Community Support Teams

How to Be an Adult: The “Five A’s” of Healthy Community (with apologies to David Richo)

Actually, Vic Dippenaar knows quite a bit about how to be an adult.

While waiting in Atlanta for his flight to San Francisco, a colleague of mine, Vic Dippenaar, sat down in the waiting lounge to nurture patience in the pages of a book. He raised in front of his eyes David Richo’s book, How to Be an Adult, and began reviewing the chapters. Vic, the director of our Clinical Pastoral Education program here at UAB Hospital, uses the book in teaching young adults how to be chaplains. After a few minutes of perusing the chapters, he sensed someone looking at him. He raised his eyes and looked across the top of the book.

Opposite sat a very large, muscular man with a shaved head. The man made eye contact with Vic, looked directly at the book’s title, then with raised eyebrows looked back at Vic and tilted his head to one side. It was an unspoken question: “Really? You need instruction on that?” Or perhaps his silent query was, “So, is this the how-to manual I’ve been looking for?”

Well, I don’t know about you, but I can think of many interactions with folks in my personal and professional life which left me wishing they’d read a “how-to” manual on maturity.

David Richo wrote How to Be an Adult in 1991 and followed up with another one entitled, How to Be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving in 2002. They’re both excellent books and if people were to embrace what Richo describes, I’m certain they’d improve the quality of their individual lives. For my money, though, the “Five Keys” Richo talks about in both books also describe what it means to be a healing community.

Frequently in this blog I’ve spoken the phrase I first heard from Mark Hyman, the director of the Functional Medical Institute at the Cleveland Clinic. In an interview he said, “Community is medicine.” I’ve repeated that phrase frequently because its wisdom lies at the heart of what we do in pastoral care. As our society suffers increasingly from the Epidemic of Loneliness, we need to unpack, examine, and absorb the powerful healing effects of living in an embracing and loving community.

The “Inklings”

Not just any conglomeration of human beings can weave healing community, however. Despite what we’ve seen on television and in movies, healthy community isn’t likely to happen in a tavern at 3 a.m. Oh, yes, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their colleagues often met at a (now) famous tavern in Oxford, and from those conversations produced some amazing literature. Those guys, however, met regularly elsewhere, too, shared professional lives, and in some cases worshipped together at an altar other than the Guinness tap. Their healing community – as any healing community – included some essential dynamics which Richo describes as “The Five A’s.” Here they are with my commentary regarding how they characterize a healthy community:

Attention. In a healthy community, people pay attention to each other. They observe, listen, and notice things. They see more than their own interest and can forget what they saw in the mirror that morning.
Acceptance. In a healthy community, people accept each other, having suspended judgment and refused to exert evaluations on the other(s).
Appreciation. A healthy community recognizes and celebrates each individual’s gifts, passions, longings, and limitations.
Affection. In a healthy community people express their love and appreciation for each other through words and appropriate touch.
Allow. A healthy community provides avenues of expression where each individual’s gifts, passions, longings, and limitations can be embraced, mobilized, met, and, expanded, as Richo says, “with all their ecstasy and ache, without trying to take control.”

Here’s another reason why we counsel the organization of support teams for our friends who’ve been patients at our hospital. When folks have taken the initiative to remove the randomness from their efforts of compassion, they pay attention to whether or not they’re practicing the wisdom of the Five A’s, whatever they’d call them. In fact, it occurs to me that the whole process of weaving healing community begins with paying attention, with recognizing the world’s incredible pain. Many of us have the impulse to look away when we run across bleeding wounds . . .

. . . others, however, those who make a difference, refuse to divert their attention. They notice, then they bury their denial. They embrace the humans in front of them as worthy of good effort and then give them the freedom to grow in the Grace of the One who calls us all to healing and wholeness.

That’s the essence of a Support Team.

By the way, if you’re interested to learn more about David Richo, click here for a link to his website.

“Independence” Doesn’t Happen in Nature

We could see the Milky Way almost this clearly on that night without whippoorwills.

Some years ago, I stood with a cousin of mine on a balmy June evening at the edge of a field on our late grandfather’s farm. It was about 10:00 p.m. and the field stretched away for nearly a mile to a distant tree line, visible as a dark jagged ribbon against a luminous night sky. We’d gone to that field because of its distance from any night lights and our desire for a clear view of the Milky Way. We stretched out on our backs in the thick turf and with our heads in our interlocked hands looked up. There it glowed above us, what the Bushmen of the Kalahari in South Africa call “The Backbone of Night.” It began in the constellation Cassiopeia directly overhead and stretched into the southwest. I felt the usual awe as I stared up into infinity and contemplated the immensity of the universe. “It’s just so awesome,” my cousin said.

“Sure makes me feel small,” I said. He pointed out the steady movement of a satellite, we laughed at the blinking lights of a high altitude airplane, and began to notice the various shades of color in the stars.

Then, I started to notice some things closer to earth. I could hear the night creaks of the insects and the calls of frogs from a small pond in the field to our backs. It felt familiar because my cousin and I had been to that very field many times over the years, long before we were married, had kids, got educated and moved to cities where ground glare made it impossible to see the Milky Way and where the night sounds included far more sirens than frogs.

I waxed a bit nostalgic. I said, “You know, it’s so quiet out here, but I haven’t heard a whippoorwill the whole time we’ve been here.”

My cousin sighed. (He’d returned to the farm much more frequently than I.) He said, “I miss them, too.” He went on, “They used to fill the air with their calls this time of year, but they’ve grown less frequent over the last few years.”

“Why is that,” I asked.

“There’re all kinds of theories, but I can tell you what happened here. First, they bulldozed all the hedgerows, which was where they hung out.”

“Why’d they bulldoze the hedgerows?”

“They wanted a bigger farm and they wanted to plant a lot of corn and the hedgerows made it inconvenient for the big machinery. Of course, without the hedgerows, the whippoorwills weren’t around to eat the moths that got in the corn, so they upped their usage of pesticides. After that, my grand-dad and dad wouldn’t let livestock in the fields to eat the stubble because they were afraid the pesticides would poison them, so the natural fertilizer wasn’t there anymore, which led to using artificial fertilizers. The heavy machinery compacted the soil, so they have to use even more fertilizers and pesticides. And now, the run-off from all those chemicals has killed off most of the bass in the tributaries to the Pee Dee. And if by chance you DO catch a bass in those creeks, I wouldn’t advise eating it.”

My cousin waved his hand at the Cosmos above us. “We might not notice it right away, but all of this is connected. I think we’ll hear that missing whippoorwill song again when we take all these connections seriously.”

The more we saw these guys, the better our snapdragons and rosemary grew.

I thought of that night when I was reading some research the other day. The author made the statement that the notion of “independence” is an abstract political term, but independence doesn’t happen in nature. Rather, interdependence characterizes the way the creation works. If bees don’t pollinate crops in California, grocery shoppers in Alabama pay higher prices – IF they can get the product.

That’s why we do Support Teams, in fact, because we human beings depend upon one another far more than many of us want to admit. As I’ve come to see, health isn’t just the absence of disease. To be healthy means a person is living and loving within a network of relationships, embodied in a community, and making a contribution to the community while enjoying other people’s contributions. Too often in our work as chaplains, we come across people who believe the “rugged cowboy” myth of our society, that if you’re what you ought to be, you can handle whatever comes your way all by yourself. We do Support Teams because we weren’t born alone, we weren’t raised alone, we weren’t educated alone, we don’t make all our clothes or raise all our food, or mine the minerals that someone else used to make our iPhones, TVs, and automobiles. We aren’t even entertained alone.

And we will not get well and stay healthy alone, either.

So we regularly offer our counsel and companionship so that folks can better use the unique medicine that is their community. For so many folks, that organized community is the missing piece in their worlds. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, needing each other to be healthy. And so often, when we take our actual interconnectedness seriously and organize and nurture it, a missing song returns.

Voting For the Wrong Person

The lady who lives next door to us is voting for the wrong person. At least, that’s what I think. A couple of times, our conversations have moved toward political issues and the apparent qualities of the presidential candidates and judging by some of her statements, she doesn’t think the way I do . . . except . . .

Our neighbor kept our flowering plants watered, and look who appreciated it as much as we did!

. . . that she does. In fact, she thinks better than I do. When Vicki and I went to the Northwest in May, we asked her to keep an eye on our outdoor plants. When we returned, they’d been watered just as we asked, but she’d also mowed our lawn, weeded the shrubs along the front of the house, and sprayed herbicide on the most persistent weeds. “You did too much,” exclaimed Vicki.

“Hey!” our neighbor responded, “I’ve got your back. I enjoyed it.” Vicki and I were glad that we’d brought her a thank-you gift from Seattle.

When we went to New Mexico, we asked her to water the plants again. I told her that she didn’t need to cut the grass. She did anyway and upon our return, told me that she enjoyed it. Don’t tell her not to do things she enjoys doing. “Please! ALWAYS ask me. I’ve got your back!”

Then we went to Maine in October. I went into a specialty store in St. Johnsbury, Vermont and bought a quart of genuine maple syrup for her because I knew she’d take care of things. When we got home, it was as we’d expected. The plants looked great, and our neighbor had even made sure that the recycling bin had been deployed and returned, something we’d not mentioned but she noticed. She wasn’t at home when I took over the syrup, but I saw her a few days later and she told me that her kids were now spoiled. All they wanted was pancakes with genuine maple syrup. “It’s all gone,” she said with a wide smile.

“I’m glad y’all enjoyed it so much,” I said. “You’ve done so much for us.”

“Hey,” she said, “I’ve got your back – syrup or no syrup.” Then she paused, “But if you bring us more of that syrup, I won’t complain.”

I really want to take care of her yard when they go out of town, but as she told me once, “We never go anywhere – and won’t until the 14 year-old graduates.” So, the next time we go north, I’m looking for some syrup.

When I was a chaplain resident at the University of Louisville in the Department of Psychiatry, my mentor Wayne Oates taught us about the insights of a scholar named Otto Rank. He summed up Rank’s theories by stating, “The fact remains that human beings are far more alike than they are different.”

My generous neighbor and we have a common life. We have plants to water, laundry to do, grass to cut, groceries to buy, and house payments to make. When Vicki and I were sitting on our patio a couple of nights ago, our neighbor popped through the side gate of our yard and sat down with us. She’d brought along a glass of white wine and while Vicki and I enjoyed our red Cotes du Rhone, we talked about our kids. It was abundantly clear that both our families love our kids the best we can and then fret about releasing them into a world where they’ll hear the opposite of what we taught them. We helplessly pray that the world won’t cut our beloved sons and daughters down in the middle of their hopes and dreams, and we’ve both known that desperate ache in the chest when we learned that a loved one had been diagnosed with a threatening disease. We share so much.

In fact, every single person we encounter as we move through life shares more with us than not. Every single one of us needs to know that our neighbor “has our back.”

There are a number of things our legislators could do to heal the profound rifts we see in our governing institutions. I hope they can become adult enough to pull it off. In the meantime, I’m confident that when I’m out of town, my neighbor “has my back,” and she will do that faithfully – despite the fact that she knows I voted for the wrong person.

Locust Fork Baptist Church – GOOD Medicine!

Just outside Locust Fork is the Swann Covered Bridge which spans a portion of the Locust Fork River near Cleveland, Alabama.

Locust Fork does it right. An incredible congregation. Here’s the story –

Just this past September while rounding on one of his units, Chaplain Jeff Woods met a couple, the husband of which suffers from advancing dementia. The wife felt completely overwhelmed and that seized Jeff’s heart. He discerned that they could really use a good support team. The wife told Jeff that she wasn’t a member of any congregation currently but that they lived near Locust Fork, Alabama.

Jeff called me and told me about the family. “They could really use a support team. This woman doesn’t even have time to clean her house, and it’s really depressing her.”

“Where do they live,” I asked.

“Near Locust Fork, Alabama,” Jeff responded.

Well, it just so happens that we have a cracker jack group of Support Team practitioners at Locust Fork Baptist Church. I called their leader and coordinator, Mary Ann Crider and told her about Jeff, his patient, and the patient’s need. Mary Ann and Jeff talked. Mary Ann called the family.

“We have a house cleaning team,” Mary Ann informed the wife.

“And you’d just come and do that for me?”

“Why, yes! That’s what we do,” answered Mary Ann, and so Locust Fork Baptist Church launched their House Cleaning team, and the wife who’d been so overwhelmed with a sense of hopelessness was suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude at the practical, disciplined love expressed to her by Locust Fork Baptist Church.

Now, here’s a bit of back story –

Locust Fork Baptist Church's team of team leaders and coaches. On the front row, that's Mary Ann Crider on my right (my wife's on my left).

Locust Fork Baptist Church’s team of team leaders and coaches. On the front row, that’s Mary Ann Crider on my right. Pat Standridge is on the very back row all the way on the right.

Back in January, one of our chaplains, Rev. Harlan Bailey, had befriended a patient and her family while rounding on one of our neuro units. She suffered from a central nervous system lymphoma and the husband recounted to Rev. Bailey that he simply didn’t know how he was going to hold everything together. Harlan told them about how our pastoral care department works with families to help them organize their practical support when they leave the hospital. They were intrigued, so Harlan introduced them to me and we talked some more.

That’s when the family told us about being a part of Locust Fork Baptist Church. They gave us a couple of names, one of them being Pat Standridge, and when we called her, she said, “Sure! I’ll get a few people together and let’s see what we can do!”

Harlan and I then drove up to Locust Fork on a Wednesday morning in early February, and Pat and company listened carefully as we told them about the Support Team methodology (which you can find spelled out in detail on this website and in multiple other blog posts – I’m not going to belabor those specifics here). Among the folks who attended that meeting was Mary Ann Crider.

Mary Ann Crider conducts a meeting with her leadership team at Locust Fork Baptist Church.

Pat became the team leader for the patient and her family and as I learned this past Sunday (October 9), the team is still functioning, making adjustments appropriate for the changing family situation as any good Support Team will do. Mary Ann, however, along with some others with whom she works at Locust Fork, had an inspiration of imagination. She arranged for me to speak at a Wednesday evening Bible study. She had invited a number of people to attend along with the regular crowd and at the end of the service, people started signing up to be on different teams according to what they love to do. She also arranged for me to come back again and do a coaches training. At that meeting, I learned that they had organized their volunteers into ten teams, one of which was the house cleaning team to which I referred at the beginning of this post. (I’ll list all the teams at the end of this post.)

I’ve really enjoyed getting to know the folks at Locust Fork. They’re warm, welcoming, smart, and passionate about doing service in their community. When I showed up for the Wednesday evening Bible study, Mary Ann brought me one of her peanut butter pies and another church member, Ronnie Dinkins, brought me a bag of organic heirloom tomatoes from his garden. AND . . . I had lunch with their pastor, Rev. Rufus Harris at a diner in town that makes the best donuts in Alabama, in my experience. Rev. Harris practices wise and creative pastoral leadership and evidently has won deep respect in the community because when we finished our lunch, the server came to our table and told us someone had already paid our bill. (I’m going to invite Rev. Harris to lunch more often.)

But it’s not just because I’ve come away with some pretty good loot when I leave Locust Fork, or some fantastic, home made donuts from the local diner, or a literal free lunch. It’s more because they’ve caught a vision for how a congregation can actually practice medicine through community. It’s because they’ve formed a meaningful partnership with the UAB Department of Pastoral Care, and by extension, have become an invaluable resource for UAB Medicine in general.

This is the kind of service that will begin to push back against the epidemic of loneliness sweeping our nation. I’m grateful for Locust Fork Baptist Church because they know they’re a healing presence in their community, and wherever healing is, there the spirit of God is.

I was reading a passage in Thomas Merton’s brilliant book, Disputed Questions. In it, he makes the following statement: “Our faith . . . is the needle by which we draw the thread of love through our neighbor’s soul and our own soul and sew ourselves together in one Christ. Our faith is given us not to see whether or not our neighbor is Christ, but to recognize Christ in him and to help our love make both him and ourselves more fully Christ.”

Or, as Mary Ann Crider put it perhaps more clearly: “You can tell ’em all day that you love ’em, but if you don’t show it, it doesn’t mean a thing.” In Locust Fork, their love means something profound.

______________________

Here are the 10 teams Locust Fork has formed and the link to their website:

The Compartment Conundrum

I’ve been thinking lately about community and human connectivity. It’s becoming more and more dear to my heart as I see the divisive nature of our public discourse and the dismissive attitude so many have toward those whose lives differ from their own. Indeed, I realize I’m as guilty in these tendencies as any of the folks I’d target for my ire. At the same time, I remind myself that in my work here at UAB, with Support Teams, with The Wholeness Project, and with the emerging Loneliness Project, the unifying force in all of them is the need for meaningful human connectivity. What if our population became skillful at nurturing meaningful connections between people?

First, The Compartment Conundrum —

The pedestrian bridge spanning the space over 18th Street S. between the North Pavilion of the University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital and the Women and Infants Center.

There was a small traffic jam on the crosswalk from the North Pavilion to the Women and Infants Center (WIC) yesterday. A pedestrian traffic jam. Normally, twelve people walking shoulder to shoulder could stride comfortably along that crosswalk, which spans the space over a very busy street. Yesterday, though, a group of visiting physicians had stopped on one side of the corridor for their tour guide to explain the various campus buildings which are visible from that vista. Simultaneously, a woman in a wheel chair had stopped on the other side of the corridor directly across from the visiting physicians. Her daughter had been pushing her IV pole while her husband pushed the wheel chair. Other folks going in both directions funneled into the space between the wheel chair entourage and the huddled physicians. The daughter had grabbed the IV pole and tubes so as to shield them from accidental collision. I had to stop right behind the wheel chair family.

The daughter saw that I’d stopped and realized I was waiting. Three nurses stopped and stood beside me. She and her dad looked at us sheepishly. The daughter looked anguished. “Oh! We’re so sorry! We’re just blocking up everything.” She indicated to her father that they should squeeze over to the side.

I said, “Oh! Take your time! No problem!”

The nurses with me expressed the same sentiment. “We can wait! Take your time!”

After all, each of us – I, the chaplain, the three nurses on their way to the WIC – could see the scarf around the woman’s head, the billiard ball smoothness of her skull beneath the scarf’s hem, the absence of eyebrows and lashes. It was obvious to me, as I’m sure it was to the RNs, that here was a family taking their beloved mom/wife for a little excursion away from the confines of her room. For a few steps, we walked along slowly behind them. I said, “Out for some fresh air?”

The woman in the wheel chair turned her face toward the light streaming in through the crosswalk windows. “Yes! It feels so good to get out of that room and feel the sun on my face.”

“Where’re you from,” inquired one of the nurses.

The 18th Street Crosswalk at a much less busy time.

“Oxford, Mississippi,” said the daughter.

“I’m from Oxford,” cried one of the other nurses.

“Y’all pull for Ol’ Miss?” The question came from a physician who’d slowed to walk behind us.

“Oh yeah,” answered the father, speaking for the first time. He pumped his fist.

Then the group of visiting physicians across the hall moved on. The corridor opened up. People spaced themselves evenly again. The nurses, the physician behind us, and I walked around the trio and each of us wished them well as we passed. We were rewarded with a bright smile from the woman in the chair who said, “Thank you. Bless you!”

We walked a few more steps before one of the nurses said, “Isn’t it interesting how patient we can be when we’re walking? If you’d come across someone going that slow on the interstate, there’d have been a long line of tailgaters. People would’ve been blasting around them, probably flipping them off,” and she made motions with her arms.

That made me smile. I said, “It’s difficult to be rude when there isn’t anything separating you from the other person and you can see what they’re up against.”

I thought of that again as I made my way home yesterday afternoon. Our cars are compartments that shield us from wind as they whisk us along to our destination, but they also make it impossible to know the human beings riding along beside us. In our moving compartments, zipping from the cubicles where many of us work, to the houses where many of us collapse after a hard day’s labor, we’re largely separated from the stories that animate the lives of those around us. We don’t know them. And when a vehicle slows in front of us, many of us feel irritation at the object that has interrupted our pace. It’s certainly not easy for ME to remember that a human being sits in that car, a human being with a story which could be as compelling as the trio on the crosswalk. (Sure, they also might be distracted by their cell phone, but that isn’t true of everyone.)

Our compartments lull us into a sort of dazed forgetfulness. Of course, this isn’t just true for car commuters. I’ve commuted in cities with public transport, sitting on the Metro in Washington, D.C., for example, with hundreds of other people. Many tuck themselves behind books, or their Kindles, or studiously avoid eye contact listening to their ear buds which emit a sound like a small belt sander is in their head. Though automobiles serve as very concrete compartments, we can also construct compartments in our hearts. It takes a certain discipline to remember that we’re surrounded by hundreds of stories.

I know some people who possess this virtue which I have not yet nurtured to maturity in my own character. They don’t feel irritation when they have to slow in traffic, or wait for a car to merge, or get all twisted out of shape because someone up ahead didn’t respond quickly enough to the light changing from red to green. I’ve ridden with people who seem to see past the barrier of their mobile compartment, who remember that a human with a history rides in that other compartment, and they may be dealing heroically with challenges that would crush me.

That’s why I was so glad for the pedestrian traffic jam. It reminded me that I need to get past my compartments, whether the literal compartment of my automobile, or the more psychological/spiritual compartment of my preoccupation with my own issues. When I do that, and lean into the relationships across which I stumble everyday, I’ll see the particularity of people and experience the warming of the heart I experienced with the trio from Oxford.

This is one of the major advantages that occur when we organize support teams for folks we know and care about. Putting together and participating in a support team obliterates our compartments and gives us the privilege of playing a small but crucial role in a friend’s heroic story.

That’s what happens when we “lean into relationships.”

In the next post, more on “leaning into relationships.”

Compassion Stamped on the Very Rocks of Our Creation

Dr. Xavier le Pichon, pictured here with one of his granddaughters.

A geophysicist helped me understand better why the work we do with support teams is so crucial. I was listening to Krista Tippet’s podcast “On Being” a few days ago and her guest was the man who pioneered the science of plate tectonics, Xavier Le Pichon.

In introducing the scientific world to plate tectonics, Le Pichon observed, measured, and described the movement of the giant segments of the earth’s crust that virtually float on the underlying magma of the molten core of our planet. These plates move very slowly and bump up against each other over millions of years. Along the boundaries where these plates grind against each other, earthquakes erupt. For example, the Pacific plate meets the North American plate at the San Andreas fault and from time to time, people on the surface feel the vibrations (earthquakes), and sometimes those vibrations do a great deal of damage, like in San Francisco in 1906. The same holds true all over the globe, like in the Indian Ocean back in December of 2004 (earthquakes near or under the ocean floor cause tsunamis), and at Fukushima, Japan in March, 2011.

In 2005, a 35-mile rift opened in the earth in Ethiopia along the boundary between two tectonic plates.

Krista Tippet, the host of “On Being,” asked Le Pichon what studying the geophysics of the Earth had taught him, and he gave a very surprising answer. Studying the earth had taught him why some organizations and people handle change better than others. Change is inevitable, he said. It’s happening all the time, sort of like the steady movement of the earth’s plates. The question is whether the inevitable change happens traumatically or in such a manner that people can grow. For example, earthquakes happen in the area of the earth’s crust that are hard and rigid. Around 15 miles deeper in the crust, however, the earth is more “ductile.” The rock is more malleable, in a liquid form that moves more easily. In that region, there are no earthquakes.

This is a great picture of what happens in human systems, Le Pichon said. In human societies or organizations which are composed of all the same kind of people with fixed systems of rules, rituals, and recreation, when change comes, it causes great disturbance. However, a human society composed of many different kinds of people with a wide variety of rules, rituals, and recreation, will not experience change in a catastrophic way. On the contrary, these more flexible, “ductile” societies experience new strength through growth.

The best way to make sure that a society is highly diverse is to place at its center the weak, disabled, handicapped, really anyone who suffers. In Le Pichon’s observation, “As I knew from my own scientific experience, the weaknesses, the imperfections, the faults facilitate the [growth] of a system. A system that is too perfect is also too rigid [to grow]. This is true in politics; it is true within a society, within families, within nature.” If your society, institution, or church has some very strict and hard-lined rules and regulations, then change will bring on what Le Pichon calls “major commotion.” On the other hand, when human beings organize themselves to take care of the weakest and most vulnerable in their midsts and actually embrace their imperfections, their social systems actually become stronger through change.

I find it astonishing that a geophysicist would see the basic compassion that lies at the heart of all the major world religions stamped on the very rocks of our Creation. Isn’t that great!? The old scripture passage lies stamped on the geology beneath our feet. When we are weak, then we are strong.

In Memoriam: Johnny Barnes – A Bermudian Insurgent

Johnny Barnes greets people from the Crow Lane Round About in Bermuda.

I learned this morning from a reader that Johnny Barnes passed away this year, at the age of 93 (see the first reply beneath the post). I was so inspired when I first heard about Mr. Barnes, that I thought I’d repost this particular blog entry from over a year ago. Here it is.

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When the railroads shut down on the island of Bermuda, it forced an electrician by the name of Johnny Barnes to find work as a bus driver. As a bus driver, Johnny came face to face – quite literally – with surly people. Johnny was – and still is – a very cheerful sort of person, so he rarely let the less cheerful sort bother him much. Instead, he decided to make a special effort to be even more cheerful with people who get on his bus.

That’s when a realization developed: cheering people up would be his life’s work, so at the age of 60, he quit bus driving. Instead, he started getting up at around 2:30 every morning so he could be at the Crow Lane Round About in Bermuda by 3:45. Then, as commuters made their way into the city from their homes, he’d wave and yell greetings. “Good morning!” “God bless you!” “I love you!” Of course, at first people were a bit startled. Some thought he’d lost a portion of his mind. After a period of time, however, he became a fixture.

Now, people wave back. Most feel that their commute would be incomplete without seeing Johnny. They actually have come to anticipate gladly seeing Johnny as they drive by that spot. The vast majority feel uplifted. In fact, one day when Johnny wasn’t at the round about because he’d needed to go to the hospital, it caused a stir. Some people even went so far as to stop, park their cars, and walk over to embrace Johnny. Others sought advice. And after about 25 years of this, a group of citizens commissioned a local sculptor to fashion a statue of Johnny – which he did, and which has been erected in a small green sward not far from the Crow Lane Round About. An independent film maker even made a documentary about Johnny entitled, “Mr. Happy Man.” You can view the film by clicking on the link below.

People can’t stand the thought of not having Johnny Barnes around.

No one ordered Johnny to conduct his independent campaign of blessing. He’s a sort of happiness insurgent. He made the personal decision to do his part to convey blessing to other people, however small the effort may have seemed – and even a bit nutty.

I think of our own individual lives like that. When we decide to be blessings in whatever way we can, and just do it – over time it can make a huge difference. I don’t expect that anyone will ever make a statue of me, but then, that’s not why Johnny Barnes decided to be a blessing. He just wanted to do his part to make the world a cheerier place.

And the statue? The blessing we leave for others will form a monument in their hearts – and that’s the most enduring statue of all.

Eagles on Orcas – Slugs on the Tiger

Look in the top of the left-most pine tree at the top right of the photo. See the two eagles?

The ferry cruised steadily on its usual course among the San Juan Islands of Puget Sound. We’d left the port of Anacortes earlier that morning, fog hanging heavy over the forested shoulders of multiple islets. As we came into sight of the ferry terminal at the little town of Orcas, on Orcas Island, the sun had begun to burn off the fog. To the west, as we passed by Shaw Island, the snow caps of the Olympic Range backdropped the rich blue water of the sound, and I knew I had to get a picture of the panorama.

I grabbed my camera and ran out from the heated protection of the passenger cabin. A sharp wind whipped across the deck but a perfect photographer’s scene spread out before me. I spun my baseball cap around catcher’s style, rammed the view finder to my eye socket, and began snapping shots before the thickly wooded shoulder of Crane Island would obstruct my view. As the shore of Crane nearly took over the frame, I took one last shot. I felt a gentle lurch beneath my feet as the ferry slowed for docking and I joined my wife on the gangway to descend to the car level.

We’d already established breakfast as our first order of business but at that early hour, the only restaurant in town hadn’t opened yet. So, we followed a line of cars north, emerging from a virtual tunnel of thick conifers into a swale between rich green fields filled with wild flowers. After about a 15 minute drive, we arrived in the town of Eastsound. It lies at the northern end of a fjord called East Sound and nearly splits the island so it has the shape of a horse collar. There, we found a restaurant and sat down to enjoy pastries and coffee. That’s when I started looking at the pictures I’d taken just before we docked.

As often happens when I shoot landscapes, the photographs simply couldn’t convey the sense of majesty one gets from standing in the middle of the actual reality. I quickly thumbed through the images – until something caught my eye from the last shot – the one taken almost as an afterthought as Crane Island swept into view. There were two black dots in the top of a pine tree that were much too large to be pine cones. Besides, they had white tips. I magnified the image, and there in the top of that tree sat two bald eagles. I sat back in my chair, and laughed. Vicki wanted to know what it was, and I showed her. We both just laughed in amazement.

They followed us to the summit of Constitution Mountain. I’m sure of it.

In a real sense, that typifies much of my life. I’ll get wound up with the big picture and often miss the beautiful details right under my nose. In this particular case, I was grateful for the the camera I possess for allowing me to magnify the shot. Then, later that morning, as we finished our climb to the top of Constitution Mountain, the highest point on Orcas Island, again I was snapping shots of the panorama. From that point, you can see south toward Mt. Rainier, standing alone and prominent like the Lonely Mountain from Tolkien’s “The Hobbit.” To the north you can see Vancouver, and to the west Victoria, and Vancouver Island, Canada. The waters of the Puget Sound, slotted and dotted with green mounds of islands, glittered in the sun beneath a blue sky studded with clouds. Then Vicki cried out, “Look!” And there, circling in a thermal coming right at us, another bald eagle – and I was grateful for the telephoto lens I happened to be using, and to Vicki for noticing things up close while I obsessed on things afar. Eagles abound around the Puget, but I’ll always insist that the eagles we saw on that summit had followed us from that tree on Crane Island. Same two eagles, I’m sure of it.

Astounding beauty in Tiger Mountain State Park. I like to call this, “Vicki Among Giants.”

The next day, We hiked the Tiger Mountain Trail. It’s in the Tiger Mountain State Forest not far from Mt. Rainier, Washington. We hiked among huge stands of alder, Douglas fir, redwood, and madroños. Ferns grew chest high and boles reached 80-100 feet above our heads. Vicki actually wept at the beauty, exulted in each flower, snail, and variety of fern she saw. Yes, you read right – she saw snails on the trail. Again, I was gazing at the canopy over our heads, surveying the green air underneath it, letting my eyes sail off through the distances revealed on the long slope across which the trail cut. I would never have seen the snails. Vicki noticed. She moved a little slower and deigned to look down at the little things at our feet. She saw the snails on the sides of rotting logs, in the mulch beneath the nascent ferns, and in the moss on a boulder or two. And, she saw the biggest slug either of us had ever seen. I would’ve missed it. She pointed it out. I would’ve stepped on it. She knelt beside it and said, “Get a picture!” And she placed her thumb beside it so we’d get a sense of scale.

I like to call this one, “Eeeuww!”

All throughout our trip, I’d needed help to notice the little things around me. Once it was technology. The rest of the time, it was Vicki. In all cases, when I stopped and noticed, I got increased resolution to the place around me. The texture of the present became more rich. I lost myself in the moment, and when I lost myself in the moment, I knew some real happiness.

That’s one of the reasons why I haven’t made a blog entry since March 26. I’ve spent a good deal of time “bending down,” so to speak, pausing on this “trail” I’m walking to notice the texture of what’s around me. In my work and in my personal life, I’ve been finding a new texture and a new continuity. Since my last blog entry, my radiation treatments have ended with an excellent prognosis, and I’ve gotten married, which is why I was in Washington state, with Vicki, my wife. We were on our honeymoon.

Gazing off into the haze at the distant mountain ranges has always been one of my life-long faults – along with a serious case of trail-haste. Since moving to Birmingham, though, I’ve had to learn how to deal with loneliness in a healthy manner, which means that I’ve had to learn how to build community, and do that intentionally. I’ve been challenged to deal with prostate cancer, which, despite the fact that it’s really the common cold of cancers, has required me to endure the various elements of a treatment process that can get tedious. And, I’ve met and fallen in love with a woman and begun a new marriage. All of those experiences have called me to quit gazing off into the haze of a distant future and dwell deeply in the present moment.

There’s abundance in the moment. There’s exotic beauty in the backyard. There’s joy in the embrace of conversation with friends. There’s a symphony in my wife’s whispers.

Such incredible creatures…

There really is nothing more beautiful than truly connecting with the small things of daily living. I’m glad I’ve been led – and at times, forced – to slow down, to focus in, and settle on. Because that’s when I’ve discovered the eagles on Orcas and the slugs on the Tiger.

Mortals Telling Stories on the Threshold of Mystery (with apologies to Ray Barfield)

I wonder what the story is.

You never meet an individual. Oh, sure, you can run into someone standing by herself in the line at the coffee kiosk, exchange greetings, and have a two-way conversation analyzing the coffee, but the fact is: she’s responding with a style, using vocabulary that she learned, and referring to cues she picked up from a vast community of family, friends, colleagues, and culture in which she’s been soaked for years. When you take the time to learn that history, a “typical business woman” in a suit grabbing a Pike Place at Starbuck’s – almost a cardboard cut-out – becomes Elaine from Savannah who needs a shot of caffeine to escape the lethargy induced by the long drive from Georgia the night before after visiting her ailing mother over the weekend. Listen a little to the story and watch texture and depth emerge.

Be careful before you entertain all the assumptions that go with regarding this as a “typical country church.”

I’ve found this to be the case with the congregations with whom I’ve worked over the years, both as a parish pastor, and now as a chaplain. There really is no typical congregation. When you take the time to enter into the particular history of a particular congregation, you discover unique nuances, stories, and traditions which give character to that group of people, regardless of the denominational label they carry.

I began grappling with this reality at the outset of my pastoral career in the early ’80’s. I had been a psychiatric chaplain at the University of Louisville Hospital and had made the shift to local parish ministry at a little Baptist church by the name of Muldraugh, in Muldraugh, Kentucky. I’d arrived at that church, a Ph.D. student in the psychology of religion, and thinking I was God’s gift to these people, that I had the insight for which they’d thirsted and for which they’d be eternally grateful when I imparted it to them. After a few months getting to know the leadership’s names and holding forth in the pulpit, I led a deacon’s meeting in which I revealed the analysis I’d made of the church based on a very good book on congregational dynamics I’d been reading. After I showed them my little chart of where I saw the church heading in the future unless they adopted my particular program, the group fell into silence. Then the chair of the deacons exploded in fury. There isn’t enough room in a short blog entry to reveal all his insights into my pastoral incompetence, or his very colorful language which included questions concerning my genetic origins. I don’t remember how the meeting ended, but someone offered a weak prayer of dismissal, and I staggered out into the night.

Muldraugh Baptist Church, Muldraugh, Kentucky, on a cold winter’s Sunday.

Later that week, one of my personal, lifetime heroes emerged from the blur. Ernest Ennis had been at that deacon’s meeting and he invited me to his house to drink tea, eat pecan pie (gooey pecan pie), and “just talk.” After he congratulated me on a “fine sermon this past Sunday,” and reflected on what he’d learned from it, he began telling me stories. I learned his story. I learned how Mr. Ennis, an engineer and a brick mason, had partnered with three other church members to lay the masonry which composed the walls of the church building. I learned how the congregation grew from the engineering personnel drawn to Fort Knox at the beginning of World War II and about how that church provided a place of comfort during the early years of a war that seemed fraught with dread. It dawned on me that I’d been regarding Muldraugh Baptist Church as a cardboard cut-out.

I began going to Mr. Ennis’s house every Thursday afternoon and that investment of time in what Charles Gerkin has called a “living human document” was a major part of what taught me that my books were good beginning points. The substance of my ministry, though, would occur as I immersed myself in the narrative of this particular group of people. When I learned their stories, which in turn composed their Story, I learned that Muldraugh Baptist Church wasn’t at all “typical.” This congregation possessed depth, character, and texture.

It was about this time that I encountered James Hopewell’s insights in his book, Congregation: Stories and Structures, published after his death. Hopewell illuminated how each congregation possesses stories which the congregants know, or at least sense, and these stories define what sorts of programs and ministries will be successful. It behooves pastoral leadership to know the stories before they try to introduce innovative initiatives. Otherwise, you’re dead in the water before your ship is even launched. You could very well learn this truth at a painful deacon’s meeting.

RAY BARFIELD is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Christian Philosophy at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He received his MD and his PhD (in philosophy) from Emory University. He is a pediatric oncologist with an interest in the intersection of medicine, philosophy, theology and literature.

This lesson, first learned more than 25 years ago, comes to me again as I work with Support Teams in our community. It reminds me that compassionate listening stands as perhaps the greatest skill I can develop and nurture. Indeed, in reading the reflections of a physician by the name of Ray Barfield, active engagement in the narratives of the people we serve is essential for all versions of health care providers. As Barfield says, “If we want a better medicine, we have to become better . . . storytellers.” In a beautiful phrase, Barfield describes the people we serve as “mortals telling stories on the threshold of mystery.” When the people we serve understand that we’re empathetic participants in the ongoing narratives of their lives – where they’ve confronted tragedy, handled adversity, and found some measure of humor and resolution – we go a long way toward weaving a community of health and wholeness.

I’ve come to see our Support Team effort as one means of entering into and nurturing the collective narrative of the communities in which we live. As such, there isn’t really a template for making Support Teams happen beyond being present, listening, and blessing. Indeed, we’re all mortals telling stories on the threshold of mystery.

A Word to Pastors: Don’t Try Hard – Try Easy (Lesson 6, Part 2)

You can tell by his tie that Kriegel wrote this book in the 1990’s.

I’ll never forget something I read back in the 1990’s from a business innovation guru named Robert Kriegel. He wrote a book called If It Ain’t Broke, Break It! Kriegel said that when you aim to accomplish something, don’t wear yourself out trying your hardest. Instead, Kriegel says, “try easy.” In my observation, we have thousands of pastors out there trying their hardest to motivate, guide, and engage congregations in works of service and worship. I see support teams as one way they can succeed by “trying easy.”

Some points on the way to trying easy –

Despite the fact that it sounds very counter-intuitive, the best place to begin with support teams in a congregation is NOT the pastor. While I see the support team methodology as an excellent way for a pastor to multiply the pastoral care exponentially in a given congregation, it might seem like a whole lot more work to a given pastor. As in every other instance of launching successful support teams, if pastors come on board, it’ll be with someone they trust and have established a relationship and relationships take time. Take it easy and spend the time building the relationship.
In time it will become clear that the Support Team methodology provides support to one of every pastor’s professional goals: it equips church members to do ministry, and to do it enthusiastically.
Pastors who feel the need to be in control of everything might view such delegation with suspicion, but most pastors I’ve known, including myself, welcome the enthusiastic involvement of laity. With this in mind, find key persons in the congregation who enjoy organizing and coordinating (gifts which I decidedly DID NOT possess). With the blessing of the pastor, let this person pursue the Support Team effort. The most successful teams begin with people who love the patient and family. The pastor’s involvement can be that of primary cheerleader of the method.
Don’t EVER even HINT that the pastor isn’t doing enough. Even pastors with a sizable staff have more than they can handle, complete with laypersons who joke that pastors only work for four hours on Sunday. Personally, I haven’t committed this particular sin since I’ve been working at UAB. My own history as a senior pastor remains too fresh. Besides, one of the main points underlying the Support Team spirit is NO GUILT. You do Support Teams out of love and joy.

Here’s a last point. I think I’ve made it clear that my sympathies lie squarely with overworked and underpaid local pastors. However, I do have a word of caution. As pastors, it’s very easy to become preoccupied with oiling the institutional machinery, soothing ruffled feathers, and “putting out fires” and in the process overlook opportunities for building healing and healthy relationships. I’ve spoken with a number of pastors who recognize the potential for intentional, disciplined teams multiplying pastoral care, but wear themselves out preparing budgets, doing the bidding of a variety of committee chairs, or taking on a “lone ranger” mentality, thinking they have to do all the pastoral care themselves. In my estimate, this is neither wise, nor in keeping with the best examples of Judao-Christian congregational theology.

In both Jewish and Christian scriptures, examples abound of leaders enlisting the strategic and tactical aid of partners. Take, for example, Jethro’s advice to Moses for delegating the administrative load among competent team members in Exodus 18:17ff. Moses was trying to do all the work himself and Jethro said, “You and these people who come to you will only wear yourselves out. The work is too heavy for you; you cannot handle it alone.” Then there’s the Apostle Paul’s analogy of a church being like a human body with many parts working together. That’s in I Corinthians 12. I’m not saying that our Support Team method is the only method for enlisting and equipping congregations to care for others, but for the most part, pastors, priests, and rabbis who last the longest in their ministries have developed some method for systematically incorporating all of the corpus in the work of caring.

So, acknowledge the great work pastors, priests, rabbis, and mullahs are doing, then encourage them to do what every wisdom tradition teaches: DELEGATE – and try easy.

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