Journal of Sacred Work

"I can give my teaching in brief. I can give my teaching in detail. It is those who understand that are hard to find." – The Buddha

   Moments after his birth, my grandson leans into his mother for the nurturing he must have to sustain life. He surrenders himself to her loving strength completely and unquestioningly.

   You can see in my daughter's face that she will give this tiny being every kind of Love a mother can offer. It will be the first Love he will know but not the last. This loving relationship between mother and child is one of the most inspiring examples of Love in this world. It will resonate for the rest of their lives. 

   Newborns "understand" something they will soon forget: Love comes to us when we yield to it, not when we try to conquer it.

   The pull of the world upon our body and spirit is so great that, as we edge into early childhood, body and spirit soon slip out of balance. Doubt arrives in our hearts and travels with us as a kind of life-long suffering. As our bodies and minds mature, we begin seeking with our human strength rather than yielding to God's Love.

How We Teach Love

   How do we teach what caregivers and their leaders say they already know? Why is it written in Proverbs 29:18 that "without a vision, the people perish?"

   The need for "a vision" is the need for hope. To live Love, we need to share a hopeful vision with each other. 

   Jesus offered us the most radical teaching in history in his Sermon on the Mount: "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." (Matthew 5:44) Don't we already "understand" these things?

   Unfortunately, we know, but we seem to forget. Instead of loving our enemies as fellow children of God, we are instead ruled by the old, unenlightened teaching of revenge: "an eye for an eye…"

   Babies know no hate, know no enemies and have only two fears: falling and sudden noises. Every other fear is learned.

   As babies, we looked outside ourselves for someone to bring to us what our bodies needed. No one taught us this. We moved, in our earliest days of life, by instinct. We discovered that we must have relationships.

   Beyond food, we saw early the energy that is the sole determinate of our life's meaning. We saw Love. We saw what Jesus sought to teach the woman at the well in Siloam - that it is not the actual water our spirits need. It is the endless richness of Love's "living water" that nourishes our thirsty souls.

   Without Love, our bodies can keep functioning. But without Love, what is the point of living? For Love breathes meaning into our lives. 

   Our years of living, our rising consciousness of the world, bring something else to us. We begin to unlearn Love. We learn to distrust and to fear – whether justified or not. 

   Children enter a society where transactions rule. We take in order to get. Or we trade – giving so as to receive.

   The way loving caregivers teach most powerfully is not "in brief or in detail." It is most of all by two things: example and presence. We learn by seeing, we learn by feeling Love's presence. And, when we are teaching, we are the ones who learn most.

How We Learn to Love

   It is difficult to teach what we have not yet learned. How do we learn to Love – to give with no expectation of getting something in return? As a housekeeper at Baptist Hospital taught me, "Love means helping other people no matter what."

   Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Mohamed, and every other prophet, make the teaching clear. As caregivers know better than most, love means loving God and loving others. It also means loving ourselves so that we may do both of these two things.  

   In his book, Love Walked Among Us: Learning to Love Like Jesus, Paul E. Miller writes that it is "our weakness, not our power…that enables us to know God."

   To leaders and caregivers across the country I offer Love's teachings. I offer them not because I am a great example, but simply as a messenger of ancient spiritual truth brought into caregivers environments.

   The suffering ask caregivers to live a Love that includes our skills, our discipline as well as our compassion. This is what those in need require from us in every setting where people come seeking healing.

   One hundred percent of leaders tell me they "understand" and believe in Love. Perhaps fifty percent make some effort to live this out. In my observation, less then ten percent achieve meaningful success at living what they say they understand and believe.

   Why? Part of the answer is that many truly do not "understand." Another part of the reason is that most top leaders are men. Most male CEOs, including me, have been taught to compete, to win, to conquer.

   It is against the nature of most men, as well as many women, to Love their enemies. An enemy is interpreted variously as, outside competitors, and anyone inside who threatens the power of the leader.

   For well-meaning leaders, an enemy can also be the difficulty in changing patterns that focus on profit at the expense of caring and efficiency at the expense of Love. In other words, most leaders practice an approach which is out of balance with Love.

   Teaching change is exceedingly difficult. For it requires that leaders and caregivers let go of some of the "power" they say they need.

   How do we "let go and let God?" How do we live our highest truth?

   The learning and the teaching of Love move in a circle. We learn, we forget, we relearn, we teach, we try out living Love, we succeed, we fail, we try again. The most important thing in this process is that we never give up striving to live God's Love.

   Love travels through us so long as we are seeking. The door in us through which Love flows will only fall shut if we quit.

   One of the most eloquent teachings I have ever encountered comes from poet T.S. Eliot in The Four Quartets: 

 I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
 for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without
    love
 For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
 But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

   How hard it is to let go of our power. How hard it is to know that it is "all in the waiting."

   I believe that we come to the point of waiting only after we strive. First we strive, then we wait for the Love that is most helpful in healing those who come to us in need.

   One day, as we wait, faith and love and hope will arrive. It is worth the waiting, for the moment of highest epiphany is called Grace.

-Rev. Erie Chapman

Note: The Journal of Sacred Work has now presented more than 1000 essays and garnered more than 4000 comments in its nearly four years of existence. Our 4th anniversary will be June 7. Thanks to each of you for your encounters with this work. 

On this Memorial Day, and every day, may we remember and pray for all of our brothers and sisters in the armed services and the many veterans who preceded them.