What have I always known about my life?  I often hear people, speaking about vocation, say they have always known they had a passion for… or wanted to be…; but I’m not so sure.  Frederick Buechner  writes originally in The Sacred Journey,

By the time I was sixteen, I knew as surely as I knew anything that the work I wanted to spend my life doing was the work of words. I did not yet know what I wanted to say with them. I did not yet know in what form I wanted to say it or to what purpose.But if a vocation is as much the work that chooses you as the work you choose, then I knew from that time on that my vocation was, for better or worse, to involve that searching for, and treasuring, and telling of secrets which is what the real business of words is all about.

When I was young, maybe 9 or 10, I distinctly remember the realization that my life would involve working for God.  That is everyone’s vocation really, right?  What did I know then or sense at least that made me know that?

One is that I have always been a deep thinker– pondering my life in unforeseen ways.  Like the time we were “camping” in my backyard in our small town neighborhood of tract homes.  I think I must have been in junior high school.  My friends at the time, I don’t even remember who they were for sure, wanted to leave the relative safety of our fenced-in back yard and venture out into the neighborhood around midnight.

Even though I knew my parents were sleeping and really weren’t of dispositions to check up on me, I didn’t want to do it.  It wasn’t the right thing to do and I stood my ground; they went.

I remember my inner voice that was strong even in the face to face encounter with peer pressure.  It wasn’t concern that I would get caught; it was my own inner voice that didn’t think it was a good idea, even though I was confident my parents would never know.

What was that strong sense– God in me?  I can’t say for sure but I know for certain that a sense of God’s presence was always with me in my teenage years, lifting me above my life and propelling me forward.

What else would compel me to go to Hardin Simmons, a university over 1000 miles from my home that I’d never laid eyes on; to get on a plane when I had no idea where I was going much less how I would get from the airport to the school.

That year really was one of blind (and I do mean blind) TRUST.  I have no idea how that year changed me and maybe that is it, trust.  Trusting the ride home at Thanksgiving with a crazy hippie girl who drove a VW and picked up hitch hikers, I knew getting to come home at all was a kind of miracle even though being home was not.

Somehow I knew that year would not be more than that one year, so far away, but it gave me a taste of trust that did suspend me above heartbreaking family life.  It moved me beyond what seemed real to see myself as capable and smart and even a writer for the brief moments before my 1:00 composition class and a thinker in that biblical studies class where I dug deeply into highlighting thematically every verse in the New Testament.

That same sense of trust brought me to the large midwestern university and then to Florida for an internship– again with NO IDEA how I would make it–so many miracles really.  That blind trust seems to have waned or is it growing up?

What do I know about choosing or being chosen by God?  How do I enter that place of trust again with confidence that God is ever-present in ways that I don’t even know?

When I, like Buechner, consider the miraculous work of the spirit undergirding even my wondering and wandering around in the wilderness, my strong voice inside and my deep thinking and writing have brought me to this new place.

Fortunately I know to trust, yes, trust that I am not alone, that my real life is above just circumstances.  I will take a new step everyday into unknown places that are solid and full of incredible possibility.  Is that a vocation?

 

 “Welcome everyone as if you are welcoming Christ.”

Benedictine Credo

Hard to live sometimes when you are with the people with whom this should be the easiest– family. On Thanksgiving, or any holiday where there is a gathering of extended family, we truly are thankful for each other. However, those little things that draw more attention than the bigger truths separate us from that thankfulness so easily spoken.

Today I wait. Others peoples’ schedules and sensibilities about how the day unfolds don’t always match my ways especially when I am someplace else. The truth is that here, in someone else’s home, it’s not my ways that matter.  

To have the patience and insight to see the goodness of God at work in other people’s lives is grace. To understand how that goodness can be nourishing and nourished by my honoring their presence is a gift.

The lesson comes again for me, to meet this day with openness. To welcome another person means that I am open to other ways of seeing the world. There isn’t just “one story” but a continual story that changes moment by moment.

Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

This works for paying attention to people too, even those we hold so closely that it obscures this expanded and liberating view.

 

You’d think it would get easier; figuring out what is important to do in a day.  Because, as it goes, each day makes a lifetime.

Kathleen Norris’ found poem, Imperatives, puts together Jesus’ spoken words on the subject.

Imperatives

“Look at the birds

Consider the lilies

Drink ye all of it

Ask

Seek

Knock

Enter by the narrow gate

Do not be anxious

Judge not; do not give dogs what is holy

Go:  be it done for you

Do not be afraid

Maiden, arise

Young man, I say arise

Stretch out your hand

Stand up, be still

Rise, let us be going…

Love

Forgive

Remember me.”

Today is before me; it is very clear right now what to do. Remember.

This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one
day will grow. We water the seeds already planted
knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects
far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of
liberation in realizing this.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning,
a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s
grace to enter and do the rest.

This is part of a prayer composed by Bishop Ken Untener of Saginaw titled “A Future Not Our Own.”  The whole is worth reading (click here).

As we do, we construct meaning from powerful words like these that connect and make sense of our own experience. I grew up in a family of secrets.  I learned how to be self sufficient so that others would consider me strong and reliable so the secrets remained safe.  It’s taken me many years to realize that and how trust is not just about trusting God but trusting other people who have given me every indication that they are trust worthy.

Even though I sometimes falter, I know I am capable; I am productively aware that I cannot do everything. I only catch glimpses of the sense of literation in realizing this.

I do know that I can let go of the wheel, so to speak, and the world keeps turning; that letting go is another opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter…even me.

I decide I should leave by 8:30 to arrive in plenty of time for my day long interview that begins at 9:30.  Thanks to my phone I know it will take me about 20 minutes to drive.  I’ve never been here so I should give myself a bit more time. I gather everything I need to take with me.  But, where are the car keys? 

Losing car keys, even for a rental car,  is not life threatening.

Frantically, for a few moments, I search.  Pockets of yesterdays jeans or jacket?  Suitcase?  Work bag?  Left at the hotel desk when I checked in?  Laying near the car in the parking lot?  No, I remember pushing the button to lock the car on my way into the hotel.  They are big keys, what did I do with them?

In The Wisdom Way of Knowing, Cynthia Bourgeault writes that “surrender is an act of spiritual power because it opens the heart directly to the more subtle realms of spiritual Wisdom and energy.”

Meeting this day in a state of anxiousness will not serve me.  I know that.  I also know that I can’t find my keys.  Surrender, not to give up, but to know there is more I can find here.  

First, give up that I can do everything for myself.  Call the chairperson of the interview committee and admit I’m not perfect and need help.  Well, not in those words… I will say I’ve done something embarrassing by misplacing my car keys and need help to get to the interview on time.   She isn’t answering, I’ll leave a voice mail.  I’ll further admit my vulnerability to someone I don’t even know.  Call the main number and ask for the administrative assistant’s number, that seems logical to get  a message to the committee.

“No one by that name works here, are you sure that is the person you are looking for?”  Yes, she works in this department, her name is on the itinerary.  I’m connected with the chairperson’s voicemail again.  I call back and the kind lady says,  “Oh yes, I found out her father passed away and she is not in the office.”

Don’t be anxious, meet this with calm surrender… this is what to do. 

At the hotel’s front desk, the person in charge had lost her voice.  She listened as I calmly (amazing, I know) asked, I need to get to an interview by 9:30.  Anyone who could take me?   Wade, the security or maintenance person, cheerfully said he would pull his truck around front to pick me up.

Wade trusted me (really my phone), the one who’d lost her keys, to get him there.  He wasn’t sure of the way as we navigated winding roads full of fall color and rolling hills. It was a beautiful October day and  a joy to just ride and listen to his story of Wades. His father and grandfather before him were named Wade he told me, when he heard my son was named Wade too.

The main entrance was blocked due to construction but in good hands we made our way around another curve to the entrance that led directly to the building where I needed to be.  Wade pulled over so I could ask a young girl who kindly directed us. I thanked him for the ride, he noted I was early and had some time; no need for hurry or be anxious.  

Losing [my keys], I had to let go of outcomes that were beyond my control.  Losing is giving up seeing what will happen next. Losing is ultimately not knowing, but also knowing that I must do what I have before me in the moment; where I suspend the lostness to lean into other kinds of provisions.   In that surrender, I was able to notice and experience care.  Paying attention to the care of hotel staff who looked out for me; the hug instead of a handshake I received from the chairperson who had listened to my voice-mail and called me to say everything would be fine; the care of one who shared his thick sweater with me when we walked outside because I forgot my coat in my hurry; and the casual conversation with the quiet one who gladly took me back to my hotel.  And more…  to lean into the vastness of the world around me and the abundance of God’s imagination for living.

Ephesians 3:20  “Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or imagine.”

I’m wiggling this quote out of the context in which it was originally written for my own purposes, just so you know.

Frederick Buechner wrote this line in a piece titled “Healing” as advice to the one who prays for another to be healed, whether it is in body or soul or both.

Like all writing we read, we scrape out bits that help us tell the stories of our own lives.

“Think of yourself rather (if you have to think of yourself at all) as a rather small-gauge, clogged-up pipe that a little of God’s power may be able to filter through if you can just stay loose enough.”

First of all, being unselfconscious, as I see it, is a struggle.  Even when I think I’m honestly putting myself out there for the sake of another person or cause, I’m still putting myself out for all to see, don’t you see?  Those continuous conversations, wonderings and to be honest—stories I create in my mind are based on my assumptions that are rarely filled with truth.  Clog.

Stay loose enough?  Letting go, being attentive to the moment occur fleetingly in my clogged mind; but even small moments make break-throughs possible.  Open up even enough to let God’s power filter through.  And…

“if God doesn’t seem to be giving you what you ask, maybe he’s giving you something else.”

Struggle and grace are recursively lived.

Holding on to what I discover and experience—what does that look like in real life, over and over anew?

It means to me that I listen for how God is already working and that I work alongside capable people, wherever I am, to live lives in response to God’s love.

The monks at Gethsemani I observed on my recent retreat there generally don’t make themselves known individually. Collectively they create a place for people like  me to renew and find my life by living their own lives—being true as they see it to the people God made them to be. By caring for each other as a community, they make it possible for each one of them to live out their devotion to God.

In the little I know about Thomas Merton from his work and other’s writing about his life; he couldn’t have, wouldn’t have written what he did without the support or collective presence of Gethsemani.

How does struggle and grace enable me to live outside the lines, or as Father Seamus, housemaster at Gethsemani, explained the contemplative life as countercultural?

Parker Palmer records that Rosa Parks, when asked why she sat on the seat in the front of the bus that ordinary day in Montgomery, Alabama, said that she did it because she was tired.

That seems to me like she had the courage to do what was right for her at that moment that was counter to the cultural norm. Was it that simple or profound?

Palmer says it was more than her body being tired. It was her soul that was tired of playing by the racist rules and denying her selfhood.

One of my challenges as an educator is to find,  as Parker Palmer says, ” a right relationship to institutions with which I have a lifelong lover’s quarrel.” Is an academic presence a way for me to build new relationships that create an ethos of shared lives that dismantles hierarchies? My faith compels me to work alongside other people to create more equitable footings in a spirit of grace and growth.

Every journey, honestly undertaken, stands a chance of taking us toward the place where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.

I met someone yesterday that says that place found him. I am on the way there, too.

Surrender is not acquiescence, reluctantly yielding; it is an opening up to unknown possibility.  In Whistling in the Dark, my dear Mr. Buechner explains sleep as surrender.

…a laying down of arms.  Whatever plans you’re making, whatever work you’re up to your ears in, whatever pleasures you’re enjoying, whatever sorrows or anxieties or problems you’re in the midst of, you set them aside, find a place to stretch out somewhere…

An inner yieldedness, Cynthia Bourgeault calls this state.

As I enter a week of out of the ordinary opportunity, I want to remind myself of how to be open on the inside. Too often I am anxious, controlling, and self-conscious.   How do I soften, open and yield.

Surrender is not an outer state, like rolling over and playing dead, that is precisely what troubles me about the idea of surrender I learned from my childhood faith.

Bourgeault continues in Wisdom Way of Knowing.

On the contrary, interior surrender is often precisely what makes it possible to see a decisive action that must be taken and to do it with courage and strength…action flows from that place of relaxed, inner opening.

Setting aside or laying down all anxiousness, all the reasons “it” won’t work, all my inadequacies to stretch-out in God’s provision.  

The best things that happen in life rarely make good sense.

From The Coal Tatoo, a novel by Silas House

One spring evening several months ago, I decided to check out one of the chapel speakers at the upcoming Writer’s Workshop I planned to attend at Princeton Seminary.  He happened to be the President of Princeton Seminary, M.Craig Barnes.  The sermon wasn’t recent but the message to me timely, “When Life is Interrupted.”

He spoke about deaths, falling in love, loosing your job and aging– life’s interruptions–some wonderful and some not so much.  When interruptions occur your life is in a different place.  The only way to get from one place to another is through the wilderness.

Navigating the wilderness can only be done in complete trust.  There is a temptation to go back but the only way out is to move forward.  Life is not going to be what it used to be- it is going to be something new.

18 “Remember not the former things,
    nor consider the things of old.
19 Behold, I am doing a new thing;
    now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness
    and rivers in the desert.  Isaiah 43

I give thanks for the interruption; I have changed.

So I’ve been working on squelching the “conversations in my head” that distract me from awareness of the present.  Technically, I don’t intentionally construct these conversations; the talking takes flight when I’m walking the dog, in the shower, trying to get to sleep, or even when I’m reading something that isn’t engaging enough to talk over those other voices.  Anytime I’m not consciously attentive, fixing my attention on what I’m doing, the chatter begins.  I want to not speculate or fantasize about my life so much as I am aware and engage with the world around me.

A few days ago, I read Frederick Buechner’s definition in Wishful Thinking.  Angels are powerful spirits whom God sends into the world to wish us well.  Since we don’t expect to see them, we don’t.  He states, “an angel spreads his glittering wings over us, and we say things like ‘It was just one of those days that made you feel good just to be alive…”  Hmmm, I wonder.

Then, I went to the grocery store, the smaller local one with not so many people crowding the aisles. It was early afternoon.  I saw my mailman who had a day off and a regular cashier at the store who was a shopper today. I noticed her stop briefly to ask a quite elderly couple how they were doing.

The couple walked side by side both leisurely pushing their cart. He was clearly in charge of getting items off the shelves as she held fast onto the cart’s handle. As they neared, I took notice, looking up from my grocery list.

Determined to “pay attention” I purposely looked into the lady’s eyes, a kind of silent greeting.  She lovingly looked back, a sparkle in her gray blue eyes who’d seen many more years than me.

It happened so effortlessly.  She put two fingers to her lips; kissed them and pushed her hand gently but squarely toward my forehead, holding my gaze.

I’m not sure what I believe about angels.  But she did wish me well without words.  I sensed a tangible blessedness to be in that moment.