Journal of Sacred Work

Days 28-32 - The Invisible Caregiver & the "I" Word

While playing in a golf foursome a physician friend shared his recent diagnosis: stomach cancer. Before two of us could offer sympathy the 4th (a CEO of course) said, "I have a friend who got that diagnosis and he..." The CEO went on & on, never offering sympathy.

  Unfortunately, we have all been guilty. Without meaning harm we become chronically self-referential. Someone tells us a story & before they finish we launch our own "I" story. 

   Not every "I" user is an egomaniac. Whether we say "I" or not we quietly & quickly consider our experience when someone shares theirs.

   Alpha male leaders (including me) can be the worst "I" users.

   When CEOs are surrounded with sycophants they fall prey to the idea that one person is more important than others. 
How many times have you heard a leader call first line staff  “lower level employees?" 

   Subconsciously, leaders may begin thinking that first line caregivers matter less than the high paid executives in the C-suite.

   The first way to overcome this is: Change the language & the thinking underneath it. No ER patient seeks an executive. Patients want care only from those low paid, "lower level" caregivers.

    A second solution can become a "sacred encounter": Don a housekeeping uniform & work half a shift once a month for a year - shoulder to shoulder with these often invisible caregivers. Humility may arrive in the leader's heart as she or he walks the halls ignored because of one difference: The uniform.

   Over 35 years of engaging this practice successfully as CEO at Riverside Methodist Hospital I have recommended it to hundreds of leaders. Only one has done it.  Every CEO should note his report. "It was so humbling," he shared.

-Erie Chapman 

Days 26 27 Our Temple

The House of Belonging

I awoke
this morning
in the gold light
turning this way
and that

thinking for
a moment
it was one
day
like any other.

But
the veil had gone
from my
darkened heart
and
I thought

it must have been the quiet
candlelight
that filled my room,

it must have been
the first
easy rhythm
with which I breathed
myself to sleep,

it must have been
the prayer I said
speaking to the otherness
of the night.

And
I thought
this is the good day
you could
meet your love,

this is the black day
someone close
to you could die.

This is the day
you realize
how easily the thread
is broken
between this world
and the next

and I found myself
sitting up
in the quiet pathway
of light,

the tawny
close grained cedar
burning round
me like fire
and all the angels of this housely
heaven ascending
through the first
roof of light
the sun has made.

This is the bright home
in which I live,
this is where
I ask
my friends
to come,
this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love.

This is the temple
of my adult aloneness
and I belong
to that aloneness
as I belong to my life.

There is no house
like the house of belonging.

– David Whyte

Shared by Liz Sorensen Wessel
Watercolor by ~liz

 

Days 20-24 - Fireside Prayers

   A rare snow coats the mid-south this morning. It invited me to a party I too-rarely attend, held by a fireplace. There I soloed the still-dance of reflection as flames fluttered their rhythms.

   You are invited. Sing silent prayers for those who cannot find silence.     

 My prayers included #321012. The prison system stole his name in favor of a number. Glenn Sexton is the prisoner to whom I have ministered for 9 years. A court death-sentenced him in 2001. One might think that Death Row's row of 81 prisoners might find silence in the 23 hours a day they occupy solitary cells. Instead, noise drenches their steel & concrete cages.

   But, Glenn is used to noise. Abandoned by his parents at 6 (literally left alone for three days.) He lived in 19 homes before escaping to a house of his own: a cardboard box beside a factory. He was fifteen. Pray peace for Glenn.

   In her early teens Gwen was expelled to Nashville's streets to sell her body to predatory men. Now fifty-going-on-ninety, her body wrecked by decades of addiction, abuse & smoke, she struggles for every breath. Pray peace for Gwen

   In the hospital or hospice where you work lie your patients. What moments of silence they find may be interrupted by PA systems, noise from the nurse's station or abrupt, predawn interruptions. They too wear numbers. They too wear uniforms almost as humiliating as prison jump suits. Help them find silence. 

   Kate Gray may be unknown to you. When her next book of poems appears, buy it. If you seek light-hearted rhymes to send you skipping pick another poet. If you seek inspiration that touches your soul & transforms it choose Kate Gray.

   She begins "Incantation For the Man Outside" with Mark 1:35, "In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed." Then:

   "There is no silence like the night by the train station/ after trains leave, after moonset, after Venus moves/ in an arc across the night to a spot blocked by Earth.

   There is no silence like the brown bag, crumpled, supple,/ drenched, the doorway filled with sack and trash, the way/ the viewer's eye reduces the weather-beaten man to drink.

   There is no silence like the one in the tongue/ where words wait for tooth and breath and nerve,/ where threat floods the brain, knocking thought out.

   What silence can there be for him when all sound is threat,/  when outside is razor wind, when piss rims the nose, when inside/ is forbidden, or inside the mind, a movie plays too loud.

   The din stretches dawn to dusk. Pray./ The morning is still very dark. Pray./ Pray, make silence safe."

   Here, by the fire, I pray silence for you.

-Rev. Erie Chapman

Days 19-20 Something Precious

I was introduced to Mary Oliver's marvelous poems by Erie Chapman through the years on this Journal. I recall the first time I experienced "Wild Geese." It was life changing!

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

As the years have passed, she became a welcome friend and companion. This week, I join in the world’s sadness with the news of her death. The following is an excerpt of another profound expression of hers. A journalist shared, "She taught me how to live."

When Death Comes by Mary Oliver

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore, I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

 

Mary's light filled energy continues to grace our lives with her everlasting love.

Shared by Liz Sorensen Wessel
Watercolor by ~liz

Days 13-17 - Why Lovers Never Lose

 One of the first things boys learn is this: You must WIN.  An endless line of male sports stars have coined now-trite slogans including: "Winning isn't everything. It's the only thing." 

  Apparently, beating others was woven into male DNA from ancestors who killed to survive. Many men never evolved beyond that. 

   This high testosterone nonsense has no place in caregiving - particularly in hospitals with Christian traditions. Jesus (history's greatest "loser" along with modern followers like M.L. King & Gandhi, both jailed & assassinated) taught love, not fear.

   Nevertheless, non-profit leaders are obsessed with beating enemies. My predecessor as CEO of Baptist Hospital demonstrated that before I took over.

   "Your job is to defeat the evil empire," he told me, gesturing towards HCA's flagship hospital two blocks away. 

   Obviously, the enemy in health care is disease not the hospital down the street. Every ounce of caregiver energy must be focused on healing not hating.

   Erie Chapman Foundation trains leaders how to practice the mission of every hospital: Radical Loving Care. Every hospital that has engaged it has succeeded. 

   But you see the point already. If you heal with love you always succeed, even when the patient dies. Lead with love & you will always "win" even if you get fired (as I have been) for you will have lived Love. 

  We all get scared. We all enjoy winning.

  It is when Fear rules that life fails. "God is Love."

-Erie Chapman

P.S. As for the HCA hospital, over my next four years at Baptist thousands of women shifted their hospital preference from Centennial (and other hospitals) to Baptist - NOT because we were trying to "beat" the other hospitals. It was because we lead with Radical Loving Care  - for staff as well as  patients.

Days 11-12 A Cold Winter's Night

 

THE WINTER OF LISTENING

What is precious
inside us does not
care to be known
by the mind
in ways that diminish
its presence.

What we strive for
in perfection
is not what turns us
into the lit angel
we desire.

What disturbs
and then nourishes
has everything
we need.

What we hate
in ourselves
is what we cannot know
in ourselves but
what is true to the pattern
does not need
to be explained.

Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.

And
here
in the tumult
of the night
I hear the walnut
above the child’s swing
swaying
its dark limbs
in the wind
and the rain now
come to
beat against my window
and somewhere
in this cold night
of wind and stars
the first whispered
opening of
those hidden
and invisible springs
that uncoil
in the still summer air
each yet
to be imagined
rose.

Excerpt : The Winter of Listening
From River Flow
New and Selected Poems
©David Whyte and Many Rivers Press

Shared by Liz Sorensen Wessel
Watercolor by ~liz

Days 7-11 - The Ultimate Kidnapping

 The searing importance of life's penultimate moment burned itself into my soul this Christmas as it never has.

   The moment's significance is obvious. Subconsciously I had relegated our creation to merely evolutionary status. 

   In fact, the instant our umbilical cord is cut we are not only separated from our mothers. With blitzkrieg suddenness Earth also kidnaps us from God - not to be seen again until death. 

   Hafez provoked my epiphany: "Your separation from God." he wrote.  "is the hardest work in this world." 

   Life is a "separation from God." If you take my view we were with God before birth & to God we shall return. Thus Rumi urges "Since life is short as a half taken breath don't plant anything but love."  

   It is massively comforting to accept God as our ultimate caregiver.

   Consider Michelangelo's masterpiece again. God is surrounded. Adam is alone. The breath of life lives at the tip of God's finger. 

   Put aside this fanciful image to note a transcendent truth: No matter how surrounded by family & friends we always know that something is missing.

   We recognize our isolation. We are so plagued with separation anxiety that we spend our lives doing the "hard work" of scaling the mountain to the same God that cut us adrift. 

  Eventually, God sent us the caregiver we needed. Jesus reminds us of what we chronically forget. God is Love. Through Love's practices (including Radical Loving Care) we recapture glimpses of the God we left at birth. 

  We need new artwork. Instead of Death as the hooded horror with the scythe, Death would be God the Mother throwing us the lifeline of a salvific umbilical tethering us to heaven.

   My God gives what mothers offer - relief from pain, freedom from fear, healing of life's wounds & heaven's joy. God alone rescues us from Earth's kidnapping & restores what this world cannot give - unconditional love. 

  Our bodies go from dust to dust. Our spirits glow with finer stuff. 

Reverend Erie Chapman 

Days 5-6 Hope

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul - and sings the tunes without the words and never stops at all. ~Emily Dickinson

As we ring in the New Year I am reflecting on the idea of hope and hopefulness.

This world is one of great paradox.

Although my heart longs for wholeness, the fast-paced demands of daily life and the flurry of work reveals a need that is greater than humanly possible on any given day.

More and more, I recognize how my mind conjures up this illusion that if I peddle faster, work harder and longer, I will gain control over the chaos.

What a difficult challenge.

How does hope manifest?

In a flower sprouting up through the cracks in concrete, so strong and resilient is life’s yearning…

 A new law in CA that requires pet shops to only sell animals who come from shelters.

 Through the hands of volunteers who cleaned up trash in federal parks this weekend during the partial government shutdown.

 Within a sense of belonging, human connection, intimacy, vulnerability; being seen at your worst and still loved…

 In the eyes and joy of a grandmother holding her granddaughter for the first time.

In the image of a child accompanying her doll everywhere…

A good laugh during a stressful day

Kindness offered in a thousand small gestures of caring each day.

Seeing the Beauty in another human’s soul.

In contemplative prayer, listening beneath the stories of judgement to a deeper knowing of acceptance,

forgiveness,

peace

&

In becoming more generous of Spirit; more LOVING.

Liz Sorensen Wessel
Artwork by ~liz