Journal of Sacred Work

Days 210-212 Falling in Love with Poetry

Polyprint watercolor by ~Liz

“Catch a falling star an’ put it in your pocket, never let it fall away!” (Words and music by Lee Pockriss and Paul Vance)

 Keeping company with this Journal for the past five years has blessed me (and so may others) abundantly.  One significant way, is how Erie has opened up the world of poetry for me by sharing many of his own extraordinary poems as well as works of other inspiring artists.

 Poems reach beyond the superficial to the heart of our being.  Once you fall in love with a poem, they become a dear friend. Perhaps you carry one  around in the wallet that you carry in your back pocket. Most endearing is how their edges become frayed with time.

 The following excerpts are from a few of my favorite poems that I like to take out from time to time and wish to share with you …

 Love Slow-Written

Did love take a different shape when handwritten onto handmade paper two centuries ago, the writer’s eyes flecked candle-gold, his quill tip dipping deep for words that curve desire?

When the writer’s writing stopped, (tops of his final L turning & swirling) did the lover’s heart rise as he overlapped the ends of the paper upon each other the way his beloved crosses her hands in her lap?

                                                                                                                                                By Dane Dakota

¸¸.•*¨*¸.•*¨`*ི♥

somewhere i have never traveled

somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

                                                                                                                    By e. e. cummings

¸¸.•*¨*¸.•*¨`*ི♥

i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
                                 
                                                                                                                         By e.e. cummings

¸¸.•*¨*¸.•*¨`*ི♥

Love after Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

                                                                                                                                                 By Derek Walcott

¸¸.•*¨*¸.•*¨`*ི♥

The following video is on inspiration by poet Naomi Shahab Nye

 

What are the falling stars that leave stardust in your pocket?

~liz Sorensen Wessel

Polyprint watercolor by ~Liz

Days 208-209 - The Beloved's Eyes

When

The words stop

And you can endure the silence

That reveals your heart's

Pain

Of emptiness

Or that great wrenching-sweet longing,

That is the time to try and listen

To what the Beloved's

Eyes

Most want 

To 

Say.

---Hafiz

Days 205-207 - The Humility of Water

   "Let us bless the humility of water,/ Always willing to take the shape/ Of whatever otherness holds it..." - John O'Donohue - To Bless the Space Between Us - A Book of Blessings (2008)

   Millions of children are, at this moment, attending summer camp. In spite of the dining hall food and insect attacks, I hope you have had this experience.

   In the summer of 1956, our YMCA counselor took us for a forest hike. Deep into our journey he stopped. "Listen up!" he instructed.

   We tilted our ears. "Do you hear it?" he challenged.

   We listened again. This time we heard it. Soon, we saw the water, bubbling a few inches into the air and landing in the small pond formed by its fountain.

   "It's an artesian well," he told us. "It runs clear forever. No pumping needed. It's a gift from God."

   "Can we drink it?" I asked, already trained to doubt.

   "You'll never drink anything cleaner," he replied.

   "Let us bless the grace of water," O'Donohue wrote, "The imagination of the primeval ocean/ Where the first forms of life stirred/ And emerged to dress the vacant earth/ with warm quilts of color."

   Water, like all of nature, is a powerful teacher. We swim in it. We drink in it. We cool off in it. And we can drown in it.

   O'Donohue reminds us that water "takes the shape of whatever otherness holds it." And he tells us this is humility.

   Imagine the humility you, as a caregiver, have to adopt to accommodate the multitude of demands that surround you each day. How do you "take the shape" of the ill who come to you? For in taking their shape, your empathy will open your heart to their discomfort.

   Do we have the strength to absorb the pain of others while simultaneously treating it?

   Many believe this is how Jesus healed. His Love for lepers brought God's healing to their bodies. His grace enabled the blind to see. His compassion enabled him to raise one from death itself.

   Ultimately, Love merged Jesus' mortal life with ours. He died so that we might know that Love heals our thirst far beyond anything an artesian well might do.  

   Jesus offered us  "living water."  It is forever there for us to drink each day. 

-Reverend Erie Chapman   

Days 203-204 Splendor Past The Sun

For I have seen a splendor past the sun.

I have heard a voice

beyond the listening stars.

A voice as luminous and as cool

as dew is near me,

though I saw not when it came.

And you are here,

sweet inexplicable you,

making miraculous music

of my name.

♪♫•*¨*•.¸¸

~Anonymous Contributed by Sr. Madaleva

Polyprint watercolor by ~liz

Days 201-202 - A Golden Wing From God's Heart...

   "The union we all need with love, a golden wing from God's heart, just touched the ground, now step upon it with your brave sun-vows and help our eyes to dance." - Hafiz (written, here, without line breaks.)

   Scientifically-trained caregivers know how parts of our bodies regenerate, that after some period of time, most of our cells have replaced themselves. So our body renews itself across the years in ways not always easy to discern.

   But, what about our spirits? What is the nature of the change that occurs as we focus our lives on Love?

   The photograph portrays twin windows we see as in relationship. What of the connection of brick to brick and leaf to leaf? What is the bridge that connects you to another or you to me?

   God's Love comes to us on the "golden wing" that Hafiz describes. This wing can lift us to the highest level of the human state.  Or we may, of course, ignore this soul-saving opportunity.

   Love among us, Love as a pathway chosen between two people, appears as a decision that must be remade each day. Our physical cells regenerate with nourishment.  Worldly love requires a constant but different kind of nurturing. 

   The food of love comes as acts of love. Kindness and compassion lend sacredness to sexual encounters just as caring and sensitivity nurture the physical care we give to the sick. We yearn for love in the same way we desire the balance of full health.  

   The nature of our uncertainty along with occasional breaks in our self-esteem can cause us to doubt the love we have for each other. Patients chronically wonder if the nurse or doctor or therapist that enters their room really cares about them as a person or is just performing a task on their bodies.

   Curing can be accomplished with task work. Healing requires Love.

   Relationships can continue as transactions and may move mechanically for years. Meaningful relationships between partners require the continuous engagement of Love as well as the practice of one of Love's subsets, romance. 

   For Love to survive in caregiving, and for romance to survive in partnership, we need to climb onto God's golden wing. We cannot simply sit back, we must take courage to risk the flight that Love's journey requires.

   On the days when loving care has become exhausting. In the nights when romance seems to have lost its energy, we need to find the strength to endure.

   "We are people who need to love, because love is the soul's life," Hafiz writes in his poem, "The Stairway to Existence."

   Called or not called, Love is present. It is for us to know this truth, and to lift our scarred hearts and often tired souls into the arms that offer our only salvation.

   We need to trust the Love that lives beyond the sun. We need to trust each other by opening to this Love no matter what.

-Reverend Erie Chapman 

photograph - Twin Windows - copyright Erie Chapman 2011

Days 198-200 - The Sun

     The moon is so often the image of romance, a white wafer reflecting the sun to us across our journey through the night. But, it is the sun that ancient Egyptians and Aztecs worshipped as God. 

   We know that without the sun, there is no life. Beneath this sun our lives, like the painting at left, are works in progress.

   The reliably eloquent David Whyte reminds us of the chance life brings to us in his stunning poem, "The Sun." He writes "...I look out/ at everything/ growing so wild/ and faithfully beneath/ the sky/ and wonder/ why we are the one/ terrible/ part of creation/ privileged to refuse our flowering."

   Whenever I read of life's opportunity wasted, I find myself feeling anxious about ways I have remained closed and eager to open my heart further.

   "...how I want to claim/ my happiness," he rhapsodizes, "...to walk/ through life amazed and inarticulate with thanks."

   Whyte mourns, with us, "the unlived lives:/ those who fail to notice/ until it is too late."

   Radical Love brings us to radical presence, a kind of "noticing" that brings us closer and closer to the ecstasy of life's richest promise. In love with our work as caregivers, we see the beauty that rises from pain's departure.

   "After great pain, a formal feeling comes," Emily Dickinson reminded us. We speak of the way caregiver's witness pain. We know, as well, the joy caregivers share with patients who experience relief and healing.

   In love with our parents and our children, we feast on the treasures only family can bring - the memories of earliest life, the chance to know our heritage in this world, the opportunity to pass love hand to hand across generations.

   In love with another, we feel the marriage of our most primal selves with the highest joy of existence. Lovers experience a kind of secret together - the intimacy that comes from sharing the most precious gifts we can offer to another.

   Yet, lovers are notorious for squandering this gift through bitterness and remorse instead of celebrating forever the joy of traveling the stars hand in hand.

   In his final lines, Whyte reveals, "...there is more/ to lose/ than I thought/ and more at stake than I could dream."

   It is our very life that is at stake. Why not live our dreams? Why not love with every fiber of our being, with every breath we take, with every chance we have to touch the earth and sing to the open-hearted sky? Why not reach for the sun?

-Reverend Erie Chapman  

Dats 196-197 "My Grandmother in the Stars"

My Grandmother in the Stars
By Naomi Shihab Nye

It is possible we will not meet again
on earth. To think this fills my throat
with dust. Then there is only the sky
tying the universe together.

Just now the neighbor’s horse must be standing
patiently, hoof on stone, waiting for his day
to open. What you think of him,
and the village’s one heroic cow
is the knowledge I wish to gather.
I bow to your rugged feet,
the moth-eaten scarves that knot your hair.

Where we live in the world
is never one place. Our hearts,
those dogged mirrors, keep flashing us
moons before we are ready for them.
You and I on a roof at sunset,
our two languages adrift,
heart saying, Take this home with you,
never again,
and only memory making us rich.

  Note: Polyprint watercolor by ~liz

Days 194-195 - "Slipping the Surly Bonds"

   During my leadership of Baptist Hospital (Nashville) I learned that fourteen babies were born there each day and two died (the number of births has since risen to eighteen.) As caregivers, we converted the meaning of these cold numbers.

   They became a way in which we reinforced the sacred quality of our work as caregivers. "Each day, fourteen people enter this world, and two leave it...and they make these journeys in our presence," we said.

   The whole idea of re-imagining these statistics informed our way of thinking and therefore how we acted. During that time, nurses who had helped deliver hundreds of babies began to reconsider their work as a presence to newly arriving life. Staff in intensive care units thought anew about their journey alongside people living their last days.

   As we die, we "slip the bonds of earth", vanish into some other consciousnes as God carries us somewhere we cannot truly imagine.

   But what of those arriving? Are they slipping into some kind of bondage to the world? Clearly, at the moment of our birth, we begin to wear a body we had no role in selecting. We ride the waves of our ocean until, one day soon or one day late, our ship dissolves into the earth and air and water from whence it came. And our soul leaps free. 

   These are, perhaps, lofty thoughts. At a practical level, the reponsibility of caregivers is to help our journey at both ends of life's spectrum as well as in between. Patients come to us not out of desire but out of need.

   No one wants to come to a hospital. No one says on Saturday night, "What shall we do for fun? Hey, why don't we go to the hospital?"

   The need every patient feels reinforces the criticality of the caregiver's role. Patients and families require our help during what is typically an important passage in their lives.

   Before anyone of us slips the bonds of this earth, is freed from our body's incessant needs, may we help each other along. This can be a hard journey. Only Love can make it tolerable.

-Reverend Erie Chapman, M.T.S., J.D.

*Photo - Rebecca and Baby, Impression 1a copyright Erie Chapman 1979, 2011 

**"Slipped the surly bonds of earth" is a phrase adapted from the following poem by John Magee (1922-1941) a poet and aviator who died while piloting his plane in the skies over England.

 "High Flight"

 Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
 And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
 Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
 of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
 You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
 High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
 I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
 My eager craft through footless halls of air....

 Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
 I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
 Where never lark, or even eagle flew —
 And, while with silent lifting mind I have trod
 The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
 - Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

Days 191-193 - Love & Pain

  "You who promised our forever now kindle the flames of despair." - Dane Dakota, Woman as Beauty (2010)

   Within the forest of God's Love lives a wild animal called romance. Romance is unpredictable. Love never ends.

   Professional caregivers have a hard time with this. Their divorce rates are unusually high. Is it the long hours? Is it that caregivers are too sensitive?   

   In the months after my son and his wife divorced, I could only imagine the despair that must have stalked his life. Eight years of marriage, including a happy wedding, a joyful birth experience, shared family and friends,  all lay wrecked on the shoals of bitterness.

   Must this be true for every broken relationships?

   How can lovers who once shared the sacred land of intimacy leap so suddenly to opposite, unbridgeable islands?  What happened to all the warm hope and sweet memory that attended the bonds of commitment? Where are Love's promises?

   The world is littered with the embers of broken hearts, the wreckage of betrayal, the frozen bones of disappointment, the ugly edges of ridiculed dreams. In our hours of lead, we walk the forest alone. Rotted limbs fall through us to an earth that no longer cares.

   Since no marriage exists in a vacuum, there is "collateral damage."  Family frets. Friends jump to ascribe blame. Work, including our caregiving, may suffer and those we care for may suffer as well. 

   Perhaps, it doesn't have to be this way. Our worst energies come to bear when we feel the glass of trust slip from our hands and hear it shatter. A once-smooth shape explodes into shards that scar our hearts.

   But, Love heals. 

   My son and his wife have each experienced a wonderful recovery. "The best advice I got," my son tells me, "was to get over the bitterness. Just imagining that helped me to move on to a much better place."

   On this new, firmer ground, he knows he will find a relationship much better suited to him. In many ways, he feels grateful to be free from a relationship where both were drowning.

   Betrayals come in many forms. Some are not to be tolerated. Others must be endured if real love is to thrive. Lovers will endure anger, disappointment, and sometimes a time of separation. They must search for their song, wait for the air that bears love's sweet scent, listen for the music only they can hear.

   "And will the world allow you to return to me, to live once more the love-filled life?" Dakota asks in his poem "Turning Still?"  His answer comes in "Postscript."

   "Love will always return, circling through every gray to pink again the world." 

-Reverend Erie Chapman

Photograph - "Angela Alone" - 1978 -  copyright Dane Dakota 2011

Days 189-190 Learning to Fall

     Stand under the stars and say what you like to them. Praise them, question them, pray to them, and wish upon them. The universe will not answer. But it will have spoken. –Timothy Ferris                                                                                                                    

In the days of childhood life had a simple quality. Maybe we were warmly wrapped in a cocoon of family life, school, playtime, friends, long summer days and cold winter nights. Then as young adults, we sailed off in freedom to pursue our dreams, feeling as invincible as the world’s first explorers.

 Eventually,  some of us set anchor in a safe harbor and settled into a conventional lifestyle to begin a career or perhaps marry and raise a family. Over time, allured by the world’s pull on us we may have succumbed to the pressures of conformity. Through the years, we weathered life’s storms and embraced moments of Grace as they ebbed and flowed.

 Today,  we find our world spins with an ever-increasing velocity, as the complexity of our fast-paced environment seems to accelerate. Technology’s explosion enables instant cyber travel across oceans but it can also shore us in with ensuing isolation.

 The wheel of life continues to turn as if to free us from the trappings of the world’s restrictive nets. A new pull is upon us now as we come full circle. It draws us to a simpler way by reminding us of what matters.  It was Saint Teresa of Avila who “saw that God chose the center of the human soul as a dwelling place because that is the most beautiful place in all creation” (Mirabai Starr, Editor).

In a recent Journal essay, (May 2, “Adrift on the Same Raft”) Rev. Erie Chapman shared this radiance, “In Love, we offer living water to each other. When we live Love, we are no longer adrift.”  This life giving water is powerfully illustrated in the following video by Eric Lowen; a musician who is living with ALS. Eric said, “There are good days and bad days and there are good parts in bad days and bad parts in good days” 

Daylight weaves into night and winds its way back to day.  We live on a vast ocean of Love that holds our universe together within us and without. Sometimes we can't help feeling alone and adrift. Yet, when we reach out to share in each other's  lives, we remember we are so much more.

With Love,

~liz Sorensen Wessel

Note: pencil drawing by ~liz

   

Days 187-188 - The Courage To Be

"Courage has revealing power, the courage to be is the key to being itself." - Paul Tillich

   On March 28, 1941, the brilliant writer Virginia Woolf (left), afraid of another painful bout of agonizing depression, put on her overcoat, filled its pockets with stones, and drowned herself in the River Ouse near her home in England.  "Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title," Woolf wrote, a warning to all of us not to judge those who turn suicidal. 

   On July 28, 1890, Vincent Van Gogh, an artist virtually unknown in his time, raised a gun to his chest and shot himself. He died the next morning.

   "My work is done, why wait?" film inventor George Eastman wrote in his suicide note on March 14, 1932. Eastman was the founder and head of the Eastman Kodak company.

   Why do we need courage to be? Perhaps, it is because so many of us struggle with doubt and anxiety every day. In some cases, this causes us to reach for religion as a life raft amid the storm-tossed sea rather than as a belief we inhabit because we truly believe. 

   "The anxiety of doubt and meaninglessness is potentially as great as the anxiety of fate and death," Tillich warned.  

   Dr. Victor Frankl, a concentration camp survivor, wrote that emaciated inmates typically died within twenty-four hours of uttering three words: "I give up." Those who had a "why" were the ones who survived. 

   It takes courage to walk this earth when we've lost meaning. Especially when we have tied our "why" to a role.

   What happens when a veteran caregiver loses her job? How do high-level executives hang onto their sense of self-worth after they retire?

   I found myself staring at the same question a few years back. Let go by the new owners of an organization I had run, and after decades of being "the person in charge," I suddenly found myself wondering what worth I had.

   At fifty-five, my role as the family provider was over. My children were grown. No one seemed to need me.

   I believed that my life had meaning only so long as what I did had meaning. Why "be" if you can't "do" something that matters, I wondered.

   Repeat the words "my life has no meaning" several hundred times a day and your brain chemistry will change, psychologists tell us. The right "self-talk" is crucial to mental health.

   You, as a caregiver, know that it is painfully ineffective to tell those who have lost hope that their depression is irrational. Hallmark-card cheerfulness deepens the agony of the troubled soul.

    Just as we admire those who find the courage to be, "we need to kneel before the kind of suffering felt by those who take their lives," a friend who is a psychotherapist told me. Those who judge the suicidal cannot understand such despair.

   Depression blocks God's message of Love. It takes more than a psychiatrist's prescription to open our hearts once again. It means finding, somewhere, the kind of courage that holds on even when holding on makes no sense.

Reverend Erie Chapman

Days 184-186 - Not-Foolish Things

"What fools we are." -last words of a friend's mother

   It's pretty easy to agree that we are fools. Look around, or take a look in the mirror. 

   To live is to be plagued by vanity. To live long is to come to know that happiness and ego don't get along with each other. 

   Like many, I have foolishly wasted a horrific amount of life in meaningless meetings. In the course of struggling to control outcomes and people, I have lost my temper far too often. Every moment I have spent trying to impress other people was wasted. 

   Now that I've flayed myself with such dark criticism, I'd like to mention a few not-foolish things I recall doing in my life.  

   1) In 1998, my son and I stood on a little balcony in Venice and smoked cigars as gondoliers guided their boats along a canal. 

   2) I shouted so loud and often at my daughter's track meets that my daughter asked my to stop coming. A decade later, she thanked me for being such a fan.

   3) In 1966, a year into my marriage, I secretly bought my wife the set of aqua pots and pans she wanted and hid them in the cupboard for her to discover.

   4) Against enormous pressure to stay, I left a Philadelphia healthcare conference mid-meeting and flew back to Columbus arriving just in time to see my daughter score the winning goal at a championship field hockey tournament.

   5) The night before my father's open heart surgery, I returned to his room to find him crying and sat with him until he fell asleep.

   6) During most of my career as a hospital CEO, I regularly exchanged my suit and tie for a housekeeping uniform and worked a shift pushing a broom down the halls of the hospital of which I was president.

   7) When I was five, I gave my aunt my only stick of Juicy Fruit gum. 

   8) In the middle of a healthcare conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, I left a meeting, climbed to the top of a high hill, took off my clothes, and sang to the sky.

   9) When I was eight, I went to Sunday School with a squirt gun hidden in my new blue suit. It leaked.

   10) This morning, I visited Death Row.

   These not-foolish things don't, of course, appear on my resume. But, I don't plan to apply for a job ever again.

   If I do, I probably won't mention to my prospective employer that I tell silly stories to my three-year-old granddaughter about flying pigs, dragons that sleep in bunk-beds, and giant dogs that eat popcorn.

-Rev. Erie Chapman

Days 182-183 On the Out Breath of Beauty

 “Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”    ҉    Rumi

  Ah, there are so many ways that one’s heart opens and shuts as quickly as a camera lens. The barriers we raise in self-protection. They can become so subtle and automatic that we may not even notice our behaviors.  I think our hearts are a lot more fragile than we are willing to admit. How often do we close ourselves off from giving and receiving Love and to fully engaging life?  

 I am at a crossroads in life. It’s as though a big chapter has ended but I have not yet turned the page to begin a new one.  This in between space and emptiness is as uncomfortable as wearing a dress two sizes to small.  Yet, I know it is important to take a little time to honor this life transition and go within to listen deeply, reverently. It is not too often that I am willing to dip beneath the surface and encounter my vulnerabilities  in a kind, non-judging way.   To acknowledge my fear and the barriers I have built up through the years. This is a time of letting go of some things to precious to speak and of old worn out habits that are no longer useful or life giving.

 As difficult as it may seem to overcome ambivalence and resistance to change, a simple beginning is to focus on a renewing source of life, our breath.   To breathe in our fears and to breathe out love.  In this way, with each new breath we can begin to Love again.

I am grateful to Candace Nagle for sharing the following poem with me, which I now gladly share with you.

 “Wage Peace”

Wage peace with your breath.
Breathe in firemen and rubble,
breathe out whole buildings
and flocks of redwing blackbirds.

Breathe in terrorists and breathe out sleeping children
and freshly mown fields.
Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.
Breathe in the fallen
and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.

Wage peace with your listening:
hearing sirens, pray loud.
Remember your tools:
flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.

Make soup.
Play music, learn the word for thank you in three languages.
Learn to knit, and make a hat.
Think of chaos as dancing raspberries,
imagine grief as the outbreath of beauty
or the gesture of fish.
Swim for the other side.
Wage peace.

Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious.
have a cup of tea and rejoice.
Act as if armistice has already arrived.
Celebrate today.

                                                                                                                 ~By Judyth Hill

~liz Sorensen Wessel

Watercolor by ~liz