Anam Cara

6 Callings

Someone asked me recently: What is it that haunts you? I said, “I can tell you exactly; it is the sense of time slipping through my fingers like fine sand. And there is nothing I can do to slow it.” One of the Psalms prays: “O Lord, help me to see the shortness of life that I may gain wisdom of heart.” As we get older, time seems to speed up. The sense of transience haunts nearly every heart. You feel that you could suddenly arrive at your last day incredulous that that was it; it was all over.

From time immemorial it has been one of the deepest longings of the human heart to strain against the erosion of one’s life, to find a way of living and being that manages to find some stable ground within time, a place from where something eternal can be harvested from our disappearance. This is what all art strives for: the creation of a living permanence. It is what we are secretly doing when we become parents: endeavoring to maintain our continuity beyond our own ending. The harvesting of transience is what we also are attempting in choosing the form of life we live. When we arrive on earth, we are provided with no map for our life journey. Only gradually, as our identity forms and we get an inkling of who we are, do possibilities begin to emerge that call us. It is one of the weightiest decisions: to decide what to do with your life. The challenge is to find a way of life that will be in harmony with your gifts and needs.

Behind each face there is a unique world that no one else can see. This is the mystery of individuality. The shape of each soul is different. No one else feels your life the way you do. No one else sees or hears the world as you do. The creation of the individual is a divine masterpiece. We were dreamed for a long time before we were born. Our souls, minds, and hearts fashioned in the divine imagination. Such care and attention went into the creation of each person. Given the uniqueness of each of us, it should not be surprising that one of the greatest challenges is to inhabit our own individuality and to discover which life-form best expresses it.

The great law of life is: Be yourself. Though this axiom sounds simple, it is often a difficult task. To be yourself, you have to learn how to become who you were dreamed to be. Each person has a unique destiny. To be born is to be chosen. There is something special that each of us has to do in the world. If someone else could do it, they would be here and not us. One of the fascinating questions is to decipher what one’s destiny is. At the heart of each destiny is hidden a unique life calling. What is it you are called to do? In old-fashioned language: What is your vocation in life?

For some people, the question of their calling is very difficult to decipher; for others, it follows from an early intuition and practically unfolds of its own accord. For some, it can be the singular and exclusive direction their life takes; for others, it can change and follow new directions. Again, some people never seem to find what they are called to do; this can burden them with a continual restlessness and dissatisfaction. When you find what you are called to do, your life takes on a focus and purpose. You come into rhythm with the deeper longing of your heart.

The notion of vocation is interesting and rich. It suggests that there is a special form of life that one is called to; to follow this is the way to realize one’s destiny. Following one’s vocation ensures that what you choose to do finds itself in harmony with your inner nature. It also means that this is the optimum way to unfold and develop whatever gifts one has. A vocation does not clear before you a smooth path through difficulties. Having a sense of one’s vocation does not in any way relieve one of the travail and turbulence of being human. Indeed, being true to one’s vocation can often require a level of generosity and risk that will cause great suffering, for more often than not there is no surge of light to clarify direction; the light on offer is enough to guide only the next step.

The nature of the calling can change over time, taking a person down pathways never anticipated. The calling opens new territories within the heart; this in turn deepens the calling itself. The faces of the calling change; what at the beginning seemed simple and clear can become ambivalent and complex as it unfolds. To develop a heart that is generous and equal to this complexity is the continual challenge of growth. This is the creative tension that dwells at the heart of vocation. One is urged and coaxed beyond the pale regions into rich territories of risk and promise.

It is devastating to feel trapped in a form of life where you feel utterly misplaced and all your effort is labored; everything you do is done against the grain. You take no joy or pleasure in what you do, and your heart is haunted by alternative lives you will never have. When you feel like this it can make for a resentful and bitter life—a life where you are neither seen nor understood for much of the time—and your gifts remain locked away, never to emerge. It is clearly time to change what you are doing, perhaps sacrifice the familiar in order to find your true calling. Such change can utterly transform your life. It is such a relief and joy to find the calling that expresses and incarnates your spirit. When you find that you are doing what you love, what you were brought here to do, it makes for a rich and contented life. You have come into rhythm with your longing. Your work and action emerge naturally; you don’t have to force yourself. Your energy is immediate. Your passion is clear and creative. A new calling can open the door into the house of vision and belonging. You feel at home in your life, heart and hearth at one. FOR PRIESTHOOD

May the blessings released through your hands

Cause windows to open in darkened minds.

May the sufferings your calling brings

Be but winter before the spring.

May the companionship of your doubt

Restore what your beliefs leave out.

May the secret hungers of your heart

Harvest from emptiness its sacred fruit.

May your solitude be a voyage

Into the wilderness and wonder of God.

May your words have the prophetic edge

To enable the heart to hear itself.

May the silence where your calling dwells

Foster your freedom in all you do and feel.

May you find words full of divine warmth

To clothe the dying in the language of dawn.

May the slow light of the Eucharist

Be a sure shelter around your future.

FOR MARRIAGE

As spring unfolds the dream of the earth,

May you bring each other’s hearts to birth.

As the ocean finds calm in view of land,

May you love the gaze of each other’s mind.

As the wind arises free and wild,

May nothing negative control your lives.

As kindly as moonlight might search the dark,

So gentle may you be when light grows scarce.

As surprised as the silence that music opens,

May your words for each other be touched with reverence.

As warmly as the air draws in the light,

May you welcome each other’s every gift.

As elegant as dream absorbing the night,

May sleep find you clear of anger and hurt.

As twilight harvests all the day’s color,

May love bring you home to each other.

ELEMENTAL BLESSING FOR A NEW HOME

Before a human voice was ever heard here,

This place has known the respect of stone,

The friendship of the wind, always returning

With news of elsewhere, whispered in seed and pollen,

The thin symphonies of birdsong softening the silence,

The litanies of rain rearranging the air,

Cascades of sunlight opening and closing days,

And the glow of the moon gazing through darkness.

May all that elemental enrichment

Bless the foundation and standing of your home.

Before you came here, this place has known

The wonder of children’s eyes,

The hope of mornings in troubled hearts,

The tranquillity of twilight easing the night,

The drama of dreams under sleeping eyelids,

The generous disturbance of birth,

The anxieties of old age unclenching into grace

And the final elegance of calmly embraced death.

May the life of your new home enter

Into this inheritance of spirit.

May the rain fall kindly,

May daylight illuminate your hearts,

May the darkness never burden,

May those who dwell here in the unseen

Watch over your coming and going,

May your lives of love and promise

Refine and deepen the mind of this land.

FOR THE FARMER

Before the human mind could warm to itself,

The hands of the farmer had first to work,

Creating clearances in the earth’s thicket:

Cut into the thorn-screens of wild briar,

Uproot the clusters of scrub-bush,

Dig out loose rock until a field emerged

Whose clay could be loosened and softened

To take seed and bring forth crops.

The earth was able to trust

The intention of the farmer’s hands,

Opening it, softening it, molding it

Into a domain of shelter and nourishment.

It waits through its secluded winter

For his imagination of springtime

To feed into its darkened heart

New seeds for it to work its mind on

Until the harvest gathers and thickens

With golden corn, honey-scented hay,

Ripe red and dark purple fruit.

In his mind, his fields become presences;

The feel of their colors, the brace of their walls

Have greened his thought and tempered his heart.

His eyes can read the animal atmosphere;

And see through their silence to sense their minds.

His skilled hands can guide calves and lambs to birth.

Out among his animals, in rain, cold, and snow,

Talking to them in affectionate callings,

Something in him tuned to their rhythm.

In these times when geography becomes virtual

And developers urbanize the earth,

May the farmer continue to hold true ground,

Keeping the intimate knowing of the clay alive,

Nourishing us with the fruits of the earth,

Serving as custodian of that precious threshold where

The rhythm of nature with its serene pulse

And sublime patience restores our minds.

FOR A NURSE

Your mind knows the world of illness,

The fright that invades a person

Arriving in out of the world,

Distraught and grieved by illness.

How it can strip a life of its joy,

Dim the light of the heart

Put shock in the eyes.

You see worlds breaking

At the onset of illness:

Families at bedsides distraught

That their mother’s name has come up

In the secret lottery of misfortune

That had always chosen someone else.

You watch their helpless love

That would exchange places with her.

The veil of skin opened,

The search through the body’s night

To remove tissue, war-torn with cancer.

Young lives that should be out in the sun

Enjoying life with wild hearts,

Come in here lamed by accident

And the lucky ones who leave,

Already old and in captive posture.

The elderly, who should be prepared,

But are frightened and unsure.

You understand no one

Can learn beforehand

An elegant or easy way to die.

In this fragile frontier-place, your kindness

Becomes a light that consoles the brokenhearted,

Awakens within desperate storms

That oasis of serenity that calls

The spirit to rise from beneath the weight of pain,

To create a new space in the person’s mind

Where they gain distance from their suffering

And begin to see the invitation

To integrate and transform it.

May you embrace the beauty in what you do

And how you stand like a secret angel

Between the bleak despair of illness

And the unquenchable light of spirit

That can turn the darkest destiny towards dawn.

May you never doubt the gifts you bring;

Rather, learn from these frontiers

Wisdom for your own heart.

May you come to inherit

The blessings of your kindness

And never be without care and love

When winter enters your own life.

FOR THE TIME OF NECESSARY DECISION

The mind of time is hard to read.

We can never predict what it will bring,

Nor even from all that is already gone

Can we say what form it finally takes;

For time gathers its moments secretly.

Often we only know it’s time to change

When a force has built inside the heart

That leaves us uneasy as we are.

Perhaps the work we do has lost its soul

Or the love where we once belonged

Calls nothing alive in us anymore.

We drift through this gray, increasing nowhere

Until we stand before a threshold we know

We have to cross to come alive once more.

May we have the courage to take the step

Into the unknown that beckons us;

Trust that a richer life awaits us there,

That we will lose nothing

But what has already died;

Feel the deeper knowing in us sure

Of all that is about to be born beyond

The pale frames where we stayed confined,

Not realizing how such vacant endurance

Was bleaching our soul’s desire.

FOR THE UNKNOWN SELF

So much of what delights and troubles you

Happens on a surface

You take for ground.

Your mind thinks your life alone,

Your eyes consider air your nearest neighbor,

Yet it seems that a little below your heart

There houses in you an unknown self

Who prefers the patterns of the dark

And is not persuaded by the eye’s affection

Or caught by the flash of thought.

It is a self that enjoys contemplative patience

With all your unfolding expression,

Is never drawn to break into light

Though you entangle yourself in unworthiness

And misjudge what you do and who you are.

It presides within like an evening freedom

That will often see you enchanted by twilight

Without ever recognizing the falling night,

It resembles the under-earth of your visible life:

All you do and say and think is fostered

Deep in its opaque and prevenient clay.

It dwells in a strange, yet rhythmic ease

That is not ruffled by disappointment;

It presides in a deeper current of time

Free from the force of cause and sequence

That otherwise shapes your life.

Were it to break forth into day,

Its dark light might quench your mind,

For it knows how your primeval heart

Sisters every cell of your life

To all your known mind would avoid,

Thus it knows to dwell in you gently,

Offering you only discrete glimpses

Of how you construct your life.

At times, it will lead you strangely,

Magnetized by some resonance

That ambushes your vigilance.

It works most resolutely at night

As the poet who draws your dreams,

Creating for you many secret doors,

Decorated with pictures of your hunger;

It has the dignity of the angelic

That knows you to your roots,

Always awaiting your deeper befriending

To take you beyond the threshold of want,

Where all your diverse strainings

Can come to wholesome ease.

FOR WORK

May the light of your soul bless your work

with love and warmth of heart.

May you see in what you do the beauty of your soul.

May the sacredness of your work bring light and renewal

to those who work with you

and to those who see and receive your work.

May your work never exhaust you.

May it release wellsprings of refreshment,

inspiration, and excitement.

May you never become lost in bland absences.

May the day never burden.

May dawn find hope in your heart,

approaching your new day with dreams,

possibilities, and promises.

May evening find you gracious and fulfilled.

May you go into the night blessed,

sheltered, and protected.

May your soul calm, console, and renew you.

FOR ONE WHO HOLDS POWER

May the gift of leadership awaken in you as a vocation,

Keep you mindful of the providence that calls you to serve.

As high over the mountains the eagle spreads its wings,

May your perspective be larger than the view from the foothills.

When the way is flat and dull in times of gray endurance,

May your imagination continue to evoke horizons.

When thirst burns in times of drought,

May you be blessed to find the wells.

May you have the wisdom to read time clearly

And know when the seed of change will flourish.

In your heart may there be a sanctuary

For the stillness where clarity is born.

May your work be infused with passion and creativity

And have the wisdom to balance compassion and challenge.

May your soul find the graciousness

To rise above the fester of small mediocrities.

May your power never become a shell

Wherein your heart would silently atrophy.

May you welcome your own vulnerability

As the ground where healing and truth join.

May integrity of soul be your first ideal,

The source that will guide and bless your work.

FOR CITIZENSHIP

In these times when anger

Is turned into anxiety

And someone has stolen

The horizons and mountains,

Our small emperors on parade

Never expect our indifference

To disturb their nakedness.

They keep their heads down

And their eyes gleam with reflection

From aluminum economic ground,

The media wraps everything

In a cellophane of sound,

And the ghost surface of the virtual

Overlays the breathing earth.

The industry of distraction

Makes us forget

That we live in a universe.

We have become converts

To the religion of stress

And its deity of progress;

That we may have courage

To turn aside from it all

And come to kneel down before the poor,

To discover what we must do,

How to turn anxiety

Back into anger,

How to find our way home.

FOR A LEADER

May you have the grace and wisdom

To act kindly, learning

To distinguish between what is

Personal and what is not.

May you be hospitable to criticism.

May you never put yourself at the center of things.

May you act not from arrogance but out of service.

May you work on yourself,

Building up and refining the ways of your mind.

May those who work for you know

You see and respect them.

May you learn to cultivate the art of presence

In order to engage with those who meet you.

When someone fails or disappoints you,

May the graciousness with which you engage

Be their stairway to renewal and refinement.

May you treasure the gifts of the mind

Through reading and creative thinking

So that you continue as a servant of the frontier

Where the new will draw its enrichment from the old,

And you never become a functionary.

May you know the wisdom of deep listening,

The healing of wholesome words,

The encouragement of the appreciative gaze,

The decorum of held dignity,

The springtime edge of the bleak question.

May you have a mind that loves frontiers

So that you can evoke the bright fields

That lie beyond the view of the regular eye.

May you have good friends

To mirror your blind spots.

May leadership be for you

A true adventure of growth.

AXIOMS FOR WILDNESS

Alive to the thrill

Of the wild.

Meet the dawn

On a mountain.

Wash your face

In the morning dew.

Feel the favor of the earth.

Go out naked in the wind,

Your skin

Almost Aeolian.

With the music inside,

Dance like there is no outside.

Become subtle enough

To hear a tree breathe.

Sleep by the ocean,

Letting yourself unfurl

Like the reeds that swirl

Gradually on the sea floor.

Try to watch a painting from within:

How it holds what it never shows.

The mystery of your face,

Showing what you never see.

See your imagination dawn

Around the rim of your world.

Feel the seamless silk of the ocean

Womb you in ancient buoyancy.

Feel the wild imprint of surprise

When you are taken in by your lover’s eyes.

Succumb to warmth in the heart

Where divine fire glows.