Journal of Sacred Work

Day 366 - The Mysterious Gift of Terminal Illness

"...having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world." - Herman Melville, from Moby Dick

   The way the ground melts into oceans, lakes and rivers, the way we can sail on water, bathe in it and drown in it, all of this awakens stories.

   What makes water into waves? What lives beneath its surface? How could it be that it can both excite and kill?

   That is what the late New York Times essayist Anatole Broyard divined about cancer when his doctor told him he was terminally ill - that his cancer could kill him but it could also elicit his most fascinating story.

   "...[my diagnosis] was like an immense electric shock," Broyard wrote. "I felt galvanized. I was a new person. All of my old trivial selves fell away and I was reduced to essence." (italics added.)

   Imagine being "galvanized" by the news of your imminent death! Instead of thrashing in panic, Broyard swam straight into the waves. His diagnosis became a gift from a sea now askew. 

   The first thing Broyard did was to take charge of his destiny as much as he could - to remind his doctors and himself whose life was at stake. 

   But, his most crucial act was to embrace the mystery of his illness through storytelling. "...narratives are the most effective ways to keep our humanity alive," he wrote.

   Isn't this true of all of us whether we are ill or well? Metaphor is better than a scapel for engaging the terminal condition we call life. 

   The cause of death is life. How else can we make any sense of it except through story? Moby Dick captivates us through storytelling not through Power Point analysis.

   "...a sick person can make a story out of his illness as a way of trying to detoxify it," Broyard wrote. 

   Imagine the way the lives of caregivers would change if they transformed the alternating panic and drudgery of suffering into a narrative. At the moment of his or her appearance the patient's life begins to spill the blood of stories.

   What do we do with those pictures the patient paints? What do we do with our stories?

   Beyond the clinical diagnosis lives our humanity. Lose that, and both patient and caregiver are cast adrift in a sea of misery unrelieved by what we need most - Love. 

-Erie Chapman

Photographs copyright erie chapman 2012

Days 362-365 Pearls Streaming

And I said to a man who stood at the gate of the year; “Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.” And he replied: “Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than a light and safer than a known way.”  ~M. L. Haskins

Fear creates an illusion of separateness.  Worries flare in shards of anxiety.

First instinct is to run from life’s quandary but instead I freeze. I heard your voice and turned 

 Just in time to glimpse pearls streaming from heaven.

Reflecting the truth of what we are. For beneath our human frailties and half truths

 Lives a deeper truth

  A radiance from which we are born.

By saying uncomfortable feelings out loud, it somehow magnifies their significance and increases my vulnerability. I’d rather share with you serene surface thoughts but I owe you so much more. Given a little space I notice my emotions play out and perspective returns. (I am grateful when perspective returns balance). Suddenly, what seemed monumental now seems almost silly, if it were not so painful. Perhaps, an emotion “playing out” is an apt term. I am hopeful that the more I notice the pattern; the intensity of my emotions will lessen and lose power over time.

However, I am getting sidetracked from what I really want to say. Our circumstances in life are not significant; we can be on top of the world one moment and tragedy might strike the next. What matters most, is how we respond. Although, I may have heard these words a thousand times over, they hold a new meaning for me. Tara Brach offers wise counsel by encouraging us to be present to what arises in a life affirming way. Not to deny pain, anger, anxiety, sorrow or any uncomfortable emotions but to allow ourselves to feel and acknowledge them and to offer loving kindness and acceptance. 

Often we may avoid painful emotions by numbing out with various distractions, be it food, alcohol, T.V. etc. Yet, I can't help wonder, if we avoid feeling our difficult emotions do we miss out on feeling the good ones such as joy and happiness, too?

As I stand at the gate of this year I have ample time to reflect. It is clear to me that each of YOU are pearls streaming from heaven and that we are inexplicably strewn together by Love. I will place my hand into God’s loving trust as I cross the threshold into this New Year. I can relax into the new and leave old worries and cares behind because it is not what happens that is of relevance.  I can only take with me the gratitude in my heart for your radiance in my life.

Note: I dedicate this post to my sister Patricia Maio who has offered me a lifetime of love and is a radiant pearl in my life. Happy Birthday, Pat!

~liz Sorensen Wessel

Mandala, Dec. 2012 by ~liz

Days 359-362 - Toys & Dreams

   It's been more than sixty-five years since I discovered the toy (at left) sitting beneath our Christmas tree in California, just where Santa had left it. A flick of the switch and its cars still clatter along the rusted tracks into the tunnel from New Jersey and back out on the other side on their way over the bridge to New York.

   The Santa Claus I visited in 1946 (in banner photo, above, with my older sister, Ann) delivered a surprise on Christmas morning that I enjoy to this day.

   Isn't Christmas, for children, all about imagining? Wasn't Santa Claus himself the captain of our dreams, organizing his company of elves to craft the trucks and dolls and books and toys we craved across winter nights? 

   When I discovered that Santa himself was just "a spirit" (as my dad described after he confirmed the bad news) my first question was, "Will we still get presents?"

   Santa Claus may be a phantom (strange how our child-centric view convinces us that one fellow could refill his bag billions of times and then drop down every chimney in the world in one night) but those little metal cars (pulled along by a string underneath) were real to me and a lot more fun than that pair of brown socks I watched my father open.

   What is real about Christmas, of course - more real than toys - is hope. Children hope for the
"reality" of Santa just as adults hope for the reality of God.

   Both are true. 

   I always wondered why I could never catch Santa in the act - why it was that our father sternly warned us on Christmas Eve not to enter the living room should we awake in the middle of the night.

   We can't ever see the real Santa. We can't ever see the real God.

   But we can see the hope of Christmas in every believing child and we can see the face of God sealed on the heart of every loving caregiver.

-Erie Chapman  

Photographs of toy copyright erie chapman 2012

Dayss 357-358 Peace

 

"Nature was a mirror of the soul for St. Francis of Assisi—a mirror for himself and a mirror for God. All this mirroring effected a complete change of consciousness, a shift in how he saw reality.The outer world began to name the inner experience and the nature of God for Francis. It all became a two-way mirror through which he could see God and also see his deepest soul. Our Franciscan tradition has always seen creation as “the first Bible,” which had a 14.5-billion-year lead on the written Bible."  -Fr. Richard Rohr                                                           

 

Frances had a desire to honor and express his Love of God by celebrating the birth of Jesus. In Greccio, Italy on Christmas Eve in 1223, Francis recreated a nativity scene complete with a manger, people, and live animals. The villagers all came to bear witness to the miracle and mystery of the incarnation. Christmas hymns filled the cold night air with joy and wonder. This awe inspired evening began the lovely tradition of making a nativity scene for decoration during Advent and Christmas.

 

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. 

Where there is hatred, let me sow love.

Where there is injury, pardon.

Where there is doubt, faith.

Where there is despair, hope.

Where there is darkness, light.

Where there is sadness, joy.

-St Frances

 

We, Angels and Mortals, Believers and Nonbelievers,
Look heavenward and speak the word aloud.
Peace.

We look at our world and speak the word aloud.
Peace.

We look at each other, then into ourselves,
And we say without shyness or apology or hesitation:

Peace, My Brother.
Peace, My Sister.
Peace, My Soul

~Maya Angelou 

Wishing you a peace filled Christmas.

~liz Sorensen Wessel

Days 355-356 - Solstice & Reverie

"...healing and creativity are different pieces of a single picture...The entrance, or key, to all these inner processes...is a particular state of consciousness called reverie." -Elmer Green, Menninger Foundation

   What causes the tectonic plates of our hearts to shift in ways that open us to healing or to bursts of creativity? The true caregivers among us know that some process is required.

   Mother Theresa relied on prayer. In this state, she reports moments of reverie that brought her into the kind of dreamlike state that allowed her to meet God.

   Yet, she also knew that her searing encounters with the poorest of the poor could crack open a pathway for Love to travel through her and into the hearts of lepers, the dying and the starving children haunting the back alleys of Calcutta.

   Artists often use strange tricks to kick-start their creativity. Charles Dickens, author of countless classics (including, of course, A Christmas Carol) thinking that magnetic forces helped him to create, turned his bed to the north.

   Beethoven poured cold water over his head, believing it stimulated his brain.

   But, all artists understand that it is reverie that they can open them to Beauty's energy where they can discover and begin to incubate the ideas that will touch our souls.

   How do you, as a caregiver, prepare yourself to be a healer each day?

   Any occasion can provide a bridge across which we can walk from ennui to Beauty.

   Those who measure dawn and darkness tell us that the shortest day of the year (or longest night) arrives with the Winter Solstice (December 21).  The ancients (and some contemporaries) viewed this longest night as something to be either celebrated or feared.

   Yet, the long night can symbolize the state we occupy when we grapple with suffering. As caregivers, we can consult our own chapters of pain in order to find the compassion the ill need from us.

   The sages among us engage reverie in their journey to healing and to Beauty. Inside this reverie they can imagine what Love looks like and translate it into this world for us to appreciate (or ignore.)

   We can celebrate the healers and the artists. And we can learn from them how we may, each short day and long night, find our way into the light.

-Erie Chapman

Photographs: "Tia in Reverie" and "Full Moon # 1" copyright erie chapman 2012

Days 352-354 - "The Rich Running Day" - Poems As Pictures

 

"I love the rich running day [and]...The real poems, (what we call poems being merely pictures,)...This poem drooping shy that I always carry and that all men carry." - Walt Whitman 

     So many of us shy away from poems. I like to carry them around in a pocket of memory so that in any given "now" I can take them out as pictures that revive the soul.

   What poems do you carry with you - not printed on paper but written on your heart?

   There are poems "drooping shy" that live hidden in all of us. We may try to speak the but we can't. For our deepest poem is always beyond the linear world of pictures or music.

   What is the poem that recites itself during your long hours of caregiving? Is it a poem of grieving? A sonnet of celebration? An image of a healing moment?

   Just knowing that my life carries a poem or picture or song is itself healing for me. 

   The poem of our smiles is not limited to our mouth or eyes. When we smile, our whole body smiles. When we cry, our whole body grieves.

   It's not only the faces of the saddened in Newtown, Connecticut that cry. Their entire bodies bend in grief.

   This day, as well, children will die amid bombs in Syria and starvation in the Congo and disease in Bangladesh.

   After we, as caregivers, give thanks that it is not our children that are among the dead can we hold enough Love for the suffering who are not our children? Can we love them as if they were "ours?" 

    The weight of the world's suffering is too much for any of us to hold. The lilt of the world's highest joy may feel beyond our reach.

   What can we do?

   Every moment that we embrace "the rich running day" we are healed.

-Erie Chapman   

Photograph: "Paddling the Harpeth" copyright erie chapman 2011

Days 350-351 This Art

(Please note: Today's GUEST ESSAY was submitted by Artist, Maria Doglio).

Painting, "Heart in Tree" ~ by Maria Doglio

 

“In your light I learn how to love.  In your beauty, how to make poems. 

You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you,

but sometimes I do,

and that sight becomes this art.”

                                                                                                          - Rumi

Visualize a ray of Loving Light and let it radiate and touch anything, and any being around you:

I AM LOVING LIGHT, I AM LOVING LIGHT, I AM LOVING LIGHT.

I ACCEPT THE LOVING LIGHT IN EACH AND EVERY CELL OF MY BEING. I RADIATE THE LOVING LIGHT ALL AROUND ME.

 I LOVE THE LOVING LIGHT. I AM THE LOVING LIGHT.

 

PEACE ~ ONENESS ~ LOVE TO ALL  

                                                                                                                                       ~Maria Doglio

Thank you, Maria for sharing your radiant Light with us!

Days 348-349 - Are We Dreaming?

"Maybe the things I perceive, the...flowing waters,/ the skies of day and night, colors densities, forms, maybe these are (as doubtless they are) only apparitions,/ and the real something has yet to be known."   -Walt Whitman  (1819-1892)

   "You won't remember a thing," the anesthesiologist says as he puts his patient to sleep. But, what will happen inside the patient's dream world as surgeons work to repair his outer body?

   Does it matter to know whether life itself (as Plato said) is all a dream? What is the practical value to such awareness?

   Since we have no control (except for so-called "lucid dreaming") in our asleep state, perhaps this would mean that our management of our awake state is an illusion.

   Religious and spiritual guides tell us to "yield" to a higher power. If everything is a dream, why not get out of the way and let this other energy guide us?

   We say it is because we can't let go. We have to make choices across our conscious lives, don't we?

   The only good choice we have in this world is to let our everyday decisions be guided by Love's energy instead of letting Fear's energy shadow our days. 

   But how do we do this when we are drugged? States of consciousness are what caregivers deal with all the time. If we are "conscious" of our pain, we do, of course, want to relieve it. So we run from the nightmares of our hardest pains toward the soft lap of joy.

   Knowing that our life may be all a dream can be very helpful. Why fight the waves? Let our dreams take us where they may, even if the destination appears dark.

   Sometimes, fighting the dark means doubling our pain. Amid agony, what is wiser: to tense with pain or to relax by using the phrase we sometimes repeat to ourselves - "it will pass."

   Time is a trick. But, the biggest trick of all may be reality.

-Rev. Erie Chapman

Photographs: "Ocean Dreams #2"; Banner - "Wash Cloth" - both copyright erie chapman 2012

Days 345-347 - From Another Country - The Golden Thread We Inherit

   Anxious to see my newly-born grandson (in 2010) but separated by the distance between Nashville and Boston, I wrote him a letter-poem. Many years from now, I hope he will sense the passion I felt for him from the moment of his birth.

   The photograph (although not of my daughter & grandsom) reflects the deep-life link between mother and baby. There are other bonds that matter. 

   Both poem & photograph speak to the Golden Thread that weaves through all of us - strands woven by our ancestors into a fabric handed to us at our births. 

   The Golden Thread is the first of the three core concepts of Radical Loving Care. Each day every caregiver holds the ancient strand of healing in his or her hands.

   It is a sacred trust. We can illuminate the thread or we can break it.

   As for the poem, it is offered as a tribute to our fellowship as Lovers of healing.

To my grandson, newly born, from your Grandfather Chapman – June, 2010

 In last light cardinals & wrens evensong each other home to night’s nest. Only the mockingbird remains.

 You live in another country. Mountains, the layers of cities, the long span of age, the worries of others separate you from me.

 Clear as I speak, you cannot hear me. Hard as you cry, I cannot feed you. Hard as I cry you cannot hear my need for you.

 Do you miss the comfort of your mother’s within: the whisper of voices outside, the muffled bells of love?

 New to the world, you test earth’s air with fresh arms, beginner’s legs, the power of your lungs.

 We share a single strand. It weaves through your blood with other threads that tint your skin, texture your bones, focus the color of your eyes, signal our lifelong bond.

 We are blood brothers.

 From another country, my father wants to know you. His father wants to know you. These men greet you through ether’s mist.  

  I want to hold you amid the sinew of this world.

  How do you hear the colors of the day? What flows through your heart when you find your mother’s skin, your father’s arms, the curious touch of your sister’s fingers, or hear your grandmother’s sighs?

 When will I see the curve of your shoulders, the dark of your eyes, the silk of your hair? When will I hear the timbre of your voice & feel the heft of your body as it claims its part of the world?

 I tire of longing. I am done with the absence of ecstasy.

 Son of my daughter, grandson of my wife, child of the earth, I reach, now, across the mountains, the cities, the distance of our ages. I lift you to the clouds to glimpse the raw, unlived chapters of your life.

 May I see you before I leave? May I hear your voice before you begin to sort out the world’s words?

 -Erie Chapman

Photograph: Julie & Ryder 2010 copyright erie chapman 2012. 

Days 343-344 A Light Shines - A Guest Essay

  [Please note: Today's GUEST ESSAY was submitted by Bobbye R. Terry Executive Director, Odyssey Hospice and represents her views]

   One of my favorite verses in the Bible is found in Isaiah 61:1, the beginning verse of The Year of the LORD’s Favor: The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners,…

   What better time to share this than at the beginning of the Christmas season.

   This section of Isaiah is a mission statement proclaimed by an unknown prophet to bring about restoration to God’s people, to renew and vindicate them so they can resume active roles as witness to God. Jesus later read this scripture in the Synagogue at Nazareth (Luke 4:18-19.) To me he was telling his people that it was and still is what they are to do: Restore those who have been besieged by the tyranny of life.

    No matter what your faith may be,  if you are a hospice worker - someone who has chosen to serve the dying - you are fulfilling a similar mission. The people we serve, regardless of their position in society or ability to pay, have been attacked by an enemy, one that often stalks its prey - sometimes undetected for a long time until it is discovered through symptoms now out of control.

    Terminal illness claims its victims, stealing everything they have: their possessions, their familial and friendship ties, their memories, their health and, ultimately, their lives. We, as clinicians do the best we can to comfort and ease the physical pain of final illness. Support staff is there to support those in the throes of complicated emotional and social dysfunction and depression. They also assist with the sometimes challenging task of shoring up self-esteem.

   Yet, perhaps the largest commitement is focused on the spiritual care and bereavement coordinators, our "soul surgeons", who must bring hope to those who have lost it. The soul surgeons seek to explain a concept that is difficult for all of us:  What is life beyond this realm?

   Sometimes the dying receive that message, resting comfortably with the knowledge they can surrender to a higher power. Some, with little faith on which to rely, may not accept the calm finality of physical life and, like fish beached, have no air to breathe. They fight against the inevitability of organ failure, believing that is all there is, a finality with no light at the end of the tunnel.

   Yet, all you have to do to know otherwise is spend some time in our inpatient unit with those actively dying, feel the presence of more than human beings occupying the space, watch what happens within those walls when a patient dies at peace. 

   If we have done our jobs well, light will shine into the hearts that are gathered there. And once a small ray of light shines, even into a pitch black room, darkness must abandon the space.

~Bobbye Terry

Thanks to Bobbye Terry for submitting today's guest essay.

Days 338-342 - Profiles of Radical Loving Care

   The woman in the photograph at left is not posing for my camera. Instead, she is playing the Second Movement of the Beethoven Piano Concerto #5. 

   She is an image of Beauty married to the music of Beauty. Her lyrical performance is part of my new film, "Alex Dreaming," a movie made to celebrate as many shades of life as I could direct onto the screen. 

   The documentary "Sacred Work" (www.amazon.com)  which I made ten years ago, portrays Beauty in a different way.

   The film is suffused with images of caregiving: New-born triplets lifted into the world, a man terminally ill with cancer saying goodbye to this world, a critically sick patient groaning in agony amid the wires, beeps and tubes that populate intensive care units.

   The Beauty in images of pain appears in Sacred Encounters where Love meets need.

   The triplets are delivered by doctors and nurses who seem as happy as the new mother. One of the nurses caring for the dying patient climbs into bed with him and lets him hug her. Another nurse sheds tears as she discusses her patient's imminent death.

   Listening to the heartbreaking moans of the intensive care patient are two nurses, one on either side of the bed. One adjusts I.V.s and struggles to bring physical comfort. The other holds his hand and intones a line that becomes a mantra. "It's okay. It's okay. It's okay." 

   Love blooms in the mysterious heart of the miraculous. She does not move by increments. No measuring stick can calculate or calibrate her energy.

   Trying to measure Love is like attempting to snap a picture of God. 

   Still, we can see Love at work when caregivers bring to the bedside of the suffering the skills to cure and the compassion that brings light into darkness.

   The pianist does the same.

   They are, each of them, profiles of Radical Loving Care.

-Erie Chapman

Photograph: "Kelsi Playing Beethoven" copyright erie chapman 2012

Days 336-337 Countless Masks Falling

I look out into a field of stark, leafless trees wrapped up in a ghostly fog of grey.

Their dark limbs silhouette tributaries of black lace, entwined in a colorless sky.

How bare and vulnerable without their protective garb, their countless masks falling into this God given moment.

This past week Mother Earth has been watering the plants and trees with life giving nourishment. Yet, there is an unsettling northern wind blowing though the inner landscape of my mind. When I touch the edges of my resistance, an anxiety floods my senses and I want to bolt. Run fast and free until these feelings take wing. Or, maybe pick up a pen and let all my fears pour out on paper in a swirling torrent until the last drop wears me out in healthy fatigue. Lest, I pull back from life and hide in a safe but lifeless cocoon of my making.

Or, can I turn... right here and now to breathe in this question; can I love in this moment, even my anxiety and fear?

Funny, but suddenly I feel my energy shifting as this storm recedes back out to sea.

~liz Sorensen Wessel

 Ireland 2010, Photo by ~liz