A sacred calling
I’ve been reading a little book by a Jesuit about the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius and the process of coming to recognize your “one true name”—your vocation. This book was passed to me years ago by a graphic designer friend who is spiritually inclined. Our conversations often veered from the project we were supposed to be working on together.
Our January 1 snowfall a couple of days ago has spurred me on in my project of organizing the entire upstairs, including my office, and the little book spoke—
“It’s me again.”
—on Friday as I went through the box it had been packed in when we moved to the farm two and half years ago. I read it yesterday and finished this morning, a long morning in a calm, reordered office with a view of meadows and wooded hills covered by hoar frost, everything held still in a blanket of fog.
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Life purpose is an obsession of mine. Not just my purpose (all this assumes there is at least one), but everyone’s—their path and how they got on it, and if it feels right. I’ve had several extended Zoom or text sessions this year with my youngest nephew, who is 23 and starting graduate school, about classes and majors and temperament and life balance and relationships and how all these things go into the confusing, mushy surface that makes up the path from Step A to Step B. (This young man’s eighth-grade photo happens to be on my desk at the moment. I am lucky to talk with him about majoring in English.)
The Jesuit’s book drew me in by its recognition of the cry of the heart, through and beyond any particular religion. It reminds me of another, much longer book that has a permanent place on my shelf: a study of 350 accounts of dreams and visions from Great Plains Indians. The dreamers sometimes gained knowledge through spontaneous visions, but other times they braved isolation and danger on the vision quest, and there again was the cry from the heart, the longing for a vision, for purpose and a gift to share with the community.
In the little book, the Jesuit tells of a friend who came to him and spoke about how he had not been able to truly pray in his heart for many years. He could only go through the motions. The writer asked his friend if there was any time in his life that he felt uplifted and spontaneously close to God, and the friend said he could always look back at his own life and see how good God had been to him and feel close to God. And the writer asked his friend if he had tried to pray on the goodness of God. Three weeks later, the friend visited again and said he found he could always pray on the goodness of God. The writer said he believed his friend had discerned his personal vocation: the goodness of God, the animating idea he carried through his hours and all he did.
This is a mystery to me, the idea of praying on the goodness of God. Crying for a vision and purpose makes more sense to me at a felt level. But there are statements in the Jesuit’s little book that resonate. Our vocation, the writer says, is with us from the beginning of life. It is not tied to a particular job or profession or position or station, but a way of being, an orientation, that we carry within and that carries us through times of struggle and confusion.
The writer tells about his own first reading of Viktor Frankl’s classic, Man’s Search for Meaning, and how Frankl saw his fellow prisoners in Auschwitz better able to survive as he, a trained psychologist, subtly reflected back and reinforced the meanings in their lives that he picked up in conversation. Also, the Jesuit writes, he consistently sees that the people he has counseled realize, when they have discerned their vocation, their sacred purpose, that it has been present in concrete manifestations throughout their life history.
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I think strong memories of seemingly ordinary experiences, and choices made when we were very young, and longings, are all concrete manifestations of our calling. One of my strongest early childhood memories is of a visit to a particular plant nursery at Christmas. Also, I remember thinking in high school and college that I’d be a teacher but that what I wanted to do right at the moment was work as a gardener for the summer. On and on.
This morning when it was after 10 and I’d been reading and writing and Bob finally came up to check in, I talked to him again about how at one time I was all lined up for a graduate teaching assistantship in English—while working as a professional salaried editor—and I just broke down and turned in my keys. It was too much, even for a few months, and would have left me no time outdoors. No “free mind time.” I knew what it was to grade papers; I’d done it for one awful year as a high school teacher straight out of undergraduate school. I couldn’t do it.
I have had my nose in a book and my feet in the garden since I can remember, no matter what else is going on. Once during a very hard time I said to my garden, “You are going to save my life.” Now, during the pandemic in winter, I long for the national parks, and I survive by walking on trails nearby.
I feel pulled in more than one direction and always have. I want my calling to be clear and it’s not. I hold onto the notion that I should have something to share. There have always been pressures; I have supported myself financially my entire adult life, so I have had to winnow, make choices, as everyone does. I have to pay better attention to the question of what I want to do, right now, this minute, without expectation of compensation or praise.