Journal of Sacred Work

Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world, we will have discovered fire.    -Teilhard de Chardin

    If there’s one thing my two-year old grandson still understands, it’s how to be present (click on photo to enlarge.) With limited memories in his short life and little to worry about in the future, he knows how to do something many of us have forgotten – he is a living meditation on presence to this moment.      

     It turns out, the rest of us, with long memories and a simultaneous preoccupation with the future, need to re-learn what we knew when we were two. That is partly what this Journal is about – relearning presence we once could provide naturally as very small children.

     Now barely two months old, certain things are becoming clear about the Journal of Sacred Work. We know that the vast majority of our readers are the people we were trying to reach from the beginning – caregivers. More than 200 comments have been posted from people coast to coast (and internationally) from hospital, hospice and other caregivers. People like Sim Yoon and Karen York and Sonya Jones at Alive Hospice in Tennessee, Elizabeth Wessel at St. Joseph Home Care in California, Kathy Parolini with the American Cancer Society, Diana Gallaher at the Tennessee Justice Center, Natalie Sellers with Parrish Medical Center in Florida and nurses like Jane Sirac in New York and Jennifer Stanhope, and physicians like Dr. Brian Wong in Seattle and Dr. Keith Hagan – along with so many others around the nation. And this doesn’t begin to cover the millions of caregivers who work quietly at home. As one reader, Reeta Parks, told me, "I’m not a professional caregiver, I’m just a Mom and a wife and a daughter and a friend." In others words, as I told her, "You are a caregiver…."

     What does it take to "harness for God the energies of love?" Can there be any more important thing for us to do?…

     Over eight thousand visits have been recorded at this new Journal in just two months and the number is rising rapidly. Clearly, the Journal has tapped a need among caregivers for more support and increased dialogue about what really counts in our work – loving care. YOU are the people for whom this weblog was designed. And you are some of the people for whom the Baptist Healing Trust was created.

     The Journal of Sacred Work reaches out to any person who desires to be more present to life. The caregiving experience can be a among the richest life has to offer. It can also be one of the loneliest, most draining and most frustrating. We at the Healing Trust want to offer you our support.

     So much depends upon presence. In one of his finest short pieces, the great twentieth century poet and physician Dr. William Carlos Williams wrote:

So much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

     At first glance, this may seem like an odd combination of words to some. What’s so important about a wheelbarrow covered with rain and a bunch of chickens? But what is Williams saying to us? Notice, he says, the way rain glazes the wheelbarrow. Be present to its red. Discover that there are white chickens nearby. Be present to all of this and pause in meditation over how to be present to the power of what is before you in this moment. For, as Dr. Williams discovered in his years of delivering babies and caring for the hospitalized sick, life is more about these everyday elements of beauty than it is about news from Hollywood, what’s for sale at the shopping mall, or the latest dispute in Congress.

     It’s those other noisy things that pull us from true presence. It’s the sense that there’s something else more important than what is happening in front of us right now. Many people fritter away their lives either dwelling on the past or anticipating the future. In the course of this, they miss the life they are living right now.

     A nurse sits with a mother in labor. A counselor sits with a depressed patient. A hospice caregiver sits before a dying patient, a father sits with his small child. Sometimes, the temptation is to let the mind drift – to think about the groceries I need to buy on the way home, to review my plans for the weekend, to worry about the incomplete chart sitting out at the nurse’s station. When I allow my thoughts to drift in such a way, I have lost my presence to the situation before me. And the patient has lost the gift of my presence.

     Are we ready yet, as Teilhard de Chardin challenges, to harness for God the energies of love? Indeed, perhaps these energies are not to be harnessed, but to be expressed. Love flows through us not from us. And when it does, something greater than fire appears. For Love brings light. My grandson knows this. Look at the light in his eyes.

Presence Meditation: Begin (or continue) your daily meditation in which you close your eyes and listen to your breath. As you feel your mind drifting to the past or floating to the future, bring yourself back to the rhythm of your breath. Your breathing is in the present. Stay in the present.