Unfortunately, rather than confront and act on the longings we feel, and the conniptions of change that usually ensue, we often simply tune out, denial generally being the endorphin of choice. Perhaps it’s not, after all, that we really forget our calls, but that the fear of what might be demanded of us in pursuing them blocks us from acknowledging that we do know, and have always known. Perhaps we fear not just what will be required of us, but fear the hope that such calls evoke in us, and the power we know is dammed up behind our resistance.
A multitude of forces in this world certainly conspire 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 modelled for us that dreams aren’t bankable; schooling that braided into our minds the message that we must live up to certain standards, but seldom do; the wheedlings of adversiting 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 simply constraint on those who leave the flock to go their own way,” say the authors of Art and Fear. “The 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 us on a path that half of us thinks doesn’t make a bit of sense, but the other half knows our lives won’t make sense without. This latter part, continually pushing out from within us with 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, and 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 of which the 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 insignificant all at once. Our lives are like giant earthquakes: in geologic terms, muscle twitches; in human terms, titanic. Knowing such a thing, we can’t help but approach the prospect of following our deepest callings with anything but exhilaration and terror.
THE VEIL IN THE TEMPLE
Because the notion of callings is historically tied up with religion, we tend to think of them as divinely inspired, and this induces a good measure of the terror. Calls are, in our minds, big, and we feel we have to respond in a big way. This, 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 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!’ ”
Secondly, few people actually receive big calls, the equivalent of flaming chariots and visions of burning bushes. Most of the calls we recieve, 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; 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, synchronicities and the like. 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, it would sear the flesh off our bones, as happened to Semele, mother of Dionysus, who was incinerated with lightning and thunderbolts upon asking to see her lover, Zeus, in his full immortal splendor----and being obliged.
We thus need to learn to recognize our calls in many disguises, and know that the channels through which they come are like pierced ears----we have to keep rings 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.”
