Journal of Sacred Work

Technology and business have hijacked compassion from the healthcare agenda.
-Erie Chapman

   I believe most women understand caregiving
better than most men. Hospitals are staffed primarily by women yet they are run primarily by men. Why are men in charge? Perhaps because most hospital board
members are men – drawn to volunteer service on the local hospital board from fields of business and professions where, again, men still dominate.
   The problem here is that most males are socialized to compete,
to score points, and to win. Most women, on the other hand, are raised valuing relationships and caregiving. I am, of course, speaking in the most general terms about male aggression and female receptivity. Since all of us hold both the male and female within us, there are plenty of exceptions. Plenty of women know how to attack and defeat, lots of men are open to the caregiving side of their nature.
   The issue is that male aggression is fine on the football field but it can be destructive
to the process of caregiving. As my friend, Vanderbilt Professor Bart Victor
says, "Hospitals are charities. Charities should not be trying to defeat
other charities." 

   Yet, in many cities, the process continues as hospitals and some
charities battle each other for market share and non-profit organizations
increasingly behave like for-profit companies. It’s the American way, isn’t it? Perhaps it is for American business. But what about its hybrid twin, large charities? Yes, charities, especially large hospitals, need business discipline to operate effectively. Yet do we really want one hospital trying to defeat another?
   This over-focus on competition among a segment of American charities has happened because we have allowed a toxic imbalance in
American health care. Love needs to balance the roles of compassion and
competence.
   Love needs to be not only at the core of charity work but it needs
to displace fear-driven leadership approaches – including ones that focus on closing down the competition.
   Let love balance the healthcare agenda so that compassion holds an equal
place with discussions of money and technology. Don’t let money and technology hijack the role of loving care. Don’t let people try to
quantify kindness and love. Instead, focus on how people are giving it, not on
trying to measure the outcomes of love’s gifts.
   I have written recently about Quantum Caregiving. For anyone who
knows the most fundamental nature of this kind of thinking, it’s not really
about measurement. It’s about accepting that we have the capability of delivering, through love, a gift beyond measure. As some blessed caregivers go about their work, we know that
the impact of their grace is causing an explosion of healing in the other.
   We
could convert this, as I have thus far tried fruitlessly to do, into some kind of weird
forumula of love’s energy squaring and cubing and quadrulpling to create an explosion of healing. But we would
miss the point. Love, like beauty, cannot be measured or totaled since it is, by definition,
unmeasurable and priceless.
   The new question for America’s healthcare meetings, the one I
challenge you to raise as often as you can, is not how much do we love,
but how are we expressing love? This information comes not in numbers
but through stories of sacred encounters.
   I hope women reading this will speak up. I hope that both male and
female leaders will listen. The goal here is not to throw out all the men. Instead, the objective is the balance of male and female natures in the leadership and operation of charities.
   Each of us must tune our hearts to the  quieter, more recessive voice of our nature. Women need to hear their male side in mustering the energy to fight illness and advance justice, men need to attend to their female side so they may nurture the gifts of relationship and caregiving. The answer lies in knowing the nature of charities and in finding the balance that this work needs.

-Erie Chapman