"Halloween 1943" sounds like a horror movie. I hope not.

   Three things unfolded well at my birth (noon, October 31, 1943)*. After the umbilical was cut I was raised to my mother's breast. Life giving milk. Equally important skin to skin contact.**

  Then, a standard test. A caregiver pretended to drop me. I threw out my arms as if to catch myself. 

   That balance test proves something Hitchcock incorporated into his movies. We all fear falling.

   Decades later I saw proof of how psychological orientation impacts sanity. Once, many ICU's were windowless. Now windows are mandated. 

   Helpless patients unable to distinguish day from night were developing "ICU Psychosis." Awakening from trauma, intubated patients wondered, "Does that analogue clock mean 10 A.M. or 10 P.M.? An inability to orient caused violent thrashing.

   Eighty years after my mother's first nursing, first hug and that scary falling test, I still need nurturing, balance and orientation IF I default to a chronic mistake: Defining my life by roles, making me a lawyer without clients, CEO without a hospital, t.v. host without a show, minister congregants, artist-poet-composer without an audience, father whose job is done. 

   But when my banker joked that I was a "has-been," I was glad to respond, "Better has-been than a never-was."

   Meaningful memories and beautiful remaining "roles": husband to a saintly wife of 57 years, grandfather to five, wonderful friends, the two-pronged ministry of Radical Loving Care^®…

  Wisdom warns that letting that determine self worth is repeating my old mistake. We are children of love and eternal light; not skin-to-skin but spirit-to-spirit with  God. 

-Rev. Erie Chapman

*My mother's first visitor that Sunday was her minister.

"Wow," I said, "A blessing."

"Not for me," she smiled. "He shook my bed when he sat on it and stayed too long."

Maybe that is why I am still restless in church.

**Photo by Erie: "Skin to Skin" (2012)