Journal of Sacred Work

Caregivers have superpowers! Radical Loving Care illuminates the divine truth that caregiving is not just a job. It is Sacred Work.

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Former President & CEO of multiple hospital systems and founding president & CEO of 20-hospital OhioHealth, best selling author, film artist, ordained minister, composer, published poet, syndicated T.V. host, trial attorney, federal prosecutor and Municipal Court Judge. Erie is internationally known as the founder of the Radical Loving Care(R)movement. He also heads Erie Chapman Foundation, Dane Dakota Productions, LLC, and Chapman Health International, Inc.

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The Wittiest American

June 22, 2007

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society. – Mark Twain

He’s my nominee for the wittiest person in American history. No, it’s not Billy Crystal, Eddie Murphy, Lucille Ball or Will Ferrel – all very funny folks. I make my selection not only for his one liners but for the gold that threads through his entire body of work. Clearly, Mark Twain was a genius.
It’s unfortunate that we have no talking films of Twain in action. But we know from all eyewitness accounts that he was an extraordinary performer. He filled concert halls worldwide, making people laugh from Europe to the Orient. And he suffered from chronic depression…

How could a man so witty also experience such enormous lows? It’s not an uncommon problem with "funny" people. Artists must empathize in order to create.
No expert has ever suggested that Twain was bi-polar. Instead, we can posit that he was a person of such enormous feeling that he he could envision the richest comedy and also retire to his room for days of melancholy. I believe that all of this flowed from his deep empathic ability combined with his biting honesty. He also had a large and sensitive ego, making him vulnerable to taking things personally.
What about his training? As Twain wrote: "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. And yet Twain was a genius of enormous discipline, spending hours each day writing at his desk in his Hartford, Connecticut home.
Our sense of humor can be developed or it can die from inattention or from the squelching by some fool from the army of anal retention. Perhaps, as Twain indicated, we should be glad for such fools for without them we could not succeed. Who would we make fun of?
If depression is anger turned inward, I wonder what humor turned inward would be?
Perhaps today is an occasion to release some of the many laughs stored within. Laughter has a magic ability to shrink big problems.
Twain informs us that "wrinkles merely indicate where smiles have been." If this is so, may today be a time for adding wrinkles.

-Erie Chapman

Posted in Meditations

5 responses to “The Wittiest American”

liz Wessel

June 22, 2007

Mark Twain is a marvelous choice. I loved reading his book, “Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.”
I remember when I was a teenagermy dad would say, “Lizzy is 17 and thinks she is 40.” I had some thoughts about his age too! This is my favorite Mark Twain quote,
“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
Twain’s quote on laughter says it well, “The old man laughed loud and joyously, shook up the details of his anatomy from head to foot, and ended by saying such a laugh was money in a man’s pocket, because it cut down the doctor’s bills like anything.”
Thank you for this fascinating series on humor and the showing the reflection of humor’s many faces. Yes, may the wrinkles form.

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Tom Knowles-Bagwell

June 22, 2007

I love Mark Twain, also! He wrote this very esoteric line in an essay entitled, “The Beautiful German Language.” It went something like, “Some German newspapers have been known to go to print without a verb.” You have to understand German sentence structure and the propensity of German writers to string dependent clauses together to get the humor of that statement. But I think that is also true of the humor that we as caregivers use as well. We do seem to have a cluture of our own, that once you understand it, becomes ripe for the joy of humor.
This has been a really good theme this week, Erie. Thanks!

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Karen York

June 22, 2007

Thank you for bringing joy and humor to us this week. It’s the second day of Summer – what’s not to celebrate? After our meditation time at work today, I talked to the group about your meditations this week, and we began to relay funny stories because we all felt like we needed to laugh. It was a great time of stress relief and remembering joy in the midst of hard work.

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Jan Keeling

June 22, 2007

When I was a child, I saw Hal Holbrook perform his one-man Mark Twain show. Twain was so marvelous that, even though we have no talking films of him, it was considered worthwhile to put on a show of a man pretending to be him.
(It was a great show.)

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Diana Gallaher

June 23, 2007

I was in training all week, learning rules and regulations related to Social Security Disability. Pretty serious stuff, no question. However, as I reflect on both these mediatations and the training, I think about how effective humor was during the training. The humor kept us engaged and it built relationship. Without it, I probably would have zoned out too many times to count viewing slide after slide of rules and regulations. I’m so grateful to the two people who lead the training for incorporating humor (and it appeared spontaneously) into the training. It made a huge positive difference.

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