The Introduction to the Book "Callings"

[J.D. Hildebrand]

"The wind, one brilliant day, called." --Antonio Machado

Some years ago, along a country road outside of Fresno, California, on a windy spring day, a part of the invisible world was made, for a brief moment, visible to me.

I saw, in the light lancing through a row of trees, great streams of yellow pollen sweeping by on the wind, every speck filled with information -- blueprints for making perfect blue flowers, the dark musculature of trees, meadow grasses.

I saw in that moment that the whole sky is filled with furtive transmissions -- pollen and seeds, radio waves and subatomic particles, the songs of birds, satellite broadcasts of the six o-clock news and the Home Shopping Network. And I saw that what is necessary to make substance or meaning out of any of it is a receiver, someone to receive.

Years later, struggling to make sense of a stunning aggregate of symptoms and synchronicities in my own life that appeared to cluster around the question of whether or not I should leave a job, I realized that my own life was similarly flooded with signals of which I was only dimly aware but that seemed to indicate the necessary steps I should take to make my life literally "come true." Until then, unfortunately, the receiver had usually been turned off, so these incoming calls fell into silence.

***

In many traditions, calls -- in the form of sounds -- precede prayer, rites of initiation, spiritual healings, and major life events. The purpose of calls is to summon adherents away from their daily grinds to a new level of awareness, into a sacred frame of mind, into communion with that which is bigger than themselves. The calls may come from bullroarers, trumpets, rattles, wooden clackers, songs, bells, or the chanting of muezzins atop minarets.

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."

***

This book, then, is about putting on a lens through which we can see our lives as a process of calls and responses. To me, this is a much more appealing and meaningful vision than, as I heard a character on television remark recently, seeing life as "Just a bunch of stuff that happens." This book is about religion in the original sense of the word -- re-ligare, to re-connect -- to re-member what has been dis-membered: our own selves, the deep life within us that is a strong "religious" impulse despite whatever outward waywardness our lives may exhibit. This is the sense of "religion" that psychologist William James meant when he described religion as "the attempt to be in harmony with an unseen order of things," to remember what we already know.

"When my daughter was seven years old," says artist Howard Ikemoto, "she asked me what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college, that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forget?'"

Yes, we forget, and this book is about remembering our vocations, again in the true sense of the word -- our callings -- whether they are vocations in the arenas of work, relationship, lifestyle, or service. They may be calls to do something (become self-employed, go back to school, start or leave a relationship, move to the country, change careers, have a child) or calls to be something (more creative, less judgmental, more loving, less fearful). They may be calls toward something or away from something; calls to change something, review our commitment to it, or come back to it in an entirely new way; calls toward whatever we've dared and double-dared ourselves to do for as long as we can remember.

CENTRIFUGAL FORCE

Unfortunately, we often simply tune out the longings we feel, rather than confront and act on them. Perhaps we do not really forget our calls but we fear what they might demand of us in pursuing them. Anticipating the conniptions of change blocks us from acknowledging that we do know, and always have known, what our calls are. Perhaps we also fear the hope that such calls evoke in us, and the power that we know is dammed up behind our resistance.

A multitude of forces in this world certainly conspires to divide us against ourselves, our power and authenticity, our voices, even our ability simply to listen to ourselves and believe what we hear: parents who either told us or modeled for us that dreams aren't bankable; schooling that braided into our brains the message that we must live up to certain standards, but seldom do; the wheedlings of advertising and consumerism; a patriarchal culture that taught us -- by the brute force of reason -- to abandon our instincts and intuitions; the juggernaut of conformity, without which culture couldn't exist but that exacts from us in return a stiff price in individuality; and even the instinct for survival.

"Nature places a simple restraint on those who leave the flock to go their own way," say David Bayles and Ted Orland in *Art and Fear.* "They get eaten! In society, it's a bit more complicated, but the admonition stands: avoiding the unknown has considerable survival value. Society and nature...tend to produce guarded creatures." The upshot is that we often end up trading our authenticity for what we perceive as survival, terrified to swap security for our heart's deep desires, which is the imperative of all callings and one of the dominant fears in responding to them.

Saying yes to the calls tends to place you on a path that half of yourself thinks doesn't make a bit of sense, but the other half knows your life won't make sense without. This latter part, continually pushing out from within us with a centrifugal force, keeps driving us toward authenticity, against the tyranny of fear and inertia and occasionally reason, against terrific odds, and against the knocking in our hearts that signals the hour.

We find ourselves compelled to follow the sometimes blind spiritual instinct that tells us our lives have purpose and meaning. We find that we must act on this imperative despite the temptations -- to back down and run for cover -- that will divide even the most grimly resolute against themselves. We must persist with the sort of hope about which playwright and former Czechoslovakian president Vaclav Havel spoke when he said, "Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."

This requires a cussed determination to prevail, especially in the face of a bewildering paradox that lies at the heart of each of our calls and each of our lives: Both are incredibly important and incredibly significant. Our lives are like giant earthquakes: in geologic terms, they are muscle twitches; yet in human terms, they are titanic. Knowing such a thing, we can't help but approach the prospect of following our deepest callings with both exhilaration and terror.

THE VEIL IN THE TEMPLE

Because the notion of a call is historically tied up with religion, we tend to think of it as divinely inspired, which induces a good measure of terror. Calls are, in our minds, big, and we feel we have to respond in a big way, which, of course, can be paralyzing. It is therefore important to remember, first, that a call isn't something that comes from on high as an order, a sort of divine subpoena, irrespective of our own free will and desire. We have a choice. We have a vote! "Thunder doesn't rent the sky," Rod Serling once said, "and a bony finger come down from the clouds and point at you, and a great voice boom, 'You! You're the anointed!'"

Second, few people actually receive big calls, in visions of flaming chariots and burning bushes. Most of the calls we receive and ignore are the proverbial still, small voices that the biblical prophets heard, the daily calls to pay attention to our intuitions, to be authentic, to live by our own codes of honor.

Our lives are measured out in coffee spoons, wrote T.S. Eliot; they are measured out not in the grand sweeps but in the small gestures. The great breakthroughs in our lives generally happen only as a result of the accumulation of innumerable small steps and minor achievements. We're called to reach out to someone, to pick up an odd book on the library shelf, to sign up for a class even though we're convinced we don't have the time or money, to go to our desks each day, to turn left instead of right. These are the fire drills for our bigger calls.

"I don't ask for the full ringing of the bell," wrote the poet Wallace Stevens. "I don't ask for a clap of thunder that would rend the veil in the temple. A scrawny cry will do, from far off there among the willows and the cattails, from far off there among the galaxies."

Perhaps our callings, the wisdom of our true natures, can only be hinted at, anyway -- filtered through symbols, dreams, symptoms, happenstances, and synchronicities. They are not shown to us directly but only mediated, for the same reason that the goddess Athena had to come to the aid of Ulysses disguised as a mortal, and for the same reason we can't look directly at the sun. The ancients believed that if gods or goddesses were to appear to us in their true forms, the sight would sear the flesh off our bones, as happened to Semele, mother of Dionysus, who was incinerated with lightning and thunderbolts after being granted her request to see her lover, Zeus, in his full immortal splendor.

We thus need to learn to recognize our calls in many disguises. The channels through which they came are also like pierced ears -- we have to keep earrings in them or they close up. We have to stay in dialogue, stay vigilant, and be willing to be seized by our encounters, by what comes our way.

And we have to act! Responding to a call means doing something about it. If passion is the call, as psychologist Rollo May has said, then form is the response and the way we ground our calls in the world. Passion -- or as Plato said, Eros (love) -- moves instinctively toward the creation of form. It wants to take shape, fashion of itself a vehicle, and, as the mystic poet Rumi once wrote, "There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground."

***

In this book we'll apply the oracular arts of sign reading to the search for authenticity, deciphering the calls that issue from our lives and point us toward action. They come in a tremendous variety of forms, all of which should be considered as divining rods to help us locate the underground streams, so we'll know where to dig. They include:

o A dream that keeps coming back, or what it is that pursues you in dreams.

o A symptom that recurs and is exquisitely metaphoric, such as a pain in the neck from shouldering too much responsibility.

o A conversation you overhear in a restaurant that seems as though it was spoken directly to you.

o Places in your life where there's friction. As in nature, friction occurs where changes are taking place, or trying to. Where, for example, do your words not match your deeds; where do you fight with others; where do your longings rub against your security?

o Song lyrics you can't get out of your head.

o Instructions that arise unbidden from the silence of meditation.

o An ultimatum your partner gives you: either go to couples counseling or the relationship is over.

o What you would preach about if given an hour of prime time.

o What decisions you need to make in your life right now; what issues are hanging in midair waiting for resolution.

In reading all these signs, we are searching for the power inherent in simply naming things, for that which we cannot name is lost to us, and that which we can name is coaxed into life. The danger, of course, is that we tend to overexplain and overinterpret, which, as the playwright Eugene Ionesco once said, "separates us from astonishment."

Calls are essentially questions. They aren't questions you necessarily need to answer outright; they are questions to which you need to respond, expose yourself, and kneel before. You don't want an answer you can put in a box and set on a shelf. You want a question that will become a chariot to carry you across the breadth of your life, a question that will offer you a lifetime of pondering, that will lead you toward what you need to know for your integrity, draw to you what you need for your journey, and help you understand what it means to burst at the seams. These questions will also lead you to others whose lives are propelled by the same questions, and from them you will receive "oh, never an answer," as writer P.L. Travers says, "but a spark of instructive fire."

A PATH BETWEEN TWO QUESTIONS

The critical challenge of discernment -- knowing whether our calls are true or false, knowing how and when to respond to them, knowing whether a call really belongs to us or not -- requires that we also tread a path between two essential questions: "What is right for me?" and "Where am I willing to be led?" Discernment also requires that we ask these two questions continually and devotedly, in hopes that by doing so Providence will, in due course, be alerted to our desires and answers will find us.

In stone sculpting, an artist taps a stone lightly with a hammer to see if it's "true." If it emits a dull tone, it has faults running through it that will crack it apart when you work on it. A clear ring, one that hangs in the air for a moment, means it's true, has integrity, and, most importantly, it will hold up under repeated blows. This is the same information we seek about our callings, and we need to be continually "tapping in" to discern their truth.

Thus we cannot know whether a cigar is indeed just a cigar without studying it. We cannot declare a happenstance "just a coincidence" without looking at whether it corresponds to a theme or issue in our lives. Without submitting to the ceaseless thrum of our own intuitions over a period of time, we cannot know whether the voices we hear are those of inner guides or just the babble in Babylon.

If you're bored with your work, does that mean you need to leave it or change it? Does falling in love with someone else signal that your marriage needs dissolution or attention? If you didn't get the job, does that mean you weren't supposed to pursue the career, or that the rejection is a test of your resolve? If you can't get pregnant, is it that you're not meant to, you're meant to redefine the meaning of parenting for yourself, or that you simply have a medical condition that means nothing? Is a calling true if it's propelled, in part, by a desire to prove something? If you're afraid, does that suggest the need for courage and a leap of faith, or do you need to back up and reevaluate? How do you know when you're procrastinating or when the answer you seek simply hasn't revealed itself to you yet?

The channels through which callings come -- whether dreams and symptoms or intuitions and accidents -- are like oracles of any kind. They aren't meant to be treated as psychic vending machines, merely dispensing information. They are to be approached for dialogue, entered into in the spirit of correspondence and what the poet William Butler Yeats called "radical innocence." Their answers are typically metaphoric, paradoxical, poetic, and dreamlike, and they require reflection and conversation.

SHAKEN UP

Recently, an acquaintance of mine who has searched for many years for a sense of direction and mission revealed that he was waiting for "an unshakable vision." I immediately thought of the work of the Belgian physicist Ilya Prigogine, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his theory of what he calls "dissipative structures," part of which contends that friction is a fundamental property of nature and nothing grows without it -- not mountains, not pearls, not people. It is precisely the quality of fragility, he says, the capacity for being "shaken up," that is paradoxically the key to growth. Any structure -- whether at the molecular, chemical, physical, social, or psychological level -- that is insulated from disturbance is also protected from change. It becomes stagnant. Any vision -- or any thing -- that is true to live, to the imperatives of creation and evolution, will not be unshakable.

We must therefore be willing to get shaken up, to submit ourselves to the dark blossomings of chaos, in order to reap the blessings of growth. Much of this is axiomatic: stress often prompts breakthroughs; crises point toward opportunities; chaos is an integral phase of the creative process; and protest abets the cause of democracy. The whole science of immunization is based on this wisdom: We introduce a little bit of chaos in order to prevent a lot of chaos. Just enough, but not too much. We shake up the system for the sake of helping it evolve and become stronger.

If you aren't willing to get shaken up, if you hang on to the belief that you have an unshakable vision, when your call falters in any way -- say you follow it and something painful happens, or you hear it once but then it goes away, or you drive into a tunnel and lose the reception -- then you will probably conclude that the call wasn't true to begin with because...it shook! Almost by definition, calls shake us up because in the same breath that a call is uttered, so is suffering. As Jonah discovered, a call rocks the boat, because it often points to passions, and the word "passion" derives from the Latin "passio" for suffering.

Being unwilling to bear the hurly-burly of faithfulness to our call, we court disaster -- Latin for "against one's stars" -- and we end up agitated anyway. Although we have the choice not to follow a call, if we do not do so, the Sufi poet Kabir said, our lives will be infected with a kind of "weird failure." We'll feel alienated from ourselves, listless and frustrated, and fitful with boredom, the common cold of the soul. Life will feel so penetratingly dull and pointless that we may become angry, and turn the anger inward against ourselves (one definition of depression) or feel seized by the impulse to run madly out of the house, down to the river, and search among the bulrushes for a miracle. The calls we will not name or follow coalesce into entities that will attempt to tunnel their way into consciousness using any rough tool at hand to remind us of their imperatives, and they will do so through the impeccable logic of pain. As an old Roman saying goes: The fates lead those who will. Those who won't they drag.

Callings keep surfacing until we deal with them. They return, in Freud's words, as "repetition compulsions": the same marital fight over and over; the symptom that recurs; the fantasy that won't go away; the urge drawing us to the same type of partner; being fired again. In the Bible, God often called to the prophets by repeating their names. "Abraham, Abraham." "Jacob, Jacob." "Moses, Moses." Once, it seems, wasn't enough. Indeed, repetition is fundamental to learning. Ask teachers, ask advertisers, ask parents. "Still, small voices" may not have enough voltage to rattle the status quo, but they do have staying power. I have, for instance, dreamed for more than 30 years of a certain house where I once lived in New York. Ever since my parents' divorce and my mother's remarriage, my mind is still working it out, my soul is still unresolved.

Those who refuse their calls, though, who are afraid to become what they perhaps already are -- unhappy -- will not, of course, experience the unrest (or the joy) that usually accompanies the embrace of a calling. Having attempted nothing, they haven't failed, and they can console themselves that if none of their dreams come true, then at least neither will their nightmares.

Generally, people won't pursue their callings until the fear of doing so is finally exceeded by the pain of not doing so, but it's appalling how high a threshold people have for this quality of pain. Too many of us, it seems, have cultivated the ability to live with the unacceptable, and I hope that this book will make a convincing case for the benefits of allowing ourselves to get shaken up, to trade some of our stagnating certainties and securities for the generative effects of a little friction.

VIRGINS AND VOLCANOES

Perhaps the main reason that we ignore calls is that we instinctively know the price they'll exact. In order to become authentic, we're going to have to give up something dear: a job, a house, a relationship, a belief, a lifestyle, the prestige of being a big fish in any size pond, security, money, precious time, anger at somebody, or just the pleasures of cynicism.

In recent years, a lot of people have taken as a personal motto and policy statement Joseph Campbell's admonition to "follow your bliss," believing, perhaps, that by doing so their lives will be blissful. Unfortunately, "follow your bliss" is more about following than about bliss. The flat-out truth is that if you follow your bliss you'll have your bliss, but nothing else is promised. Having your bliss is not a trifle, for grievously few people possess it. But all calls lead to some sacrifice because even just one choice closes the door on another, and some calls lead to much sacrifice, which may feel anything but blissful. If you're unwilling to make sacrifices, though, you can end up losing a great deal more than you might have sacrificed.

The natives of some Asian countries have a tradition of trapping monkeys by placing a piece of fruit in a gourd, with a small hole bored in its side that is tied to the ground. Monkeys reach in for the fruit, but by grabbing it, and thereby making a fist, they can't get their hands out of the gourds. The natives then bag them and eat them. If the monkeys would only let go of the fruit, they could escape, but for some reason this doesn't enter their monkey minds, and it costs them their lives. We are only a notch up the evolutionary ladder and often act as if we, too, are hardwired with the same suicidal attachments.

We have to be willing to surrender. It's no coincidence that at all times in all cultures throughout history, the wisest among us have said that surrender is about liberation, not defeat. Historically, surrender has involved giving up the transitory for the sake of the transcendent. It has been a way of dis-possessing ourselves in the hopes of bringing good graces down upon us. The question sacrifice asks is: "What are you willing to give up to ensure your own unfolding, and the unfolding of what is holy in your life?"

Unfortunately, sacrifice is typically seen as deprivation -- belt tightening, inconvenience, the tossing of virgins into volcanoes, the nailing of men onto crosses. Its reputation is one of punishment, but also, according to most of the world's religions, one of redemption and rebirth. Hopi Indians, for instance, buried their dead in the fetal position. In dying, we come back around to life. Sacrifice is an essential fact of life however, not an isolated act of appeasement. Rock eventually crumbles and becomes dirt that feeds plants. Grain is crushed to make flour. Snow melts to become water that nourishes the earth and makes for good river rafting in the spring. Each time we sacrifice -- each time we let go of something, die to an old way of being, relinquish our grip on the fruit -- we are practicing for bigger and bigger surrenders, and eventually for what M. Scott Peck calls "the final vocation": growing old gracefully and -- a tough call -- dying. We all owe God a death, Shakespeare once said, so we owe it to ourselves to practice for the occasion whenever possible.

One way we do so is by tending to the small surrenders that come our way almost daily: letting go of a bad mood, making a choice or a compromise, forgiving someone, parting with fear and saying the truth in a moment, spending time without children instead of working late again.

Every sacrifice, though, every step toward action, every response to a call necessitates a leap of faith and is done without knowing the outcome. It is, as the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard described, the epitome of anxiety meeting courage. It is Jonah leaping overboard, which seems like madness, yet often in following our own calls, we're told by others that we're crazy. At some level, we, too, have to make an ultimate sacrifice to our callings. We need to devote everything, our whole selves. A part-time effort, a sorta-kinda commitment, an untested promise, won't suffice. You must know that you mean business, that you're going to jump into it up to your eye sockets and not turn back at the last minute. In making the leap from vision to form, you will be tested and suffer setbacks, occasionally severe. At our first steps toward authenticity -- or love or compassion or any high calling -- every devil in hell will come out to meet us. Only when you try your vision in the world can you test whether it's true.

How will you fare, for instance, when the higher calling meets the bottom line? What will you do when what seemed so meaningful in the solitude of introspection or retreat or an altered state suddenly begins to unravel in the cold light of practicality, of having to pay the rent and go to work and shuttle the children to day care and music lessons? What will happen when the backlash hits, when you're bombarded by the implorings of old roles and responsibilities, by the blank stares of loved ones, by fear and doubt and impatience -- yours or others' -- and by the sheer force of entropy in your life?

What happens when you discover, too, that you yourself are the prime saboteur, that whenever you have a breakthrough, it's followed by a breakdown, that you unconsciously blow a fuse every time you think too big, move too fast, get too excited, run too much juice through the system, as if you're sending up balloons in a room whose ceiling is studded with nails.

It is equally disconcerting to realize that you can have what you want. In most cases, this is true, if the call is. It is also a test to realize that if you really wanted, you could quite your job tomorrow. You might be in a pickle but you could do it. You could get on a plane and fly to the Orient this week. You could pack a few things and take a retreat first thing in the morning. You could leave this marriage tonight. You could start saving the whales or the children or the planet right now! Of course, when you realize this you run into the paralyzing freedom.

Granted, there are real limitations in the world -- poverty, racial discrimination, sexual stereotypes, disability, lack of access to education, financial responsibilities. Yet people do prevail against what conventional wisdom would suggest are impassables. They find ways of making end runs around such odds. This book is filled with stories of people who have successfully negotiated the right passages to authenticity and personal power. They will describe, in detail, the process of how they responded to their callings, from the moment they first heard them; how they figured out what those calls were; where they found the courage to pursue the call in the face of opposition from within and without; and what in their characters helped and hindered them on their journeys.

ARIADNE'S THREAD

In attempting to weather the tests and win our spurs, it is essential to know how to gain and regain strength -- to what people, places, teachings, practices, beliefs, and sanctuaries can we turn? Who and what are our allies?

In the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, after Theseus has slain the beast in the center of the underground labyrinth, he guides himself back to the surface by a length of thread given him by Ariadne, the king's daughter, retracing his steps through the dark maze of tunnels.

What is that thread for you? What can guide you through the labyrinth back to safety, back from your encounters with the dark? Perhaps it is the lamp of someone's love, the support and feedback of people who genuinely believe you can do it, your connection to something bigger than yourself (family, community, nature, music, God), your own courage and humor, even your own desperation. Whatever the forms, these parts of you, of your life, can help you remember who you are. These are the parts of you that haven't gone to sleep or forgotten.

If our allies help us stay the course, though, our "enemies" -- whatever forces thwart us -- provide us with the true tests of our spirit. They offer us the best opportunities to learn strength, resolve, patience, and compassion -- skills that are easy in the abstract and damnably hard in the doing. Sometimes, however, what first appears to be an enemy turns out not to be, and it is the better part of valor to exercise a heroic quality of discretion in following our calls. Be willing to approach obstacles as if they might be allies, and make your leaps of faith accordingly.

When Jonah went overboard, he leapt not into the swallowing sea but into an unexpected benediction -- the belly of the whale. The whale served as Ariadne's thread for Jonah, leading him to safety, delivering him to his own fate for resolution. The whale is an inspired bit of symbolism. The only other time we are inside another's belly is before birth, so the image reflects the anticipated birth that follows sacrifice. In that bellow, drunk on evolution, we are not so much acting as being acted upon by something bigger than ourselves. It is our preparation before we are spilled forth into life, into the world, ready at last to carry out our missions.

The psychologist Ira Progoff once said that each of our lives is like a well, and we're meant to go down deeply enough into our own wells so that we finally reach the stream that's the source of all the wells. There, says theologian Frederick Buechner, in the place where "our deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet," we hear a further call. This call leads us out into the world to test our bright swords in real combat -- to teach love, save lives, change minds, educate, minister.

But the question must arise in our minds whether our deep gladness can satisfy the world's deep hunger. This, also, is a test of our faith. The difference that any of us will ultimately make in the world is equivalent to our throwing a stone into the sea. Science tells us that because the stone is lying on the bottom, the level of the water must have risen, but there is no way to measure it. We must take it entirely on faith.