If Only Life Offered Caller ID

A sermon Offered by Jim Gardner
Sunday, May 27, 2007 • Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading

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“You missed your calling.” 

How many times have you heard these words?
How many times have you said them to someone? 
How many times have they been said to you?

There is no such thing as a missed calling.  As intelligent beings we make choices in our lives, one of those choices is to ignore or not answer a call, for whatever reason.

The dictionary defines a calling as:

An inner urge or a strong impulse, especially one believed to be divinely inspired. An occupation, profession, or career.

From a religious or theological standpoint Gregg Levoy in his book “Callings – Finding and Following an Authentic Life” states:

In the primary creation myth of Western cosmology, the very first call came through the voice that said “Let there be light,” and there was light, the words then becoming flesh.  Every call since then has also been a call to form, a call to each of us to materialize ourselves.

Calls, of course, beg the question “Who, or what, is calling?”  But, in attempting to answer this question even an exhaustive list of every name for Soul or Destiny or God would be beside the point.  It simply doesn’t matter whether we call it God, the Patterning Intelligence, the Design Mind, the Unconscious, the Soul, the Force of Completion, the Center Court or simply “Life’s longing for itself,” as Kahlil Gibran envisioned.  It is clear, however, that “living means being addressed,” as the theologian Martin Buber once said, and whatever or whoever is addressing us is a power like wind or fusion or faith: We can’t see the force, but we can see what it does.

Primarily this force announces the need for change, and the response for which it calls is an awakening of some kind.  A call is only a monologue.  A return call, a response, creates a dialogue.  Our own unfolding requires that we be in constant dialogue with whatever is calling us.  The call and one’s response to it are also a central metaphor for the spiritual life, and in Latin there is even a correspondence between the words for listening and following.

If life only came with Caller Id Service it would make it much easier for us to discern those Calls in our life that are authentic from those that are just distracting.

Callings come in many forms and come to people in many different ways.

Our beloved former Summer Minister, Reverend Wendy Von Zirpolo found her calling to the ministry while exploring a stream bed.

In our earlier reading I talked about how Mother Teresa found her calling while praying, at the feet of our Lady of Letnice, as a young child and then again while traveling by train.

Nevell Owens a former Criminal Prosecutor, who next year will be completing his doctoral dissertation in theology, found his calling when he looked into the eyes of a thirteen year-old boy accused of murder.  He saw that they were empty, and he wanted to know where was god in the life of this boy?  He knew the boy’s mother was active in church, and wanted to know, why isn't the minister here?  Why aren't the members of the church here?

Last year I had the opportunity to interview a dear friend of mine the Reverend Alicia Corea who recently retired as the minister of the Houghs Neck Congregational Church.  Alicia and her husband the Reverend Peter Corea spent fifty years jointly ministering to this, the church I grew up in.  During that interview Alicia told me of how she found her calling.  She was a young girl, going to college in Chicago and was studying to be a journalist, which she believed would be her fulfilling career.  Female journalists at that time were mostly assigned to human interest and social issues, so her professors encouraged her to take courses in theology so as to be better prepared to report on issues relating to the church.  Alicia and several other girls from the school moved to Massachusetts and enrolled in courses at Andover Theological Seminary, this was prior to the merger in 1965 which created the school we now know as Andover-Newton Theological School.  With much encouragement from fellow classmates and her future husband,  Alicia eventually went on to become one of the first female Congregationalist ministers ordained in Massachusetts. 

A few years back, I had the privilege of attending the 50th anniversary of her ordination.  A colleague of hers, who originally was adamantly opposed to not only her ordination, but any woman’s ordination, got up and spoke.  The first thing he said was “he was wrong, and that Reverend Corea is a rare gift to the church,” he then turned and asked if she had any regrets.  Reverend Corea spoke up and said finding and following her calling to the ministry, as difficult as it was, turned out to be the most rewarding thing she has ever done.  Even retired and well into her eighties Reverend Corea still teaches progressive bible studies in the UCC church.

Sometimes, we as beings fail to distinguish between a vocation and an occupation or career.  Jobs change as do the organizations we work for, however a vocation is a constant thread which is bigger than our jobs or careers.  Some may be able to express their call in their job while for others, the job simply puts bread on the table so a person can pursue a vocation outside their job.

Some people feel obligation to pursue a particular career path after investing a great sum of money (or their parent's money) in an education program.  Their sense of loyalty blinds them to new opportunities they should be considering.

On the other hand, if we fail to appreciate the sacredness of all vocations then some pursue "ministry" roles because they think that is of greater value to god but they then can become trapped in a role that is not truly their calling.  Their lives, then become burdensome to themselves and as a result to others. 

Taking the time to explore and understand your deeper calling and what it truly means, and how it defines a vocation in your life is the most important thing.  Authenticity is the fruit that results from the alignment of one’s vocational call with one’s sense of personhood. Pastoral authenticity should flow from the center of one’s vocation, rather than from an abstract goal toward which one moves. True excellence is rooted, not in the achievement of a predetermined outcome, but in a sense of faithfulness to the particular vocation to which god has called.

Noted author, Parker Palmer, writes, "There is a Quaker Saying 'Let your life speak.'  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 value you represent."

My mother found her calling, but not to ministry, her calling was to teaching and working with children in the Quincy School System.  My mother has been working with the children of Quincy for thirty-seven years, the last ten with special needs students.  Even when she was diagnosed with cancer and needed to take time off from work for treatment she was concerned about keeping track of all of her teaching materials for when she got back to teaching.

Of course this brings up a curious question.  Is my mother working in the school for thirty-seven years the result of following a calling or just a result of circumstances?  That sense of blinding loyalty and obligation. Many times over the years she has had the opportunity to change careers and she chose to continue doing what she does despite the uncertainty year to year and the low wages.

This is that concept of vocation, which I spoke about earlier, a recurring theme which plays out throughout our lives.

A true calling will manifest itself in our lives in many ways.  This could be in dreams, visions, coincidences, tragedies, epiphanies or advice.  Author Gregg Levoy describes a calling by saying that it will continue to manifest in our lives until we here it and address it.

We may be too busy to take the call or too caught up in our daily lives to even hear the call.  In either case these calls will just keep coming.  Like the proverbial telemarketer the calls will keep coming until we act on them.

Of course there are calls we hear and follow through on regularly.  What called each of you to come to church this morning?  As our opening words say “to put aside the demands and delights of the daily round” to fulfill this call.

In saying yes to our calls, we bring flesh to word and form to faith.  We bring substance to dreams, to passions, and to the ancients’ urgencies.  We ground ourselves in life and bring ourselves into being as alchemists and magicians in their finest hours.  By following our calls, we come as close as seems possible to embodying the gods and knowing some of what it means to have their power – to make bodies our of clay, rain out of vapors, gold out of lead, fruit out of the idea of fruit.

There are times in people’s lives when they are called and they don't respond, so the calls get stronger and more demanding.

An example of this is the story of Ann Kreilkamp, she was twenty-six years old, when Truth came flapping out of the wild place in her life, cloaked in the sackcloth of illness and propelled her into an immense struggle to figure out what it meant.  Was it a call? If so, from where was it coming, why, and what sort of response was it calling for?  Furthermore, how would she know whatever response she devised was the right one?

The year was 1969.  She was in graduate school, married with children, trying to be all things to all people: the perfect mom, perfect wife, perfect graduate student, perfect catholic girl.  She was also coming apart at the seams.  “I thought I was going crazy.  I kept asking ‘Why do I feel so trapped, why am I so unhappy, why am I so unsatisfied, why do I want to kill my children even though I love them?’” She didn’t know that a whole generation of women was asking similar questions and unraveling in similar ways.

One day she just seized up, literally and figuratively.  She landed in Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston with generalized peritonitis, an inflammation of the lining that cradles the guts.  She couldn’t digest.  She couldn’t absorb.  Nothing moved, either in or out.  During the seven days she was in the hospital, her stomach ballooned to the equivalent of a six-month pregnancy.  It was more than peritonitis, she sensed.  Something was brewing.  When she got up the nerve to ask the doctor if she was going to die, he shrugged and walked out of the room.

This provoked something good Catholic girls are not supposed to do:  She got angry at God.  Her logic was: “Not only is there no God to pray to, there’s no God to give the finger to.  If there’s no God, I’m therefore free – and responsible.”  At which point, she describes, “For the first time in my life, my soul came down inside my body and said to me, ‘Live or die.  You have a choice.’ “

Within twenty-four hours, Ann Kreilkamp experienced something the medical community is reluctant to document, let alone investigate.  She had a spontaneous remission, or what most doctors, in a massive failure of the imagination, call a misdiagnosis.  The peritonitis completely disappeared, leaving her doctor once again shrugging.

Before she left the hospital, she glanced in the mirror and was astonished to see that her physical shape had changed.  Her body weight had redistributed itself, her contours were now different and have remained so ever since.  Her soul, it seemed, had a shape all its own.

For the next year, she struggled to discern what specifically her soul was calling her to do, besides choosing between life and death.  Her graduate studies in philosophy, she discovered, were largely the search for certainty, for justification of some of the choices she was considering, for truth – an attempt, perhaps, to unveil the statue.  “And when I found out there is not Truth, that ultimately there’s no way to be certain, it terrified me.  It threw me into an intellectual panic.  I realized I just had to jump, to leap with my whole self, which is tricky when you’re not entirely whole.  But you take your best guess.”

At that time, Kreilkamp had to leave her marriage, true to D.H. Lawrence’s dictum that every human being is treacherous to every other because we have to follow our own souls.  Two years later, she also relinquished custody of her two boys to her husband; it was “the most painful, unnatural act of my life.”  These broad jumps, however, taught her that the most reliable test of a calling’s veracity and meaning come only in the results.  There was not way she could have analyzed her way to clarity, bent over her dilemma as if over an anvil, trying to beat shape into it, trying to confirm whether the call to part ways with her family was her soul’s voice or just the voice of restlessness, some misguided sense of self-preservation, or even the spawn of her own anger at God.

The answer is in the outcome, she insists.  “What is the feedback your life gives you?  Is your energy growing or shriveling? Moving or getting all jammed up?  Is your life deepening? Ultimately, we may make some decisions and never know if they’re justifiable, if they’ll ever make sense in a way we can fully understand.  For example, I still don’t know if I was justified in leaving my children, though they now understand my decision, and as adults we’re very close.  Maybe I wasn’t justified.  But I had to do it.  And that’s another sign that a call is true, I think.  No matter how uncomfortable, it feels right.”

The process of discerning one's vocational calling is often a difficult task, especially when surrounded by the "noise and chaos" of everyday life. Everyone should take the time to find that sacred space in their life that allows them to listen to the callings that are coming from within their being and develop a dialogue with those callings.

I was lead to this church, at the hands of Roald, nine years ago and in turn discovered Unitarian Universalism at a time when I was not looking for a religion in my life.

It has been during these past nine years that I have experienced what I would consider to be a calling.  For me it started out as just a fleeting thought, which then became a feeling, over time that feeling grew enough that I felt it necessary to start exploring it further, so at the encouragement of Reverend Tim I have stared on a  journey of “Finding and Following my own Authentic Life.”

Putting together and delivering several summer services and being involved in countless others has lead me to a point in my life where I have started exploring ministry as a vocation for the outward manifestation of my calling

I don’t know if this is my “true calling” or just a yearning for change.  Like Ann Kreilkamp had to struggle with what her soul was calling her to do, I too will need to make my way through the exploration process in my journey to find my “true calling” and “authentic life”. 

Take the time in your own lives to listen for your callings and as the author Parker Palmer says “Let Your Life Speak.” 

On our journeys we will be connected to many other souls, some local and some long distance, always treasure those connections when they are good, and when they are bad, hang up and dial again.

So may it be.  Amen

©Copyright 2007 Jim Gardner
All rights reserved.