Aligning with Calling

“If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair,

but ask me what I am living for, in detail,

ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.”

― Thomas Merton

I want to invite us to encounter calling freshly, as if we had never encountered the term before. I say this because our sense of calling may have long ago lost its edge; we may carry an over-familiar answer as to the core of our calling in life. This may be something we once felt keenly, which has been precious. But we have evolved since that original clarity. Our planet too has altered. Where does calling touch us now?

From the spacious, open present, sensing all this territory freshly as if our purpose here was newborn: What do we find ourselves drawn to respond to?

I want us to pay attention to the visceral quality of feeling 'called'. Calling is about attraction, about a response, about what stirs us. In calling we are beckoned toward something that compels us.

It is not always easy to take calling seriously. Many of us betray and neglect ourselves before we listen more deeply.

But calling enriches how we relate to both past and future. This is precious. Instead of seeing the past as a place of wounding, calling encourages us to look for what it might reveal about our gifts. Equally, calling enlivens our futures, creating a trajectory of attraction, significance and value.

Self-Care as a Calling

The bud / stands for all things, / even those things that don't flower,

for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;

though sometimes it is necessary / to reteach a thing its loveliness,

to put a hand on its brow / of the flower / and retell it in words and in touch

it is lovely / until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing...

Galway Kinnell

As we have seen, a sense of calling is often curative: of inner slumps, of social hurt, of faltering self-esteem. Yet it also has its shadows. Some of us have served or sacrificed too hard, burning ourselves out for grand projects, leaving us exhausted and deflated by what our devotion has cost us.

Particularly as we age, callings may grow more subtle and local in scope. If calling is to be truly medicinal, to refresh us and nourish our futures, we need to listen to these humbler calls. It may be time to shed a sense of duty toward some great purpose and tend to something personal while there is still time.

It can feel frightening or revolutionary to turn toward care for the self: to relate to ourselves with deeper kindness and acceptance, to prioritize an activity or a love that has always beckoned us. Yet this too can be a call, a long overdue act of tending, a place where, in the lovely words of Buchner, 'the world's deep gladness and our deep hunger meet...'

So if we find that we are called now to pleasure, to quietude or to deep rest, can we honour this not as a solitary, selfish project, but as a healthy recalibration of a life spent in service or self-denial? To follow this call is to bring the world into balance in new ways.

Aligning With Calling

[video transcript]

When we think about Calling, it’s a common mistake to feel that it has to be epic, that it has to be highly impressive and heroic. That belief can separate us from a more subtle recognition of what we are uniquely called to do. So, I want to read a few quotes here that speak to this.

The first is from James Hillman who says: “Calling can refer not only to ways of doing, meaning work, but also to ways of being. Take being a friend. Goethe said that his friend Eckermann was born for friendship. Aristotle made friendship one of the great virtues. In the past friendship was a huge thing, but it’s hard for us to think of friendship as a Calling because it’s not a vocation.”

What I want to just clarify there is that each of us has gifts and each of us has a sense of what is meaningful and precious to us and of what we can bring to life. And it’s really important that we don’t objectify ourselves, but instead really feel into where our passion, and our gift is, and allow that to be subtle, to be modest, and to be particular.

Because one of the beautiful things about Calling is that it is so particular, and this specificity and uniqueness can take us out of a more linear, competitive, comparative reality into something healthier: How am I cherishing the things that feel precious to me, the gifts that I sense inside me? How am I supporting those?

I’d like to draw on a quote here from Leonard Cohen about this. He says: “You know I’ve taken a certain territory and I’ve occupied it, and I’ve tried to maintain it and administrate it with the very best of my capacities. And I will continue to administrate this tiny territory until I’m too weak to do it, but I understand where this territory is.” I find this very beautiful. There is a recognition that each of us is going to end up in our lives tending tiny territories; that’s all we can do. (Even Steve Jobs or some of those big apparent hero guys, they’re actually in a very tiny territory doing something very specific). So, that’s something I want to just bring in, to allow for the specificity and not to try to be grand.

The other piece that I think is very important in that is to see Calling as a very dynamic, evolving thing rather than one thing we must continue to work away at, even after we’ve lost our passion for it. We need to learn to keep listening to what calls us now. It’s not that we’re rushing around and changing direction all the time, but that we’re listening out for an unfoldment of Self, an unfoldment of whatever territory calls us, so that we’re not getting caught or trapped in a role that once had meaning for us but is starting to stagnate.

I’m going to finish with yet another quote which I think is quite helpful here, and this is from Joseph Campbell, and he was speaking about Calling, but this is from a book by Greg Levoy, and he says: “Even more important than meaning for people is a feeling of aliveness.” Campbell says: “People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, of the rapture of being alive.” That phrase “the rapture of being alive” has a link with Calling, when we are in flow with what brings us alive. For me calling expresses this way of exploring this rapture through action. And in some ways this angle takes Calling beyond ethics, and ‘should’ and responsibility into the ecstasy of passion. I’m not trying to suggest that many of us are living in an ecstatic version of Calling all the time, but that if we devote our energy to things that are precious to us, that rapture and aliveness, and that vitality is being supported and is from time to time visiting us in very sweet ways.