[The following column is excerpted from my new book-in-progress – Inside Radical Loving Care.]

“Wanting
to alleviate pain without sharing it is like wanting to save a child from a burning
house without the risk of being hurt.” – Henri Nouwen

              On a recent windless day I watched
several jets accumulate cloudy tracks that intersected far up in the
sky. As I raised my camera to photograph the phenomenon I thought of the people
on those planes, their energies crisscrossing in their temporary communities like invisible contrails.

             It requires
courage to show up for life – to find the intersection between our soul and the soul of another.  

             Beauty glows at intersections. Isn't this the appeal of the image of the Christian cross? We are drawn to the center of a naked cross, not to the edges.

             Compassion rises in waves from the ocean of Love. Her crests may generate troughs of fatigue (and sometimes fear) because compassion is the human expression of Love's eternal energy. Human energy ebbs and flows. Love is constant. 

             Many of us used to be present but it got too
painful. We are always running the risk of being hurt in the course of our
caregiving just as we may have been hurt elsewhere in our lives. Henri Nouwen understands this.

             “Those who
do not run away from our pains but touch them with compassion bring healing and
new strength,” Nouwen wrote.

             But, each of us carries scars.  Pain has taught us to be wary.

   The Santa Trick

            As children some of us showed up for Christmas until we found out there was no Santa.
After that, if we showed up, we may have appeared with a new reluctance to be
fully present lest we be tricked again.

             After I got
“The Santa Disclosure” at about age seven I immediately wondered about God. If
Santa was a fake, was God another trick played by adults? Not until I began to
think of God as Love could I overcome my cynicism.

             The reason
it is so important for caregivers to establish real presence with patients is
that it is the only way to truly appreciate the patient’s needs. Is this
difficult? Of course it is. It is worth doing only if you are genuinely
interested in meeting those needs. 

II – The Crucial Intersection of Compassion with Competence 

             If we truly
care about those in pain we will work to
change how we define them. The more we imagine another as a stranger the more we may dissect that person away from our hearts as not worthy of our compassion (as if compassion were a finite quantity that might run out.)

             The challenge is that compassion requires empathy and competence calls for professional distance. Professionals are not supposed to care for members of their own families and yet it is those members for whom we want the deepest compassion. 

              In fact, I have seen professionals give spectacular care to their own children and to friends of theirs who are, in many cases, closer to them than family. So the family/professionalism dichotomy, while understandable, is false.

             The challenge of compassion is be as "tough-minded" with those we love as we are "tender-hearted." (Martin Luther King's phrase.)

   Who are We?

             “I am not a mechanism, an assembly
of various sections,” D.H. Lawrence wrote in his poem “Healing.” “It is not
[only] because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill. I am ill
because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self….”

             How do
caregivers reach this “deep emotional self” that has been wounded? It’s
impossible to develop compassion for patients until we have first found it for
ourselves.

             In the same way that caregiving requires both compassion and competence those who have found self-compassion sometimes need professional help in order to develop the self-competence to treat their own pain. 

             It is
crucial that we distinguish pity from compassion. There’s a silly-sounding
rhyme that describes the critical difference: “Pity stops and
stares. Compassion stoops and cares.”

             Self-pity
is an ugly thing and can cause depression. Compassion is beautiful and lives at
the heart of our healing.

             Everyone
one of us has suffered enormous personal pain. Can we develop compassion for
our pain instead of pity? After that, do we have both the strength and the competence to enter the pain of another and, in so doing,
relieve it?

             If this is not loving care, what is?

-Erie Chapman

Photograph, "Intersecting Trails" copyright erie chapman 2013