Calling Is a Conversation | PASSAGES :017

Thoughts on calling (part 2) & wrestling with the divine

Last week I announced that I’d be exploring the idea of vocation, aka calling, in a SERIES of upcoming posts. Make sure to read The Elder and the Stone, a parable about purpose in that introductory series post. And I’d love to hear your thoughts on this series as we continue. Let me know if there is anything in particular that you want to cover.

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Catching the Total Solar Eclipse in Marshall, Illinois with our legendary minivan.

“So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak… 

Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.”

But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me”...

Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome”...

So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.”

—Genesis 32:24, 26, 28 & 30

“When you notice yourself NOT writing about something that you are wrestling with internally, then most often THAT THING is exactly what you need to write about (and it will probably resonate with others too).”

A new friend said something like this to me a couple months ago while we were having coffee. I had heard this kind of writing advice before, but it was a needed reminder. And it helped that it came from a trusted source, Garrett Bucks, a fellow memoirist and Milwaukeean, who writes The White Pages newsletter and whose new book, The Right Kind of White, I celebrated in last week’s March Collection.

With both of our book launches approaching after that meeting, we were talking shop about writing and publishing and books. Since he’s been on Substack for a while, I also was eager to learn from him about his experience on this platform, including his rhythms for generating ideas, planning, and actually writing. It was somewhere in this section of the conversation where he shared the reflections above, and when he said it, I immediately had two thoughts about my track record of “wrestling” in public—both of them directly related to my exploration of the theme of calling.

First, writing about things I’m wrestling with is not foreign to me. I’m not afraid to be vulnerable or to admit that I don’t have everything figured out. Heck, I wrote a whole book—The Way Home—in which I explored the tender and tumultuous terrain of my inner landscape! What Garrett’s words made me realize, however, was that while it is one thing to write publicly about what one is wrestling with in long form, i.e., a book, it is another thing to do so in short form newsletter/blog posts. I noticed that in my writing for STILL, there are words, concepts, and ideas that I hesitate to mention because I often feel like each one of them needs to be accompanied by a backstory and qualifications** and a host of hyperlinks. So I don’t go in those directions. I avoid. Which means that I don’t write about a whole host of things that are swirling around within me.

**For example, with the biblical quote I’m sharing today, I’m feeling the nagging need to point out that a reference to ancient Israel is not a commentary on the modern day State of Israel, as well as to make clear that none of this is a reference to Jordan Peterson’s forthcoming book, We Who Wrestle with God (but while we’re on the topic, if you’re looking to dig into a contemporary reflection on the Genesis stories, go with novelist Marilynne’s Nelson’s Reading Genesis instead).

Second, in addition to this literary challenge of long form versus short form, Garrett’s comment got me thinking about the difference between sharing the really real stuff about what already has transpired in your life versus what is transpiring right now. I’ve done the former (again, my book!), but I’ve still got some learning to do with the later. I think there are good reasons for both approaches, but it is important to be thoughtful and intentional about why I might want to work something out behind close doors instead of sharing it now while it is in process.

Both of these insights converge when it comes to today’s topic of calling… 

Let me tell you the story ‘bout the call that changed my destiny.

-“The Call,” Backstreet Boys

You see my calling is the thing I am wrestling with. Always wrestling with. It’s a huge theme in the six-year season of my life that I explore in The Way Home. And it has been front and center since I lost my job two years ago. While the specific questions I’m asking and things I’m discerning change (which we will delve into in subsequent posts in this series), it is still the same subject… 

Why am I here? 

What is my purpose? 

How do I make my fullest contribution to the world? 

And this all leads me to the most fundamental thing I want to say about calling…

Calling is a conversation.

Calling is a dynamic dialogue with the divine.

Let’s look at the three different parts of this: divine, dialogue, and dynamic…

Divine

The mere mention of the divine may have some of you checking out. But stick with me for a second. Because this is precisely one of the topics that I end up avoiding in my writing here because to simply say “God” is filled with so much complexity (and baggage!), which is why I should take a moment to say more about the divine or God! To do this, I want to turn to a section from The Way Home:

Many of the major world religions, using a host of different names, say God, with a capital G, is the cause [of mystical experience]. Or gods. Certain strands of the Christian tradition give credit to the Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost. It is "the great" or "the vastness" of the Tao Te Ching.

To many, it is Mother Earth or Nature. To others, it is the divine, the sacred, the soul, the inner voice, the ancestors. Some call it a Higher Power, a unified consciousness, a metaphysical essence, or simply, grace or magic.

Many speculate that what we identify as supernatural is still strictly natural and material, and our detection of it is just the result of sharpened senses. Others physically locate it in the pineal gland or the gut.

Socrates, the fifth-century-BCE Greek philosopher, talked about the voice of his daimonion, or "divine something" that frequently cautioned him when he was about to make a mistake. For Star Wars fanatics it is The Force. Meanwhile, Rev. Otis Moss III calls it the "unknown knowable" and "knowable unknown."

Whatever we call the author or cause of mystical experience, ultimately it is, "Unnameable. It is transcendent of all names," as Joseph Campbell once said in a famous PBS interview with Bill Moyers. Beyond name, beyond term, beyond any form or construct. Nevertheless, in this book, I'll use a variety of names for the unnameable. My hope is that this doesn't trip you up. You are, of course, more than welcome to substitute terms from your vocabulary if it helps.

For this quest, it doesn't matter what you call it. It doesn't matter if you credit the experience to a divine entity, a cosmic coincidence, or brain chemistry. What matters is paying attention, yielding to the experience, and taking the next step. You just need to stay open.

With this in mind, however you want to describe it… calling is a conversation with this mysterious Something More.

Any discernment of one’s calling starts here. Because to even have the audacity to ask questions of purpose assumes a purposeful existence. To have a calling, there must be a caller. This doesn’t mean you need to have a neatly organized theology or elaborate belief system. But it does mean you are open and curious—and that you are willing to… surrender. 

Surrender to what?

Surrender to who you are… You are who you are. You have particular innate capabilities that are unique to you. You have a particular story, painful things included. You have specific passions. You can attempt to work against these things or you can accept them and ask the question of what this unique constellation of qualities means for your role in the universe. This is not a passive process. Instead, it is about actively getting aligned with—as the world of Alcoholics Anonymous says, archaically—“the care of God as we understood Him.”

Dialogue

We get this alignment through dialogue. A back and forth with the divine, as we have come to understand it—God or Universe or True Self or Soul.

We can call this a conversation… or we can think of it as a wrestling match. Like in the Genesis story at the top of this post, when we attempt to discern and discover our vocation, we say to the mysterious divine character, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” We wrestle our way towards insight, clarity, and direction. We look beyond our small self and its myopic vision to our universal nature to reveal truths about our individual nature.

I remember first wrestling with my calling in college. In contrast to others around me who seemed to be on a track towards a particular career (which I mistakenly conflated with calling), I was confused. I scribbled furiously in my journal about how I felt like a jack-of-many trades, but a master of none. I got on the track to become an elementary school teacher and then abandoned it (Kids are are still my favorite humans. I just didn’t know how to decorate a classroom). Later, during a semester in Spain, I entertained dreams of becoming a travel writer. As the conclusion of college approached, I remember spending a night camping alone in the woods while reading Frederick Buechner’s The Sacred Journey, a book about his discernment and embodiment of his own calling. While many of my peers graduated with degrees that set them on a clear career path, my college major ended up being… Spanish.

Hola! Me llamo Ben. Donde está la playa?

But I did eventually get clarity, at least about the next right thing, which ended up being seminary for a Master of Divinity degree, which then led to a meaningful ten years starting a church and serving as a pastor in Seattle. This was followed by The Way Home years and then the creative, multi-faceted, unknown-filled season I am in right now. The wrestling continues…

To name this as a dialogue or wrestling match is to say that you cannot pursue your purpose on autopilot. It is an active endeavor. It takes intention. Dedication. Practices. Practices like journaling, meditation, reading, wandering in nature, help from a spiritual director or coach, and other rituals (fyi, The Way Home is packed with explorations of these and a bunch more “Ritual Practices”).

Dynamic

The calling conversation is also dynamic. It is not static.

Just because you sense a green light to go in a particular direction one day, does not mean that you must forever remain on that road. In fact, more often than not, to express your calling will involve twists and turns.

This is harder to understand when we limit the scope of calling to career. But when we see calling as something that encompasses all of life and is expressed in every moment—well then, this makes complete sense. When we are participating in the great conversation with the “Unnameable,” we learn that our calling is… to do the next right thing.

A moment. A situation. An interaction. They will each call forth from within us a particular contribution… a unique creative act.

At both a momentarily level as well as a broader one, this is why being actively engaged in this divine dialogue also requires experimentation. You have to try things. Take risks. Walk down certain dark pathways they may end up feeling like dead-ends… or others that open into expansive new realms of self-expression. If you only take the predictable path in which you repeat what you already know, you won’t gain new information about your unique gifts or where they are needed in the world.

Okay, there’s a lot more to say, but I’ll sign off here.

Calling is a dynamic dialogue with the divine… 

What do you think? How would you describe it? What does your dialogue look like?