The Call
“Vocation means, of course, a call... Those who have vocations inhabit a world where doing and being are one and the same because continuous learning unites them. ”
A calling is felt before it is heard. Sometimes it beckons, sometimes it stalks. Because our calling shapes us, in fundamental ways it is us. It's what one friend calls what we can't not do. That's how to recognize a vocation.
To serve one's vocation is to be filled with delight. I think of the story my cousin's wife shared about the moment she fell in love with him: it was the way he lit up when describing a discovery in his lab. (He's a neuroscientist who researches eyesight.) Fascination and wonder coalesced in his exuberant grin as he attempted to explain a complicated experiment. Struggling to capture the precise experience of discovery, he finally just turned to her and exclaimed, I mean, Fuckin' A!
Exuberance is a birthright. Fascination is a birthright. But western industrial culture sucks the oxygen out of soul-nourishing awe because fragmentation is required in order to survive. At least, that's what we tell ourselves, though the opposite is true: fragmentation means death. There comes a point when a forest or a reef or a living body of water is too divided and compromised to survive. What's true for a habitat is true for a human.
When reverence is supplanted by greed or expedience, we are forced to relinquish alliance with nature and unseen realms. When that happens, we must amputate those parts of ourselves that require the nourishment of vocation. It's the soul-splitting price of being complicit in destroying the matrix of life. From that moment on, we must lie to ourselves about who we fundamentally are.
When money is the measure of a successful life, vocation falls silent. That's because vocation isn't personal, it's relational. Vocation requires alliance. Dialogue. Gratitude as a state of being.
Western industrial culture creates an unbearable dissonance between the tangible and intangible worlds that seek to coexist within us. We lose our bearings when we allow the connection between them to rupture. In our confusion, we mistake the threads of our personal narrative for whole cloth. Narcissism is the inevitable result, as we can plainly see in the endless Instagram and TikTok posts overflowing with the trivia of home decor, restaurant meals, hair hacks, emotional struggles and all the inane, self-focused hoo-hah filling social media. Hunger for attention is a hunger for meaning that can only be met by vocation.
The word culture comes from the Latin word cultus, meaning care, labor, honoring, reverence. In the culture that grows in the petri dish of an extractive economy, we are forced to disengage from the Natural World because progress and intactness cannot coexist. The diminished Natural World becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, or should we say, profitcy.
We've known for a long time that a new culture is required, but, as is evident lately, activism has failed: the hard-won gains of the last fifty years have been swept aside, from civil rights to voting rights, women's rights, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ protection, clean water, clean air, nuclear arms treaties, all of it disappearing before our horrified, heartbroken gaze. At best, progress erodes slowly as the pendulum swings from action to reaction and back again and from one political agenda to its opposite. The same is true of our response to climate change, for the same reason: within the current culture, attempts to mitigate the deadly effects of an extractive economy cannot succeed because our allegiance to profit demands that we self-exile from the community of Life. Everything is sacrificed on the altar of commodity.
As humanity peers into the abyss of extinction, the vocation of now is to discern the call we each were designed for. How else will Earth heal and the future be restored? The task now is to make ourselves hospitable to the attunement required as we learn to sense where relational repair lives inside each of us. It's the deeper longing of our unique gifts calling from within and beyond the chaos, trying to get our attention so they can lead us from boredom, rage and despair back to awe. It shows up as curiosity. It lives in a hunch. Wondering feeds wonderment feeds reverence feeds Life. The expression, I wonder, takes on new meaning.
All those spirits and feathers and rivers and bones that made us are calling to that part of us that yearns for deeper connection. Vocation itself is calling - the Calling is calling, inviting us to listen for wholeness, using our beyond-human ears. The invitation is everywhere and so are the examples that school us in appropriate response. Deep space is singing. Orcas are taking action. A mother deer and her fawn school a driver in devotion. Sea lions and dolphins in Southern California are dying to show us the way. Our celestial selves recognize primordial origins beyond this galaxy. Our animal selves know what is needed.
