“How
many leave hospitals healed of their physical illness but hurt in their
feelings by the impersonal treatment they received?”
– Henry Nouwen

             Nouwen
describes the reason for the concepts of Radical Loving Care and Healing
Hospital. It is the universal concept of Love applied in a health care setting.

             For decades,
hospitals have done an excellent job treating illness and injury and an often poor job
of providing compassionate care. Radical Loving Care provides an approach to
transforming medical care from an assembly line process to a series of
meaningful meetings, of sacred encounters that bring
a sense of healing to the vulnerable.

 
            What do I mean by Love? It is a universal concept that describes
Beauty’s energy in this world. “The Buddha advised that, “The motivation of all
religious practice is similar: love…” The apostle John wrote, “God is Love.” ( 1 John 4:8)

             If God is Love, how can you as a worldly being ever express
it? Your human condition, with its endless appetites, consistently challenges
Love’s passage through you.

             Fortunately, Radical Loving Care does expect perfection from you. It recognizes the rich and difficult shadows in life as well as the light.           

             Because you exist by nature at the center of your own
consciousness it takes work to recognize how to ensure you are balancing your
needs with the needs of your fellow beings.

            When you are fearful your needs dominate your ability to
live Love. At your best, you transcend your needs to relieve the suffering of
another.

            This is the challenge of Love. There is nothing more
important.

            The brilliant Rainer Maria Rilke wrote that “For one human
being to love another:  that is perhaps the most difficult task of all…the work for which all other work is but
preparation.” (italics added.) 

            Poets, apostles and saints are the ones you can look to for
inspiration. But how can you as a so-called “ordinary” caregiver ever expect to
express such a beautiful love?

            Deep within you, with all your blessings and difficulties lies
the chance for you to strive in your own way to clear a path so that Love, at
least on occasion, can make its way through you.

            My favorite American poet, Emily Dickinson, offered a
shattering commentary in quiet words:

“The Love a life can show below

Is but a filament, I know,

Of that diviner thing

That faints upon the face of noon…”

             You may engage that “filament,” that Golden Thread, as you
make your daily and nightly journey.  As
every traveler knows, the journey can be exhausting. You can only continue
successfully if you pause, like a desert traveler, at the occasional oasis.

             You are already on this journey.

             Martin Luther King said that when you live
Love you speak “The unarmed truth." Truth is its own protection.

             Radical Loving Care is God’s Love
expressed in the caregiving world. It means living Love, not fear. It is
radical because it is exceptional and therefore rare. Only the finest
caregivers can sustain it.

             “For one human being to love another:  that is perhaps the
most difficult task of all.” That
is why your travels are both more challenging and also more rewarding than
anything else.

 
           The biggest distinction between you
and the machines you use to give care is Love. Computers can now program robots
to do, or potentially do, almost everything a human can do except for one thing: to Love.

            Doesn’t this tell you that your life improves if you increase your
focus on developing compassion to balance
any obsessive focus on task performance? Doesn’t this tell you that you can be
a powerful expression of Love?

            Imagine how much more beautiful your life could be. Imagine living Love every day.

-Erie Chapman

[The above is extracted from the forthcoming book, Inside Radical Loving Care.)