Journal of Sacred Work

In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down…you will find what our sciences cannot locate or name…the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here.  -From Teaching a Stone to Talk, by Annie Dillard.

   Across the Atlantic in a town north of London, 33-year-old Lorraine Allard and her husband Martyn (above left, with their son, Liam) were excited about the forthcoming birth of their third child in the summer of 2008. After two girls, a boy was predicted.
   Four months into her pregnancy, the couple received devastating news. Lorraine was in the advanced stages of cancer and needed immediate chemotherapy.
   What should Lorraine do? If she was to have a chance at survival, doctors said she would first need an immediate abortion and then the rapid initiation of aggressive chemotherapy.
   It's hardly an easy decision. Lorraine had her other two children to think of as well. Starting chemotherapy right away would giver her the best chance of continuing as their mother.
   This turned out not to be a story involving the politics of pro-life or pro-choice but of pro-Love – the Radical Loving Care of a courageous woman.
   Lorraine insisted on delaying her chemotherapy far enough into her pregnancy to give her unborn son a chance to survive. "If I am going to die, my baby is going to live," Lorraine told her husband.
   Most of us learn about Love from our first caregiver, our mother. One day little Liam Allard, born weighing less than 2 lbs and now over a year old, will know that he was born from Love.
   Although Lorraine got to see her son, she died two weeks after his birth. She told her husband that when Liam was older, she hoped he wouldn't tell him about her sacrifice. "She told me she didn't want him to feel bad," her husband reported.
   From whence does such Radical Loving Care arise? Dillard says that it is born somewhere in "the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil." This is, according to Dillard, the great unified field.
   In a town north of England, Love found expression in the miracle of a mother's gift to her son. 

   When have you seen miracles of Radical Loving Care in your work? If you haven't seen any yet, please keep looking, for they are surely there, happening every day within the gaze of sacred eyes.

-Erie Chapman