Teams and organizations are powerful fields of energy.   
– Erie Chapman

   Your team has an impact on you that is positive or negative but rarely neutral. Similarly, your team can have a powerful impact on the people they care for if they develop a group focus that engages Love’s energy. Entire health care organizations create energy fields that are healing or not, depending upon the nature of the energy circling within them.
    We know about the enormous, even atomic power of groups through stories. What I mean by atomic power is the ability of a group of people to generate forces so powerful that they can save lives simply by the attitude a the circle of people takes towards someone in need. Their energy becomes atomic because it is exponentially so much greater than the power of any one member and so much stronger than a group that has no vision. Consider the atomic power of Mother Theresa’s small circle of nuns on caring for the poorest of the poor in India. Reflect on the ability of the relatively small Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to implement wholesale changes in desegregating the South in the 1950s and ’60s.
   Consider the case of a former prostitute and drug addict named Katrina and how she was saved by an organization in Nashville named after St. Mary Magdalene (see painting, above, left, by Titian – 1531) …

   Here is the beginning of Katrina’s heart-rending story told in her own words as I reported it in my latest book, Sacred Work – Planting Radical Loving Care in America’s Hospitals and Charities:

I remember my last days using on the streets. I walked up and down Dickerson Road until a car stopped for me. I go in the car, and the man asked me to have sex with him. I agreed. i then asked him how much money he would give me. He told me how much, and I felt like it was not enough; but I felt compelled to accept his offer because I wanted that next hit of dope so bad. He took me to a park where we had sex in the car. After we finished, he dropped me off at the store on the corner of Dickerson Road and Hancock Avenue. I saw the guy who I always bought my drugs from and I bought some dope. I went behind the store to take a hit. I smoked it on a glass stem and tried to forget what I had just done.

   Katrina was saved from this world by a group of women who supported her decision to change her life. What kind of group has the power to cause a drug addict to choose its company over the ecstatic high of cocaine or heroin? The answer is called Magdalene. And it is one of the most successful treatment programs for drug addicted prostitutes in the country. The atomic energy of Magdalene to defeat drug addiction rests in their ability to create a sort of force field of community that is so loving that most clients will choose to stay clean and in the group rather than return to the lure of the streets.
   Magdalene forms a circle of love. Former prostitutes stay up to two years in the program during which team their primary support is not professional counseling but each other.
   Imagine, again, the energy it takes to cause a woman to choose a group over a drug high. Imagine the passage of suffering she must traverse to shake her addiction and exchange it for the love of a group of women led by an Episcopalian priest names Becca’s Stevens.
   Rev.Stevens and her team have made miracles possible through the power of the community they have created. They are a prime example of a team of women as a healing energy field.
   Katrina is not the only woman who knows this. Years into her recovery, she knows her life has been saved and her spirit redeemed by the committed energy of a circle of women that welcome her, affirm her, and love her.

   What is the energy in your team? The group of which you are a part has the potential to do more. How can you help enrich your group’s energy and imbue your circle of partners with a greater gift of healing? Invite your colleagues into a discussion of this. Sustain the discussion over weeks and months. Consider how the group might be reshaped to increase its effectiveness.
   Remember the power of one. Remember the power of twelve disciples whose faith laid the ground work for a church whose members now number in the billions. And remember the example of Magdalene.

-Erie Chapman