During my leadership of Baptist Hospital (Nashville) I learned that fourteen babies were born there each day and two died (the number of births has since risen to eighteen.) As caregivers, we converted the meaning of these cold numbers.
They became a way in which we reinforced the sacred quality of our work as caregivers. "Each day, fourteen people enter this world, and two leave it…and they make these journeys in our presence," we said.
The whole idea of re-imagining these statistics informed our way of thinking and therefore how we acted. During that time, nurses who had helped deliver hundreds of babies began to reconsider their work as a presence to newly arriving life. Staff in intensive care units thought anew about their journey alongside people living their last days.
As we die, we "slip the bonds of earth", vanish into some other consciousnes as God carries us somewhere we cannot truly imagine.
But what of those arriving? Are they slipping into some kind of bondage to the world? Clearly, at the moment of our birth, we begin to wear a body we had no role in selecting. We ride the waves of our ocean until, one day soon or one day late, our ship dissolves into the earth and air and water from whence it came. And our soul leaps free.
These are, perhaps, lofty thoughts. At a practical level, the reponsibility of caregivers is to help our journey at both ends of life's spectrum as well as in between. Patients come to us not out of desire but out of need.
No one wants to come to a hospital. No one says on Saturday night, "What shall we do for fun? Hey, why don't we go to the hospital?"
The need every patient feels reinforces the criticality of the caregiver's role. Patients and families require our help during what is typically an important passage in their lives.
Before anyone of us slips the bonds of this earth, is freed from our body's incessant needs, may we help each other along. This can be a hard journey. Only Love can make it tolerable.
-Reverend Erie Chapman, M.T.S., J.D.
*Photo – Rebecca and Baby, Impression 1a copyright Erie Chapman 1979, 2011
**"Slipped the surly bonds of earth" is a phrase adapted from the following poem by John Magee (1922-1941) a poet and aviator who died while piloting his plane in the skies over England.
"High Flight"
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air….
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark, or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent lifting mind I have trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
- Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
Journal of Sacred Work 
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