Journal of Sacred Work

Days 364-365 "Ring In..."

Shared by Liz Sorensen Wessel. 

Something so whimsical & light of heart as this little angel who perches within the freshness of an evergreen.

Even more extraordinary is the tradition of a living tree standing majestically in our living rooms adorned with baubles, each with a story of its own. Baby’s first Christmas, a child's handmade ornament; cherished gifting’s passed along from family & friends through the years.  Reflections of our lives & the people that we think of fondly with love.

Perhaps she captures a little bit of the magic of this season amidst the chaos, tragedies & heartache; reminding us that love shines through in every circumstance.

As this year winds down, may we go forth a little wiser, a bit kinder & with generous hospitality towards one another & especially for those unwanted aspects of ourselves that long for acceptance, love & forgiveness.

Ring Out Wild Bells by Alfred Lord Tennyson, (1809-1893)

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
 For those that here we see no more;
 Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
 And ancient forms of party strife;
 Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
  Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
 Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Photo: Christmas Angel, 2017 ~liz

Days 359-363 - Congratulations, You are Rich

   It is the best gift you can receive & the hardest to accept. It is the gift of gratitude - from you to yourself.

   You will never be paid enough for the sacrifices you make. Yet you are rich. Every professional caregiver is. Your personal bank account is flooded with the gold of meaning.

   That's an easy thing to forget after a day of helping patients while struggling under a supervisor who forgot that the leader's job is to support you. You are there to serve patients, not the boss. 

   You have helped so many. Thank yourself.

   On the day of Jesus' birth & ever after, celebrate that you are living the message Jesus taught. Every time you serve the suffering you are serving God.

   Breathe in the light that flows from every kind thing you have done. As you celebrate Jesus' birth bathe in the joy of your own.

-Reverend Erie Chapman

Photoart: "Hidden Church" - by Erie

   

Days 357-358 Love Is

Offered by Liz Sorensen Wessel

"God bless us everyone!"

(Tiny Tim, The Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens)

With Love and gratitude,

From Liz Sorensen Wessel

Merry Christmas!

Drawing by ~liz

 

 

Days 352-356 - Ghost Hospitals

   Even from a distance something looks wrong. The giant building, once the healing home for up to three hundred patients at a time, the workplace for tens of thousands of caregivers since 1883, the 271 bed Riverside Hospital of Toledo where I became President & CEO at 33 & led until 1983, is a ghost house. 

   The place is as desolate as a an abandoned mining town. If tumbleweed grew in Toledo, Ohio dead bundles of it would dance with the wind across the overgrown parking lot & rattle the once-welcoming doors.

   Riverside Toledo (unlike the thriving Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus, where I was CEO for twelve years) was never a major medical center. It served a blue collar community in an industrial city whose energy was also fading. 

  We did the best we could & Riverside thrived during my eight years there. Employee & patient satisfaction was sky high. If we did not have fame we certainly gained respect. My successors, Carroll Ashley & Scott Shook, were outstanding. No one could save a hospital in that part of town. 

   What do you do with a dying hospital? Transplant it if you can. That is how Mercy St. Anns was born in 2002.

   What do you do with a dead hospital building? The choices are always limited. What was once a complex health center is collapsing. One Toledoan wrote in 2015 that no one had bothered to clear out things like vials of blood. The online magazine Roadtrippers actually touts it to tourists because, "It is believed by former workers & visitors that some parts, like the tunnels, are haunted."

  Gloria Brown, a 36 year employee I remember, posted that the building is spooked. She hears that, "Call lights come on in empty rooms & you can hear babies crying in the OB dept." 

   Maybe, Gloria is right. As I gazed at the ruins, I heard the whispers of those I loved as family: Bruce Trumm, who changed my life when he recruited me from an incredibly unlikely place - a federal courthouse where I was a Justice Department prosecutor. He thought I would make a good leader. I turned him down twice before accepting.

   I gratefully recall the voices of Marian, Tracy, Terry, Pat, Harold, Steve, Cherie, Helen, Shirley, Jane, Mary, Jean-Guy, Eli, Sam, Zeno, Althea, Kandy, Hugh, Rita, Carole, Cindy, Rose, Marlene & hundreds more (including my sister Martha who volunteered.) These were companions not just fellow employees.  

   That is the best legacy of empty hospitals. Meaning glows for those who appreciate the days when lives were saved & the long nights when loving caregivers entered patient rooms to bring cures, compassion & kind hands to comfort the suffering. 

   The buildings do not matter much. Meaning flows from caregivers.

   Happy Holidays & special thanks to everyone who devoted their hearts & souls to helping others inside those now crumbling walls. 

-Erie Chapman

photos by Erie

Days 350-351 No Room at the Inn

 Advent reflection shared by Liz Sorensen Wessel

The meaning of Christmas can become obscured by commercialism and the whirlwind of activities that accompanies this season. We worry, about so much to  do and so little time. It can crowd out the mystery and beauty of love's unfolding. Quiet reflection reveals the deeper truths of Christmas and the relevance it holds in our lives today.

As Mary and Joseph traveled, they searched for a place to rest but there was no room at the inn. So they journeyed forth into the dark night and came to rest in a stable where  Jesus was born. Even though they were crowded out, Love found a way in.

James Finley offers a wonderful analogy between this Holy night long ago and contemporary times.  I invite you to pause for a few minutes from your busy day and listen to this incredibly beautiful Advent reflection. Discover the precious gift that awaits you.  

Advent Drawing by ~liz

Days 345-349 - Harder Truths

   "If you are going to tell people the truth, you had better make them laugh or they will kill you." Oscar Wilde

   The great Wilde (1854-1900), author of masterpieces including, The Picture of Dorian Gray & "The Importance of Being Earnest" could not make the police laugh about the truth of his homosexuality. Instead, the Judge "killed him" by imprisoning him in a way that led to his early death.

   Art often calls for telling hard truths. 

   My photographs of children or street scenes are easy truths. My pictures of nudes, even if they have hung in museums (which some have) represent hard truths.

   Since I believe the female form is the source of beauty I honor respectful portrayals, as did Amy, who would only pose for work she respected.

   In 2008 I hung this photograph in my office. A fellow executive complained. I was severely punished by the Board. 

   A favorite poem is "Love After Love" by Derek Wolcott: 

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

    Organizational living can kill our truths. It forced some of mine into hiding. No longer.

   Older & bolder, I "love again the stranger" whose truth I long ignored. For me, a certain "feast" has begun.

   Some people may not like this picture. But no educated adult should be offended because the truth of this image lies in its decency. 

-Erie Chapman

Photograph, "Amy Seated - Study #3" 2008, by Erie

Days 343-344 One Holy Night

Reflection offered by Liz Sorensen Wessel

Advent Poem by Rainer Maria Rilke

In the winter forest the wind drives
the flock of snowflakes like a shepherd,
And a fir tree senses how soon
she will be blessed with candle-light,

and strains to hear. She shelters
the white ways with her branches – ready
to resist the wind, reaching towards
the one Holy Night.

Watercolor by ~liz 

First posted in Dec 2016

Days 337-341 - Our "Pale Blue Dot"

    The incomparable Carl Sagan enchanted us in 1980 during his riveting, dreamy PBS series, "Cosmos" (Note also Neil Degrasse Tyson's contemporary series.) Close listeners to Sagan recognized that he was a poet as well as an astronomer.

   Many say the multiverse "gives us perspective." Sagan's language lifts us higher. Each of his sentences is worth savoring.

   After seeing a view of earth sent back from the Voyager Spacecraft Sagan spoke of it as "a pale blue dot" & rhapsodized: 

   "From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

   He is right, of course. We roam a barely discernible spec amid the multiverse. Yet, no matter how rich our spirituality, earth means everything to us for now. It is the stage on which we celebrate & suffer & sometimes claim boredom. Most of us hate to leave it even though we are told repeatedly that regardless of its length our life is short & departure is certain.

   Does Sagan's vision of you occupying a "mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam" inspire or diminish your belief in Radical Loving Care, of your efforts to heal those that desperately need you? 

   Yes, Time tricks us, Reality fools us most & we are brief breaths across earth's face. But this is the stage for our drama, our comedy & your healing. This is the pale blue dot on which we whisper our dreams to each other before we voyage, ourselves, to a different consciousness.  

-Erie Chapman

View of Earth from Voyager - NASA 

Days 335-336 Trusting

 Reflection by Liz Sorensen Wessel: Parting with apt affection I embraced and bid Tom farewell; his care package in hand for the long trip home. The road hugged the river’s edge, we passed the covered bridge on the left and I felt compelled to stop at the Old Jelly Mill, a hidden jewel but well known to local Vermonters.

Memories flowed upstream, of teen years, a leisure summer afternoon with Jean relaxing on natures cool granite, lulled by a gentle breeze with trees splaying dappled sunlight; engrossed in the story of “Siddhartha” by Herman Hesse.

A poignant recollection surfaced as well, of friends shouldering each other in a circle of solidarity, grieving the loss of Billy. In naked vulnerability we confronted the reality of deaths grasp on one so young. Momentarily the veil lifted and for an inkling we were keenly aware of our aliveness. 

Pleasant thoughts too, of family and dear ones who were drawn into a familiarity of old friends, accepting nature's invitation to linger awhile without agenda and to listen to her hubbub. We’d take in her exquisite contours, delighted by her cascading waterfalls and in awe of her ability to soften hard stone.

Yet, on this particular day a winters chill had set in as the temperature
dropped to below freezing. I was intrigued by the dazzling formations taking shape. Nature has a lovely way of informing our lives, lifting us towards our better selves while bringing us closer to our Source; to a knowing that is beyond words. 

Water flows in harmony with all that is, ever was and ever will be, encouraging us to trust, for we too are connected with an expansive energy born of Love.

Liz Sorensen Wessel

 

Photos taken by Liz- Vermont Nov. 2017

You can click on the photos to get a closer look at Mother Nature's splendid designs.