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.”
Thus, 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, that point us toward action, and that 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:
* A dream that keeps coming back, or what it is that pursues you in dreams;
* A symptom that recurs, and is exquisitely metaphoric;
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