Journal of Sacred Work

Live love, not fear. –  Erie Chapman

Love, allowing the other to be a legitimate other, is the only emotion that expands intelligence.  -Dr. Humberto Maturana, neurobiologist and co-inventor of autopoiesis

   Leafing through the scrapbook of early life moments, we may come across images of early incarnations of ourselves. Who is that little fellow in the black and white photograph? I asked myself that when I came across this image from 1949 (click to enlarge.) I know it’s me, digging along the Pacific shoreline, my mother and two sisters nearby. But that me is also gone. Where did he go?

   Our physical ‘child’ has vanished along with the young body that housed our spirits back then. And yet that child lives still, hiding somewhere behind our aging faces along with all the other people we have been in our lives. It is as children that we first learned about love. As adults we still seek to understand this power we have and how to express it.   

   We certainly hope our own caregivers will see us, through love’s lens, as more than the mask before them. We want love to teach that each person has many past selves living within. And we need to see them the same way – as more than the person before us. We need to live love, not fear…

   Everyone says they believe in love. But how well are we doing being present to love’s light? The primary principle of loving care is contained in a single, four word phrase: Live love, not fear. That this is a difficult concept to practice becomes clear when we review the number of decisions we make out of fear – fear for our lives, self interest, fear for our livelihoods.   

   In addition to the above line, Maturana has written that living is a process of cognition. We act on what we have learned and how we perceive reality. From the time we are infants, our cognition, or awareness, is constantly changing. We study the world around us for clues about who we are and often wonder at the answers. Who is the person we see in the mirror today? Is it a being in love or a being in fear? It is, of course, both. Living love means shifting the balance within us so that we become more present to the power of love and more distant from the threats of fear.

  Remarkably, we are born with only two fears: of falling and of loud noises. All other fears are learned. We learn fear of things that threaten our lives. Soon afterwards, we learn fear of punishment and fear of things that threaten our livelihood. To recover our presence to love requires conscious cognitive practices.

  I don’t like lists because they seem to convert mysterious and hallowed principles into overly simple phrases. I’m also not sure that lists of things really change behavior. What they can accomplish is awakening those who are truly interested in participating in genuine change. So I have created a list of personal loving care concepts, each just a few words long, in the hope that they will be starting points for reflection and guiding principles along our journey to loving presence.

   Today’s meditation touches the first and most central principle. I offer the rest of the list as hints for future reflection.

   True understanding, as Peter Senge, et al, have addressed in their remarkable book, Presence – Exploring Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society, comes from a continual deepening of the resonance that lives between thought and action. This remarkable book offers us a great reward if we are willing to climb the Everest of the heart. By continually integrating reflection into our thoughts and actions in a persistent and heartful way, we have the chance of achieving the kinds of epiphanies that may come to those with the courage to dig deeper. Like mining for gold or silver, the work calls us for commitment as well as inspiration.

   Here are seven key points:

1) Love: Live love, not fear.

     This is your life’s purpose. Love is the divine spark planted in us by God. Let that spark shine in your life, extinguishing the darkness of fear.

2) Energy: Where attention goes, energy flows.

     By attending to your energy, you can change your life.

3) Self-care: Take care of yourself so you can take care of others.

     Self care is essential to other care.

4) Calling & Presence: Live your calling by being present to life.

     As Kierkegaard said, we are all born with sealed orders. Open yours.

5) Guiding Principles: Follow guiding principles, not rules.

     The world is too complex to live by rules. Rules call us to be robots. Guiding principles appeal to our humanity, our ability to think, reflect, and allow God to work in our lives.

6) Humor and humility: take your work seriously, not yourself.

 Humor and humility about ourselves allows us to stay balanced. Without these, we may confuse the living of godly work with being a god.

7) Gratitude: Live with gratitude & joy will be your regular companion.

 All of these practices are intended to change cognition, to affect the way in which we interpret life and live love. And there should really be an 8th – Practice all of these principles all the time.

   Why aren’t these patterns already ingrained in us? Part of this has to do with how we were raised and how peer pressure continues to influence our thinking. Who were we as children? What were our dreams and insights? Who are we as adults?

The U Process

  Thought patterns and routines can pull us into a state where we lose presence to our daily lives. If we have learned how to do our jobs with ten percent of our attention, where is the rest of us? Senge and his colleagues call us to investigate something they call the U process – a beautiful image that can help us dig deeper to mine the gold of loving care.

   Imagine an encounter. Consider its potential levels of depth. I walk by you in the hallway. My thought is to say hello. I take that action and walk on by. What if I continue to reflect on that split second action – how you looked when I saw you, how you seemed to be feeling. And if I continued that reflection, I might ask myself what I know of you and your life. I might also explore my mental models of you and how I react to your appearance. Each time I explore the territory between thought and action I dig deeper. At the deepest level, I might begin to wonder about you at a spiritual level. Next time I encounter you, I might let go of my mental models, find a new presence with you, be open to the arrival of your spiritual presence, and even realize that presence.

   Great thinkers in all areas seem to be pursuing a process like this. They are discovering things you and I seem to miss. Perhaps this is because, looking with love, they are staying exquisitely observant to the world they inhabit. Mozart heard whole symphonies through this intuitive process. Einstein discovered theories the rest of us can barely penetrate by respecting the wisdom of his intuition. Mother Theresa saw the need to serve the poorest of the poor by welcoming the presence of Christ into her heart and watching for his guidance. Part of this seems to be their genius. But another part is their commitment to deep understanding, to allowing the pendulum between thought and action to swing low enough to graze the skin of the soul. 

  What about the rest of us? In the course of a lengthy career in health care, I have had the chance to ask longterm caregivers how they began their jobs. A surprising number say things like, "Well, I applied to work at the hospital and thought I’d just try it for awhile. And now, here it is thirty years later."

   This reference does not demean the great commitment and loyalty of these individuals. Instead, it poses the question of whether many of us have fallen into the Rip Van Winkle phenomenon. Have we spent much of our career in the half-light of semi-consciousness – coming up with the same answers ever day because we never probe very deeply with our questions? Suddenly, it may seem that thirty years has passed in the blink of an eye.

   How much time have we spent hoping for the end of the work day, looking forward to Friday, dreading Monday, fearing of being fired, dreaming of retirement? We may repeat the same thoughts every day until finally retirement comes. On that day, we may looking around, dazed, wondering what has happened to all that time we spent at work.

   The great singer Kenny Rogers reflected this problem of presence when he said in a recent interview that much of his famous life seemed like a blur. Now married to his fifth wife, he says he can barely recall receiving many of the awards he’s won. This is not because of alcohol or drugs but because "it all happened so fast – there was so much." In the midst of a high profile career, he may have allowed lots of noise to block his presence to his life.

   To live love, caregivers, also surrounded by lots of noisy distractions, need to pause, reflect, and take time to listen to their breathing. Our lives will pass anyway. We might as well be present to them.

   We need to know, as well, that routinized thought patterns steal the gift of presence. If we seek to live love, we can look to the seven principles as keys to the door of fulfillment. We can begin to truly be present to life. We can live love, not fear.

—

Reflection in Verse

All experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades for ever and forever as I move.
– Alfred Lord Tennyson 

The black and white child digs a hole in the sand,
an opening to a world that is long gone.
The camera didn’t preserve
the colors of the day. Those left
along with the child who
dug the hole, along with the small hands
that held the shovel, along with
the young mother & younger sisters,
along with that day’s sun & wind,
along with the umbrellas that have long
since been folded, tossed, replaced,
along with the waves that swept that
shore on that day. All of that is gone, &
all of that is still here,
informing this moment,
gleaming through the arch
of 1949 and into this day.

-Erie Chapman