who count on us to come through on our commitments. There is no denying the stakes are high.

I’ve become addicted to multi-tasking. I just don’t feel productive if I am not trying to do two things at once. Yet, studies reveal that multi-tasking is not effective and can waste more time in having to re-do work. Juggling multiple important priorities can be challenging to say the least. Recently, I am trying a new tact. I am giving my full attention to projects for limited amounts of time. This enables progress to be made in unison but without multi-tasking. I’m finding it helpful.

The most important lesson for me is the necessity of self-care. I find that when I am hectic, I let go of self-care first. I feel too exhausted to exercise. In the morning, rather than meditate, I just want to sip a cup of coffee and take time to wake up. Yet, I am coming to understand that is not wise to do this.  Some days I cave in to my tiredness and that is okay. However, I am making a conscious effort to do my self-care routines more faithfully. Each time I do, I feel so much better and I am more effective in all aspects of my work and caregiving. Otherwise, things begin to spiral, or as they say, "it's a vicious cycle." All these words seem to connote images of violence. This is true; it is violence against ourselves, or as a dear friend once reflected back to me, “spiritual suicide.” Wow, did that give me an awakening jolt.

We must not get swept away and lose sight of what matters. Spring is here. Mother Earth is giving birth to Iris, Buttercup, Rose and Jasmine. Are we going to visit these bundles of joy? These little miracles of creation, or will we lose out on these precious moments of their new lives. We can’t hit the rewind button, puff... it's gone. So stop the madness and take time out for what you love. Even if in little snippets reach out to Love, and come rest in God today.

~liz Sorensen Wessel

An Excerpt from A Course in Miracles, Lesson 109

“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.”

Note: Forest photo, photographer unknown; Rose at Judy Vine's Garden, photo by ~liz; Bluebird, photo by Barry Pike

Days 117-118 - Loving The Vulnerable

      From across the room I watched my daughter recently as she held her infant son in a baby sling, rhythmically swinging her body as comfort to him. All the while, she kept a weather eye on her three-year-old daughter, a bundle of energy whose favorite pace is running. A bright child, our grandaughter perpetually fires questions her mother anwers with the patience of a gifted teacher. 

   Although both children, thank God, are strong and healthy, my daughter recognizes their vulnerability. Her son is not sick, but he cannot, of course, eat without her, dress without her or take care of himself if he should fall ill. At the most important level, neither child can thrive without the Love she and her husband provide. 

   She is a study in caring for the vulnerable as she attends to her children with the grace and intensity of a world class caregiver. Her mothering is a model for the Love we all want across our lives - especially and exquisitely when we are sick. 

   Our primary model of Love flows first from our mothers. When we speak of the "Mother Test" in Radical Loving Care, we address not only the treatment level we want for our mothers when they are hospitalized, but the care we want for ourselves when we are ill or injured. We want to be cared for with a mother's love that includes the high skills born of rigorous medical training.

   But, the sick are hard to love. They bleed, they smell of disease and they may be troubled with mental illness or any number of other problems which may render them, in our eyes, as "less then" us - as weak in the presence of our strength.

   Weakness, of course, is what brings the ill to us. But, their helplessness does not mean they will be loved.

   Afraid of their own vulnerability, caregivers can default to a professional distance so great that caring proximity may be replaced with cold distance.  As a result, a broken leg may be "fixed" and a cancer patient may receive the required drugs. But, neither will benefit from the healing power of loving care.

   How do we love the vulnerable? The answer may be found as we recall our own children or ourselves in our awful times of fear, sickness, agony. Times when all of us depended on the nurturing that only Love can provide.

-Erie Chapman 

*Note: Since my daughter and son-in-law do not want photos of their children on the internet,  the photo, above, is one I took of a friend with her baby.

Days 114-116 - After Easter

    The days leading up to Easter carry an evocative array of names - Palm, Fat, Ash, Maundy, Good and, of course Easter itself, decorated not only with lilies but with every kind of flower. 

   This very morning, I found an Easter cathedral in an iris, complete with purple carpeted ramp leading up to the arched entryway.

   What of these days after Easter?

   For Christians, the resurrection marked the turning point, the day when humanity pivoted away from "an eye-for-an-eye" and began to consider (if not actually live) the energy of Radical Love - a Love that challenges us everyday to embrace our enemies.  

   Before the first Easter sin (a word I distrust) was in search of some kind of salvation. After Easter, a door to salvation was thrown open for all who might choose to enter.

   Jesus' principle gift was never physical healing. Jesus brought to billions the hope that lives through his resurrection. 

   The first Easter gave Love a new power in the world. The days, years, centuries and millenniums after that Easter may leave us wondering why everyone doesn't embrace such a comforting message. Instead, too many leaders insist on fighting "eye-for-an-eye" wars. 

   But, the peoples of the earth have found many pathways to Love. Easter offers hope to Christians. Many gods offer hope to Hindus. Buddhists find peace in the contemplation of Beauty.

   Not everyone finds hope through religions organized by others.

   Love waits with eternal patience to be found by whatever pathway we may choose. God lives in the eyes of suffering, in the hands of old age, and within the cathedral built around the tiny heart of a single iris.

   On Good Friday, the heart breaks. On Easter, and in the days that follow, healing for all lies in the resurrection of one.   

 -Reverend Erie Chapman

Day 113 Easter Joy!

 

Days 112-113 An Easter Greeting from the Ministry of the Arts

i thank You God for most this amazing day:

 for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any - lifted from the no
of all nothing - human merely being
doubt unimaginable You? 

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

                                              e e cummings

EASTER REFLECTION

Jesus helps us to see the daily resurrections

that can transform our world and ourselves.

This Easter we can catch a glimpse of the Risen Christ

and our Risen Selves by . . .

helping to transform another's hurt into forgiveness,

. . . transforming our dying planet

into a world of interdependence and beauty,

. . .  freeing ourselves from anything

which might hold us in the tomb.

Resurrection is about allowing ourselves and others

to live alleluias every day of our lives. 

It is believing we are all one. 

It is about hope and being set free. 

And, yes, it is about a cosmic leap of faith!

Reflect Joy in your own life !

Credits: "Ode to Spring" art by Mary Southard, CSJ;  Easter reflection excerpt by Marlene Schemmel, CSJ from "Springtime of the Soul, 2011.     Ministry of the Arts

Submitted by ~liz Sorensen Wessel    Happy Easter Transformations!

Days 110-111 - "...Learning to Die?" - The Power of Opposites

   "I thought I was learning to live. I was only learning to die." Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519)

  Leonardo da Vinci was, of course, the first and foremost renaissance person. Yet, it's hard to know how to fathom his startling statement (made in the last year of his life.) With all the efforts we make at living, it's strange to imagine life as "learning to die." 

  Da Vinci was a supernova who exploded onto this earth five hundred years ago.  His one life changed all of ours.

   His far-ranging intellect expressed itself everywhere, from painting the Mona Lisa, to designing the first helicopter, to doing such ground-breaking work in human anatomy that his insights are still taught today.

   I'm inclined to listen to him. Observing the life-death tension, Da Vinci saw that every energy must have its opposite. 

   Light must have dark. Black requires white. Love lives on the other side of fear.

   Men and women are counterparts.  Joy lives an inch from agony.   

   The more passionately we live, the more that passion's fire will both illuminate the holy and burn tears from our eyes.

   The more loving we are as caregivers, the more likely our patient's pain bleeds into our hearts. No wonder many shy away from opening their souls all the way. Yet, the finest caregivers find a way to balance compassion and skill. 

   A brilliant scientist, Leonardo wanted art to be the queen of the sciences.  He realized art and science were brothers not enemies. Art must inform science and vice versa. 

   As an architect (he tried everything) Leonardo designed a "shadowless" building - a structure where the sun would touch every room across the day. Honoring opposites, he also knew that once the sun walked from one room to the next, light's opposite would creep into the vacated space.

   Da Vinci climbed art's pinnacle with another of his masterpieces, "The Last Supper." This iconic work was painted on the wall of a mausoleum. Befitting its gloomy location the painting has been decaying for centuries, fading into the surface on which it was expressed. But, it is alive in our hearts. 

   Those who quest for a shadowless life will miss this world's most heroic beauty. John Muir courageously embraced nature - in spite of enduring malaria and other ailments - so he could experience the ecstasy of Love's realm.  He bequeathed to us the national parks. Mother Theresa bequeathed light to the poor. Martin Luther King endured shadows to shine light onto hatred. 

   Are we learning to live or to die? Here, the ancient Greeks, Jesus Christ, and the poet Rilke share the same view.  It's not learning to live or die that matters. What means everything is that we leave the shadows and live Love's passion.

-Erie Chapman 

*The re-imagined photograph, below, is an effort I made to express passion's fire.

Days 107-109 - A Never-Before April

     As my sister drove our ninety-eight-year-old mother (at left) to Sunday church this past weekend they encountered a detour that took them through a neighborhood known to be controlled by gangs. "We need to keep the doors locked, Mom," my sister warned. 

   "It's okay," my mother said, "I see robins in the trees."

   My very young grandchildren and very old mother seem to carry more wisdom than do most of us. A veteran of ninety-nine Aprils, my mother knows the real hope of the robin. 

   In hospitals across our country, it is the last spring for some, the first spring for many. No matter how long we've lived, each spring is new. Life never seen appears before us.

   In the western United States, spring shows a different wardrobe than she does in the south, where she is in mid-journey. In the northeast, spring squeezes in a short life between winter and summer. In the midwest, where I spent much of my adulthood, April offers a delicious invitation. 

April in the North

Every April, the ground unbuttons herself to welcome the sun.

I have seen this before.

Or maybe I haven't.

It is the first time that these just-born leaves twirl from their buds.

In woods of northern Ohio, green crowns.

This earth I occupy swallows more of me each spring.

I melt back into her, struggling against her quicksand or exhaling relief.

But, I am remembering once more what I forget each winter.

There, on at the top of April's stairs, truth's hard soil softens into hope.

-Reverend Erie Chapman

Days 105-106 What If ?

“We crave truth tellers. We crave real truth. There is so much boloney all the time. What matters is an under girding truth that I think is the power of poetry.” ~Elizabeth Alexander

 What is our truth? Our story, yet to unfold? Are we curious to know about one another? These are questions that make for an interesting journey. I am learning that perhaps least important is having all the answers.

 Poet, Elizabeth Alexander shared these thoughts about exploring truth in a recent interview, “I was thinking about the act of asking real questions in poems as a kind of spiritual practice.  I ask questions relatively often in poems and I ask them because I don't know the answer.  And I ask them because I think that poems are fantastic spaces with which to arrive at real conundrum kinds of questions, to go as far down the road as you can of understanding something and then sometimes that road ends with a real question.”

 This week, I shared a memorable moment with a colleague.  She said to me, “Sometimes I don’t know how to get from a superficial conversation to a more meaningful connection with people.  It seems to take so long to get there.”  Yet, we know it when we "get there" because the experience is so magical. It's when you reach a level of intimacy and feel at home to be truly you. There, we discover the warm embrace of mutual hospitality.

 I tend to be someone who wants to connect on a deeper level too.  So much so, that I wish to skip over surface level of communication. Yet, I can find myself at a loss to say anything seemingly worthwhile.  I'd rather not speak at all,  if my words are empty chatter meant only to fill up space. Therefore awkward pauses can ensue. For me, musical chant is a powerful and awakening way to be in communion with others. It takes me deep into my  heart  space without overthinking how I relate to others.

  The  easy rhythmic flow of talking draws me in to listen, more than to speak. The art of conversation is a trait I'd like to cultivate. As I write this, I find myself coming full circle to a simple realization. It really does not matter so much, what I say. What matters is the sincerity with which I/we show up for one another. When we have a genuine intention, it shines through and can help place the other person at ease.

 As I finished this sentence and put down my pen, I happened  into a conversation with a stranger who sat next to me on the plane trip home. I experienced a delightful friendliness and connection with him. A reminder of what can occur when we get beyond the initial barrier of not knowing someone.

Interviewer, Krista Tippett asked Alexander, “I wonder if you think that poetry for all of us actually gives us a way to point at those interior spaces that would reawaken, as you say, this essential interest in each other, which makes new futures possible?”  What a wonderful question in and of itself!

  In closing, I’d like to share one of Elizabeth Alexander's poem's.

Praise Song for the Day

What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,

love that casts a widening pool of light,

love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air,

any thing can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

 ~liz Sorensen Wessel

Note: You can listen to the interview with Elizabeth Alexander called, “Words that Shimmer” at NPR’s on Being, with Krista Tippett (Jan 6, 2011)  http://being.publicradio.org/programs/2011/words-that-shimmer/

In addition, the above  image is from the internet.

 

Days 103-104 - The Scorching Truth

   A couple months ago I encountered an old friend in a new way. 

   "Obama is an idiot!" he said. "I never thought I'd see a Muslim President," he continued, his tone fueled by alchohol. "My God," he shouted, "the S.O.B. was born in Kenya."

   What was I to say after such acid was thrown in my face by a man I know otherwise as friendly, not hateful? I wanted to scorch him with stubborn facts: "idiots" don't graduate towards the top of their class from Harvard Law School. Obama is Christian. He was born in Hawaii.

   It's okay to attack a person's point of view.  Personal attacks are different.

   But, this is about truthful relationships. What if I had responded, "I hope you're spewing nonsense because you're drunk, not because you mean it."

   What if I told him my truth - that I was disgusted by his comments? Afraid of further controversy, I said nothing.

   But another friend tells me such encounters offer the chance for a "scorching truthfulness" that informs the strongest relatlationships. This truth burns both ways, steering most of us away from difficult conversations. How tragic. 

   Candor tests friendship's tensile strength. But, honesty also heralds Love's presence.

   Love wants truth. Love's Truth can enter relationship's home through different doorways. It needn't come crashing through the roof. 

   Love knows that anger is a child of fear. My friend's assaults were grounded in anxiety not accuracy. If I granted him the benefit of a doubt, I would see the little boy inside, scared of a force he could name only with epithets.

   It's easier to Love the frightened child within than the angry adult without.

   It takes heroism to survive truth's fire when it flames as criticism or, worse, burns holes in the fabric of trust. I can stand the heat if a fellow caregiver tells me I'm sounding arrogant. It's far more painful if that caregiver is a friend who sees me as only arrogant. 

   We want Love. Yet, none of us can deliver empathy all the time. Our flaws will flare in ways that may sear the hearts of those we actually love, scaring them back from the intimacy we seek.   

  Have we scared ourselves away from our own truth? My oldest friend wrote me: "The worst hurt I've ever experienced from others pales in comparison with the way I've hurt myself."

   How do we walk through the fire of our own truth to discover, on the other side, light as well as heat?  On that journey, only Love can teach us how to sing compassion as well as how to drum candor.

  Consider the fallen orchids - how they suggest butterflies, angels, the veined hands of age, wind-blown lace. And how they lie gorgeous in their dying, whether in relationship or alone. 

   Hard truths will scorch us.  But, spoken with Love honesty burns away lies revealing God's healing light. Only in this light can relationships shine sacred. 

-Reverend Erie Chapman

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Orchid Series April, 2011 copyright Erie Chapman

Days 100-102 - Clouds of Memory

"When was the last time he closed his doctor's bag, reassured a patient with a parting word, and drove the long way home?" -Kirsten Lokvam Chapman in her book, The Way Home (Third Tree Press.)

   For twenty-one years, my wife of forty-four years wrote a sweet column for the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch. Her columns described her clouds of memory: friends, family, recollections of two childhood homes. Twice, she was selected by the state's press association as "Best Columnist in Ohio."

   Her father was a physician - first a country doctor in Wisconsin and then a surgeon. The doctor's bag was a symbol of power back then. The appearance of one struck fear (those dreaded shots) or signaled, with its very presence, that healing, relief, and comfort, had arrived.

   In the days of house calls, the arrival of the doctor with his satchel of magic wrapped in pebbled leather told us help had arrived. In the midst of illness, particularly after I was struck with Scarlet Fever and, later, Crohn's disease, I remember feeling better just hearing the doctor's voice in the hallway.

   What recollections rain down from our clouds of memory? Of course, not all will sprinkle soft warmth.

   For the Death Row prisoner I see each week, the clouds sleet pain.  There was the year when, at age fifteen, he lived in a cardboard box outside the workplace that paid him $3.35 an hour. 

   But, it's the good memories that heal us to the point where we are homesick for the days we have now haloed and placed reverently on the altar of happiness.

   In his last months, my father often re-imagined the markers he laid along Ohio's Black River where, as a child, he had placed his Muskrat traps.

   In her last days, my mother-in-law repeatedly recalled the Depression that stole her family's farm.

   The former Chief Nursing Officer of the the first hospital I headed (more than thirty years ago) tells me her days are flooded with recollection. She recalls her hours in the operating room and the times she and I worked to solve nurse-doctor disputes.

   When we discover we have less time ahead we lean into our past. 

   After a stroke felled her father, my wife visited him in Kenosha. She brought his black bag into the kitchen.

   "I felt how the handles, brown with age, still carried the imprint of his grip," she wrote. "Before Dad opened it, his hands, in greeting, rubbed across and patted the leather. Then he unsnapped the lock, releasing the bag's familiar, medicinal scent... He slowly scrutinized an old prescription pad here, a stethoscope there. I wondered what middle-of-the-night births or sickrooms or accidents rushed forward in his crowded memories." 

   The next day she said goodbye, then hesitated. "Seeing him at the table, so patient in life's hand...made me go back inside...he looked surprised, as if to say, What's this?' "

   She told her father she needed one more hug. It was the last time she saw him. 

-Reverend Erie Chapman 

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Days 98-99 God is Painting

After all, "Who doesn't like poems." ~Ms. Emily Irby

 
 Photo by Frank Kee, Tehachapi, CA 3/20o5

Amid the chaos and the noise, spring blossoms in fragrant remembrance, awakens new life, sings with heart. Daylight lingers hoping we might take notice. She longs to coax us from the neon lights and cement walls into communion with her enchanting beauty. She calls to us, “Don’t pass me by, join the rhythm of my turning, come dance with me!”

 Is it any surprise that April is National Poetry month?  Poetry reveals a world of intimacy and passion in changing hues of light and shadow and bold splashes of color,  once invisible melodies  become our closest friends.

 On April 14, all around our nation, in our schools, libraries and workplaces, people will be celebrating a Poem in Your Pocket Day. I hope you will participate! It's simple, just pick your favorite poem to fold in your pocket. Create some of your own fun capers and watch the flowering  of  smiles  grow.

   

After all, said the lovely young poet, Ms. Emily Irby, "Who doesn't like poems?"

Please share your favorite poem with us... Visit www.poets.org to sign up for “a poem a day” e-mail, in commemoration of National Poetry month!

~liz Sorensen Wessel

 

P. S. Please sponsor me with a $5.00 donation for Concern America's "Walk Out of Poverty" on April 16, 2011. I am walking for the people of Guatemala and in loving remembrance of my brother John Sorensen whose birthday is April 17th. Go to www.concernamerica.org/walkoutofpoverty

(My Goal $500.00, so far  $175.00  in pledges)

Days 96-97 - "Not in Picture"

 
  "[Photography] is a view of the world...which confers on each moment...the character of a mystery." - Susan Sontag, On Photography

   It's just a snapshot, the kind that appears in millions of scrapbooks and, now, in computer files. We "see" with our five journalistic questions: Who is that? Where, When, How, Why?  

   Then comes the mystery.  What mystery informs this picture? 

   Sontag wrote that "...most photographs do not keep their emotional charge." It's hard, especially today, to hold the power of most images for long. Further, the "emotional charge" may change as we alter from within.

   Consider what time does to the energy in our pictures - especially those strange images we call "snapshots." The very name suggests a quick look - nothing enduring - just a glance.

   Part of the power of photographs, Sontag wrote, is that they can "alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at..."   

   Cues about era flood this picture. The clothes look quaint. The truck, with its hard rubber tires, looks ungainly. The giant camera speaks of the way people saw photography then (and maybe now) - as a big deal - not as a way to create art, just to record.

   This photograph was made in 1921. The lone survior from that day is the little girl in the white stockings.

   My mother smiles at us through nine decades. She will be ninety-nine this year.

   But, this picture matters to me for more than who it includes. As a photographer, I see art here, something that rises above the intention of the craftsman as the image shimmered up to him through the "stop bath" in his darkroom.   

   Like starlight, the energy of a picture may take years to reach us, to turn some page in our scrapbook of memory.  Beyond the journalist's five questions, we find that the meaningful answers live deeper than our "snap-looks."

   Some pictures, years after our eyes recorded them, become drenched in rising waves of feeling. They carry an inescapable power over us. 

   In yearbooks, we were listed as "not in picture" if we didn't show up. I look at photos of my photographer daughter today and see the little girl "not in picture." 

   I see a fragile newborn's photo and remember a terminally ill infant "not in picture" -  a baby whose dying I witnessed ten years ago. Never named, he lived fewer minutes than my mother has lived years.

   It staggers me to imagine how many pictures like that you, as a caregiver, must know.

   For me, the power of photographs is how they change the way I see when I am not looking through the lens. A beautiful photograph is not made simply by snapping a shot of something "beautiful."

   Photography rises to the level of art when the photographer provokes for many something "not in picture" - an encounter with Love.    

   Great pictures, seen with the eyes of our heart, help us discover the sacred.  That is why the finest images, even those that may appear via a random snapshot, usher us into the presence of God.

-Reverend Erie Chapman

Days 93-95 - "God is Praying..."

"God is praying in the temple of my body." - Line from a song by Nashville storyteller/songwriter Minton Sparks.

   I was so caught when I heard this line in Ms. Sparks' song that I could only think of a companion sentence: Love is singing through the cathedral of my soul.

   We always think of praying to God. Yet, God, too, is praying within us. Just look at this new spring.

   God's living water flows. Will we drink from that endless river to slake our desperate thirst? Or will we erect damns made from anger, resentment, hate and jealousy?

   I see Love flowing through my two youngest grandchildren, aged three and 10 months. Then I  see how society is pushing my seven-year-old grandson to erect the kind of damn that blocks Love's flow - the same one that challenges us every day.

   Behind that damn, toxins assemble to burn life's agony into our hearts and souls. This poison diverts Love's presence. Instead of letting Love sing, we often open the doors of our lives to all the trouble that fear brings.

   The reality is that all of us, as adults, live in the middle of a damned-up lake - a brackish mix of fresh water mixed with salt. Our lives are  informed by both the clarity of Love and the perversion of poison.  As humans, we struggle to rediscover the wisdom we had when we were three years old an to express that with adult courage. 

   There is hope. We can listen to Beauty. We can breathe Love in the energy of this brand new spring.  

   There is nothing original, perhaps, to say about "spring".  But, there is this joyful truth: This is a new spring. Those daffodils planted early last fall are raising there faces to the sun for the first time.  The old maple sews the lace of new leaves. The lilacs bloom anew.

   It is spring, my friends and Lovers. It is spring my fellow caregivers. It is spring in the now - THIS now.

   God is praying through this spring. Do we hear, smell, touch, feel, see and absorb with all of our hearts the thrilling truth that God is singing through the cathedral of our soul...right now?

-Reverend Erie Chapman

Days 91-92 Follow that Road

(Part III in a Series on Hospitality; Hospitality for Ourselves)

Where is that road that leads us back home, back in time to the days of ease? I long to find it, yet, too often my feelings, like unwanted guests seem to invade my space. Perhaps painful feelings of sadness, anxiety, or grief come for an unannounced visit. I want to cast them out and wash them all away. A voice within tells me that I should not feel this way…rather more like this…and I want to run to escape my discomfort.

 John O’ Donohue touches on the core of this, "If you try to avoid or remove the awkward quality, it will pursue you. The only effective way to still its unease is to transfigure it, to let it become something creative and positive that contributes to who you are. Nietzsche said that one of the best days in his life was the day when he re-baptized all his negative qualities as his best qualities. Rather than banishing what is at first glimpse unwelcome, you bring it home to unity with your life…..One of your sacred duties is to exercise kindness toward them. In a sense, you are called to be a loving parent to your delinquent qualities."

Hospitality to oneself, and with those who live within our inner circle, is so in need of a little kindness and of a welcoming in. We might begin by listening to the  story untold,  to the song unsung. To be heard and understood, not with the critical eye of judgment,  but as a loving presence that wants to understand the stranger within. 

  Tea at the Palaz of Hoon

 Not less because in purple I descended
 The western day through what you called
 The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

 What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
 What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
 What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

 Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
 And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
 I was myself the compass of that sea:

 I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
 Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
 And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

-By Wallace Stevens

 Hospitality call us back home to the  gift of self-acceptance. It encourages us to call a truce and make friends with our self-centeredness. For after all, ego is a part of our genetic make-up. To embrace our human brokenness and our shadow sides in a spirit of love and forgiveness.  I don't wish to be seen as saintly, or sinner, but loved as I wholly am.  I want to open to not knowing,  trusting my part in life's unending story. Or as Rilke encourages to, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions."

Jeffrey Lockwood author of “The Fine Art of the Good Guest” describes hospitality as being in relationship. It is about how we show up for one another... and ourselves. 

“One begins by demanding nothing more than the bare elements of life and dignity, which every host is more than delighted to exceed. The good guest then simply allows the other person to be a good host—to share his gifts, to play her music, to tell his stories, to show her places, and to serve his foods. Finally, a guest should cultivate and express genuine gratitude. It need not be effusive or exorbitant, only sincere.”

“We might also think of ourselves as uninvited, but not unwelcome, guests of the planet. And I think the rules for being a good guest of the world are just the same: Ask little, accept what is offered, and give thanks.”

P. S. Please consider sponsoring me with a $5.00 donation for Concern Americas Walk Out of Poverty on April 16, 2011, in Loving remembrance of my brother John Sorensen

go to www.concernamerica.org/walkoutofpoverty

   

Note: Above photo taken in Ireland by ~liz