Journal of Sacred Work

 
    I want to know if you can see beauty, even when it's not pretty, every day, and if you can source your own life from its presence. – Oriah Mountain Dreamer

   Every encounter holds the potential to become sacred because every moment is pregnant with the holy. It is only Love, which can consecrate any occurance or any place.

   I have frequently used the photo, above (taken by my daughter, Tia, at Yale New Haven Hospital) because it bears all the signs of a sacred encounter. Is not the nurse, above, consecrating the moment with her sick patient by the Love with which she cradles him?

   This means that you can consecrate any encounter, no matter how slight it may seem, by letting Love flow through you. Abraham Lincoln did that on November 19, 1863 through the encounter he had with a crowd of mourners at Gettysburg.

   In his sacred speech, Lincoln confessed to the audience that none of them could consecrate the battleground spread out before them. "The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract," Lincoln told the half-listening crowd.

   When Lincoln finished, no one realized they had just heard what would become the most famous revered speech American history, before or since. In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln may also have freed the word "consecration" from the heavy weight religiosity it had carried for centuries.

   In fact, the word consecration refers to any act connected to the sacred.

   Experienced caregivers know that the birth of a baby may be a holy event. It can also be stripped of meaning by the participants.

   Twenty years ago, while helping out with a delivery at Riverside Methodist Hospital, I saw a mother desecrate the moment of her daughter's birth by expressing repeated disgust that the child was a girl. Six months later, I saw another mother and father consecrate the birth of their baby with tears and joy.

   Sacredness depends upon Love. Disgust, apathy, and hatred can drive the holy from any setting.

   Part of the reason hospice care has become so powerful for millions is that hospice caregivers are trained to understand how to be present with dying patients. With God's Love, they consecrate the departure of the dying.

   But, here may be the most powerful understanding for caregivers: You and I truly do have both the ability and the opportunity to consecrate our work – to bring such Love to patients that we bless them with our healing presence.

   To do this may mean stepping back and looking with new eyes, sacred eyes, at encounters that may have seemed routine and places that have seemed ordinary. Neither cathedral ceiling, nor gold leaf nor rich clothing is required for consecration. All that is needed is Love and the reverence that flows from it.

   I  can look into your eyes or look past them. You can listen or you can ignore. We can open our hearts to beauty, or we can close down and move on.

   After Lincoln finished his speech, Edward Everett, the keynote speaker at the event, told Lincoln, "You said more in two minutes than I said in two hours."

   Everett may have been the only one who truly heard Lincoln. He may have realized that Lincoln's brief remarks helped consecrate not only the battleground but the hearts of all of us who read his words nearly one hundred-fifty years later.

   Like Lincoln, Oriah Mountain Dreamer's words, above, challenge us to create the sacred by seeing beauty every day, "even when it's not pretty,"

-Erie Chapman