Illuminated as if on stage, the dogwood blossoms sing to us of spring. The solstice long past, they find it safe to bloom full and glorious. 

   Solstices mark the bridge between one season and another. What if you were caught on that bridge as precariously as if you had one foot on a dock and the other on a boat?  

   Every season is sacred. But spring reigns supreme here in the south where it lasts a full three months (instead of being truncated on the front end by the long winters in the north.)

   The only way you can miss spring's searing beauty is if your looking is fastened on her function instead of open to her mystery. 

   Radical Loving Care offers a way to awaken us to a new season of seeing. Look at the dogwood petals overlapping each other – as if mimicking the intersecting circles of love and need.

   How can it be that a single Sacred Encounter can change everything? A patient utters a simple four-word statement: “I am in pain.” You ask, simply, "Where does it hurt?"

   But sacred encounters are never simple because suffering is always complex. 

   Do you remember your worst pain? Do you recall how hard it was for
you to experience that pain and to know that nobody else, in that moment, could
understand?

   This is the agony that isolation can produce. When your life struggles
from breath to breath you may even believe it is not worth living.  Why breathe again if such profound discomfort is to continue?

   Pain is complex because illness casts you into a liminal
state – an earthly purgatory. When you are ill you are, by definition, not well but you are also not dead. You are caught on the bridge. Like a pilgrim asea you lack the comfort of your homeland and you have not yet arrived in the new world.

   The thunder of liminal states can feel deafening. There is a particular desperation,
a desire to be in one place or the other but not in between. It is an indescribable fear whose only antidote comes when Love arrives.

   In this state of illness you remember the safe harbor of your
homeland. You want the new land of healing to be better. Meanwhile you are
gasp for air amid the roiling ocean.

   Who will help you? Your only lifeline is the caregiver. Your eyes beseech.

   What will you as that caregiver bring to that suffering soul?

   This is the reason we invite you to sail into the waters of
Radical Loving Care. When we are suffering we need more than medicine. We need what only Love can provide – water from the wellspring of healing. 

-Erie Chapman