Epiphany 2: Here I am, but where am I?

Lord, you have searched me out and known me;
you know my sitting down and my rising up;
you discern my thoughts from afar. Psalm 139

When I was growing up, once or twice a year, the priest would round up all of the Sunday School classes, bring us into the church and give us a talk about listening to God to see if we had a vocation to the priesthood (boys) or to become nuns (girls).  We were told to listen quietly and to pray and if we had a calling, it would come to us. Usually, he reminded us of the young boy Samuel’s response when God called him. I think he also told us or had a guest priest or nun tell us the story of their vocation, but I can’t remember because every time, at that point, I was too stricken with fear  to listen.

There was nothing terrifying about my priest, and his words weren’t meant to scare us.  But from a very young age, I knew that I wanted to be married and have children, and having spent my childhood in fractious relationship with my two sisters, I was also certain that I did NOT want to spend my entire life with a conventful. So if some time in the night, God suddenly woke me up, a voice said, “Mary, I want you to live your life as a nun,” what would I do?  Like Samuel, I’d have to say, “Here I am,” right?

It’s not like Samuel was given a choice.  His mother turned him over to Eli, the high priest, when he was barely weaned; when Eli told him what to say the next time God talked to him, what else was he going to do?  And then, God tells Samuel to tell Eli that he and all of his descendants would be punished because he hadn’t controlled his wicked sons. What a burden for a small boy to carry back to the man who he probably loved as a father!

The story of Samuel is important to our faith  tradition in all sorts of ways that I am not dismissing.  But I think that maybe we should stop using it as a model for how we listen to God’s call, how we find our vocation and life’s work.   

When my priest told us to listen for God’s call, my younger self imagined that that call would come like a disembodied voice in the night, and that what I felt inside was irrelevant. To the Quaker writer and teacher Parker Palmer, this idea that vocation that comes from outside the self is “rooted in a deep distrust of selfhood, in the belief that the sinful self will always be ‘selfish’ unless corrected by external forces of virtue.”  True vocation, he suggests instead, comes when “the soul speaks.”  Martin Luther King, for example, described his call to ministry “not as a miraculous or supernatural something. On the contrary, it was an inner urge calling me to serve humanity.” 

 It makes sense that the call of the God–who, in the beautiful words of today’s psalm, created our inmost parts and knit us together in our mothers’ wombs–would come from deep within us.  And yet,  most of my life, I’ve persisted in the belief that vocation is a call that comes from outside me, disconnected from the longings and desires of my inner self.

I became a teacher because my mother told me she thought that was my gift and my calling, despite spending all of college telling people that yes, I was an English major and no, I didn’t want to teach.  I trusted my Mom’s viewpoint, so I started subbing at the school in my home town, and thirty-five years later, I’m still in the classroom.  Over the years, too, whether it was to teach Sunday school, serve on a committee, or  fight for boulevard trees, when someone called, even when I was already overcommitted, I always said, “Here I am.” Good has come out of that work. But as I’ve actively lived into my vocation as a priest in these past few years, it now seems to me that all of that other work was just throwing shovels of good soil into a deep hole that needed to be filled with something else.  

Because here’s the thing. While outside voices can call us to work that might not be our innermost vocation, but that is still good and important, they can also keep us from that inner call. When I was a girl, being a priest at all, never mind a priest who could have children, was not even a possibility, at least in the faith tradition that nurtured me.  The voices explaining with gentle logic why  only celibate men should be priests stamped out that spark before it even had a chance to flame.  Maybe that terror I felt as a child wasn’t actually fear that God wouldn’t let me have babies some day, but  a deep mourning for that inner urge King experienced, that soul speak that was silenced before it could even whisper.

So what’s the alternative?  Parker Palmer suggests, “Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.”   To hear the voice of the soul, the voice of the one who searches us out and knows us, we need the space and freedom to listen to our lives.  The soul, Palmer tells us, “speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting, and trustworthy conditions.” Instead of outside voices directing our path, we are helped most by the voices of others who echo today’s psalm by simply, quietly affirming that we are marvellously made. 

In the Gospel, Jesus and Philip both provide this kind of freedom and affirmation to Nathanael,  the skeptic sitting under the fig tree who responds cynically to his friend Philip’s excited declaration that they have found the Promised One: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”  

First, Philip doesn’t try to argue with Nathanael,  just tells him to come and see, opening a space.   Then when Nathanael does, Jesus doesn’t come at him like that voice in the night, directing him to do something completely out of his comfort zone.  Instead he says, “Here he comes…Look at him!  He’s a real Israelite.  Genuine through and through…I saw you under the fig tree” (John 1:47-8).

Fig trees provided sacred space in biblical times, where people would go to study God’s word, together or alone; their fruit or lack of fruit is frequently used in the Bible as a symbol of the spiritual state of God’s People.  Jesus looks at Nathanael and lets him know that sees something in him that is fruitful and real, something that God’s People should be. Recognized and loved for who he truly is, Nathanael’s skepticism gives way,  and he opens to truth and light.

It’s not so easy  for some of us. It’s only now toward the end of middle age that the fog begins to lift, and I can see the road I’ve been stumbling along for years. I suspect I’m not alone: that many of us, as Palmer says, “ if we are awake, aware, and able to admit our loss… spend the second half trying to recover and reclaim the gift we once possessed.”

And yet that voice has also always been there, directing my hands and feet, even when my eyes couldn’t see. And there have been those like Martin Luther King with clearer inner vision from the start who model another way.   In the end, maybe what’s most important is not when or where or how we hear our soul speak, but what happens once we do.