Journal of Sacred Work

    Bob was a high school art teacher for more than thirty years. At eighty-two, he continues to create.

   "Isn't it interesting to notice the difference between things we make and the things nature offers?" he told me recently.     "Humans try to make things perfect – straight lines, exact circles," he said. "Nature doesn't bother with that."

   Nature offers soft flowers and hard rocks and smooth ocean waves. Sometimes we try to mimic her. The shell I photographed is real. You may notice imperfections. Humans might try to make a "perfect" version of this same shell – clearing away as many "imperfections" as possible.

   Human-made objects have the chance to appear sharply geometric. Sometimes nature-made and human-made objects compliment each other, as in the image of nature's sun reshaped into stripes in the second set of pictures (below).

   This is about noticing. What is the chance we will notice the remarkable patterns that stripe our lives every day? The combinations in the photo are endless and endlessly fascinating to people like me.

   As a five-year-old still consigned to take naps, I remember the California sun sneaking through the closed blinds to rest next to me on my pillow. The warmth of those moments has left with me with an enduring appreciation of line, shape, texture and color.

   Some caregivers suffer compassion fatigue to the point that they may see patients as all the same. "Here comes another gall bladder," a veteran nurse may grumble, as if all gall bladder patients were assembly-line vehicles in need of adjustment.

     It's difficult to keep seeing each case as new just as it  
is difficult for many to see that the color image (at left) is a different artistic experience from the black & white image, even though they are the identical scene. 

   Take a moment to click on these images. What is the difference between nature's lines and human-made objects?    

   As you encounter patients and your fellow caregivers, perhaps it would be interesting to ask yourself about what is similar and what is unique about each person. Look in the mirror and ask yourself the same thing. Would any of us want to be treated as if we were exactly the same as everybody else?

   It is part of Love's gift that although each of us may share similar problems, we are all unique. Each of us is entitled to be cared for by people who know our disease and recognize that we are created by the hand of God, not by the hand of man.

-Reverend Erie Chapman

p.s. Wandering with my camera during vacation, I found other examples of what the sun does when it encounters human-made structures.