Journal of Sacred Work

Days 243-244 - Profound Presence - The Steady Gaze of Marina Abramovic

   For three straight months, Mariana Abramovic did something as remarkable as anything I've witnessed. She sat for twelve hours every day in a chair in New York's Museum of Modern Art. Her performance art appeared an exhibit called "The Artist is Present."

   Across from her, thousands lined up to sit across from her, Others watched. Some shook their heads in dismay.

   No words were spoken. Before each guest took their seat, Marina sat with her eyes lowered. When she sensed the presence of the other, she raised her eyes and looked directly into theirs for as long as they wanted to sit there.

   The experience of such profound presence shook many to tears. 

   Why?

   In general, only babies can stare us straight in the eye. The rest of us seem to be afraid of such a steady gaze.

   I tried a much safer sounding variation on Marina's approach. I stared into the mirror into my own eyes. It was hard to maintain the gaze for long. 

   After all, what is the point? If you want to reach deeper into yourself, try this exercise with someone you love - or with a stranger open to the experience.

   If you want to go deeper still look into your own eyes for ten or fifteen minutes.

   The length of time matters. A five second gaze will accomplish little (although even that can seem like a lot if neither you or the other person are speaking. And that's a second key: no talking.

   Radical Loving presence requires completely changing our way of being present. A curator at the museum said that Ms. Abramovic's performance literally "slowed everyone down." 

   Unoccupied with the long list of things that chatter through our mind, we begin to experience life in a richer way. 

   Most important for caregivers, this is the kind of work that transforms us from "fixers" to healers.

   Jesus understood this. So did Gandhi and Mother Theresa and everyone else who experiences Love in deeper ways.

   Profound presence is difficult. Mariana does not say she has the answer. 

   Like all geniuses, she points the way for us. She offers a remarkable gift.

   She offers Love.

-Erie Chapman 

Days 240-242 - "The Steady Gaze" - What the Dying Know

"The problem is, death keeps looking at us."  T.E. Holt, M.D. - from an article in Men's Health

   An old friend, approaching her seventieth birthday, shared with me that the older she gets, the more she fears death. I feel the opposite.

   Perhaps, our anxiety comes from the common definition of the odd, fear-laden word we don't like to mention. Death is routinely described as the cessation of all biologic functions.

Photo-Sketch -"Woman Fading #2"- copyright erie chapman 2012

   Like the image in the photograph, this life is fading away. If we are living a comfortable life, if we believe that we are only our biology than fading is frightening. Life is all we know.

    So we look away from death even though "death keeps looking at us."

   "We give death power precisely to the extent that we work to ignore it, to blind ourselves to its closeness, to imagine we have the power to stave it off forever," Dr. Holt writes. "If we go through life imagining that, then the moment when we are forced to look at death can only rupture everything we know and paralyze us, still alive. That's not a good way to die."

   What is a good way to die - to live life as we head inexorably toward its end? After all, time is a trick. We can't find ourselves in such an illusion.

   The children of wisdom are acceptance and gratitude.

   One way to birth these hard-to-raise children is to know that we are more than our biology. The big remaining question is the nature of our non-body consciousness.

   Knowing the other consciousness is coming the dying can reach acceptance. As caregivers like Dr. Holt know, the moment fear leaves a terminally ill patient the angel of grace arrives. 

   Of course, we are all "terminally" ill. No one gets out of this world alive. Indeed, the cause of death is life.

   In surrender, the terminally ill accept what we deny. Their grace can hand us a rich gift. Instead, most of us turn away.

   It is so hard to accept life's most obvious truth: we have this moment and no other. We can be at peace in this now only if we know that our consciousness will find another way to express itself when the heart stops and the breath quiets. 

   Only a fool (or perhaps someone very courageous) fights absolute certainty. We can free ourselves from our fear of death - a challenge always easy to describe and hard to live.

   This process begins when we find the courage to look at death with what another friend of mine calls "the steady gaze." When we do, we will discover that the only thing death can take is our body, something that may be less important than we imagined.

   Love's energy, unburdened by our weight, can then embrace us completely opening a whole new way of being, a consciousness that encompasses both this life and life beyond.

   Isn't that heaven?

-Erie Chapman

Days 238-239 International Caregivers Day

August 26, Mother Teresa’s birthday, marks the third annual International Caregivers Day. As we celebrate the contributions of caregivers from around the world, let us pause for a moment to reflect upon the sacredness of our work.

Mother Teresa lived a life of service; of loving her life away for the sake of others. Similarly, Erie Chapman, pioneer and visionary leader of Radical Loving Care, shares a profound message to Live Love, not fear.

What is it that makes our work sacred? Each day we awaken to a precious blessing. Yet, how often does this gift, as well as the fleeting nature of life, escape our notice?  As we slip into the shoes of our daily routine, our busyness can rob us of the awareness to bring our presence to what lies before us.

The mounting demands of healthcare reform remind us that the stakes are high. We have but one chance to get it right and time is short. Expectations for perfect care amidst shrinking resources require momentous shifts in how we undertake our work. Although stressful, change is a catalyst for creativity and innovation. Accomplishing the impossible can only happen when the hearts and minds of caregivers are focused on what really matters.

 “If I have the gift of prophecy and can understand all secrets and every form of knowledge, and if I have absolute faith so as to move mountains but have no love, I am nothing.”(1:13 Corinthians, International standard Version, 2008).

Technology has opened a  window into an expansive world. We are now able to connect and communicate in unimaginable and fantastic ways. Yet, the instantaneous power of computer know-how is moving at such an accelerated speed that we risk losing sight of our human potential for loving. The challenge is to bring our full presence into whatever is before us.  “For whenever need is met with Love; this is a sacred encounter” (Erie Chapman)

It is important to remember the Sabbath. Let us stand strong and support one another to balance work with self-care and self-love. Indeed, the need will always be more that what is humanly possible to accomplish in a day. It is forever tempting to jump into fiery frenzy and risk completely  burning out. When we bring our full presence, we find an opening for Love to enter and we are equally nourished by the sacredness of our encounters.

Special note to Journal readers, in honor of caregivers, friends, family and co-ministers, please consider offering an affirmation, by posting a story or word of appreciation to someone you know.

Caregivers, thank you for choosing to live Love.

With great esteem,

~liz Sorensen Wessel

Above drawings by liz

 

Days 236-237 - The Human Experience

   "In the rain's hesitation/ I heard,/ as the moon cleared the sea,/ our breath." -Dane Dakota, Woman As Beauty

   The rain in the poem represents the noise of the world. Inside the rain's pause lies the sound of our breath. Shared, this breathing marks an encounter with the air that can become sacred.

    The touch of a loving caregiver cannot be named. It can only be experienced in the deepest place in our soul.

   As lovers know, true intimacy transcends both words and our senses.

    How do we discover we are alive? We feel the beating of our hearts, see our reflection in the face of a pond, determine our existence by the vibrations our lives make amid the energy of this earth. 

   How do we encounter another in our human experiences? We breathe our mother's scent, we see other forms we call people, hear voices, taste food together.

   And there is touch.

   Patients are touched in ways unlike any other encounter. 

   The very intimacy of caregiver's encounters can make touching as demeaning as a whip or as illuminating as holy light.

    Walk in the door of any hospital or have yourself wheeled into a hospice or nursing home and you will acquire this interesting label - "patient." 

   Naming you this will bring you attention but we all know this classification doesn't guarantee humane treatment.

   Healthcare organizations are launching initiatives to evaluate what they call "the patient experience." There are seminars, courses and lectures on the subject.

   Isn't it really the human experience we are addressing?

   Look at the descriptors applied to us across our lives and how they affect our journey: baby, child, teenager, adult, senior adult. If we hang on, we are called elderly.

   Think of how you feel when one or more of these labels is applied to you: student, teacher, wife, mother, father, brother, son, husband, wife, employer and employee. Customer. Host. Caregiver.

   We classify each other as a way of sorting, of trying to determine how to encounter each other.

   Every label, name or category triggers a way of thinking. 

   Yet, there is only one guiding principle that matters. 

   Honoring the human experience means seeing beyond names, diagnoses and ages. We can only see what is sacred with the eyes of our souls.

-Erie Chapman 

Days 233-235 - How the Soul Learns to See

"In a dark time, the eye begins to see.../ The day's on fire/ I know the purity of pure despair.../The edge is what I have." -Theodore Roethke

   Nearly twenty-five years ago I interviewed a patient who had just finished her last round of chemo therapy. The occasion was my television show, "Life Choices with Erie Chapman."

   Her doctor said she was "cancer-free." She knew that also meant the cancer could return.

   "How do you feel now that you have completed treatment?" I asked. "Are you worried about the return of your cancer?"

   Her answer was startling:

   "Not at all," she replied. "I'm so grateful I got this cancer. Now I can truly see life. Before, I think I was blind."

   Joy sets the day on fire. So does agony.

   It is the bland space in between where we linger neither fully alive nor actually dead. Perhaps, fearing agony or boredom, we anesthetize ourselves and thus never see some of the richest colors in life's painting.

   One hundred years of living guarantees that there will be days of tragedy. My mother has been through enough of that to find serenity - or maybe she had it all along. You see her elegant light in another photo (left) taken recently by my daughter, Tia. 

   Some patients (and caregivers) who have been very sick or simply lived a long time understand the treasures of age and illness. Others block the inspiration that can come from facing into our hardest darkness.

   "I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal," the poet John Berryman wrote. 

   Who would want an ordeal? But, that is exactly what the courageous do. 

   "Why go through the pain of climbing Mount Everest," the bold are asked.

   The most common answer? "Because it's there." Why did Roger Bannister struggle to run the first four minute mile in 1954? Because he wanted to show what a human being could do. Why do saints like Gandhi and Mother Theresa and Martin Luther King choose painful paths to humanity? Because they believe their is nothing more important than Radical Loving Care.

   What we know is that it is impossible to "see" unless we first enter the dark and then, crucially, reflect on the experience.

   Pain is expensive. Why not let it teach us?

   Of course, pain will find us whether we seek it or not. The tragedy is that when we run from it too fast we misplace its most valuable lessions, the ones that open the eyes of our souls so that we can truly see.

-Erie Chapman

Days 231-232 From a Distance

From a distance, how easy it is to de-personalize or label people and lump them into a category of different; “not one of us”. It can be a slippery downward spiral if we buy into to disparaging talk and name calling that only breeds contempt for one particular group or another.

Heated words spread like wildfire. Soon dislike metamorphoses into hate. Group think is a dangerous phenomenon that can lead to unimaginable atrocities and genocide. We have watched history repeat itself and the mayhem continues. Yes, from a distance, how easy it is to become biased and to hate. Ah, what a strong emotion hate is.

Everything begins with a thought. Before we experience an emotion we think a thought, add personal meaning and begin to tell ourselves a story.  Past experience influences our perceptions and can quickly lead us up the ladder of inference. Too often we make faulty assumptions and then our emotions swell. Suddenly, we are upset with someone based on our obscured ability to see clearly.

When we do not recognize our reflection in one another eyes it is like an autoimmune disease where the body does not recognize its own cells and mistakenly thinks it is being invaded by a foreign enemy.  Ironically, our body’s defense system turns on itself, doing everything in its power to rid itself of the unknown threat.   

Yes, from a distance how easy it is to objectify people, to see another as stranger; as a threat to be reckoned with or eliminated. There is a way out of this vicious cycle. It begins with a reversal of thought. We need to take great care in what information we absorb into our minds. We must make a conscious effort to be aware of our perceptions and willing to challenge our assumptions of how we see in this world.

The best way I know to begin this reversal of thought, from fear to Love, is to journey into our own discomfort zones. To get upfront and personal, so to speak and meet the very people we see as different.

When we meet face to face and can begin to relate on a more personal level, we can see each other as real people, not stereotypes. Great healing can come from a place of connecting and experiencing our common ground. Ultimately, we may see that our dreams, hopes and aspirations are not so different after all.

My friend Fr. Jim Farris shared these two verses with me that I believe illustrate this understanding of our shared humanity.

Chapter 29 from the Tao Te Ching:

 Do you want to improve the world?
I don't think it can be done. The world is sacred.
It can't be improved.
If you tamper with it, you'll ruin it.
If you treat it like an object, you'll lose it. There is a time for being ahead,
a time for being behind;
a time for being in motion,
a time for being at rest;
a time for being vigorous,
a time for being exhausted;
a time for being safe,
a time for being in danger. The Master sees things as they are,
without trying to control them.
She lets them go their own way,
and resides at the center of the circle.

And here is a passage from Ecclesiastes 3:

 There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:

² a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
³ a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
⁴ a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
⁵ a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
⁶ a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
⁷ a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
⁸ a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.

⁹ What do workers gain from their toil? ¹⁰ I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. ¹¹ He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet^[a] no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. ¹² I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. ¹³ That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God. ¹⁴ I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it.

~liz Sorensen Wessel 

Days 226-230 Love, Dreams & Wounds

"Love and dreams are two parentheses./ Between them I place my body/ and discover the world. -Adonis (Translated from the Arabic, by Khaled Mattawa)

   If you click on the photo at left (taken by my daughter, Tia) you will see more clearly an interesting cake-topper. My mother waves triumphant at the first of several celebrations of her 100th birthday. The still-rare three digit number rises from her birthday cake like triple highway signs marking the long road of her life.

   She loved her husband of sixty years. She loves her four children, her eight grandchildren, her eight great-grandchildren and the diminishing cadre of her friends, none of whom are her age.

   She has led such a quiet and gracious life that I don't know much about her dreams. She has focused, instead, on nurturing her children's hopes. Her life has been, and continues to be a gift to all whose lives she has touched.

   "I was wounded early," Adonis wrote in his poem, Celebrating Childhood, "and early I learned/ that wounds made me."

   No matter how magical  our childhood we are sure to suffer wounds. Will those cuts shape our occupancy of the "parentheses" or will Love inhabit the many rooms of our lives?

   Perhaps, wounds are the mothers of our dreams. Maybe we can't love without embracing our scars -including the ones never healed - the ones that yet bleed through the seams in our souls.

   During a recent visit to Saint Johns Regional Medical Center in Oxnard I watched caregivers so sensitive they routinely do more than strive to "fix" the wounded. Time after time I encountered the kind of love that brings healing beyond curing.

   This kind of love flows through this center and its sister, Pleasant Valley Hospital, because of the guidance of one of the finest leadership teams in the country. CEO Laurie Eberst and her colleagues, that include COO Kim Wilson, Sister Suzanne Krawczyk, Grace Ibe (who heads culture initiatives) and George West are using Radical Loving Care to reshape the mission of their organization into a true Healing Hospital.

   On this same trip, I visited my childhood street in Westwood Village. The "Ozzie and Harriet" style neighborhood remains. Our old house is gone, replaced by a modern box of a thing devoid of the Spanish charm of its predecessor. 

   The only remnant is the eucalyptus tree that soars above the backyard. It was that very tree that nurtured so many of my childhood hopes, its branches the parentheses between which I placed the soul of my young body as it began to discover the world.

   Two lines from Adonis, a Syrian poet, sear us, "My wishes are flowers/ staining my body."

   Love invites flowers into our lives. Love helps us celebrate their stain. 

   The fragrance of invited flowers suffuses our souls. The mark of their petals helps us to heal the wounds of our childhood making us carriers of Beauty. 

-Erie Chapman

Days 223-225 Our Hidden Truth

Note: A special thank you to Nic Askew for sharing his short film "One True Voice / Jonas Gerard."

When artist, Jonas Gerard heard these words reflected back to him by a caregiver, “Jonas, you lost your voice” it awakened him to the deepest truth of his life.  Listening to Jonas tell his story, stirred my own desire for truth, as well as experiencing a few ah-ha moments.

Perhaps, the era I grew up in was one that often admonished, “Children are to be seen and not heard.” Then again, maybe it was my father’s attempt at constructing order with in a household of eight people living together. Regardless, like Jonas, I grew up with a sense of not having a voice. For me to speak up in a group created an anxiety that caused a trembling of hand and voice, it was as if I were breaking a cardinal rule. Throughout my childhood and into early adulthood I was frequently sick with bouts of tonsillitis that progressed into debilitating strep throat illnesses.  Over time, I found safety in expressing my thoughts on paper with words or with colors.

What surfaces for me, are the fine Journal essays offered this past week by Erie Chapman and Candace Nagle. Both writers touched upon intriguing questions related to mind, body, spirit and the connection of illness and healing, whether or not the universe is a friendly place, and honoring the creative mystery that guides our lives. Jonas’s personal experience also connects intuitively with our soul’s quest to seek authentic expression.

When we are knee deep in the muddy waters of our lives, our first inclination may be to revert to a longing to ‘be’ elsewhere; anywhere, ‘but here’ as we unwittingly try to escape the intimacy we want most. We mistakenly think that elsewhere must be ‘it’, that better place.

Yet, ever hopeful to me is the idea that mud is the artist’s true palate. Even in the brokenness and limitations of my life there are worthwhile territories to explore fearlessly rather than to abandon them. Or as Journal frequenter Maria Doglio so aptly quoted from Rumi, "The wound is the place where the light enters you". Jonas became aware of the blessings in life that come in disguise and once aware, how it changes everything we see.   

A reversal of thought cultivates an open friendliness to the invitation of creation. Surprisingly, as we work with the mud in our lives, the artist's hand finds the clay receptive.  As small cracks open to let Light in, we receive affirmation and a resounding 'yes' from our universe. When we value not only gorgeous colors but even mud as our medium, perhaps we too, unknowingly become the instrument.

~liz Sorensen Wessel

Days 218-222 - Land of the Unforeseen

"Whoever cannot seek the unforeseen sees nothing, for the known way is an impasse." Heraclitus

   Alex McCloud, the lead character who narrates a film I am making, says at one point "The world is an abstract painting. We try to make order from it. But, it can't be done."

   What we can do is accept and love the abstraction, the mystery, of life.

   The photograph at left presents an image we can easily identify. If the tree were presented abstractly we would nevertheless struggle to make sense of it by sorting it into something we know.

   Once we've classified, we often stop right there. Our naming creates the "impasse" Heraclitus references.

   When we have labeled something or someone we think we know them. Instead, we have blinded ourselves to the sacred mysteries that live in the soul of that being.

   The essence of the tree thrives in mystery.

   We are more than our name and role.

   Obvious as this statement seems, the process of classifying each other - so necessary to our functioning - can create a tragic obstacle between us and those we seek to love and to heal.

   If you are suffering with cancer, do you want to be classified as "The colon cancer in room 4002?"

   Clearly, your nurse needs to know where you are. But, do we need to convert you into your cancer?

   "Of all the defenses human beings erect against God [Love], the most vulnerable are our places of suffering," the Dalai Lama wrote in The Good Earth. "Healing, therefore, speaks to the deepest and often most hidden part of us."

   When I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease in 1963 I hid that information - for decades. I was embarrassed and didn't want any questions. I feared being labeled as weak or "defective" - as "the kid with Crohns."

   In order for healers to heal, they must delve into the land of the unforeseen where our deepest mysteries lie. Doctors or nurses who slotted me into a disease category and sought to use only mechanical cures remained stuck (with me) at the impasse.

   You and I can be photographed. The picture will tell the superficial viewer little about who we are. Those who are patient enough to keep seeking may travel beyond our two-dimensional surface and glimpse our hearts.

   If I were painting a self-portrait, I might try abstraction. I would use many hues to suggest the strange-colored palette of my moods. I would embed music into the canvas along with some big question marks. I might even use a little poetry.

   I cannot paint or sing my mystery because, by definition, I don't know it myself. But, I can honor it.

   We need to be seekers. For in seeking, our mystery may join with the mystery of another.

   This is the miracle of Love's healing in the land of the unforeseen.

  -Erie Chapman

-photograph - erie chapman

Days 216-217 “In Spite of It All….YES!"

 “I think the most important question facing humanity is ‘Is the universe a friendly place?’ This is the first and most basic question all people must answer for themselves.” -Albert Einstein

Note: W/E Essay by Guest Contributor Candace Nagle

Albert Einstein’s suggested inquiry implies much about our personal relationship to life and to God.  It is an invitation to move beyond our monkey brain, to create a miraculous and loving relationship with life regardless of uncertain and ever-changing terrain.

 I don’t know about you, but for me, the benevolent status of the cosmos consistently vacillates. It can be influenced by everything from how much sugar I eat and what crazy adventures my adult children are planning, to economic hardships and the kink in my back.   Being a Happy Camper is not an easy job.  On a continuum that stretches from sinkhole to smiley face, from Eeyore to Tigger, there is a lot of territory, which we all get to know intimately.

 Recently, along this path of living with The Question, I found myself loitering in a dark corner of my soul and falling prey to some serious unfriendliness.  Once again, The Fates had seemingly conspired to confound my thinking and I was experiencing a prolonged bout of living in the dark with my wrathful confusions. 

 But Einstein also said,“God does not play dice with the Universe.”  Nor does he do so with the human soul.  Thankfully.  So, eventually The Graces arrived, whispering encouragement and providing friendly companions.  With the help of kindred spirits, I dared to stick my head up out of the sinkhole and peer around a bit.  Timing can be everything.  When I finally took a good look around, here are a few of the gems that restored my faith in the sanity of an unequivocal YES:

 In one afternoon, I was called ‘sweetie’, ‘hon’, and ‘darlin’ by a variety of kind strangers.  AND I found a rhinestone heart trinket in the thrift shop.  I felt loved.

 The same day, I recalled a squirrel I met in the park.  She was prancing along happily without a tail.  Just like Erie’s squirrel of his last reflection, she stopped to chat with/at me for a spell.  In our conversation, I found out she didn’t know her tail was missing and refused to give it much credence.  She went her merry way balancing along a fence like a professional gymnast.  She had NO IDEA she was sporting a glaring deficit.

 My friend, Pete, recently widowed, is currently traveling around the country in his big red truck.  My inbox is aglow with a steady flow of his images of hay fields and sunrises…visions from his friendly universe.

 Another friend, a mother of two small boys, has recently been diagnosed with breast cancer. One of her responses to her illness has been to create a “YES” Wall.  She is decorating a wall in her home with all of the things that bring her happiness. 

 Then, while looking through my old books, I found one written by my friend, Lou.  Lou was a photojournalist who had witnessed the soul of the world; the beauty and the horror.  During WWII, he had flown on bombing missions over Japan.  After the war he went to the bombsites and saw that the targets had been civilian populations.  But, in spite of that, and many other things he had seen and experienced, he still believed in the goodness of humanity.  “In spite of it all…Yes!”, he had said.

In his last year, struggling with cancer, Lou continued to create and write.  On the eve of his death, while lying in a hospital bed, floating in and out of consciousness, he had a visit from his publisher who came to tell him that his book was at the press.  Lou opened his eyes one more time, smiled, and raised his clasped hands together above his head in victory. 

So, here is the bottom line on the universe for today:

As Lou also said, “Can’t argue with a sunrise!”.  Nor can you argue with a crazy squirrel, a devoted mother, and a wise man.  At least I can’t.  Not now.  I would rather use my time here to create a ‘Yes Wall’.

-Candace Nagle

Note: above photo is a sunrise from international space station - Doug Wheelock