Journal of Sacred Work

"Doesn’t gentle beauty, such as the sound of harp music, sometimes make the heart ache?" – Claire Bateman (left) in Disorientations – False Ecstasy in a Red Car

   The above quote appears in Claire Bateman’s short story in the National Literary Review (www.nationalliteraryreview.org) Throughout her remarkable tale, the issue of beauty and how we encounter it comes up constantly. So many of us are surprised to discover that the rainbow of deep beauty is always shadowed by a cloud of pain. Perhaps the reverse is just as true. Beauty also shines through pain.
   Caregivers know the beauty that can appear in the midst of the painful labor of childbirth. And this phenomenon is what gave rise to some of Emily Dickinson’s most exquisite poetry…

After great pain a formal feeling comes–
The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs;
The stiff Heart questions–was it He that bore?
And yesterday–or centuries before?

   This is not a description of the beauty of a flower. Instead, Dickinson seers our hearts with language that describes deep pain and its aftermath.

The feet, mechanical, go round
A wooden way
Of ground, or air, or ought,
Regardless grown,
A quartz contentment, like a stone.

   She concludes her three stanza masterpiece with what I believe to be some of the most memorable lines in American poetry:

This is the hour of lead
Remembered if outlived,
As freezing persons recollect the snow–
First chill, then stupor, then the letting go.

   It takes enormous courage to love so much that we are willing to absorb the pain of Love as well as her joy. Recently, I shared with a hospice physician that we had completed a video that included a sequence on one of her patients, an eight-year old twin, who passed away while in her care.
   "Oh, I don’t know if I’m ready to see that yet," she told me. "Eventually, I will find the courage."
   Each day, this same physician finds the courage to deal with the heartache of the dying. This doctor is wise enough to know that she must find several more ounces of strength in order to encounter the film image of the last moments of a patient with whom she had shared so much of her Love. It takes so much courage to live Love, And it is the only worthwhile thing we do.

-Erie Chapman

p.s. Confidential to reader in Portland, Oregon: Thank you for your great loyalty to the Journal. I hope you will contribute a comment and share in this dialogue of caregivers!