Journal of Sacred Work

Days 109-113 - When Water Falls

  We began life in Water's womb. Her waves, or lakes, her streams are poems. Especially when water falls. 

    The link below takes you to a brief meditation on waterfalls including a poem that I wrote & narrated in the hope it would bring some serenity to your life. 

   May you enjoy the peace that a marriage to the water can bring. 

   Click on the link below:

https://youtu.be/MJZx5eNThng

-Erie Chapman

Photograph by Erie from "When Water Falls" includes image of me with my mother.

The Important Path To Grace - Days 339-343

   "What is your favorite feeling?" I asked family gathered for dinner. 

   My son answered first. "Relief."

   We nodded. No one asked, "Relief from what?"

  Pain demands relief. Gratitude requires grief. The crucial final step can lead to Grace.

   Emily Dickinson captured this best, "After great pain, a formal feeling comes/ The Nerves sit ceremonious.."

   "Formal" means, above earth's house of pain. 

  How do we reach such hallowed space? Pain is unavoidable, relief. a blessing,  Grace requires work. She is the life companion we seek, the friend who remains when Agony returns.

   We all admire those who, although un-drugged, appear serene in pain's darkest hours. "How do they do it?" caregivers wonder.

   Grace's face is Joan of Arc in the flames, Jesus on the cross, cancer sufferers, laboring moms. St. Thérèse of Lisieux wrote, “Everything is grace.” 

   We are not saints. And I find nothing un-saintly in groans emerging from a tortured body. Agony, emotional or physical, seeks expression. 

   That is why I admire what I rarely practice: a grace that draws from the deepest well of courage. The refusal to be defeated by pain. The insistence on transcending it to precious, indefinable peace. 

   The three-stage path is clear and crooked: Grief to Gratitude to Grace. Although the prize is serenity it requires so much courage to achieve, must less sustain, that few reach it except in life's last moments. We envy those that find it earlier.  

   My very dear friend and leader, Tracy Wimberly, had a sign on her office door, a synonym for grace: Peace.  In my weekly talks with her she hands me that gift every time. Meet Liz Wessel and you will receive that gift as well, 

   May Grace visit you now and stay with you always. 

-Erie Chapman 

Photo: April Sand - Bone Marrow Transplant Patient

The Strange Way Grief Enriches Gratitude - Day 332-336

   Inside Thanksgiving joy another voices calls to me: "You better be grateful, buster, because you are incredibly lucky."

   That voice speaks truth...and can fuel guilt anytime I hear myself regretting, rather than grieving, a loss. It is good to take responsibility for failures like betraying a friend. It is foolish to wallow in that guilt rather than to let it teach you how to honor that same friend and the great times you shared.    

  Wisdom offers a strange truth: Grief, makes gratitude possible. Stripped of its low notes of grief incessant optimism can ring as dull as some Hallmark cards. 

   My best consultant is 19-year old grandson Miles. I have never encountered anyone who cultivates daily gratitude as richly as does he. 

   In his phone calls from college he routinely reports he is doing "GREAT." But he is no pollyanna. 

   "Why do you always sound like you just won the lottery?" I asked,

   "Because I am luckier than a lottery winner," he said. "And bad breaks can turn good. I was six and sad when my parents divorced. When they remarried I got great new step parents."

   When his other grandfather died, he cried his eyes out. Each tear signaled grief and gratitude.

   Positivity is power. Turning to it or jumping over it before grieving is a mistake. 

   Odd how I offer wisdom I rarely practice. My brand of sentimentality harbors fantasies of reclamation. And it is true that no mourning devalues what was there.

   Yet, wallowing in mourning or dismissing the loss, creates a self-made prison. Grief, makes gratitude possible. Honoring what once was creates meaning.

  The discovery, at 80, that without meaningful grief there is no meaningful gratitude has opened one of life's richest energies. I hope it will do the same for you.

-Erie Chapman 

Picture: Tyler & Miles Chapman

Does Healthcare Need a Female President? Days 323-325

   A caregiver friend who rarely talks "politics" broke her silence recently with a rhetorical question: "Is our choice for President really going to be between two elderly white guys?"

   Her tone bore the despair of millions. The Journal is not a political site. Yet, even though caregivers know government's giant impact on healthcare many have thrown up their hands and stopped paying attention. 

   Freed of an organizational timetable, and a lifelong student of leadership in general and Presidential leadership in particular, I have taken time you may not have to study up. 

   First, a multipart syllogism: Since healthcare leadership has lost its way; and since the vast majority of CEOs are my fellow males; therefore, we need women in charge.

   More accurately, we need either women, or men with enough feminine energy to practice Dr. King's injunction: Leaders must be tender-hearted as well as tough-minded.  

   Second, electing a woman as President is a great way to shatter the glass ceiling nationwide. This is our chance to do something America has never done: elect a woman.

   Third, in an effort to be objective, I offer a choice for each side. For Democrats and others anxious about Biden's age, check out a capable middle aged, two-time governor with the ability to inspire America: Michigan's Gretchen Whitmer. (left)

   For Republicans, a superior alternative to Trump has emerged. Many of her policies are different than mine, however she displays excellent leadership skills, is a former governor, and, like Whitmer, demonstrates skill, intelligence and maturity: South Carolina's Nikki Haley. 

   Clearly, these are just my thoughts. My urgent invitation is this: If you care about leadership in general, healthcare in particular and feel discouraged, I offer you hope: There are good alternatives out there. Two of the best are women. 

-Erie Chapman

   

   

"Family" Healers - Days 316-320

Seven days a week my chronically ill younger sister, Martha, receives a healing call from a "heart" doctor. Her truest heart ALWAYS  feels better after these calls - as if some magic drug had been administered - except better.

This "heart" doctor delivers compassion, practical exercises, and life-affirming attention. Different from any conventional physician, this heart doctor engages her husband and children on the healing team. Her husband is an engineering genius who helps create an environment supportive to Martha's status as a Little Person. Her teenage son is a natural improv comic who sends Martha the medicine of laughter. Her 15-year old daughter plays the violin, delivering healing music into her being.

The heart doctor is my daughter, Tia. She heals from her home in Italy. Her dedication to her aunt is beyond anything I have seen. Martha says, "without Tia and her family, I'd be dead."

Clearly, Martha is lucky to have an amazingly large healing team of relatives and friends. Tia is just one. The point is, who heals us beyond our doctors? 

And ancient and dangerous phenomenon in medicine is its obsessive focus on what is wrong. Where is the focus on what is healthy and how to advance it?

Family psychology is an illustration. We flood psychologists with news of family-induced scars.

The good news is: we all have a "family" of healers around us. The quote-marks signal an overlooked truth: Often, our dearest friends are more "family" then some blood relatives.

Our heart friends are the unsung healers in our lives. Today, you deliver healing to friends as well as to patients. 

May you always respect the healing power of your presence. Just as I respect you for the people you will help today

-Erie Chapman

Photo montage: Tia and Martha

Secret Angels of our Destiny - Days 309-313

  Associate Editor, Liz Wessel, kindly reminds us to honor National Hospice Month. One way is to engage one of the finest writers of poetic prose: the late John O'Donohue. The ancient Greeks created gods that can help ease our fears as well. Hermes, for example, shuttled between the living and the unseen gods. One of them must have whispered the words below into O'Donohue's ear. Thank you, Facebook friend David Hoover, for sharing those words here:

   "The dead are not distant or absent. They are alongside us. When we lose someone to death, we lose their physical image and presence, they slip out of visible form into invisible presence.

   "This alteration of form is the reason we cannot see the dead. But because we cannot see them does not mean that they are not there.

   "Transfigured into eternal form, the dead cannot reverse the journey and even for one second re-enter their old form to linger with us a while. Though they cannot reappear, they continue to be near us and part of the healing of grief is the refinement of our hearts whereby we come to sense their loving nearness.

   "When we ourselves enter the eternal world and come to see our lives on earth in full view, we may be surprised at the immense assistance and support with which our departed loved ones have accompanied every moment of our lives. In their new, transfigured presence their compassion, understanding and love take on a divine depth, enabling them to become secret angels guiding and sheltering the unfolding of our destiny."*

Thank you, John O'Donohue, for showing how the dead can heal and protect us!

-Erie Chapman

*Excerpt from his books, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace & Divine Beauty

**Erie's Photo - "The Dawning of Night" 2016

Halloween 1943: Nurturing, not Nightmares (Days 302-306)

   "Halloween 1943" sounds like a horror movie. I hope not.

   Three things unfolded well at my birth (noon, October 31, 1943)*. After the umbilical was cut I was raised to my mother's breast. Life giving milk. Equally important skin to skin contact.**

  Then, a standard test. A caregiver pretended to drop me. I threw out my arms as if to catch myself. 

   That balance test proves something Hitchcock incorporated into his movies. We all fear falling.

   Decades later I saw proof of how psychological orientation impacts sanity. Once, many ICU's were windowless. Now windows are mandated. 

   Helpless patients unable to distinguish day from night were developing "ICU Psychosis." Awakening from trauma, intubated patients wondered, "Does that analogue clock mean 10 A.M. or 10 P.M.? An inability to orient caused violent thrashing.

   Eighty years after my mother's first nursing, first hug and that scary falling test, I still need nurturing, balance and orientation IF I default to a chronic mistake: Defining my life by roles, making me a lawyer without clients, CEO without a hospital, t.v. host without a show, minister congregants, artist-poet-composer without an audience, father whose job is done. 

   But when my banker joked that I was a "has-been," I was glad to respond, "Better has-been than a never-was."

   Meaningful memories and beautiful remaining "roles": husband to a saintly wife of 57 years, grandfather to five, wonderful friends, the two-pronged ministry of Radical Loving Care^®...

  Wisdom warns that letting that determine self worth is repeating my old mistake. We are children of love and eternal light; not skin-to-skin but spirit-to-spirit with  God. 

-Rev. Erie Chapman

*My mother's first visitor that Sunday was her minister.

"Wow," I said, "A blessing."

"Not for me," she smiled. "He shook my bed when he sat on it and stayed too long."

Maybe that is why I am still restless in church.

**Photo by Erie: "Skin to Skin" (2012)

 

"Oh, Erie!" - Days 296-299

 "My problem playing alone is that I'm always getting mad at my partner," I joked to my close golfing friend, cardiologist Dr. Allen Naftilan.

   When Allen misses a shot, he shouts, "Oh, Allen!," so often that another pal gave him a golf towel with "Oh Allen!" written on it. 

   Golf courses are serene settings. Especially when no one is playing. When busy, the air is often pockmarked with epithets from those who have forgotten the game played amid nature. 

   It is great to joke about self anger in golf. Not so much in our professional lives.

   Self anger is natural. It can also turn into something highly toxic: self loathing. Responsible adults make the wiser choice. They take responsibility from mistakes and learn from them. 

   The opposite of taking responsibility occurs every time our former President speaks. His golf towel should read, "It is NEVER my fault."

   Our humanness guarantees mistakes. I am way am wiser about self anger than I used to. Still, too often, I hear a voice shouting at me and realize it is my own. "Oh, Erie!"

-Erie Chapman

    

   

Entering Another: one of "Ten Poems to Change Your Life" - Days 288-292

Symeon the Theologian
Turkey (949 - 1032)

NOTE: Although the following poem, cited Housden't as one of Ten Poems to Change Your Life , is by a 10th century Christian mystic, I offer it as a powerful commentary on how any of us may engage any relationship so deeply that it feels we have merged with that entity. - Erie Chapman

We awaken in Christ's body

by Symeon the New Theologian (10th century)

English version by Stephen Mitchell
Original Language Greek

We awaken in Christ's body
as Christ awakens our bodies,
and my poor hand is Christ, He enters
my foot, and is infinitely me.

I move my hand, and wonderfully
my hand becomes Christ, becomes all of Him
(for God is indivisibly
whole, seamless in His Godhood).

I move my foot, and at once
He appears like a flash of lightning.
Do my words seem blasphemous? -- Then
open your heart to Him

and let yourself receive the one
who is opening to you so deeply.
For if we genuinely love Him,
we wake up inside Christ's body

where all our body, all over,
every most hidden part of it,
is realized in joy as Him,
and He makes us, utterly, real,

and everything that is hurt, everything
that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,
maimed, ugly, irreparably
damaged, is in Him transformed

and recognized as whole, as lovely,
and radiant in His light
he awakens as the Beloved
in every last part of our body.

Relics: Letters to the Future - Days 281-285

   It is just an ancient ID Badge, circa 1994. In the tiny constellation of my family, it has meaning because we treasure symbols of memory. This was preserved by my dear wife. 

   Most discard or dismiss family relics. Many career successors do the same with legacies. Too bad. Relics release memories. Legacies transform those who honor them. 

   The "P" triangle on my old badge stands for "Partners," the word we used to describe all caregiving colleagues (versus "employees" or "associates.")

   The pin adjoining it is a ten year service award. The "Life Choices" logo honors our T.V. show that was international, not just local.

   Below Riverside Hospitals (plural to signal the goal that all hospitals would practice the "RMH Way") is "A U.S. Health affiliate." My successor changed it to OhioHealth. I hoped we would become nationally honored for loving caregiving just as we became known by millions via our televised health message. That remains possible using the existing structure. 

   My ID title of CEO leaves out "President." I awarded that to Nancy Schlicting. The tiny words at bottom remain OhioHealth's value statement: "We honor the dignity and worth of each person."  

   No trivia says what the badge truly means. When I hold it I feel the presence of thousands of partners and hundreds of thousands of patients, families and community members whose lives we Partners touched from 1983-1995.

   That, for me, converts the old badge into a sacred family relic. A letter carrying a million memories and some legacies as well. 

-Erie Chapman

Announcing New Associate Editor Liz Wessel - Days 276-280

   Liz Wessel, R.N., M.S.N., is the newly named Associate Editor of Journal of Sacred Work. Not only is our selection long overdue, but she is completely perfect for the role of associate editor. She has been our weekend writer since shortly after our founding in June, 2006 and has been a spectacular supporter of the entire concept that underscores our mission: To offer loving care and support to caregivers. 

   We are both volunteers, (along with another key contributor, Dr. Terry Chapman) and yet Liz's contributions have been worth millions to the tens of thousands of caregivers who have come here for support and information. This includes her magnificent artwork as well as her elegant writing and many other contributions.

  Liz is Chief Mission Officer, Providence St Joseph Health Home & Community Care in the Southern California Region located in Orange, California. She is also a long-serving nurse with special expertise in palliative and hospice care. 

   The distance from Nashville to Orange is such that Liz and I have rarely seen each other in person across all these years. But we have always been very close spiritually and are dear friends. 

   It is my hope that the foundation that supports and advances Radical Loving Care^® in healthcare and the arts will make Liz permanent editor at some moment down the road. Meanwhile, please join me in expressing profound gratitude to Liz for her heart, for how she supports you, and for being one of God's great gifts to this earth. 

-Erie Chapman 

"I Own Everything I See" - Days 267-271

 The title quote is from my saintly, mother-in-law, Marian Lokvam.* As a hyper-visual "see-er" that line became a favorite. I did not have to own a field of flowers to smell them or a car to enjoy riding in it. 

  Is seeing enough or do we have to "own"? When we own, what do we have actually have?

   The power in Marian's comment arises when we ask more deeply: What do we own? And its companion suggestion that maybe we never really own anything or anyone; that the very idea of "pride of ownership" triggers murders, wars and personal agony.

   Look at our ownership language: My house. My car. My job.

   Of people: My wife. My children. My sister. My friends.

   What happened to "my" mother, you first-borns, when the your sibling arrived?

   In a hospital, "My nurses" sounds different depending on whether it is spoken by a nursing director or a patient. 

   When I disagree with a doctor's recommendation I am always surprised when they say, "Well. It's your body." Were they subconsciously thinking my body was theirs?

   Why did the feminist movement gain traction with the phrase "It's My Body"? Because my fellow males so often abused women's rights that consciousness needed to be raised and laws changed. 

   Ownership requires at least two adjectives: "privilege and permission." I never really owned any "thing" or "person."  I was simply granted privileges and permissions for some period. 

   So long as I thought too literally that Tyler and Tia were MY children, their successes and failures became "mine." Marian's enlightened "owning-by-seeing" frees up healthier relationships. It sends jus again, and always for the first time, to Kahlil Gibran's oft-stated and rarely followed wisdom, quoted in part: 

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you... 

-Erie Chapman

P.S. Since writing this a thief named Covid stole "my" sense of smell and should return it, right?

Photo: Marian Lokvam, at right, helping Kirsten on our wedding day - 1966

"Eating the Sun" - Days 260-264

For caregivers, light is an energy cultivated for curing. Managed channels of electricity enable doctors to diagnose with imaging and to treat with lasers. 

The greater Light of Healing beyond curing preceded and supersedes all of that. Scientists may have sought to diminish its spiritual aspects. But they are powerless to diminish its meaning in the broad arc of human existence.  

A contemporary writer whose work has captured my spirit is Maria Popova. Her book, Figurings, is transformative. Her gifts continue through her weekly column in Marginalian. I recommend it to anyone interested in seeing how one writer, regularly offering her gifts and those of other artist's. She and they lift life's quality as they dissect important ideas and illuminate Many of Beauty's most exquisite details. 

This week, Popova aimed the the laser of her genius at the subject of how we see, and cited an expert unknown to me. One with a spectacular gift and a terrible curse.

First, his gift:

"No one has written about what it takes to see," Popova wrote, "— and how to do the looking — more poignantly than Jacques Lusseyran (September 19, 1924–July 27, 1971) in his stirring memoir And There Was Light.

"Looking back on his blissful early childhood, Lusseyran recounts his formative enchantment with the world:

  "'Light cast a spell over me. I saw it everywhere I went and watched it by the hour… flowing over the surface of the houses in front of me and through the tunnel of the street to right and left. This light was not like the flow of water, but something more fleeting and numberless, for its source was everywhere. I liked seeing that the light came from nowhere in particular, but was an element just like air. We never ask ourselves where air comes from, for it is there and we are alive. With the sun it is the same thing.
   "There was no use my seeing the sun high up in the sky in its place in space at noon, since I was always searching for it elsewhere. I looked for it in the flickering of its beams, in the echo which, as a rule, we attribute only to sound, but which belongs to light in the same measure. Radiance multiplied, reflected itself from one window to the next, from a fragment of wall to cloud above. It entered into me, became part of me. I was eating sun.'"

Then, Popova reveals the curse. Lusseyran, the genius of light, had been struck blind at the age of seven.

It is the answer to stories like these, and the questions they raise, that sends me to her column every week.

We cannot look directly into the sun. But Lusseyran says he could eat it. In the summer of 2018 I photographed someone doing that. Today, I named that image "Eating the Sun".

-Erie Chapman

"Eating the Sun" - by Erie Chapman, 2018

The Superiority of The Feminine Divine - Day 245

   Although raised male in a male-dominant world by a great dad who taught me "how to be a man," I always wondered about the role of women.

   "Always respect them," Dad sternly instructed. But was I really "superior" as society implied? 

   Nope.

  Fortunately, the "male" assertiveness I developed was balanced by my mother and two sisters. But as a boy I wondered why men dominated the world. Even religion. With the exception of the Virgin Mary, where were the women?

   Thank heavens we are in an age where the sexes appear to be entering balance. Indeed, gender identification is in dispute. 

   In 2019, I explored The Feminine Divine in my two-month-long film art show at Vanderbilt Divinity School's Art Gallery. No one objected to the nudes. Only that I was not gender-inclusive enough. 

   In early 20th century England, feminist Francis Swiney advanced the fascinating notion that "all life, spiritual as well as physical, begins as female. [Evolutionarily] the masculine was only a temporary and transitional phase, between the eternal feminine cause and the eternal feminine effect."

   For Swiney there was only one sex, the feminine...Men were simply imperfect women, both physiologically and spiritually," she argued. (emphasis added)

  This is about energy difference not body parts.  Society adapts slowly. How much longer can we tolerate the violence routinely caused by men? We desperately need balance.

    Balance is what happens in the best healthcare settings. Healing occurs only when male assertive-energy (via man or woman) is balanced by feminine nurturing (via woman or man).

   The time for men to recognize the superiority of the feminine divine is not only here, it is long overdue!

-Rev. Erie Chapman 

Poster-art Courtesy, Vanderbilt University Divinity School

Stepping Off The Path - Days 228-232

   A video including my 5 year old grandson defines "stepping off the path." While adults and older sister conversed politely above him, Reed traced a circle 8 racing in and out and around them, laughing, bumping and...being a little boy. 

   Next month he will be six. Every teacher and other adult around him (except me) will work to "get him on the straight path." 

 We have traveled that journey. We must learn the "safe" path, before considering alternatives. 

   Stretching the analogy, what is more interesting, straight line or figure 8? A great artist would not only choose the "8" but create an innovative portrayal.

   It is like New York. It  can be a jungle, or great if you walk the safe streets. Take an alley and you may end up hospitalized or imprisoned.

   Travel your career safely and gold stars for attendance and long service will come your way. We need safe-pathers. They are the majority.

   Fifty years in courtrooms and hospitals trained me to help those whose path led to trouble. Searching for innovative approaches constantly sucked me off the safe path on behalf of clients and, in healthcare, using an unheard-of practice literally called radical. 

   Loving care looks like the safe path. It is not. Look at Jesus, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Lincoln, Van Gogh, Dickinson, Nightingale. Even ET?

   Patients need Radical Loving Care^®. Caregivers who live it will break rules: some visitors stay beyond visiting hours, a nurse exits the ER to help a patient, a staffer stands up to leaders who compromise care for money or doctors that engage in patient-harming treatments.

   Radical Loving Care's requirement of exceptional service causes off-path pain: My younger sister's boss's reprimand: "Stop doing so much and making other staff look bad," and board criticism for her older brother for refusing to cut caregivers to save money.

  Renown storyteller Minton Sparks (above) summarized my life long off-path approach in just two bold sentences: "I love your odd take on the world, in Radical Loving Care and the arts. It is incredibly brilliant, incisive, and can be very scary at the same time." 

  Radical Loving Care delivers only one sure reward. It comes from your heart, not your paycheck. 

-Erie Chapman

Standing Strong Against Wrong - Days - 223-227

    One recent American story is so terrible none of its sordid details will be retold here. The headline is horrible enough: In January, six white Mississippi police officers broke into a home and viciously and repeatedly tortured two innocent black men for hours.

  All six have pled guilty.

  Not one or two but six officers actively planned and carried out this racist and sadistic attack. I wonder if any of them had second thoughts before or mid-crime but could not stand strong against his "buddies."   

  What does this have to do with caregiving and leadership? How often have you seen co-workers, including doctors, leaders, board members, or others engaged in wrongdoing and said nothing? 

  Standing strong against wrong. We are all love that idea. Still, under peer pressure, we routinely "go along to get along" and thus, actively or passively, end up endorsing cruel behavior.

   Yes. We need to know when and where to draw the line. Sometimes (not always) I have openly argued with others when they make racist or sexist comments. Many think I speak up too much. "Just let it go, Erie," I have often been told. "You aren't going to change anything."

   But silence can imply endorsement. 

   How many others in that Mississippi town's subculture of hateful rhetoric stood silent, went along to get along, let it go?

   When you look at the chart, which "zone" is your favorite? We all love comfort. Can we enjoy our comfort if we always just "let it go?" It we entered the Challenge zone more often and stood strong against wrong instead of sitting silently in the Comfort zone, could we save someone from suffering?

-Erie Chapman

Note" Screenshot of Six from CNN

   

Spotting The Hidden Light in Others - Days 216-220

It is a story reported here before and raised again to highlight a crucial truth: We hide many of our best gifts from ourselves. Jesus, in his universal role as a prophet and leader, advised not to "hide" our light.* When leaders spotlight gifts hidden in others it can sunrise success.

   In the mid-1980s Ohio's largest hospital needed a blue ribbon leadership team. A CEO is like a football coach or orchestra conductor - not just recruiting talent but helping players shine.

  The light coming through that mid'-'80s time-window revealed multiple leaders-in-hiding that would take top spots in American healthcare. "Hiding" here, meant that none of them had top leadership experience in health care. 

   Mark Evans was working for a retail department store chain. Hiring him as Senior Vice President for Human Resources was one of my best decisions. Tracy Wimberly, R.N., was a first line public health nurse in Toledo when I noticed her. She became our Senior Vice President for Patient Care. Jeff Kaplan, who was a top assistant to a university president when I recruited him to help lead Riverside Methodist Hospital. 

  These three had one more thing in common: Profound talent beyond what they recognized in themselves. That had also been true of our Senior V.P. Steve Garlock when I hired him from the Faultless Rubber Division of Abbott Labs. He did not appreciate how good he was until he helped us become so strong that by 1994 Riverside was among America's top ten hospitals and the flagship of the burgeoning U.S. Health system (now OhioHealth.) 

  I get too much credit for Riverside, OhioHealth's and Baptist Hospital's booming successes. Part of what I did was simply recognize that each star could shine more brightly if I could help them trust their talents and practice them. 

   A leader's job is not simply to hire. It is to develop a culture that nurtures the best talents in everyone! We are all stronger than we think we are. But often takes someone else to recognize our hidden gifts. 

   When that happens, Love triumphs. 

-Erie Chapman 

*Neither do men [sic] light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.” (Matthew 5:15)

How "The Pink Panther" Changed YOUR Life - Days 202-206

I. The impact of unexpected careers 

   Over 48 years so many have asked, "How did you go fr0m criminal prosecutor to hospital CEO?" The answer is so absurd many disbelieve it. 

   In 1975, my life was a river flowing predictably. Bruce Trumm (aka "Pink Panther") earthquaked that river diverting it into the lives of thousands I would never have encountered and delivering me to hospitals with river names: Riverside Episcopal* and Riverside Methodist. 

   Bruce touches you who read this. Absent him, there is no Journal and absolutely NO chance I would have run three hospital systems, started giant OhioHealth, launched an international T.V. show seen by millions, put out best-selling books, produced four televised healthcare documentaries...

   No one would know of Radical Loving Care, The Mother Test or this writing. There would be no Riverside-based hospice in Columbus or "Thursday's Baby" in Nashville. Baptist Hospital would likely have gone bankrupt.

   II. "Pink Panther?"

   We expect family to shape us, not casual contacts. I knew Bruce vaguely as a fellow church board member.  The polio that crippled him caused him to shuffle and he would sometimes approach unheard. He loved his nickname: "Pink Panther." He ran the Toledo hospital named Riverside (no connection to Riverside Methodist.) I was a federal crimes prosecutor headed back to private practice.

   It took three tries for Bruce to convince me to accept his outlandish offer to help him run Riverside. I knew nothing about healthcare.  

   "Why me?" I asked Pink Panther. "I have zero training. You have hundreds of other choices."

    "After polio slowed me down, I studied people more carefully," he said. "I watched you in board meetings. You're a leader."

   It was the only reason he ever gave.

   Caregivers and leaders change so many lives. Did someone unexpected change yours?

-Erie Chapman

*Shockingly, Google produced NO pictures of Bruce, who died in 1984. After 119 years the hospital, pictured, closed in 2002 (reopened elsewhere as St. Ann's). The building where we worked was demolished in 2018.  

When Motive Matters Most - Days 190-194

   Sure. Motive matters in criminal cases. But, "motive" has a different relevance here.

   A recent pitched battle in Nashville erupted when Alive Hospice explored selling the beloved, 48-year-old organization to a for-profit company. A huge segment of the community was horrified, launched a campaign ("Keep Alive alive") and a petition that drew 6000 signatures. The board backed away, fired the CEO and retained their non-profit status.

   Why does this matter?   

   Healthcare must focus first on best care, not highest profit. That does not mean for-profits automatically give bad care. Sometimes for-profits outperform non-profits and too many non-profit hospitals are over-focused on money.

   But hospice seems different. Data from a large Rand Corporation study proved that non-profit hospice care is better. Is that because non-profit hospices have kept their motives closer to mission? 

   Yes. The larger issue is motive. Organizations with cultures of loving care attract the best caregivers and give the best care. 

   The board of "Alive" faces a big challenge: To pick a new CEO whose motives align with mission first, not money. To succeed, they must first model their own mission. 

-Erie Chapman

Automatic Legacies - Days 177-181

   Whether or not you wish it, your life will leave its legacy.

   As I watch friends retire I know that the vast majority will leave a great legacy. Especially the caregivers.

   A given nurse, therapist or housekeeper touches many lives a day. Not just their patient but families, fellow caregivers, visitors and the family they return to after work. 

   We cannot control what anyone says about us; at work, or anywhere else. There are even debates about how much of our behavior we "control."

   What Marc Antony says in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is true of all, especially the famous. “The evil that men [sic] do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” 

   On CBS Sunday Morning, Paul Simon was asked about his legacy. "I don't care," he answered. Perhaps, he understood he could not control it. But the correspondent followed up: "What about your music?"

   "The music has its own life," Simon continued. "If it lives on, it was meant to. If not, well, it's out of my control."

   Whether our legacies last years or seconds we want, like Simon, to be able to say that our "music", our presence in this world, enriched the lives of others. That is why career caregivers are so far ahead of the rest of us.

-Erie Chapman

Photo by By Matthew Straubmuller (imatty35) Wikipedia

 

 

 

Good News! Days 172-174

   Twenty years after its broadcast I decided to update the Foundation's iconic film "Sacred Work", post it on our YouTube Channel, and submit it for recognition to film festivals. We are pleased to announce that a London festival announced today the recognition of "Sacred Work" as 2023's "Best Short Documentary."

   The award matters because it honors caregivers!

   What does a real hospital's 2002 truth look like in 2023 ? Seeking inspiration today? Even doctors shed tears watching this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bO_Ul2FlFw

   Using the documentary approach, the film's "stars" are actual patients and caregivers shown experiencing the continuous work of healing. The film was created in-house to highlight our New Healing Hospital™. Van Grafton delivered superb cinematography and editing as did Andrew Haege. 

  Leaders ask me, What advances loving culture? Documentaries help. Yet, most leaders fear the truth and order sycophantic ad agencies to produce phony pieces where every caregiver smiles and tells the world "We're the best." Only the "boss" is fooled.

   What message matters? Honest portrayals of caregiving that mix groans of suffering with a newborn baby's cry are what proves that Radical Loving Care^® matters. 

-Erie Chapman