Journal of Sacred Work

"The goal in sacred story is always to come back home…" – Richard Rohr

We leave home and head off on our search. What we discover, if we are persistent, is that what we seek is always "back home."

   But, we can't know home unless we have been away. "Home" is where our greatest truth lies.

   Sacred Story doesn't live in the shallow waters of Facebook or in the thin crust of most conversations. The holiest of ourselves lives in the deep.

   I learned a remarkable fact from Eckhart Tolle. The word person is derived from ancient words that meant "per" – "through" and "son" – "mask." People long ago invented a word for us that means we are people who "look through a mask" at the world and, in turn, present a mask to this same world.

   When we really go all the way back home, we look behind our own masks. There, we see our stories honestly and touch the edge of our mystery.

   Carl Jung understood. "Life is a luminous place between two great mysteries, which themselves are one." Every great storyteller helps us know this.

   Too often, we brush the surface of our own stories. In so doing, we miss the power these tales hold for us.

   In making a little film to celebrate my mother's one hundredth birthday (she is 13 years old in the photo above), I felt compelled to focus on happy events, smiling family, birds that she loves, and her favorite music. Imagine how much I left out.

   In fact, I didn't really tell her story at all because I thought the audience at the party would only want the Hallmark Card version.

   You can't live a hundred years without collecting chapters of pain as well as joy. Yet these are the pages that may tell us the most.

   Do photographed smiles tell the truth about our journey? Do you have any pictures of yourself in tears?

   More important, do you have any photographs of the stories you tell yourself? These images live inside of us (although they can sometimes be discerned in the corners of an expression.)

   "Why think about the hard times?" people often say. Caregivers know the answer to this.

   The deeper we study our most difficult chapters the closer we come to developing empathy for the suffering of others. And the more we learn to empathize with our own suffering.

   Suffering nurtures kindness.

   Can we face into our stories courageously and artfully enough to grow all the way into Radical Loving Care?

-Erie Chapman