Order of Canada

Canada’s Governor-General Michaëlle Jean named Dr. Henry Morgentaler to the Order of Canada Tuesday for his services to women and for leadership in the fields of humanism and civil liberties. The Order is the country’s highest civilian honour. 

 

The Conservative Government has distanced itself from the awarding and the Roman Catholic Bishop of Toronto deplored honouring “a medical man who has brought not healing but the destruction of the defenceless and immeasurable grief.”

 

Dr. Morgentaler argued that access to abortion was a basic human right and women should not have to risk death at the hands of an untrained professional in order to end their pregnancies. Morgentaler, a Polish Holocaust survivor who immigrated to Montreal after the war, opened his first abortion clinic in 1969 and performed thousands of procedures, which were illegal at the time.

 

His abortion clinics were constantly raided, and one in Toronto was firebombed. Morgentaler was arrested several times and spent months in jail as he fought his case at all court levels in Canada. His victory came on Jan. 28, 1988, when the Supreme Court of Canada struck down Canada’s abortion law. That law, which required a woman who wanted an abortion to appeal to a three-doctor hospital abortion committee, was declared unconstitutional.

 

source: CBC News

the gift of attention

The people I work with are superb role models: from the one who cleans a room after a patient’s departure, to the physician who examines, explains, and prescribes, the volunteers who dash to answer a call-bell, the social worker who assists families during times of distress, nurses who provide expert care … and many others. One thing they’re all good at is listening: to each other and to patients and their loved-ones.  

Monitoring my own interactions over the last few weeks, I’ve noticed how often I jump in with clever observations, premature conclusions, and the always-suspect bits of advice. When I’m with patients, I’m quite good at listening, pausing, holding silence, and eliciting responses if that seems appropriate. But with co-workers, so my inner critic informs me, I tend to do more talking than listening.

“Every form of caregiving is a treasure of teaching,” writes Kathleen Dowling Singh. “The treasure is offered whether the caregiving occurs in the form of caring for babies and children, the lonely, the elderly, the frail and infirm, the disturbed, or the dying. … Each act of care brings us into the realm of the private, the intimacy of the interpersonal.  …

“The gift of our complete and focused attention is one of the kindest gifts we can give each other. It confers on both parties, apparent giver and apparent receiver, a sense of meaning, of value, of mattering. Why? Because in the moment of the gift of attention, we are actually present; our attention is deliberately and single-pointedly placed, our very life in that moment is meaningful.

“I have come to think that ‘being understood’ is sometimes even more of a fundamental human need than ‘being loved.’ We are nurtured in the gift of another’s attention. It provides the safest of places in which to share our vulnerabilities, fears, doubts, and triumphs. … We feel reconnected to our common humanity in the moment of being present with each other.”

source: Singh, K. D. (2003). “The gift of attention.” In: Brady, M. (ed.). The wisdom of listening. Boston, MA: Wisdom Publ., p.192. Dr. Singh is Buddhist teacher in the Tibetan tradition, a therapist, and author of The grace in dying: how we are transformed spiritually as we die. HarperPerennial (1998).

what to do (about burma)

In the aftermath of the cyclone, some 134,000 Burmese are now dead or missing - over 40 percent of which are believed to be children. The United Nations reports that less than 50% percent of the storm’s 2.4 million affected victims have received any humanitarian relief. While the United Nations Secretary General has received promises that relief workers would be allowed access to the Irawaddy Delta, some 1.5 million people have not seen any aid.

 

The rice paddies are contaminated with salt water and corpses, including the rotting carcasses of thousands of cattle and water buffalo, without which the planting cannot proceed. As always, the monks are at the forefront of serving their people. Some are running an underground supply chain operated out of one of the bigger towns and defying the ban on private relief operations by bringing in food and supplies at great personal risk.

 

It is important to keep the light of awareness on Burma now. The international response to the cyclone could have accumulating effects on the government. The junta is being forced to open its doors a little and this light shining in the darkness can be a great catalyst. Some things you can do:

 

Write or email the Myanmar Embassy expressing your compassionate concern for the Burmese people in this natural disaster, and sincere wishes that the Burmese government will devote its considerable military and civilian resources to rescue those trapped in the path of the cyclone. Ask the government to allow the free flow of international relief aid.
 

The Honorable Ambassador U Linn Myaing, Embassy of the Union of Myanmar
2300 S Street NW, Washington DC 20008; info@mewashingtondc.com; thuriya@aol.com

 

The Honourable Ambassador U Nyunt Tin, Embassy of the Union of Myanmar

Sandringham Building, 85 Range Rd., Ottawa, ON  KIN 8J6; www.myanmar-embassy-ottawa.faithweb.com

 

Write to the Secretary General of the United Nations asking him to endorse an arms embargo against Burma and to pressure the UN Security Council to consider introducing a long-overdue universal arms embargo. The Honourable Ban Ki-Moon, United Nations, New York, NY 10017; sgcentral@un.org

 

Write to the UN-appointed Messengers of Peace: Princess Haya Bint Al Hussein, Daniel Barenboim, George Clooney, Paulo Coelho, Midori Goto, Michael Douglas, Jane Goodall, Yo-Yo Ma. Email addresses at http://www.un.org/sg/mop/

 

sources: Buddhist Peace Fellowship (BPF) and Internet

training for end-of-life caregivers

The Metta Institute in San Francisco is offering a six-day residential training retreat featuring key elements of the renowned End-of-Life Care Practitioner Program. Our core faculty blend years of experience in contemporary psychology and contemplative wisdom practices. They offer a fresh and integrated approach to the practical, emotional and spiritual dimensions of the dying experience that goes well beyond the traditional medical models. The dates are July 18 to 23, 2008.

Designed for healthcare professionals, educators, hospice workers and clergy, this training is also open to volunteers and family caregivers who cannot attend our longer program. Offered in a retreat format, mindfulness meditation forms the foundation of our work together. The training builds essential clinical competencies, strengthens individual capacity for compassionate service, and enhances spiritual development. We emphasize experiential learning and pragmatic application in the participant’s life and role as a caregiver. For further details, click here.  

Metta Institute (previously named the Alaya Institute) was established to provide education on spirituality in dying. Inspired by the Buddhist tradition we encourage the integration of the spiritual dimensions of living, dying, and transformation through professional training, educational programs and materials. The Institute was formed in 2004 as an outgrowth of the Zen Hospice Project which is widely recognized as a pioneering model in the movement to improve end-of life care.

p.s.: I completed the full year-long training program in 2006 and can attest to its impact on my spiritual home-coming. Try to find the time and money … and go. Tell your friends and colleagues.

in memoriam

 

Feng Jun carries a portrait of her dead son through the rubble of a collapsed school in Juyuan, in Sichuan. The boy was one of many students killed when the May 12 earthquake toppled the building. (Eugene Hoshiko/AP)

A letter posted at CBC News:

“This may sound silly to some, but I hope people realize they can do something very beneficial, very easily … on Saturday may 24, when all my friends were frantically trying to purchase tickets to the upcoming Madonna concert, I went into a local [bank] and donated my $200 ticket money to a Sichuan Earthquake Relief Fund.

“I can do without one evening of musical pleasure, but there are tens of thousands of people in China, and Myanmar, that are suffering without food and shelter. My money has better use in China than it does elsewhere! I post this just so people who read it can think about donating money they would otherwise spend needlessly.”

Kindly check my post on May 21 for list of aid organizations ready to receive your donation.

the way of the heart

Henri Nouwen: “Let us not underestimate how hard it is to be compassionate. Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to the place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely, and broken. But this is not our spontaneous response to suffering. What we desire most is to do away with suffering by fleeing from it or finding a quick cure for it.  … And so we ignore our greatest gift, which is our ability to enter into solidarity with those who suffer.”

source: Nouwen, H.J.M. (2003). The way of the heart. Ballentyne. image: soulterminal.com. see also: my posting on Monday, May 19 “hugged a dictator today?”

Myanmar: for your donation

World Vision - has assessment teams on the ground and wants to raise $3 million from Canadians. The organization is already assisting more than 100,000 people in Rangoon and the Irrawaddy Delta region by providing rice, water, and critical supplies. 

Canadian Red Cross - Funds raised will be used to provide survivors with basic supplies and emergency shelter, and to ensure people have access to health care and clean water. Donate on-line, call 1-800-418-1111 or contact your local Canadian Red Cross office. 

Samaritan’s Purse Canada - Working with indigenous partners in Burma (also known as Myanmar); the Calgary-based organization has been working in Burma for nearly a decade. 1-800-663-6500.

Salvation Army - Has been on the ground in Burma since 1915, with children’s homes, shared farms, pig loan programs, 60 well projects to deliver clean water, education and tuition programs as well as several health clinics. 1-800-725-2769 or visit the website. 

Humanitarian Coalition - CARE Canada, Oxfam Canada, Oxfam-Québec and Save the Children have formed the Humanitarian Coalition. Donate online or call 1-800-464-9154.

UNICEF - which has been in Burma since 1950, currently has about 130 people working in the country, providing emergency supplies, clean water, food and shelter. Online or 1-877-955-3111.

Médecins Sans Frontières - teams are delivering medical care, food and essential supplies. Medical teams are travelling to remote areas hard hit by the cyclone. 1-800-982-7903 or donate online.

Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) - The 88-year-old organization is working with trusted partners within the country who are responding to the tragic aftermath of cyclone Nargis.

source: CBC; image: SPIEGEL

practicing humility

One of the people who interviewed me for the job (see footnote to yesterday’s post) said that she’d been impressed by my humour and humility. Here’s what my mind made of that: on the ego level it said, Thanks for the compliment. I’m glad you liked what you saw; for seeing something in me to recommend that I’d be hired. On the spiritual level it said, Yes, that’s how I’d like to be perceived (some day). I’m surprised and grateful that those qualities are apparent to strangers (albeit a sophisticated one in this instance).

Humility is a virtue that can be difficult to describe because of its paradoxical nature: claiming authority about humility and claiming that one is humble each suggest a lack of humility. Google reveals that humility is seen as an essential virtue in many faith traditions:

 

·  According to Chinese Zen master Li Yuansong, enlightenment can come only after humility, the wisdom of realizing one’s own ignorance, insignificance and lowliness, without which one cannot see the truth.

·  Guru Granth Sahib, the great book of Sikhism (p. 152), holds that “modesty, humility and intuitive understanding are my mother-in-law and father-in-law.” See also my post of March 28.

·  Bernard of Clairvaux (1099-1143) defines humility as “a virtue by which a man knows himself as he truly is.”

·  The Bible depicts humility as making us fit recipients of grace: “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble” (James 4:6).

·  Moses’ greatest virtue was humility (Num. xii. 3). At first he resists the mission to free his people because he mistrusts his ability. But once he accepts it, he does so with courage and energy.

 

As with Moses, so it is with me. Awed by the complexity of hospice work, I rise to the challenge without fear. It feels right for me to be here … to humbly serve all who entrust us with the last moments of their lives.

 

sources: BibleGateway.com; www.jewishencyclopedia.com; www.newadvent.org;

image: members/fortunecity.com.

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aid to burma?

Devastation has struck the people of Myanmar, with thousands killed, even more homeless. By definition, their military dictators are not nice people: recall recent images of demonstrating monks being beaten and shot. Suu Kyi–leader of the democratically elected government, Nobel Peace Laureate, and Honorary Citizen of Canada–has been in prison or under house arrest for much of the last 18 years (see yesterday’s post).

Potentially an ethical dilemma: should I send money (since I can’t go there with a shovel or a stethoscope) to assist the aid effort … knowing that some of the funds will end up in the wrong pockets and that the junta is made up of thugs? For me the answer is clear; the question is how to help. Due diligence means finding a trustworthy organization with transparent accounting and legal presence in Canada. And to inform myself via reliable sources. 

As someone wrote in response to this morning’s CBC News article:

“I don’t care if it’s Rangoon, Pyongyang, or Tehran. Human suffering knows no boundaries, or politics. The true test of a compassionate people is not how we treat our friends, but how we treat our enemies.”

photo: SPIEGEL/AP

practice living, practice dying

For more than 30 years Stephen and Ondrea Levine have provided direction and inspiration on death and dying. Their books are of “subtle beauty and honesty … [offering] wise and grounded lessons,” writes Thomas Moore. With Ondrea coping with leukemia and Stephen too frail to travel and teach, their friends are passing the hat to assist with overwhelming costs for insurance and treatment. Kindly scroll to my post of Thursday, 1 May 2008 for ways you might help. In his last book Stephen wrote–

“Socrates recommended that we should ‘always be occupied in the practice of dying.’ So did the Dalai Lama. Recently, when someone asked him what he would like to do next, he answered that he … felt it was time to complete his preparations for death. I too am … two thirds through an imaginary life. When a journey is in the future, it is never too soon to check out the travel guides and customs, and to learn the language of the world approaching. And it’s never too late to complete our birth. As Buddha said, ‘It doesn’t matter how long you have forgotten, only how soon you remember.’”

source: Levine, S. (1997). A year to live: how to live this year as if it were your last. New York: Bell Tower, p.8.

a respite

A guest arrived on the morning ferry and will be at my house for a brief time-out, a respite. Caring for an ailing mother at home, she’s here for a day and a half of silence and rest. “I’m not used to have someone cook for me,” she said when I asked about her food preferences. My job today and tomorrow will be to provide a restful environment, to make tea, to cook and share meals, to sit in meditation with her. Her sole task is to “be” and do (or not do) whatever her body needs: reading, working in the garden. going for walks, sleeping …

For details on my respite offer, click on the tab at the top of this screen.

your presence, simply

Linda Siddall and I trained together in the Metta Institute’s year-long end-of-life care practitioners program. She works as a chaplain with the dying and their families. Here she writes:

“I wonder if we realize how healing our simple, gentle presence is. The willingness to bear witness to whatever someone is experiencing, whether joy or grief—without pushing or pulling them along to a different state of being, without turning the volume of emotion up or down—is a gift all too rare. We too often feel we have to fix, cure, advise, treat, or rescue. And yes, there are times when caring requires action. Yet, in my experience, the greatest gift we can give, especially to our intimates, is the gift of our companioning presence.

“There is a soul longing, when something exciting or shocking happens, when we feel saddened or elated, or have a moment of crystalline awareness, to be heard. We don’t want our tears to be met with platitudes, or to have someone instantly pray us out of our feelings.”

just be there

I once asked Zen Teacher Hogen Bays about the weekly meditation group at my house. Some people come for ‘beginning instructions,’ I complained, and then I never see them again. Is there something I should be doing? Offer tea, use finger puppets, give away toasters? Should I continue straightening the cushions, lighting a candle, and waiting for someone to show? Yes, came the reply without hesitation, “some people you’ll never see again, others will return once they’re conscious of their suffering.” (For an explanation of suffering in Buddhist language, kindly scroll down to my March 29 post “what’s with suffering?”.)

More than four years later, Hogen’s reference to suffering continues to make me show up as advertised, ready to welcome anyone and to sit regardless of numbers. It’s never a chore. I bow to the empty zendo (meditation room) as I set out a flower, light incense, and sweep the entrance way. Each time I make this simple offering, my heart opens in gratitude … for the opportunity to be of service.

Father Henri Nouwen—catholic priest, prolific author, and professor of theology—speaks to this in a collection of personal prayers: “Fear and anxiety never totally leave us. But slowly they lose their domination as a deeper and more central experience begins to present itself. It is the experience of gratitude. Gratitude is the awareness that life in all its manifestations is a gift for which we wish to give thanks. … We may discover the presence of [God’s] gifts in the midst if our pains and sorrows. … What seemed a hindrance proves to be a gift. Thus gratitude becomes a quality of our heart that allows us to live joyfully and peacefully even though our struggles continue.”

source: Henri J.M. Nouwen. (2002). A cry for mercy: prayers from the Genesee. New York: Doubleday, p.123.

dear reader

Perhaps it’s the number 7,700 on the hit counter (thank you all!), or because the semester at art school is ending, or for no big reason  at all … but i’m wondering where to take this weblog. It grew out of my volunteering and teaching in palliative/hospice care. I’ve made it my task to post two or three items each day; some are personal (e.g., grieving, ageing, loving), others about public concerns arising from the personal (e.g., injustice, politics, faith practices, peace). 

If there’s an underlying criteria for what i post, it’s a concern (and a vow) to be of service. Occasionally someone sends a comment (there are five of you regulars), but most of the time I’m writing into a space of “not knowing.” That makes for good practice and i’ll continue thoughtfully and honestly.

If you wish to write, i’ll be grateful for feedback, suggestion, question, or a simple Hello! Click on COMMENT below. May you be happy.

photo © Henny Schnare took this during my first Zen wedding ceremony last summer. No, not me getting married, merely officiating the union of two yoga-teacher friends before they went off to a catholic church.

each moment an awakening

Greetings to all from the Buddhist Peace Fellowship (BPF):

“The blossoms of spring remind me of a teaching by Zen master Dogen in which he said that zazen, a form of meditation, is not a method by which one reaches awakening but is itself awakening and a source of creative engagement in life. From this perspective, a moment is not an isolated fragment of life but rather a whole experience of birth at each moment in which we can be active and fully engaged in creative ways.”

To subscribe to the BPF electronic newletter, click here.