Now & Then Podcast | "Healthy Caregiving"
Michelle O'Rourke
Original Release Date: May 1, 2020
In the midst of this Pandemic, who better to hear from than emergency and palliative care nurse - Michelle O’Rourke, author of the new book Healthy Caregiving - Perspectives for Caring Professionals. Relevant and timely, in this Now & Then podcast Michelle shares with host Karen Pascal Henri's wisdom and practical advice on how to navigate the difficult time caregivers find themselves in.
Links & References
Healthy Caregiving - Perspectives for Caring Professionals in Company with Henri J.M. Nouwen by Michelle O'Rourke (Novalis in Canada/Twenty-Third Publications in USA), Hope for Caregivers - A 42 Day Devotional, Courage for Caregivers - Sustenance for the Journey in the Company of Henri Nouwen, "Befriending Death: Henri Nouwen and the Spirituality of Dying" by Michelle O'Rourke, "Embracing the End of Life: Help for Those Who Accompany the Dying" by Michelle O'Rourke, Courage for Caregiving Events & Resources, "Wounded Healer" by Henri Nouwen, "Out of Solitude" by Henri Nouwen, "Turning My Morning Into Dancing" by Henri Nouwen, "Sabbath" by Wayne Muller, Self-Care for Caregivers
Please note: book links are affiliate links
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Karen Pascal: Hello, I'm Karen Pascal. I'm the Director of the Henri Nouwen Society. Welcome to a new episode of Henri Nouwen: Now and Then. Our goal at the Society is to extend the rich spiritual legacy of Henri Nouwen to audiences around the world. Over these past four years, we've been developing an outreach to caregivers because we were aware that Henri Nouwen had so much to offer to this community. We created a series of books: Hope for Caregivers, a 40-day devotional for this frontline community, and Courage for Caregivers: Sustenance for the Journey in the Company of Henri Nouwen. In the process of developing this series and of offering retreats and workshops, we became aware that we needed a special book for professional caregivers. And by this we don't just mean medical caregivers, but our umbrella includes teachers, social workers, chaplains, and many, many more whose lifework involves caring for the needs of others on the front lines of need.
I'm delighted today to announce the latest book in this caregiving series, Healthy Caregiving: Perspectives for Caring Professionals in Company with Henri J.M. Nouwen. And I have with me the author of this new book, Michelle O’Rourke. Let me tell you a little bit about Michelle. She's a nurse with a background including emergency nursing, parish nursing, hospice palliative care, and spirituality. In 2007 she spent a year doing extensive research on Henri's life and writings, particularly around his spirituality of death and dying. This work changed her life personally and her research was eventually published in the book, Befriending Death: Henri Nouwen and the Spirituality of Dying. This was followed by another book, Embracing the End of Life: Help for Those Who Accompany the Dying. As you can hear, Michelle is steeped in what Nouwen can offer, but also brings an excellence in terms of her very practical experience.
We're so delighted to talk with Michelle today. She has represented us across North America at many Courage for Caregiving events and Michelle also plays a very important role in the Nouwen Society linking us to caregivers around the world. Michelle, thank you for bringing your deep knowledge of Henri and your knowledge of the acute needs of professional caregivers together in this new book, Healthy Caregiving. I love the title, what a timely book as we all see the vital contribution caregivers are making on the front line of our battle with COVID-19. Michelle, help us understand some of the ways you believe Henri's wisdom can help us to navigate this difficult time we find ourselves in.
Michelle O’Rourke: Thank you, Karen and thank you most of all for asking me to be a part of this kind of a conversation. Because I think for most of us it's being able to talk about our fears, to be able to talk about the things that we're struggling with and that's how we process it. But also being able to hear different perspectives and things that can give us hope and things that can give us strength is important as well. And I know for me over the years and even looking back now during this time of COVID 19, which is unprecedented in our lives, that Henri has brought wisdom that has kind of sunk in my own thinking and my own being. And I think he has a lot to offer people because his writings and his life was so extensive.
And I think one of the first things that came to me and it's a quote that I have in my new book and it comes from the book of a compilation of some of his work again around mourning: Turn my Mourning into Dancing, and he says, “One of life's great questions centers not in what happens to us, but rather how we live through and in whatever happens. Our choice revolves around not what has happened or is happening to us, but how we relate to it, how we relate to life's turns and circumstances.” And so he says, “Put it in another way, will I relate to my life resentfully or gratefully?” And I think for me, what Henri does is he offers us a way of looking at things. He's helped me to change my perspective.
How can we take something like being vulnerable, which all of us have discovered this new vulnerability in our humanity and the people that Henri lived with at L’Arche taught him so much about being vulnerable and yet recognizing that in our weaknesses is where we find our strength. And so how again do we turn that around? And Henri talks about this paradox in our living, of joy and sorrow being two sides of the same coin. And I think for every experience that we have where we feel supreme joy, there's always this sorrow that, well, that experience is going to be over again. Or if we experience a time of sorrow that ultimately joy can come from that in how we are cared for by others through our sorrow. So just Henri's words, always helping us to be able to look at things in a new way and give us hope, give us some choices, give us some guidance and some wisdom. I think that this change in perspective is what's really helpful about his work.
Karen: You know I love what you're sharing. It's funny. Because we hear a lot from the people that receive the daily meditations and the Instagram postings, we hear a lot about right now how Henri is giving them wisdom, is giving them - I would say his words are coming alive in people's lives because they need it. They kind of want something that grounds them and that business about the paradox of sorrow and joy is so true. A lot is required right now, an awful lot, patience is required. Is that sort of typical for the caregiver in that role because not everybody gets better and that's probably the thing we're all fearing right now. When is this ever going to end and can we go back to normal? And yet all of us are kind of having to grasp the reality that there's going to be a new normal. It's not a going back, it's going forward. Tell me a little bit about what you have found and you have to give to healthy caregivers about patience.
Michelle: I think patience is something that we misunderstand sometimes. And again, Henri's wisdom is timeless. Like he wrote about patience 30, 40 years ago, and we are looking at it from a different perspective. But what he did say about patience is [that] patience is not just waiting until something happens over which we have no control, which is, I think, where we feel stuck right now. We have no control over this. What do we do in the meantime? When is it going to end? He said patience asks us to live in the moment to the fullest, to be completely present to the moment, to taste the here and now, and to be where we are. So that patience is very active. It's not a sitting and waiting and seeing, but there's this constructive kind of being in the moment and how can we sit with this and help it to ground us about what's important in our life. What's truly important now that so many things have been taken away? What will our lives look like? We do have some control over how we will resume living. And do we want it to go back to the rat race that it was or how will that change for us? And so I think this notion of patience not being just a waiting for something to happen to us, but this being active in our patience. And I think that in my history, working in nursing, working in a ministry, as well as working with the dying, what I have learned so much is about this having to live in the moment, you don't know how many moments you have left. None of us knows what tomorrow will bring. And so if we can learn to live today, not worry so much about the way things were or what they might look like in the future, but what do we need to do today? Who do we need to talk to? Who do we need to call on the phone? How do we need to accept what's happening inside our heart and our soul, and to listen to that? And so this patience teaches us how to slow down, it teaches us how to live every moment with intention actively, not passively. That’s been a real lesson for me from Henri's work.
Karen: I find one of the elements of this time is that we sit with others. There's a solidarity with the world. There's a solidarity with people in France, in Africa and across Canada and the United States. So we have this solidarity that probably in a way we've never stopped to consider, and it's going to, I hope, birth in us a deeper compassion for others. But there's also the reality that people experience loneliness and aloneness in a new way. And how do we enter into that?
Michelle: I think there's a couple things that come to mind. Again, Henri's writing made me really reflect on what is true presence. You know, we always think of this physical presence, and yet there is presence in absence. And he talked about it mostly in his writings after his mother died of how he still felt close to her. But even in writing letters back and forth to his father when he was in North America and his father was in Europe, there was still a presence there. There was a felt presence that somebody was loving you and somebody was supporting you, even though they weren't in the room. And I think that's a very, very profound lesson we're all learning right now about the fact that even though we may be in this physical self-isolation that, I know in my family, we've had zoom calls.
My kids live all across Ontario and British Columbia, and I have family all over the province. And you know when you sit together and you can see each other on the computer and you can still laugh and smile and share stories, they don't seem so far away. And I think more and more people are exploring these ways of how we're connected. And as you said, Karen, we are so aware of what's happening across the entire world. I mean, our hearts are broken for Italy and France and Spain and China, and all these places that were so tragically affected by this virus. And even though we weren't there, our hearts were there, our prayers were there, our thoughts were there. And right now in Canada, where the whole country is reeling for the pain in Nova Scotia. Everybody can fathom the tragedy and the pain that those people are suffering. And yet I think there's some sense of solidarity in some way that Nova Scotia has understood that the whole country is holding them virtually and loving them and supporting them in different ways. And so for us to really examine what is presence and how are we present in our physical absence and yet how profound is that? So again, not focusing so much on our aloneness, but on our connectedness.
Karen: I want to just share something, for our audience is a global audience. And I want to just share, because you may not have heard what happened in Nova Scotia, or you may have, but it was actually the largest mass shooting Canada has ever experienced. And at this point, we know that there were 22 victims and it happened in a very, very short span of time. It was just horrific and it is an incredible heartache for Canadians and for people around the world, that kind of a horror. I also had the privilege and have felt so near to New York because I was in New York the beginning of March. And actually it was just upon leaving that suddenly the full impact of what was going to be happening in New York was beginning to hit. And our hearts go out to so many places across North America right now where this virus is just storming.
And whether it's Quebec or it's California or it's Washington or it's New York, I mean our hearts are going out to all of you. We hold you right now and long that you would just see a turnaround and we would all see this flattening of the curve that everybody wants.
I'm wondering Michelle, it would be wonderful, if you would speak directly to those caregivers and name some of the things that keep them healthy and bring them hope. I've often said that in our caregiving initiative we're not the people that put the Band-Aids on. But the people that are putting the Band-Aids on around the world right now, has Henri got something to offer to them. And can you speak directly to that, Michelle?
Michelle: Yes, I can, because I think that what Henri does is he has helped us through his writings to look at the very essence of what the word care means. Sometimes we look at care as just a task, something I do: I'm going to do some wound care, I'm going to do some mouth care and some foot care. And it's a very task-oriented thing. But Henri asks us to look more deeply and to realize that care is about relationship. And how do I enter into that person's suffering before I try to do something about it. And I think in this time, again, that's been unprecedented, there isn't any way that we can fix really what's happening. But we're asked to be present to each other's suffering and what they're going through. And I think this is particularly poignant for people who are actually caring for others.
So we have those what we might call informal family caregivers, people who are caring for maybe spouses with dementia, caring for chronically ill children, caring for spouses who are ill. But then we also have this normal, everyday caring that's kind of turned on its head because all of our children are staying home. So everybody’s become full-time caregivers to their kids. They're not going off to school. They’re not going off to sports. There's a different way that we're even caring for our own family and a different way that we're caring from a distance for our extended family and our friends and our neighbors. So, I think that the biggest thing that people have to do when they're providing care for someone else is to consider, ‘How am I taking care of myself in all of this?’ And what we've learned about things like burnout and compassion fatigue, and those things that can draw the life out of us if we do not refuel and regenerate, if we do not fill our cup , [is that] self-care is something that's important. It's not something to add on to your to-do list, but it's an intentional way of living. ‘How am I taking moments out of the day to refresh myself, to be able to just kind of take a few deep breaths and remember who I am and what's important in life instead of getting so caught up in the task? How can I put even some boundaries and some limits on how I overextend myself sometimes?’ Because I think sometimes what we do is we put expectations on ourselves that are unrealistic. And we always look at, ”I should be doing more. I should be doing this, I should be doing that.” And I say to people: have compassion for yourself.
If your friend was saying this to you, you would say, ‘No, no you have to relax. You have to take time for yourself. You have to take a bath. You have to rest. You have to keep yourself healthy. You have to eat well and you have to fill your cup.’ But we sometimes don't have that self-compassion for ourselves. We expect too much of ourselves. And if we do not take the time to feed our heart and our soul and our body to take care of our ourselves while we're caring for others, then we'll get sick and then we will not be good for anyone, ourselves or anyone else.
Karen: It's interesting because in that I'm reminded of - this comes actually in the book Courage for Caregivers - one of the stories there of what a pain, what you're saying, can be to a caregiver. When, for example, a well-meaning relative can come along and say, “You've got to take care of yourself more.” And it's almost like another thing to add to your to-do list. But I think you're really speaking to a deeper reality that you alone as the caregiver need to value yourself enough, to allow yourself what you need. And that I love that self-care, that loving, really loving and the self-compassion as you put it that is needed. But this is not intended to be another thing to add on top of all that you're handling right now. I think about those people that are working 12-hour shifts coming home to their families, worried that they might be bringing home the COVID virus to their families and therefore another whole set of tasks and trying to find rest within that. I mean the rest of us that aren't on that front line need to be praying for them and caring for them and finding ways that we can bring not just the reminder they need self- care, but find ways we can give into their lives that which would be an encouragement, that which would be a source of a little bit of joy and hope for them.
Michelle: And I think that sometimes Karen it's not really rocket science in a sense, to do that. I think knowing many frontline caregivers including my own son who's an emergency nurse in downtown Toronto, and I worry about him every day. And yet taking the time, if you have someone you know working on the front lines, to send them a text or give them a call and just say, “How are you doing?” It's about being able to give people opportunities to speak to how they're feeling, their emotions. You know so much of what we are experiencing is compound grief. And I think as a society we've had to grieve life as the way we knew it. You know six weeks ago we weren't living like this and how our relationships have changed, how our stress levels have changed, how the fact that we cannot even reach out and hug the people that we love. We can't even see them except from a distance or on a computer tablet. It's been heart-wrenching when you think of the ways of life that we've had to let go of and this overwhelming grief. And one of the things that we learn about working through grief, part of it, working through grief is the telling of the stories, having a place to just talk about how you're feeling. And I read a really interesting article yesterday about grief in the face of COVID. And he said you have to give your emotions motion. And I thought, I love that because if we keep our emotions and our fears bottled up inside, they'll just explode somehow in stress, burnout. But making sure that we are taking the time to talk to our friends, whether it's virtually or on the telephone or shooting them a text telling them that you care, telling them that you're there.
I think the frontline supporters are getting lots of encouragement from the public who are putting up signs and sending meals and driving by and honking their horns and singing from their balconies. Like there's been this collective sense of support, which is helpful. And for us to be able to drink that in and sit and reflect on it and let it nourish us and let it feed us and kind of examine in your own life who's that person that might need a quick call or a card in the mail, or a piece of cake on the front porch. It's those little things, self-care and caring for each other. It doesn't have to be huge. It all adds up.
Karen: I am so also wanting to be sure that all our conversation includes all those people that make possible our living through this. I'm thinking of those people that are at the checkout counter in your grocery store and are just as much at risk and the people that are delivering so many things to our doors and the things that we need, there's a graciousness right now. And I think we want to honor everybody in this process. You know, this book, I can't get over that this book should come out literally in the middle of the pandemic. I mean, literally it launched at the beginning of March. And it's so exciting. We're working with Novalis and 23rd Psalm in the publishing of this book. We're very, very proud of it. It was made possible by a wonderful grant from Stronger Philanthropy and it's just full, packed with good things.
But here, it's almost like you've gone out way ahead of us and you have such rich resources to offer us right now. I really want to encourage people to check out the website, there’ll be links there to picking up the book. But I'd love to hear a little bit more. Tell me a bit about one of the realities of this that is kind of almost the opposite of the loneliness is solitude. Solitude was a very important dimension for Henri Nouwen. He would emphasize solitude, community, ministry; those three. And in fact, we have a conference coming up next year that is going to look at the Art of Living by Henri Nouwen. And it's going to look at solitude, ministry or rather solitude, community and ministry. But let's talk a little bit about solitude because that is a reality right now. What does Henri bring to that for you?
Michelle: I think that, I mean Henri wrote a lot about that. He has a lovely book called Out of Solitude. And I think in our society today solitude has been something that, you know, we’re too busy, we avoid. And yet now that we've been forced into this time of self-isolation, what do you do with this quiet time? And Henri said that it is in this solitude that we discover that being is more important than having and that we are worth more than the results of our efforts. And in solitude we will discover that our life is not a possession to be defended, but it's a gift to be shared. And in solitude we've become aware that our worth is not the same as our usefulness. And so I think taking this precious gift of time and quiet that we've been given to learn how to rest in it and whether we do some reading or some thinking or some journaling, or we just sit with our cup of coffee and take a deep breath and go, ‘Wow, how has my life changed? What will be different? And what has become very important to me in these days?’
Yesterday we celebrated Earth Day and so there were different programs and things on TV reminding us that since the world’s come to a standstill, we have so much less smog and there's so much more beauty in the oceans because some of the animals have been able to come back. And you're just kind of going, wow, for the world to have to stop to realize what's important. I really hope that we don't just go back to living the kind of on-a-hamster-wheel that we thought we didn't have any choice to live. I think that taking this time of solitude and really looking inside at our heart and our soul and being able to try to grapple with what is important to me now in my life and how I spent my money and how I spent my time and what might change moving forward. So this time of solitude, Henri called it a furnace of transformation when we’ve been forced into this solitude and I hope that we can make it something that's fruitful.
Karen: I love that phrase, “a furnace of transformation” that does describe the possibility in this. And it's interesting because as we age you become so set in your ways, and this is a reset. This is a moment of reset I think, which is really interesting. Wayne Mueller had some prophetic words in his foreword to your book: “The only honorable place we can possibly begin this pilgrimage together is to slow, quiet this flailing, screaming, machine of society generating impossible demands, is to return to our center, bring ourselves home and start where we are. Our wisdom and traditions and life lessons teach us caring and growing in community with others is the key. When two or more gather in this way, faithful in the knowledge that this miraculously is enough what happens next is beyond our dominion and our imagination. We don't often know what this will look like, but we can know this much, it will surely take our breath away.” That's from Wayne Mueller, author of many wonderful books, including Sabbath.
And I think many of us have been reminded of that book Sabbath, which he wrote during this time period, because there's so much wisdom in that. And he was calling people to find that place of rest. Well, now we are forced into it and not everybody is forced into absolute stillness because let's face it there's a busyness if you've moved your office home and you've got kids around you that you're trying to school. And then of course for those that are being asked to go out and work on behalf of all of those that have to stay in, there is busyness. It's not all simply quiet but having said that, the very fact that we are at a reset moment is really critical.
Michelle: I really believe that. It's like this crossroads and it's what we do with it that will matter. And you see different sayings on social media and positive twists on this about, maybe we can discover again the joy of reading, the joy of having dinner around the table instead of in front of the TV or on the way out the door for one more appointment or event, because we've been forced to stop and stay put. And yes, for some people they're still busy coming and going. And they certainly have the added stress of worrying about bringing this virus home to their families. And yet I think even in those cases it's helped us to stop and think about the little things and to actually learn how to be, how to just be our best selves in the time that is presented to us and learning what it's like to not be in control of a situation. I think a huge learning for our society is that we always like to think we're in control, but we're really not. That can be taken away from us. So where do we put our sense of solidarity? Is it in our beliefs, in our values, in our sense of love and relationship, in our faith? We look at those things that are grounding us during this time and hopefully with the little pieces of solitude that we have, those things can be strengthened.
Karen: One of the things that amazes me about this, you've been very much a part of our Courage for Caregivers initiative. We started it about four years ago and we were very fortunate to have a grant that allowed us to develop a number of very good books and they're available online for us. But one of the interesting things was we thought, well, we'll take this out and we'll offer retreats and workshops. But what became evident to us, particularly for the home caregivers, but also for the professional caregivers, was the inability to get away. It was their working out to the edges of their lives. And so right now we have done kind of a turnaround and said let's make what we have available online. Now we're just in the process of, I can't tell you that it's all there at all. I can tell you the books you can go and purchase them on our website, but we are working towards having a web portal for caregivers so that they can go and hear stories of others that would be encouraging and would be informative. And we have wonderful material from our two key people in this program. Michelle is one of them and you've heard what a source of wisdom she is. We also have Marjorie Thompson, who wrote the book Courage for Caregivers, which was really Sustenance for the Journey in the Company of Henri Nouwen. And that was because we knew that the people, whether they kind of found themselves in the trenches of caregiving - sometimes overnight -sometimes a partner has a stroke and suddenly your world is turned upside down and you are home providing care, or you have a fragile child, or you have somebody that's facing the cancer challenge, or the Covid-19 challenge.
You are thrown into this. And we at the Henri Nouwen Society really want to provide you with resources. And as I said, it's not the Band-Aid to put on, but it's more the reality of the spiritual nourishment that Henri has to offer. I want to highly recommend Michelle's book Healthy Caregiving: Perspectives for Caring Professionals in the Company of Henri J.M. Nouwen. It's a treasure, it's a really beautiful little book. So by all means you'll be able to find a link on our website to that, but also the other resources. And you might even want to help support our efforts right now because we really want to see this be a completely available online initiative for caregivers who might be able to get away for five minutes or 10 minutes, and somehow we can lift their spirits a little bit. Is there anything else that you'd like to say Michelle about that initiative that we've got going otherwise I will just close us at this point.
Michelle: I think a couple things Karen, just in closing, is that we were able to put together the - Marjorie did a beautiful job putting together the resources for family caregivers and people caring for loved ones at home. And we realized that moving forward there were sometimes different kinds of questions and different kinds of relationships that professional caregivers have. Whether they're in healthcare, whether they're social workers, whether they're in ministry, whether they're teachers, no matter what their background, if you're caring for others there are different kinds of questions and stresses, but also different ways that we can be fed, different ways that we come to understand ourselves in this care relationship as a care partner, not just a caregiver. Because caring goes two ways. And we as care providers have come to understand that we have learned so much and we have been changed by the people that we care for. What I've learned about patience, what I've learned about courage, what I've learned about unconditional love has so many times been taught to me by the people that I've been privileged to care for.
And so as a care provider or a care partner, I am transformed just as much as that person I am caring with. And so it's a two way street. And Henri knew that. He wrote a wonderful book called The Wounded Healer, that all of us have our own stuff. We have our own grief. We're not perfect. We have our own inner struggles and wounds, but we can still come and care for each other and heal each other and learn from each other. And I think the value of some of these resources is for people who are in caregiving relationships to recognize how much they can be nourished by the person that they're caring for if they stop long enough to reflect on it. There's a giving and a receiving that has to take place. And if we are only giving, giving, giving, and we're not allowing ourselves to receive, either help and support from someone or to be nourished by the care encounters that we are in, then we burn out. And Henri was very specific about that. Burning is giving without receiving. And so just like in breathing it's important to inhale, it's just as important to exhale. There's two things happening there that have to stay in balance. So as caregivers, as care partners, care providers, we all have to look for ways that we can go inside and feed ourselves and be refreshed so we have something to give tomorrow. And I think that a lot of the work that I do actually is in secular healthcare, it's not connected to faith-based organizations. So people with any kind of background in the belief system or wisdom tradition or what have you can be helped by this resource because, as you know, Henri's background was spirituality but it was also psychology. And I think he had a beautiful way of bridging the sacred and the secular and helping people, no matter what their background or belief system is, to see the essence of what care means, what compassion means, what healing means, what dignity means, and those are universal concepts.
And I think that Henri's wisdom bridges all kinds of different areas, but it also is inspirational. And I think that's what we need more than anything, especially during this really difficult time, we need to be inspired. We need to feel fed. We need to be able to help us to look at things in a way that is life giving instead of life draining. And so Henri can do that. I think people even going on the website and signing up for the daily emails to have something inspirational in your inbox in the morning, sometimes that's just enough to get you through the day. So that's a way to do self-care. Self-care doesn't have to be onerous. It's the little things we do to feed ourselves, to refresh ourselves, sitting down with a cup of tea and not feeling guilty, and maybe thinking about two things that I wanted to be grateful for today. And just changing our focus and our perspective.
And I would just like to maybe leave the listeners with some questions. In the book Healthy Caregiving both the one Courage for Caregivers program, because there's a book with retreat questions and exercises, but also in the Healthy Caregiving book, every little section finishes with three or four reflective questions so that the reader can just take some time to look inside their own heart and their soul. And maybe you could ask yourself this question, ‘What have I learned? What can I learn during this time? How have I, what have I learned about solitude? How will it change my life moving forward? How will it change the way I care for people? How will it change the way I allow people to care for me?’ And so going deep inside sometimes and just sitting with a cup of coffee with this question or sitting with a journal and just jotting down our thoughts and our feelings and our answers and our questions helps us to be able to bring this to the surface so that we can process it. And so that our emotions have motion so that they're not stuck inside. And those things can be very life giving. They’re very simple, but they can be very life giving.
Karen: Michelle O'Rourke you have so much to offer and it's our honor to team up with you in our Nouwen Society outreach to caregivers. You’re going to find a link to this new book on our website. It's published by Novalis in Canada and by 23rd Publications in the USA. As well, please look at the beautiful book by Marjorie Thomson, which is especially helpful for home caregivers. It's called Courage for Caregivers: Sustenance for the Journey in Company with Henri Nouwen. And there's the book Hope for Caregivers: a 40-Day Devotional. These can be purchased directly from the Henri Nouwen Society.
If you've enjoyed today's podcast, we'd be so grateful if you'd take time to give it a stellar review or a thumbs up or even share it with your family, friends, and perhaps a caregiver you know, that might need to hear some of this and be encouraged by it. As well, you're going to find links in the show notes for our website and any content, resources or books that were discussed in this episode.
And by the way, we are planning … Novalis and Michelle are going to be doing a webinar. We haven't quite set the date, but keep an eye on our website and we'll be sure to update you on that because I'm sure it's going to be a golden opportunity to have resources kind of poured into your heart at this point. There’s even a link to the books to get you started on our website. In other words, some of you might not be that familiar with some of the titles that were mentioned today, and you'd love to know, ‘Where do I kind of delve in a little deeper into Henri Nouwen and what would be good for me?’
Anyway. I want to thank you for listening. I want to thank you Michelle for being part of this. And until next time I hope you'll return to Henri Nouwen: Now and Then. Thank you.
