Journal of Sacred Work

"In order to become attentive to beauty, we need to rediscover the art of reverence." John O'Donohue

    Dr. Nick Baird enters the delivery room to help a mother bring her baby into the world. He has delivered hundred of babies. This mother has never delivered. Soon, her baby will encounter his first day in the world.

    Alive Hospice Nurse Lisa Graham enters the home of a thirty-four-year old woman who is close to death. Lisa will be present when her patient spends her last day on earth.

   Between the first and last days of life other caregivers experience so many enounters there is a great risk that new encounters will lose meaning for them.

   Any encounter can be sacred. Sacredness depends on loving intention as well as action. Holiness is not reserved for church. It can enter random interactions with strangers,or with the earth as well as with friends and family.

   Some of our most precious relationships are with people we love. Still, our behavior can easily fall into patterns we live by rote.

   There is no light when we live by rote. The sense of the sacred, the art of reverence, vanishes.

   How do we continue to be vehicles of God's healing Love when we have fallen into rote behaviors? In some ways, we have to "die" to our old way of being so that we may be reborn. Our rebirth enables us to more fully practice "the art of reverence."  

   Radical Loving Care focuses on four relationships that form the basis for sacred encounters in caregiving. These encounters may be visualized by imagining two intersecting circles with three parts: Circle One represents the patient in need, Circle Two represents the caregiver, Circle Three is the area where the circles intersect.

   When Love is present, the intersection is illuminated by God. When Love is absent, the encounter becomes simply a worldly transaction.

   The art of reverence in relationships begins with the very first encounter we have. It is with our mothers. We are placed at our mother's breast and there we receive our very first nourishment. Whether we are nourished with Love as well depends upon those we encounter and how we come to encounter the world. These early experiences we have with Love (or its absence) are one factor that impacts our ability to be carriers of God's Love.

   Of course, we have thousands of encounters each day. In caregiving, though, we can practice the art of reverence by imagining four basic types of relationships:

1) Caregiver to Patient – This is the foundational relationship of caregiving

2) Caregiver to Caregiver – We need Love and support and we need to support our fellow caregivers.

3) Caregiver to Leader – As I have often written, the most important role of a healthcare leader is to take care of the people who take care of people. Caregivers can draw strength from leaders. If the leader is not living love, the caregiver needs to look to other energy.

4) Caregiver to Self - Our encounter with Love is grounded in whether we can experience (or learn to experience) God's Love in our personal lives. Our relationship with ourselves depends on how we engage Love's energy through our own encounters with God within us.

   Loving caregivers are tuning their hearts for sacred encounters all the time. Neuro-Intensive Care nurse Deadre Hall has played inspiring music to herself every day for more than thirty years. She waits in her car until she feels ready, within herself, to enter the hospital to encounter her patients, her co-workers and her leaders. She is one of the most wonderful caregivers I have encountered in more than thirty years of healthcare leadership. Part of this is because she understands that she needs to consciously re-engage her heart in order to deliver the kind of healing her patients need.

   We are surrounded by beauty all the time. As we begin to recognize beauty in places we have never noticed it before – in the wrinkles of an elderly patient, in the light as it shapes itself around a painting that has been on our wall so long we've stopped seeing it, and in the eyes (not the face or that hair) we see in the mirror every morning.

   Beauty is always present because God is always present. When we practice the art of reverence, we are living a prayer to God.

-Rev. Erie Chapman