Journal of Sacred Work

Days 31 & 32 - Becoming a Carelover

     

"The sign of the poet, then, is that by passion he enters into life more than other men. That is his gift - the power to live." - George Edward Woodberry

     How do we find our "power to live." How do we become care lovers rather than job haters? How do we move from gray world to bright hope?

    The answer at the core of caregiver’s woes comes from Dr. Victor Frankl in his landmark book, “Man’s Search for Meaning.” Frankl details how the concentration camp victims who survived were fueled by a belief that their life had meaning. Woven into that meaning was an enduring hope.

     Watching the horror unfold around him, Frankl noticed that death came more rapidly to those who uttered one three-word phrase, “I give up.”

     In the same recovery room with the spiritually flat-lined nurse previously described was another veteran caregiver whose joy was striking. I noticed immediately that she was speaking to her unconscious patient as she turned him, adjusted his tubes and stroked his face. I knew, also, that this patient would remember nothing of this nurse’s compassionate behavior.

     “How do you keep up your energy in this job?” I asked.

     “It’s not a job,” she answered. “This is my calling.”

     For the tired nurse, it’s just a job. For the tired nurse, the patient before her is “just a body.” For the tired nurse, every task is a routine.

     So long as the nurse sees her patient as a body, she will see her work as someone who “cares for bodies.”

     For the energized nurse, her work is a calling. For the energized nurse, the patient before her is a human being in an altered state. For the energized nurse, every action is done to give the patient the best experience possible in that moment.

     So long as the energized nurse sees her patient as a person in an altered state, she will see define her calling as caring for sick people who need her help.

     Love brings enormous results. Fear and boredom paralyze our days.

     Can the tired nurse change? Only if she is supported by a culture of care and trained to see her work in new ways.

     This is the work of Radical Loving Care – to develop cultures where caregiving is an honor, not a chore; to awaken everyone in that culture to new ways of seeing people in patient gowns, to support caregivers in understanding that all of their work is sacred.

     Radical Loving Care brings a new dawn into the lives of harried caregivers. It brings renewed meaning. It brings hope.

-Erie Chapman

[Excerpted from the forthcoming book, Inside Radical Loving Care.]

Photograph copyright erie chapman 2013

Days 28-30 - Living Love Not Fear

 

   

Caregiving, with its endless demands, holds a hidden risk. Protocols can be monotonous. Soon, spiritual atrophy may settle in. Light fades and we enter a gray life that sits right on the edge of shadows.

      “Here comes another body,” I heard a recovery nurse say one morning as I did my rounds through her area. Indeed, that’s what the unconscious patient looked like. Deprived of everyday reality by anesthetics, the patient appeared almost comatose.

      I watched this nurse perform her tasks as matter-of-factly as if she were cooking a hamburger. Her eyes were dead as a subway rider. Her tone was flat. Since I have never been a first line caregiver, I can only sympathize with her challenges.  

      “How long have you been a recovery nurse,” I asked.

      “Twenty years,” she responded with a sense of fatigue rather than energy.

      “Have you ever thought about working in another area?”

      “Not any more,” she answered. “I’m pretty much stuck here.”

     At the age of forty-three, she could be “stuck” in that area for another twenty-two years. Already, she may be one who counts the minutes until her shift ends, the days until the weekend, the months until retirement.

     It’s easy to see why anyone for whom work has become a chore might be tired. Amid daily fatigue, generating the energy to reignite your soul with new approaches may seem both too hard and too complicated.

     My heart breaks for the millions of caregivers who have fallen into this trap. What may have seemed like an exciting challenge in its dawning has become Chinese Water Torture.

     Equally tragic are caregivers who live in fear. Their daily lives feel threatened by anxiety over the risk of mistakes and over worry that the boss will punish them or, worse, fire them. Crossfire from fellow caregivers may also drain hope.

     Even at young ages, change can be difficult. Life grabs hold of us rapidly teaching its basic lessons: seek pleasure, avoid pain, cultivate comfort, be happy, “don’t rock the boat.”

     The older we become, the longer we have been in the same job, the more challenging change becomes. For those who have chosen careers in caregiving, spiritual atrophy may begin as early as five years into the work.

     Caregiving roles teach protocols. Protocols swiftly become routines. Routines can soon seem boring.

     “Christ what are patterns for?” Edna Saint Vincent Millay wrote in a poem expressing her horror of the killing in World War I.

     Daily patterns can silence our soul’s strength. Patterned thinking can become the enemy of the kind of fresh living that keeps compassion alive. Rote behavior can lead us to do some jobs with only ten percent of our attention.

     “He who has a why can bear almost any how," Victor Frankl wrote in “Man’s Search for Meaning.”  It is our "why" that gives us the will to live against life's most crushing setbacks. 

    That is the reason to change. If we are "dying" in our work and in our everyday lives, we need to find a new "why."

     How do we become care lovers rather than care haters?

     Thursday's Journal offers some answers.

-Erie Chapman

Photograph - "Gray Pavement" copyright erie chapman 2012

[The above article is excerpted from the forthcoming book, Inside Radical Loving Care]

Days 26-27 If Only for an Instant

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

  We have a responsibility to ourselves and others to attend to the barriers that prevent us from being a loving, positive force in our little pocket of the universe.  I am beginning to realize that my scars will always be a part of me but I also know that I am/we are much more than our woundings.

 I’ve heard it said that the people in our lives who stir up our deepest wounds are our greatest teachers because they mirror back to us the places where we are stuck. I believe that our paths cross for a reason. Perhaps, we harbor fears of abandonment, or think we are not good enough or worthy enough, or feel unlovable.  When our vulnerability is unmasked, it can serve as a catalyst for healing if we are willing to pause, surrender and begin to see. Our friends unknowingly help us see what needs our attention.  We can begin to examine our difficulties in the safety of kindness, asking for Love's guidance, while trusting in our basic goodness.

Still, I find it very hard to offer my full presence when intense feelings arise.  My lens through which I see gets distorted by old scars. What I find sad is the suffering I can create for myself and those I love. Therefore, I am highly motivated to release futile patterns or as Einstein’s coined it, delusions of separateness.

"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He/she experiences himself, his/her thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.

This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security". -Albert Einstein 

Forgiveness is essential in healing. According to Tara Brach, forgiveness is about letting go of whatever prevents us from keeping our heart open. It can mean letting go of resentments, anger, blame, guilt or feeling like a victim.

This morning, I opened my e-mail and read this synchronous message by Fr. Richard Rohr, "When we forgive, we have to let go of our own feelings, our own ego, our own offended identity, and find our identity at a completely different level—the divine level. I even wonder if it is possible to know God at all—outside of the mystery of forgiveness (Luke 1:77)."

We are spiritual beings that are part of something much bigger than our individual selves.  I believe our purpose in life is to discover our belonging in one another. My aspiration is to heal all the barriers that prevent this.  Recently, an epiphany jolted me like lightening, when I shifted the focus of my lens to that of another; I felt a deep sense of compassion expanding in my chest.   

We live, we love, we leave; there is tremendous beauty, joy and sadness in the fleeting nature of life. Each day unfolds in birth, death and resurrection until all that is left is our true essence; Love.

When I open my eyes in this moment of surrender, my heart unfolds in a tenderness that is almost too much to bear.

“Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?” -Henry David Thoreau

~liz Sorensen Wessel

Mandala by ~liz

Tara Brach offers free podcast teachings and guided meditations that I find extremely helpful and healing.  If interested in learning more I invite you go to: http://tarabrach.com/audioarchives2012.html

 

Days 21-25 - What is Radical Loving Care?

[Note: the following essay is excerpted from the soon-to-be-released book, Inside Radical Loving Care.]

 
           "The unarmed truth." That's one of the phrases Martin Luther King used to describe the power of truth grounded in Love. Truth is its own protection.

             Radical Loving Care is God’s Love expressed in the caregiving world. It means living Love, not fear. It is radical because it is exceptional and therefore rare. Only the finest caregivers can sustain it.

             The biggest distinction between you and machines is Love. Computers can now program robots to do, or potentially do, almost everything a human can do except for to Love.

             Doesn’t this tell us that we should increase our focus on developing compassion to balance our obsessive focus on task performance?

The Golden Thread

             Caregivers can carry the Golden Thread of healing in their hands or they can break it. 

             Although Love is an eternal energy, it's expression in the world requires that it flow through our earthbound selves. Like a garden it requires constant tending. Every gardner knows that there is never a moment when the plants can be ignored, when he or she can say, "I have nurtured the garden to Beauty and now my work is done."

             Radical Loving Care, once developed, requires constant support and renewal. It is the gift given by every person who walks in the footprints of the Good Samaritan. It lives in the courage of the caregiver who travels the rocky ground and then reaches into the blood of fear to try and heal a wounded heart.

Our Most Sacred Place

             The most sacred place within us is also the most secret. It is the hidden chamber of our pain.  Our scars are stirred when we encounter the agony of another.

             Many run from this darkness. Caregivers cannot.

             We need to enter the other's darkness in order to help them find healing. There is a hidden reward for this. It comes in the joy that floods your heart when you are able to relieve another’s suffering.

             It is up to you to open your heart to this greatest of all powers. The door to this gift is covered with so many warnings that most leave it shut. It requires courage to open it and to keep it open because of the struggle you undergo to understand that healing comes from within.

             Training teaches the opposite. It tells us that once we have skill we can cure. We practice our skill. Lo and behold, some people are cured. Yet, sensitive caregivers quickly discover that skill can heal injured skin but not a wounded heart.

              Only a loving heart can heal a scarred one.

              To create art our heart needs to hold the hand of skill. To heal requires an artist’s passion.

              The power to create, to love and to heal lives in all of us. It awaits awakening.

              Competence enters through one door. Compassion enters the same room through another. When the two are married in a sacred encounter, Radical Loving Care is born.

             To mend damaged hearts, surgeons have to force their way into our bodies using both saws and scalpels. They cut to cure.

             Compassion’s energy will not appear through force or command. It waits to be invited and will only enter a heart that is open.

             Let Love open your heart.

-Erie Chapman

Special thanks to Liz Wessel for creating the beautiful image that describes the essence of Radical Loving Care.

Days 19-20 "Above All, Trust"...

“God is not remote from us. He is at the point of my pen, my (pick) shovel, my paint brush, my (sewing) needle - and my heart and thoughts.” -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

                                                                                 -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

This reflection is dedicated to the most cherished, brave souls who have the courage to do what they love and risk disappointment in pursuit of living out their dreams. Oh how I admire you!

Contributed by ~liz Sorensen Wessel

Polyprint watercolor created by ~liz

Days 14-18 - How Stories Transform Our Lives & Our Culture

[Note: The following essay is excepted from my forthcoming book, Inside Radical Loving Care]

“In the telling of their stories, strangers befriend not only their host but also their own past.” – Henry Nouwen

 
           “His mother didn’t want him,” the internationally renown spoken word artist Minton Sparks told me as I photographed her for an album cover (left.) She was describing the early twentieth century story of a great aunt and her unborn baby.

                “The mother bound her body as tight as she could. Maybe, she thought the binding would suffocate the baby.”

             Minton’s story brought two departed souls to life. I saw one struggling to enter the world, the other trying desperately to slam the door on him.

             In spite of the mother’s efforts, the baby was born - his body so twisted that he was crippled for life.

              But, his spirit flew arrow-straight.

             “He raised himself up from poverty to become a doctor,” Minton told me. “Then he became Dean of The Arkansas University College of Medicine.

             A baby whose entry was dreaded grew to become a healing caregiver.

             What does it mean to tell a story the way Minton does? Stories told well hold a different power than those told in ordinary ways.

             If we say, “This is about a crippled baby who became a doctor,” we have told the facts, but we have not created what only great storytelling can – empathy and compassion.

             These are the traits we need in healing hospitals. That is why I have asked Ms. Sparks to spread her work to the caregiving world. It is not only important that we tell our stories of caregiving but the way we tell them.

          Our truest principles are born from our stories. All the rules in the world are not as effective in culture change as are the stories we report.

             Stories are like jokes. They give us a chance to “get it” on our own rather than having someone tell us.

            If you want to move a caregiving culture from fear to Love, tell stories. Tell them every day in large meetings and small; in boardrooms and in nurse’s stations; from the podium and by the patient’s bed.

            Let stories ring out from the hearts of caregivers and patient’s alike. For it is through stories that we touch Love’s truth and expiate our fear.

 II.

             Stories, told with rich detail and raw honesty hold the power to change our lives. They signal our values. Those told in organizations do the same.

             If our only stories speak of budgets, charts and technology then how can compassion thrive?

             On the other hand, consider the impact on a story or a poem when seen in the context of one of Liz Wessel's brilliant paintings.

             When we figure out what a story means to us, we own it. When we own it, we are likely to live the truth of the story.

             Stories help us live Love, not fear. They report what we value and thus signal the care we want for our mothers. 

-Erie Chapman

Photo of Minton Sparks copyright erie chapman 2013

Days 12-13 Bennacht - A Blessing - by John O’Donohue

Bennacht — A Blessing — by John O’Donohue

On the day when
The weight deadens
On your shoulders
And you stumble,
May the clay dance
To balance you.

And when your eyes
Freeze behind
The gray window
And the ghost of loss
Gets in to you,
May a flock of colors,
Indigo, red, green
And azure blue
Come to awaken in you
A meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
In the curach of thought
And a stain of ocean
Blackens beneath you,
May there come across the waters
A path of yellow moonlight
To bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
May the clarity of light be yours,
May the fluency of the ocean be yours,
And may the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow
Wind work these words
Of love around you,
An invisible cloak
To mind your life.

Contributed by ~liz Sorensen Wessel

Mandala  by ~liz

Days 7-11 The Intersection of Compassion & Competence

 [The following column is excerpted from my new book-in-progress - Inside Radical Loving Care.]

“Wanting to alleviate pain without sharing it is like wanting to save a child from a burning house without the risk of being hurt.” – Henri Nouwen

              On a recent windless day I watched several jets accumulate cloudy tracks that intersected far up in the sky. As I raised my camera to photograph the phenomenon I thought of the people on those planes, their energies crisscrossing in their temporary communities like invisible contrails.

             It requires courage to show up for life – to find the intersection between our soul and the soul of another.  

             Beauty glows at intersections. Isn't this the appeal of the image of the Christian cross? We are drawn to the center of a naked cross, not to the edges.

             Compassion rises in waves from the ocean of Love. Her crests may generate troughs of fatigue (and sometimes fear) because compassion is the human expression of Love's eternal energy. Human energy ebbs and flows. Love is constant. 

             Many of us used to be present but it got too painful. We are always running the risk of being hurt in the course of our caregiving just as we may have been hurt elsewhere in our lives. Henri Nouwen understands this.

             “Those who do not run away from our pains but touch them with compassion bring healing and new strength,” Nouwen wrote.

             But, each of us carries scars.  Pain has taught us to be wary.

   The Santa Trick

            As children some of us showed up for Christmas until we found out there was no Santa. After that, if we showed up, we may have appeared with a new reluctance to be fully present lest we be tricked again.

             After I got “The Santa Disclosure” at about age seven I immediately wondered about God. If Santa was a fake, was God another trick played by adults? Not until I began to think of God as Love could I overcome my cynicism.

             The reason it is so important for caregivers to establish real presence with patients is that it is the only way to truly appreciate the patient’s needs. Is this difficult? Of course it is. It is worth doing only if you are genuinely interested in meeting those needs. 

 

II - The Crucial Intersection of Compassion with Competence 

             If we truly care about those in pain we will work to change how we define them. The more we imagine another as a stranger the more we may dissect that person away from our hearts as not worthy of our compassion (as if compassion were a finite quantity that might run out.)

             The challenge is that compassion requires empathy and competence calls for professional distance. Professionals are not supposed to care for members of their own families and yet it is those members for whom we want the deepest compassion. 

              In fact, I have seen professionals give spectacular care to their own children and to friends of theirs who are, in many cases, closer to them than family. So the family/professionalism dichotomy, while understandable, is false.

             The challenge of compassion is be as "tough-minded" with those we love as we are "tender-hearted." (Martin Luther King's phrase.)

   Who are We?

             “I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections,” D.H. Lawrence wrote in his poem “Healing.” “It is not [only] because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill. I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self….”

             How do caregivers reach this “deep emotional self” that has been wounded? It’s impossible to develop compassion for patients until we have first found it for ourselves.

             In the same way that caregiving requires both compassion and competence those who have found self-compassion sometimes need professional help in order to develop the self-competence to treat their own pain. 

             It is crucial that we distinguish pity from compassion. There’s a silly-sounding rhyme that describes the critical difference: “Pity stops and stares. Compassion stoops and cares.”

             Self-pity is an ugly thing and can cause depression. Compassion is beautiful and lives at the heart of our healing.

             Everyone one of us has suffered enormous personal pain. Can we develop compassion for our pain instead of pity? After that, do we have both the strength and the competence to enter the pain of another and, in so doing, relieve it?

             If this is not loving care, what is?

-Erie Chapman

Photograph, "Intersecting Trails" copyright erie chapman 2013

Days 5-6 High Flight

 

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 ever eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

— John Gillespie Magee, Jr

Note: In Loving memory of my father Philip Emil Sorensen Jan. 4, 1919 - Dec. 10, 1995

Contributed by ~liz Sorensen Wessel

Mandala by ~liz