Unitarian Universalist
Meeting of
“What Is Your Calling?”
Rev. Kathy Duhon
A few years ago I heard the former President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, the Reverend John Buehrens, say that another minister attributed this saying to him, “Here I am Lord, send him.” The reference of course is to the Isaiah call we just heard, as well as to other famous call narratives in the Bible, including that of Moses.
The prophets were always responding with reluctance to what seemed to them as a call from God. “Woe is me”, Isaiah said. Moses protested that he was not worthy. Samuel at first doubted that he was being called. Jeremiah doubted that he could answer the call. The great prophets would often start with “shouldn’t you send somebody else?” and then eventually get around to the readied, purified, ‘all-questions-are-dealt-with’ state that Isaiah experienced, and his bold, “Send me.”
Ministers love to preach on the call narratives because we all experience our callings in similar ways. We say no often, we question, wrangle, doubt, despair, equivocate, seek, struggle, and try to figure out someone else to send for what we realize is obviously important work. Eventually, we answer the call to ministry with a yes. One minister told me that you know you are called when you’ve tried to escape in every way possible, and have finally been forced to your knees, realizing you can’t not be a minister.
Ministers and prophets are not the only ones who experience a calling. Many folks talk about having a vocation – something they do that they really want to do, that gives their lives meaning, and that they love doing. The word ‘vocation’ comes from the Latin vocare, which means “to call”. A vocation is a calling.
And people always try to ignore their callings, their vocations, but you do so at your own peril. You become miserable, dull. And the angel of decision always comes back to annoy you, to flit about in your mind until you finally do follow your calling. And what is your calling?
Frederick Buechner, a Presbyterian minister, talked about calling as “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” We are called to greater meaning, to serve in ways that both help others and give us joy. That’s powerful stuff.
And power makes us
nervous, and rightly so. We don’t like
it when politicians and terrorists wield great power in answer to what they
experience as a calling, God’s call. Ups the ante.
President Bush has said that he was called to the presidency, and that
President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt also believed that he was called by God to his career, and he
spoke of the great need to do his best as God’s instrument so that the goodness
of God would continue to grow in the world.
I wonder if his calling brought him deep gladness and joy. History does show that he met the deep hunger
of the Great Depression, and the deep suffering of the Nazi regime, with a
strong power that led to great transformation.
What is your calling and how will you respond, in power and in truth? Some calls naturally take a while to answer – some dreams need to be deferred until a more auspicious time. Sometimes we have multiple calls – to adventure and responsibility, to justice and mercy. We are called to the needs of the future and the past; we are called to live in each day, present to its fullness. We are called to be all that we can be, and that takes a lifetime to fulfill.
I cannot escape the sense of calling, even when I doubt the most, even when I wander through the arid desert and the dark night of the soul. Something stirs me to hope, to seek the spirit, to seek faith – something calls to me. I don’t say this is comfortable or glorious – it’s much more an annoyance, a nagging call that’s more like a Mom’s “don’t forget your jacket” or a Dad’s “what are you going to do with your life?”
Part of the problem with the language of call is the notion of who is doing the calling to us and why. You don’t have to use the word God or concept of God to talk meaningfully about calling, but many do. God is a name that has been battered by ill use and God is a concept that does not make sense to many, at least in some of its particularities. And even if we do find an understanding of God that we can believe in with integrity, which some of us do, (at least some of the time), why would God call little insignificant me? It feels too improbable, too narrow, too partisan.
We can accept more readily the other side of calling, that we are calling out to the universe, or to God. We don’t have to have an address for the call, though, that rises deep within and flings itself out beyond. This is our nature: to dream, to despair, to suffer, to seek, to cry out for justice and forgiveness, to call for peace in our world.
Our calling out is where we can begin to understand our being called, for the experience is bound together as one. We call out because we feel called into existence and meaning. We feel called because we call out for a chance to meet the world’s deep hunger and experience deep gladness. Calling and being called are part of the same movement.
Rev. A. Powell Davies, one of our Unitarian ministers, said in a 1946 sermon, in which he dismissed many ways of seeing God as fantasy, “The only God who ever lived is living still … there is a power, a spirit, a presence far beyond our intellectual grasp but utterly alive in human minds, awake in human hearts, and moving us onward to our own fulfillment….” In a sense, Davies is noticing that the call to fulfillment, to meaning, is a power that can be named God. (Or not.)
May we answer the call of the spirit in our lives to reach out to the world’s deep hunger and live our own deep gladness. Amen.