This coming Wednesday will be the beginning of Passover, when Jews around the world come together for the Seder meal to remember and reflect on the story of the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. And at that Seder table, one of the first people to be remembered will be Moses, who was, at best, a reluctant prophet.
No, it wasn’t Moses’ decision to lead his people out of slavery, but he really couldn’t ignore the burning bush. And freedom was no easy task. He tries to convince Pharaoh to let his people go, but Pharaoh isn’t going to listen. It would take a whole series of plagues to make it happen. The Nile turning to blood, the frogs, the vermin, the wild beasts, hail, locusts, total darkness. Still no freedom. Finally, during the tenth and final plague, when God passes over the homes of the Hebrews and spares their sons, Pharaoh sets them free.
And this is Holy Week in the Christian tradition beginning with today, Palm Sunday, when Jesus enters Jerusalem, and commencing through the week with Jesus’ death on the cross on Good Friday. Jesus, too, followed the call, however reluctantly. But in the Christian story that following, that call, would eventually lead to resurrection and to new life.
Our spiritual theme in this new month of April is calling. Calling. And I expect that for some of us when we hear that word we may well think of an example like Moses or Jesus where the call comes in some dramatic fashion—and from somewhere outside of them. Prophets often show up in some dramatic fashion. And where the call leads you is anything but easy, maybe even to your death.
So that theme of call. What does that word calling conjure up for you?
In our reading today, poet Nancy Shaffer asks, “When you heard that voice and knew finally it called for you and what it was saying—where were you?”[1]
Did those questions prompt a response from you? A memory? Or maybe a question along the lines of what is he talking about? When it comes to the question of call what is it that comes to mind for you? For some here, I expect, an answer may come quickly. For others, what may come are questions. Perhaps including isn’t it mostly minister types who experience a call?
Well yes, often ministers do talk about the call. And they can take many forms.
My experience of a call to the ministry happened one day many years ago as I was walking along East Superior Street in Duluth Minnesota one day. I don’t remember much of the day before that. Just how, in a moment on that walk it was clear to me that I was supposed to be a minister. I was a little startled at first. I was pretty settled in my editing job at the daily newspaper there. I had not too long before found Unitarian Universalism as a church home. But the idea of a call to ministry felt like it came out of the blue. I didn’t quite know what to do with that. I thought about it for several days—it may have even been weeks. But that sense didn’t go away. I finally got up the courage to make an appointment to talk with my minister. I didn’t know what she would say, but I feared she might say “what—are you kidding?” She listened to my story. Her first response was to say, “I wondered how long it would be before you figured it out. I had a sense you might be heading in that direction.”
She then advised that if indeed I was discerning a call I should start learning more about life in the church. And why didn’t I begin by leading the annual fund drive that would be starting in a few months. No time to waste. Long story short—you never know where the call is going to take you.
Now at first it did feel as if that sense of call came from someplace outside of me. I was a little startled. But I look back on it many years later I realize that in fact it was something that had been percolating for a long time. In fact, as I’ve reflected more about it, it was even something that may have been an expectation from my family about what I would do with my life. With time I come to see that call has been with me for a long time. It just took a while for it to come to the surface.
Words again from the poet Nancy Shaffer:
Were you in the shower,
wet and soapy, or chopping cabbage
late for dinner? Were you planting radish
seeds or seeking one lost sock? Maybe
wiping handprints off a window
or coaxing words into a sentence.
Or coming upon a hyacinth or one last No.
Where were you when you heard that ancient
voice, and did Yes get born right then
and did you weep? Had it called you since
before you even were, and when you
knew that, did your joy escape all holding?
Where were you when you heard that
calling voice, and how, in that moment,
did you mark it? How, ever after,
are you changed?
Some of us, I expect have had those moments of clarity when it comes to call or perhaps the word would be vocation, what it is we are supposed to be doing with our lives.
But I don’t think mostly that they come in the form of grand awakenings, but in more subtle ways. In those moments when we do have that sense of yes, this is where I’m supposed to be. This is what I’m supposed to be doing. This is the direction I’m headed in. And mostly they are not some one-time events but something that comes, that happens, day by day, maybe over a much longer time.
Calling, I’ve come to see, is more often than not, something that is ongoing, a kind of check in about where we are and where we are going. But it is also important to make space to discern which messages are important and which ones are not. There are all kinds of messages we get about what we should be, but those more often than not may actually lead us off course. But the thing about callings, as I have come to understand them, is that they don’t leave but keep showing up for us one way or another.
Rachel Naomi Remen writes about an odd dream she had years earlier: It was only a single image, but she awoke deeply disturbed. She had no idea what the dream meant, but felt like it was some sort of a message because it aroused strong feelings of sadness and a sense of being trapped. The image was very vivid: It was a daffodil bulb planted in the earth and lying on top of it was a large and very heavy rock. Because of this rock, the daffodil was unable to bloom.
For several weeks, she could not get this dream out of her mind, and eventually she described it to a friend. The friend said, “Perhaps there is a conversation going on between the rock and the daffodil. Why not listen in?” And Remen said that with surprise she realized that she knew this conversation well. The rock was saying, “It’s a dangerous world. DON’T BLOOM! I will keep you safe.”
Remen began to laugh and said, “That rock sounds just like my father.” Her friend asked her if she could hear the other side of the conversation. What was the bulb saying to the rock? “I need to bloom,” Remen told her. “Blooming is my whole purpose for being alive.”
The friends sat together thinking about this for a while. Then the friend frowned and said, “It should feel good to have that heavy rock between you and danger, shouldn’t it?” Suddenly Remen’s eyes filled with tears but she says she had no idea why. She let the matter drop there. But from time to time she would think of this strange dream, and once she even dreamt it again. It was just as disturbing.
Years go by and Remen is agonizing over a major career change. The stress of this decision became intense, and one morning she awoke with a severe pain in my back. Just to the right of her spine. Annoyed, she thought that she had slept wrong and took two aspirin. But the pain did not go away. After the third or fourth day she went to see her doctor, who told her that the pain did not correspond to anything anatomical that he knew about and therefore must have been connected to stress. He had nothing more to offer.
The pain went on for weeks. Finally someone suggested that she consult an acupuncturist to see if she might find some relief. This was not the usual thing to do at that time, but she had become desperate. So she goes to see the acupuncturist named Dr. Rossman. He takes her pulse for a long time and examines her carefully. He runs his finger lightly down her back. When he touched the place that was hurting, the pain was so intense she cried out. “Ah,” he said, “this is an acupuncture point. The life energy, the chi, is stuck here.” With her permission, he could try to release the block by putting an acupuncture needle in that spot. Remen had never had an acupuncture treatment and was skeptical, but the pain had gone on for so many weeks that she was willing to try. So she lay down on her stomach on his examining table and closed her eyes.
She writes: “As soon as I felt the needle, the old, half-forgotten image of the daffodil bulb and the rock reappeared to me with extraordinary clarity. Suddenly I understood how the rock felt. The rock was afraid to let the bulb bloom. It knew the daffodil’s value and was determined that it must not come to harm. If it bloomed and became visible, it could be hurt. I also understood for the first time that if it did not bloom, the daffodil might die.”
She talks about how in her family survival was something learned. Her father grew up in the depression and the war. He had become an expert at surviving. It was a question of tenacity, of putting safety above all other considerations. Living, on the other hand, was a matter of passion and risk. Of finding something important and serving it. Of doing whatever was needed in order to survive out loud.
As a child of her family, she said she had not understood the difference in this way before. Perhaps survival was not the goal of life after all. As she anxiously began to wonder if it was possible to protect something without stopping the life in it, she says that in her mind’s eye the rock spontaneously began to change its shape.
She writes: “As I watched in surprise, slowly it became taller and thinner and more transparent until I realized it was becoming a greenhouse. Inside it, the daffodil bulb put out a spike and bloomed. The yellow of the flower was extraordinary—as if it were made, not of petals, but of light.” Lying there on the acupuncture table, she began to weep.
In the blink of an eye, things had turned inside out. The reason the rock had given the bulb for not blooming was the very reason it was important to bloom. It was a dangerous world, a world of suffering, loneliness and loss. And in that world daffodils were needed.
Remen writes that after that first treatment, the pain never returned to her back. When she visited the doctor and told him the story he said that every acupuncture point has a name and that the one that was blocked for her was called the Heart Protector. Shortly after that she left her faculty position at a university and found a new way to practice medicine, which was the path she was supposed to be on.[2]
“I am here to live out loud.” The writer Émile Zola said. I am here to live out loud.
Life is about finding our voices. Sometimes it is about learning which voices are truly our own and which ones are not. And sometimes it can take a while to figure all that out. Sometimes it takes finding the right protection. It takes our willingness to pay attention to the signs that come our way. And sometimes they may not make sense, at least not right away. It takes time to know how our stories are different from—and how they grow out of –the stories of others including our families. It may take time to get enough distance from all the messages we receive about what we should be, or how we should be.
In his poem “Ask Me” Oregon poet William Stafford: Ask me whether what I have done is my life.
Words of scholar Parker Palmer reflecting on that line: “Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.”[3]
Life, I think, is about making space to hear what might be that call for each of us. It doesn’t usually come in the form of a burning bush, but who knows, it might. Maybe sometimes that’s the only way it can get our attention. But more often it is something more subtle and our first job may be to get out of the way and to listen. To pay attention.
Each of us is precious and whole just as we are. Each of us has the capacity to do our part of make the world more whole, more loving, more compassionate. That doesn’t mean to need to be at the top of our profession or the best at one thing. It means we have to just be first who we are and to listen to what the world might be asking of us. To pay attention to what our particular calling—or callings might be.
The theologian Martin Buber tells the story of the great Hasidic Rabbi Zusya. On his deathbed he began to cry uncontrollably and his students and disciples tried hard to comfort him. They asked him, “Rabbi, why do you weep? You are almost as wise as Moses, you are almost as hospitable as Abraham, and surely heaven will judge you favourably.”
Zusya answered them: “It is true. When I get to heaven, I won’t worry so much if God asks me, ‘Zusya, why were you not more like Abraham?’ or ‘Zusya, why were you not more like Moses?’ I know I would be able to answer these questions. After all, I was not given the righteousness of Abraham or the faith of Moses but I tried to be both hospitable and thoughtful. But what will I say when God asks me, ‘Zusya, why were you not more like Zusya?’[4]
Words again of Nancy Shaffer:
Tell us, please, all you can about that voice.
Teach us how to listen, how to hear.
Teach us all you can of saying Yes.
May each of us live into our callings, whatever they may be. May each of us find our way to our own liberation and with that may we join in the liberation of all beings.
In all our days may we find our way to yes.
Amen.
Let us pray: Spirit of life, we give thanks for this day and for our lives. Call us, over and over again, to the work of love. Remind us that the universe—just like our lives—continues to unfold every day, in every moment, and we are part of that continuous unfolding, that continuous evolution. As we grow and change so does the universe, in ways, we can only attempt to understand. Asking us to bring what we have to the table and to be of use, over and over again. Grant us wisdom and courage on the journey that we, in all our days, might live out loud. Amen.
Benediction
Take courage friends. The road is sometimes long. May we answer the call and all it asks of us. May our answers—and our lives—make love real all around us.
[1] “Calling” by Nancy Shaffer. Calling | WorshipWeb | UUA.org
[2] Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., My Grandfather’s Blessing: Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging, Riverhead Books, 2000, pp 133-136.
[3] Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation by Parker J. Palmer, Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2000, pp 1-8.
[4] Why were you not Zusya | rabbisylviarothschild
Topics: Calling