Journal of Sacred Work

Days 86-91 - Hidden Genius

   There is a genius living in my backyard. He is this Willow Leaf Oak. He features his own brain & a trunk stronger than Goliath. Pansies adore him.  

   His hair reminds medical students of dendrites, those strange, neuron-based tendrils without which we experience no thought.

   Neurons speak to each other through dendrites. When stimulated dendrites excite or inhibit neurons. 

   What stimuli awaken intelligence? Mozart, a certified brainiac, said "Love, love, love is the soul of genius."

   It is a mistake to limit genius to the contents of the cranium. Healing lives in loving fingertips as much as it does in scalpel blades. A compassionate gaze proves that eyes can change brain chemistry as powerfully as Valium. Love is not measured in cubic centimeters or milligrams because its power is beyond measure. 

   Genius will give herself to us if we engage effort - find new ways to express ourselves so that we discover the beauty within.

   David Whyte wrote, "Poetry is often the art of overhearing yourself say things you didn't know you knew." 

   Whyte seems to tell us: If you want to excite your dendrites write a poem, a song, a story, without worrying if anyone will like it. You will discover fragments of genius hiding in your heart!"

-Erie Chapman

Surrealist photo-image by Erie

Days 84-85 Sometimes

Note: David Whyte's poetry, shared by Liz Sorensen Wessel

l

Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest

breathing
like the ones
in the old stories

who could cross
a shimmering bed of dry leaves
without a sound,

you come
to a place
whose only task

is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests

conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.

Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and

to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,

questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,

questions
that have patiently
waited for you,

questions
that have no right
to go away.

~ David Whyte ~

Excerpts from 10 Questions That Have No Right To Go Away by David Whyte 

1.  Do I know how to have real conversation? 

 “At last I was really inviting her to tell me was who she had become—not who she had been or who I wanted her to be—but who she was now” David Whyte referring to a conversation with his daughter Charlotte.

2. What can I be wholehearted about?

"The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness. You're so exhausted because you can't be wholehearted at what you're doing...because your real conversation with life is through poetry." 

3.  Am I harvesting from this year's season of life?

"A person must understand the conversation happening around them as early in the process as possible and then stay with it until it bears fruit."

4. Where is the temple of my adult aloneness?

"Gaston Bachelard, a French philosopher, said that one of the beautiful things about a home is that it is a place where you can dream about your future, and that a good home protects your dreams; it is a place where you feel sheltered enough to risk yourself in the world."

 5. Can I be quiet—even inside?

"All of our great traditions, religious, contemplative and artistic, say that you must a learn how to be alone—and have a relationship with silence. It is difficult, but it can start with just the tiniest quiet moment."

6. Am I too inflexible in my relationship to time?

"We are never one thing; we are a conversation—everything we have been, everything we are now and every possibility we could be in the future. "

7. How can I know what I am actually saying?

"Poetry is often the art of overhearing yourself say things you didn't know you knew. We need to overhear the tiny but very consequential things we say that reveal ourselves to ourselves."

8. Can I live a courageous life?

"The word "courage" comes from the old French word coeur meaning "heart." So "courage" is the measure of your heartfelt participation in the world. So it can be a lovely, merciful thing to think, "Actually, there is no path I can take without having my heart broken, so why not get on with it and stop wanting these extra-special circumstances, which stop me from doing something courageous?" 

9. How can I drink from the deep well of things as they are?

"All intimate relationships—close friendships and good marriages—are based on continued and mutual forgiveness. You will always trespass upon your friend's sensibilities at one time or another. The only question is, Will you forgive the other person? And more importantly, Will you forgive yourself?" 

10. Can I be the blessed saint that my future happiness will always remember?

"What could you do now for yourself or others that your future self would look back on and congratulate you for—something it could view with real thankfulness because the decision you made opened up the life for which, it is now eternally grateful? "

Is there a question in particular that catches your breath? Perhaps touches your heart? How might reflecting upon these questions inform your life? 

 

Butterfly photos taken by ~liz 3/2017 

To read David Whyte's complete responses: http://www.oprah.com/oprahs-lifeclass/poet-david-whytes-questions-that-have-no-right-to-go-away_1#ixzz4c7MduKnR

 

Days 79-83 - How To Be Content

   In a brief video Liz Wessel offered in the weekend Journal Dr. James Finley asks "Why are we so content being un-contented?" We deny it then realize that he is right. 

   To the millions who covet predictability & order change is anathema. To others bored by the status quo change is essential. Neither group is content. 

   Traditionalists like predictability & order. Patterns & rules frustrate iconoclasts.

   The Journal's mantra is, Live love, not fear. Discontent with your work? Consider this challenge: Offer loving care to patients for your own benefit, not just for the patient. Caregivers tell me that when they do that they feel...more content. 

   Are we the hawk soaring through color or are we the "change" printed in this black & white laundromat?

   Love tells traditionalists that change is the wind of life not Discontent's fuel. The same love calls iconoclasts to celebrate passion's energy rather than to worry that it will never be enough.  

   The hawk fought his way to the right altitude before he could ride the breeze. He seems content with both parts of his journey. 

-Erie Chapman

Photographs by Erie

Days 77-78 Infinitely More

Note: offered by Liz Sorensen Wessel “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” Marcel Proust

We are immediately disarmed by Finley’s charm and humorous recounting of his mansion metaphor. It feels good to laugh at ourselves, especially if we can relate to this story. However, Finley soon takes us deeper as he touches on that ache in our heart, that unfathomable longing, the missing piece as we encounter (or avoid) that hole at the very core of our being.

“Why”, Finley asks, “are we content with discontentment when all the while more is being given to us, infinitely more that we could ever need?”

 As we stand at the narrow pass, Finley reminds us of something so beautiful. “All that we can take with us is Love” it is the only thing that can fit through the pass to accompany us.

 According to A Course in Miracles (ACIM), “you think you have many different problems but you really only have one: your separation from God” (Love).

 So how do we reconnect with this energy of Love?  This Source of our being, the giver of our breath, the One who has loved us into being?

Many spiritual practices help us to reconnect with the “here and now”, with what is in front of us. Daily life provides us infinite opportunities to distract us from our discontent and lull us into a false sense of contentment. Artist and spiritual companion, Erie Chapman offers the medium of art to reawaken a sense of mystery and wonder. Contemplative prayer also known as mindfulness or meditation is a vital tool that can help nurture an open receptivity to that still small voice within.

The Holy Instant:  “And if I need a word to help me, He will give it to me. If I need a thought, that will He also give. And if I need but stillness and a tranquil, open mind, these are the gifts I will receive of Him. He is in charge by my request. And He will hear and answer me, because He speaks for God my Father and His holy Son.” (ACIM)

Photo: heart rock by Ann Kaiser

Days 72-76 - Is Apple The New Apple? Can Compassion Survive the Robot Age?

     Robots can mimic kindness but not compassion because they cannot experience it. Are we arrogant to think they will never be able to?

   Herb Lin, chief computer guru at the National Academies of Science, writes, "Those areas in which human compassion is important will be less changed than those where compassion is less or not important." Note that he says "less changed," not unable to be changed.

   We are too quick to claim that computers can never be programed to be creative & compassionate. If not yet, can we say this will never happen across Future's long arc?

   Alternatively, we may, like an updated version of T.V.'s Six Million Dollar Man, so technologize our bodies that we become computers. No need for doctors. We robots would just fix each other.

   What about the greatest human power, love? Robots cannot form intention. A computer can tell you it loves you. But the robot cannot shape sincerity.   

   So what? Maybe we are so in need of love we will take its counterfeit. Does not everyone want a lover who is consistently kind, uncomplaining, smart & obedient?

   Compassion expresses love to those in pain. If we become pain-free robots why would we need it?

   Technology changes every day. Love endures. 

  God sent Jesus to remind us how to be Love's carriers. Could a computer become a "perfect" Christian? Is the computer the new apple dispatched to our Eden to seduce away our most precious gift?

   Hmmm. My laptop logo is an apple with one bite already taken. 

Reverend Erie Chapman

Photoart by erie

Days 70-71 One Heart

Note: shared by Liz Sorensen Wessel

“For you must realize that earth unfolds its properties and powers in union with Heaven aloft above us, and there is one Heart, one Being, one Will, one God, all in all.” -German mystic, Jacob Boehme

Lent invites introspection and an opportunity to self examine; to make amends with ourselves and others. Everything happens in relationship.

 What I long for is respite from the frenetic chaos of lightening speed change. Perhaps this is true for you too? Can we pause long enough to read this prayer and find a few moments of stillness with a listening heart... what needs tending in your life?

Lord of laughter, as of tears,
shake me awake
and teach me to laugh at myself,
        at my black-draped solemnity,
                over my petty preoccupation with success and failure,
                        through all the hurt and adversity
 until my laughter lures me deep
        beneath the terrors without names,
                beneath the questions without answers,
                        beneath the pain without relief,
lures me deep
        to the love in me unused,
                to the strength unspent,
                            to the courage untapped,
                                     to the dream unrisked,
                                                to the beauty unexpressed,
all the way down
        to the inescapable bottom,
                to the awareness that I must get on
                    with being who I am
                            as fully as I can,
                                    as unflinchingly as I can,
                                            as accurately as I can,
which is to say,
         as gracefully
                as powerfully,
                        as faithfully
as you have created me to be.

By Ted Loder Excerpt from "Guerrillas of Grace,  Prayers for the Battle"

Photo: girl meditating Oct 2016, Burlington Vermont by ~liz
Photo:best friends reconnecting on our journey through life; New York by Rachel Mezo

Days 65-69 - Are Hospitals "Churches"?

   As a child, did you ever wonder if God lived at your church or temple? Ministers & rabbis certainly imply that if you want to sidle up to God then you better listen to their sermons.

   The "sanctuary" pictured doubles the same giant Banyan & adds a pair of stained glass windows that I transposed from a Catholic Church. Ironically, the tree in this invented image grows at the summer home of America's most famous inventor, Thomas Edison. 

   Edison's interest in the trees was not in their beauty but in whether these plants could be a source of rubber. I see these trees as sanctuaries. 

   That is how I viewed the hospitals I oversaw during forty years as a healthcare CEO. "There is no way that medical care can be limited to the body and be good medicine," Professor Stanley Hauerwas wrote in 1986. 

   Medicine trains caregivers to know "how to be present to those in pain," Hauerwas contends. Therefore, caregivers need "something very much like a church...to sustain that presence day in and day out." 

   Healing beyond curing requires tools beyond pills & scalpels. Healing thrives when caregivers treat the hospitals in which they practice their art as religiously as they would their places of worship.

-Reverend Erie Chapman

Photograph, "Double Stained #5," by Erie

Days 63-64 Let Every Ordinary

Note:shared by Liz Sorensen Wessel: The Lenten season is observed by many Christians as a time of fasting and abstinence.  I used to give  something up for Lent as a symbol of my willingness to atone. However, in this latter part of life my focus has shifted. Now, it is more about paying attention, of experiencing metanoia;  a change of heart.

An ordinary day, nothing special, 
no big events planned, nothing on the calendar, 
not going anywhere, doing anything.

Resist the temptation to think of it as dull.
Renounce the desire to be entertained.
This is a day you are needed:

to be attentive, to listen deeply,
 to give God some loving company,
to extend loving mercy to the world.

Enter the monastery of your life.
Let the whole day be prayer and praise,
a meditation on the presence of God.

Let every ordinary thing you do,
the meeting, lunch, and the dishes,
be an act of devotion, of becoming light.

Let this day be holy, a gift from God,
 and be deeply present to every bit.
Thank God that this grace is the usual thing.

By -Pastor Steve Garnaas-Holmes, unfoldinglight.net

Photo by ~liz