Journal of Sacred Work

Note: Today’s Meditation is written and
edited by Catherine Self based on the writings of Erie Chapman (in quotes) on
High Purpose Leadership and her own reflections.

“We can all choose to
have a good day or a bad day. Why would anyone choose to have a bad day?” –
Rev. Norman Vincent Peale.

The questions came during an especially difficult and
challenging time in my professional career: “Do we really believe we can
‘choose’ to have a good day? Harder yet, do we believe we can sustain that
choice day after day, week after week?”…

   My inner response was immediate – it’s hard to put on a
happy face when staffing is so critical and our finances are so precarious!
Gratefully I was gently led into remembering that “positivity is not a costume we put on for our job, but
a way of thinking and being each day
and every night.” Positivity is both
learned and practiced. It is nurtured when we take care of ourselves
physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. For some that may be through
exercise or nutrition; for others laughter, art and music are especially
helpful. Practicing faith, forgiveness and gratitude are other ways to build
positivity. Looking to others as our model is a great way to learn about
positivity.
    For example, I could share with you the incomparable life
and model of positivity of Helen Keller (photo.) “Blind and deaf since age two, this
remarkable woman focused not on what was missing but on that which was present
in her life – her mind, her exquisite tactile sense, her active imagination,
her iron will, and her extraordinary insight. Hear her words she shared about
her studies at Radcliffe College: I fall, I stand
still…I trudge on, I gain a little…I get more eager and climb higher and begin
to see the widening horizon. Every
struggle is a victory (italics
added).” Surely this is a life that could teach us so much about positivity.   
    Today, however, I want to write about another life and model
of positivity. As I write these words I am preparing to attend a celebration of
a life departed all too soon. My friend Debbie, age 47, was unable to conquer
an unrelenting cancer. Yet her gifts of positivity and joy will give rise to an
ongoing celebration of life. As a hospital chaplain, Debbie faced death every single
day as she ministered to those in critical need, including the tiniest and most
vulnerable in the newborn intensive care unit. Her face continuously radiated
Love and compassion in the midst of challenge and loss. Her words of
encouragement were to those who suffered personal pain and to those who gave every day and night in service and care.
Everyone who met Debbie experienced her joy, even as her own life grew quiet
and still. Debbie loved and was in love.
   “To live, rather than survive, we must always be in love, in
love with those we hate as well as those we love…in love with the cries of
needy children as well as the sweet song of birds. We must be in love with the
whining patient as well as the kind hearted family member…in love with the angry
care giver as well as the patient and compassionate physician. This endless
love is the true center of positivity.”
   Chronic illness, old patterns, deep loss, and daily life
challenges all test our ability to stay positive. “To succeed, we must drill
deep through the hard rock of old habits right into the rich ground of our
innermost selves. There we may find the artesian well of positivity and the
perpetual spring of endless love that lies deep within each of us, so deep that
it often seems beyond reach. Yet it is there. Far down in us lies a human love
that can spread its healing water on all we touch – washing through us…flooding
our souls and those around us with the light of God. This love is always there,
but our human contact with it may come and go.”
 
Debbie found this love in tiny frail hands of preemies
struggling to live. “Helen Keller found this love in the darkness of blindness
and the silence of deafness. Gandhi found it in the oppressed people of India. Martin
Luther King, Jr. found it in the back rows of public buses and at the lunch
counters of the segregated South. Mother Theresa found it in the suffering of
starving lepers. Victor Frankl found it in the agony of Auschwitz."
"This positive Love is the thing of greatest value. It is embedded in the resonant music that vibrates through the best relationships we
find with each other, whether we are sick or not. This positive and perpetual
well spring of Love is the energy underlying the best people care and the best
patient care. It is a love we must find and nurture because it lives, after
all, in the very center, and right at the very heart, of true healing.”

-Catherine Self

 
Reflection (from Erie)

Helen Keller’s eyes
were closed, but she saw the world.
Our eyes are open,
what do we see?
Her ears were deaf,
but she heard the music of life.
Our ears receive
sound, what do we hear?

What is the music of
our heart?
What is the instrument we will play to express it?