Journal of Sacred Work

Days 123-124 No Where to Go

Note: Reflection by Liz Sorensen Wessel. Each morning on my drive to work I see the tents along the river bank and I wonder, who are these people and what are their stories? It is startling to see a river of blue tarps and makeshift tents that have begun to wind along the embankment stretching out for miles. What is happening? There are so many people living out on the streets. The situation has become increasingly harder to ignore.

This evening, I heard a young man speak; Mohammad Ali. Once homeless himself, this lawyer is a fiercely passionate advocate for the plight of those who are homeless.  It is easy to judge and label those who are nameless but Mohammad cautions that people can not be separated into worthy or unworthy.

People who do not have a roof over their head are criminalized. It is illegal to sleep on the street. We may think people become homeless due to drugs or alcohol.  Yet, the longer a person is on the street the more difficult survival becomes and this can be the reason people turn to drugs or alcohol.  Last year, over 200 homeless people died in our county and the death rate has dramatically increased over the past few years. 

Tonight our community gathered to learn more, seek solutions and to offer a helping hand. We were encouraged to realize that collaborative efforts and joining forces can create the momentum for change. Before dealing with difficult life challenges, people must have their basic human needs met. “Housing First” is a proven program that ends homelessness by quickly providing permanent housing and support services.

A participant spoke with emotion as she shared her heart, “When I lie in my nice comfortable bed at night and I think of all the people who are out in the cold without adequate shelter and I find it is almost more that I can bear. I work in the prison ministry and the people I meet are just like me; they are no different. Yet, it seems that our society has lost its humanity. "

It is up to all of us to help reclaim it. There but for the grace of God go you and me.

Liz Sorensen Wessel

Days 117-122 - 11 Truths About Imagination

    In the 19th century John Keats wrote, "I am certain of nothing but the Holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of Imagination."

   John O'Donohue wrote in the 20th, "The imagination is like a lantern. It illuminates the inner landscapes of our life... When our eyes are graced with wonder, the world reveals its wonders to us."

   Both these geniuses treasure imagination. So what is it?

   I consulted a natural 21st century expert. "It's like dreaming but not exactly because you are awake," my six-year old grandson Linus informed me. 

   To illustrate, he & his sister equipped a fairy with a star-tipped magic wand & planted her amid pansies. Nothing like discovering a fairy in a flowerbed to trigger daydreaming.

   In addition to his lantern analogy O'Donohue lists 10 more truths about imagination:

1) It retains the grace of innocence.

2) It retains a passion for freedom.

3) It keeps the heart young.

4) It awakens the wildness of the heart.

5) It has no patience with repetition.

6) It offers wholeness - helping keep heart & head in balance.

7) The imagination offers revelation.

8) It works through suggestion, not description.

9) It has a deep sense of irony.

10) The imagination creates a pathway of reverence for the visitations of beauty. 

   Imagining can be as difficult for us as it is easy for children. The clash of dreams with brutal realities can shut our pathway to this gift. 

   It takes work & courage to awaken wildness in this ordered world - to create unusual things in a society that favors the predictable. 

   Truly experiencing a work of art means entering it. After that we, like the woman in the photograph, can walk wherever we wish through the landscape of the artist's offering.

   Our imagination may well take us beyond anything the artist intended. Every artist hopes for that.

-Erie Chapman

Photographs by Erie

Days 115-116 The Soul of a Mountain

Note: Excerpt from the writing of David Whyte " The World Also Has a Soul."    

"The first step to preserving the soul in our individual lives is to admit that the world has a soul also, and is somehow participating with us in our work and destiny.

That there is a sacred otherness to the world which is breathtakingly helpful simply because it is not us; it is not defined by our human worries and preoccupations, and it never will be.

‘I should be content
to look at a mountain
for what it is
and not as a comment of my life’

by- David Ignatow

Taking the first vulnerable steps into our own experience, no matter how small or hidden at the beginning, opens us to a more generous life, where what we have to give figures as largely as what we receive.

We stop trying to draw infinitely from a finite world and begin to learn how little is necessary to live a life that honors the soul of the world."

Watercolor by Liz Sorensen Wessel

To read David Whyte's entire article go to: http://www.awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=1000

Days 109-114 - Between Easters: Love & The Harrowing of Hell

   "When you are that sick you fall into real hell. It's just you & God," she told me years ago.

   The torture of twin cancers had horse-whipped my dear friend Rhonda Swanson into an agonizing vortex only the empathetic appreciate. Hell's searing quicksands suck down each of us during some moments of existence.

   Who appears amid our most profound loneliness?

   Scripture records an under-appreciated day on the Christian calendar. Sandwiched between Good Friday & Easter, Holy Saturday marks the Harrowing of Hell when Jesus descended to save "the righteous." He was newly qualified to understand suffering.

   On the cross Jesus (correctly portrayed crucified naked) underwent physical agony & the profound isolation of God's abandonment. Freed from these pains and exquisitely mindful of them he descended to save "the righteous." 

   The story's power makes one wonder why it does not garner more attention. 

    Jesus visited a place caregivers see every day. Earth's hells are the asylums of the sick & wounded. There, caregivers descend to rescue us from our suffering. 

    Rhonda's faith in caregivers below & above brought cures to her body & healed her spirit. Today, instead of hiding from her time of torture she lets it enrich the compassion she offers others in the same hospital where once she lay dying.

   Rhonda Swanson lives love, not fear. She remembers what she wanted from others during her pain so she never asks intrusive questions or utters nonsense like, "I understand."

   Instead, she offers her quiet presence. And, sometimes, her tears. 

-Reverend Erie Chapman  

Days 107-108 Easter Blessing

  By the late John O' Donohue

 “On this Easter, let us look again at the lives we have been so generously given and let us let fall away the useless baggage that we carry – old pains, old habits, old ways of seeing and feeling – and let us have the courage to begin again. Life is very short, and we are no sooner here than it is time to depart again, and we should use to the full the time that we still have. 

We don’t realize all the good we can do. A kind, encouraging word or helping hand can bring many a person through dark valleys in their lives. We weren’t put here to make money or to acquire status or reputation. We were sent here to search for the light of Easter in our hearts, and when we find it we are meant to give it away generously. The dawn that is rising this Easter morning is a gift to our hearts and we are meant to celebrate it and to carry away from this holy, ancient place the gifts of healing and light and the courage of a new beginning.” 

John O’Donohue 
Dawn Mass Reflections at Corcomroe Abbey 

Shared by Liz Sorensen Wessel

Photo, Ireland 2011 by ~liz

 

 

Days 102-106 - Symbols of Love

   Caregivers engage countless ways to relate to each other as well as to patients. Words are only one bridge. Symbols speak eloquently depending on how they are offered, shared & interpreted. 

   This Gulf Coast setting was beautiful before I photographed it. The small tree at the horizon drew me to this point of view - not standing at the beach but back far enough to include more.   

   The original photograph is not the actual sunset, of course. The camera is a filter that offers a representation of what I saw. 

   Adding fire, hawk, stained glass & misplaced waves creates a different experience. Every element & the image as a whole has the meaning we choose for it. 

   Stained glass symbolize sacredness. We can worship here as deeply as in a formal church.

   Symbology impacts caregiving. Pictures of loving caregivers lining a hospital's halls support both compassionate cultures & the confidence of patients. A cross, Star of David or the non-denominational symbols of Radical Loving Care reinforce loving missions.

   Joseph Campbell defined a symbol as "an energy evoking and directing agent." Hospitals & hospices signal anxiety. The right symbols help Compassion defeat Fear opening the door to healing.

-Erie Chapman

Composite photograph created by erie

Days 100-101: Kindness

"No act of kindness no matter how small...is ever wasted." -Aesop

An empathetic gesture, a word of caring or a random act of kindness can awaken one's heart. These experiences evoke a metamorphosis of sorts. Yet it is a very private experience, a tenderness that is often not allowed to surface because we avoid touching upon the fragile nature of our being. 

When we show up with our full presence a mutual trust emerges that invites safe expression or an unburdening of what we need to lay down. A sacredness that extends beyond religious or secular belief into an intimacy that forges a bond of human connection and caring. 

Excerpt from Naomi Shihab Nye's poem,  "Kindness"

"Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. 
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
     purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend."

Self care and spiritual practices are necessary to balance the continual outpouring of self that accompanies caregiving as one turns towards, rather than away from suffering.  Caregivers are adept at giving but often less comfortable in receiving care. In relationship we discover the reciprocal nature & joy in caregiving. 
It helps to remember that fear is transformed by love.

Recently, I have been noticing how small acts of kindness unfold a thousand times a day and how surprised I am by the intensity of emotion; tears well up so easily as we soften.

The wisdom in A Course in Miracles, reveals;

 There is no order of difficulty in miracles.
One is not "harder" or "bigger" than another.
They are all the same.
All expressions of love are maximal.

Liz Sorensen Wessel
Art image by Liz

Days 94-99 - "Just a bunch of rocks"

    A friend's wife was sharing photographs of coastal formations along the Baja. "What a fine eye you have," I said.

   "Just a bunch of rocks & sand," her husband piped up. 

   Imagine an archeologist an artist & a child on this beach. Each sees the identical scene differently. We may guess what the first two see. The child is harder to peg.

   If I say, "That view is awesome," I am summarizing complex phenomena with trite simplicity. Adjectives like awesome were created to describe life's most majestic experiences. Now the word is a lazy person's crutch.  

   What if I say, "That sky is the ocean's cathedral ceiling & the sea is the sky's magic carpet." What if I ask, "What is the ocean's scent? How does the sand feel? What is the sea's song?"

   We learn little from one who says, "Europe was great." Good storytelling awakens life. 

   In a hurry? Which summary says more, "I enjoyed the ocean's voice" or, "Everything was awesome"? 

   Radiologist, nurse & poet stand by a cancer patient's bed. One wonders about tumor location, one vital signs, the last conjures words that describe pain. The sick need all three & more. 

   Radical Loving Care informs sense & soul. Those who label a patient "the leukemic" can only perform repairs.  Richer language ennobles listener and speaker. It helps transform caregivers from mechanics to healers. 

-Erie Chapman

Photograph by R. O'Keefe

Days 92-93 Hope

  

What gives you hope?

 

Is it the dawning of a new day or the twilight of stars first twinklings?

 

A stranger's smile as you glimpse each other's soul in passing or quiet moments of solitude?

 

What gives me hope is seeing the Light of Love in the eyes in every person I meet.

 

 

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

 

Emily Dickinson, 

  

Excerpt from her poem, “Hope” is the thing with feathers - (314)

 

 Art by Liz