"Those who live God's Love see beauty where others experience shame." – Dane Dakota, Woman As Beauty (Westview, 2010)
"Shame on you, you bad boy," a first grade teacher told me sixty years ago.
"God will punish you," I heard from a minister when I was about the same age.
It's difficult to see Beauty from the prison of shame. It's hard to live Love while fearing punishment.
But where's the shame in a rose's beauty or an oak's elegance? Why not live among the "pretty" things of the world all the time? Instead, caregivers work amid cold fluorescence, linoleum sterility and the blood of the wounded.
We want them to care for us free of the sword of shame and unburdened with worries about punishment. We want them to heal from their place of Love.
Caregivers enter the shadowed cave to care for those who have been bent or broken by the storms of this world. The sick and wounded seek healing.
To heal (versus to fix) caregivers must see Beauty within themselves. This means looking within and beyond the spiked walls of fear and shame that are the enemies of Love.
"I have come to realize," Henri Nouwen wrote, "that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity or power, but self-rejection." This sentence rings so true for me that I found it painful to read.
Like so many, I am driven to perform. It is uncommonly difficult for me to relax because I am forever hounded by the need to help or to create. That would be fine except for the anxiety crawling beneath too much of my behavior.
Love is the mother of Beauty. We experience her energy by respecting Beauty, not by grabbing her at the throat and trying to wring some personal satisfaction out of her.
Bill Banta is my oldest and dearest friend (we met as freshman at Northwestern University.) Bill's latest letter included a message from his minister, Don Frampton.
"The world will try to seduce us into thinking that we are only as good as our accomplishments…," Reverend Frampton writes."But God will have nothing of it."
Do we seek God's approval out of Love or out of fear? Do we drive ourselves to perform because we are afraid to fail or because, as God's children, we seek to live out our highest calling?
I wrote the quote that opens this essay under my pen name, Dane Dakota. I use another name because I'm afraid. Some of my art work stirs the fears of some who define me (and art) narrowly. (One of my photographs is above)
You don't come to this space to be startled by certain kinds of art. That is why I offer my riskier work elsewhere.
Is our greatest worry as caregivers getting fired or is it that we fire ourselves through self-rejection? For example, I ask myself whether my increasing boldness about art arises because I am now retired from organizations that can fire me. What expressions of Love have been blocked in the past by my fears?
Five hundred years ago, Kabir sent us a letter we may open today. "Inside your body there are flowers," he writes to us. "One flower has a thousand petals…Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty/inside the body and out of it…"
I wish I had celebrated more of these flowers sooner. I wish I could have realized as a child that God loved me no matter what I did.
And that I would do good thingsbecause God loved me. Never because I was afraid.
-Reverend Erie Chapman
Journal of Sacred Work 
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