On Being Foundations 4 - Calling and Wholeness
When I left my last ministry position before my current one, I didn’t know what was next. I was moving into a big unknown and it was scary. Some who had seen my photography work asked if I had considered wanting to be a professional photographer. There’s something intriguing about that but as I reflected on it, I didn’t want that to be what needed to happen to put “food on our table” so to speak. I wanted my photography to continue to be something that was more about life-giving for me (and also for others) and not something I felt pressured to have to “succeed” at. What I was coming to recognize about this part of me was that seeing and sharing these deeper things in the world, finding beauty, sharing creatively, inspiring gratitude, and so forth is at the center of who I am and that it could be integrated into the ways that I live and move and have my being in the world.
In the last of the On Being Foundations podcasts, Ms Tippett quotes William Stafford’s poem, Vocation, when she shares, “your job is trying to figure out what the world is trying to be.” And as much as I see the opposites of beauty, gratitude, and hope in the world, I do strongly believe that the world is trying to be those things even as we fight against them. That came clearer to me in these words from Ms Tippett about the callings for our time...
And just as there are callings for a life, there are callings for our time. Some of us are called to place our bodies before other bodies on the front line of danger. There are so many front lines of danger in our young century. But there are other, quieter callings that are as necessary to the health of our communal soul and to make the beyond of danger and the beyond of division more muscular and more real.
Some of us are called to be bridge people, staking out the vast ground in the middle and heart of our life together, where there is meaningful difference but no desire for animosity. Some of us are called to be patient calmers of fear.
While I didn’t hear my “specific” calling in her list (which I am sure she would not say is exhaustive), I did hear myself in that last one. Gratitude, beauty, and hope feel like they are opposites of fear and what fear elicits in us. So, maybe that is part of my calling for this time. Two photos from the same day last week and then a poem from Carrie Newcomer speak to this as well.
These two photos - one just after sunrise and the other after sunset. The first was from a spot that I had walked by countless times before but something about the light of that morning brought out what looked to be two crosses at the bend in the path. I just stopped and was so moved by the newness of what I saw in something I’d seen many other times but hadn’t fully seen.
The other came that night about ½ mile away from that point. It was at sunset and the sky was an incredible mix of purple, blue, and red. Scout and I just sat there and took it in. But I wasn’t drawn as much to the sky as I was to the water. The water looked like black and silver glass in the darkening sky but with enough ripples to beautifully distort and transform that which was being reflected. There was the rainbow of colors mixed with the silhouettes of the trees and then the silverly, rippled glass reflecting the illuminated clouds. It was a moment of such fullness, life, beauty, and awe.
I am deeply grateful that I have heard this calling and that I have been able to respond to this unique way God has stirred in me and continues to work in me. It is where I find calling and am finding wholeness. And that leads to the final piece to share...a poem called Showing Up by Carrie Newcomer. I read this the other night and ended up going through it at least ten times and have shared it with several others since that night. It speaks so beautifully to this calling in my life and it speaks to the unique callings that God has crafted in each of us.
Showing Up by Carrie Newcomer
You
Are holy
And sacred
And utterly unique.
There are gifts you were born to give.
Songs you were born to sing
Stories you were born to tell.
And if you do not give it,
The world will simply lose it.
It is yours alone to offer,
No one can give it for you.
And dearest,
Listen, because this is important,
This wounded world
Needs all the songs we can pull from the air,
Every story that helps us to remember.
It needs every single gift,
Large and small.
And yes,
Dearest,
This grateful world does rejoice
Every courageous time
We are true to ourselves and to our gifts.
And so it is,
Dear heart,
We embrace the song
And the story
And all our gifts
Because the world has such great need
And because the world exceedingly rejoices
And because there is no sadder thing
Than to leave this world
Having never really shown up.Newcomer, Carrie. A Permeable Life: Poems & Essays (pp. 16-17). Available Light Publishing. Kindle Edition.