by Kate Lore, Director of Social Justice

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Opening Words

Amid all the noise in our lives,

we take this hour to be together-- 

to give thanks for another day; 

to open our hearts to the Spirit

And to bring about the healing of ourselves and the world around us.

Come and let us worship!

I have been searching for my true calling most of my life.  It was only a few years ago that I found it: Unitarian Universalist community ministry.  In retrospect, I realize that this call to the ministry has been very consistently and very patiently knocking at my door for 30 long years!  Most of my life, however, I was just too busy and too distracted to notice it.

This fact really came home to me just a few weeks ago when my mother unearthed a long-forgotten box of my childhood mementos.  I couldn’t believe my good fortune when I was suddenly reunited with the handwritten text of my very first sermon, delivered when I was 15 years old, and the text of the commencement speech I gave at my high school graduation.  I was in awe when I reread these long-forgotten words.   My sermon was entitled “The Power of Love,” which I would name as the most significant theme of my entire life.  And that commencement speech was equally as revealing, for in it I challenged my fellow students to recapture the activism of the sixties and early seventies.   There were serious problems in the world at that time and I was desperate to engage my peers in finding solutions to them: supporting the economic boycott of the Apartheid government of South Africa, for example, as well as supporting the people’s struggles for democracy and justice in Nicaragua and El Salvador.  

I found it very comforting to see evidence of my social justice passion and my commitment to the power of love at such a young age.  It affirms my belief that these aspects of myself are part of my soul path and that I’m living out my calling by being employed as your Social Justice Director here at First Unitarian Church.

It also affirms my recollection that there were times, not so long ago, when students could publicly call for changes in foreign policies without fear of censorship or the accusation of being unpatriotic.   At the time, I remember parents coming up to me after that speech to tell me that they were proud of my earnest desire to improve the world and that they rested better at night knowing there were young people like me in our country.  Times have changed, have they not?  I imagine that if I were graduating from high school now and chose to speak on say, Iraq and Palestine, I would not get such a supportive, open-minded response.

But back to the box my mother handed to me.  In it I also discovered my high school year book, and I was tickled to see the description next to my senior photograph.  It says something like, “Known for athletics, loud laugh and radical ideas.  Likes religion, nature and her independence.”  It’s funny how some things never change! 

Yes, in retrospect, I can see that the themes of my teenage years were actually themes central to the very calling of my life.  My devotion to serving and understanding the Divine, my belief in the transformative power of love and my commitment to social activism were and always have been the driving forces in my life.  At the time, however, such clarity escaped me.  Spiritually, I felt adrift, going back and forth, back and forth between United Methodism and Unitarian Universalism.  I also felt very restless in my search for a career.  I tried being a social science researcher for a while because I love sociology but I abruptly quit when I concluded that our final results were too often influenced by whoever happened to be funding us at the time.  My yet-to-be identified “inner-minister” found this ethically troublesome and I wanted no part of it. From there I worked in health food stores out of a desire to help people eat healthy and organic foods.  And then there were those years working for Parks and Recreation and for a preschool.  I do love children, after all, so these choices made good sense.  But, even though I enjoyed aspects of all of these jobs, none of them truly fed my soul or made me feel alive.    In fact, I was grateful when I finally had children so I could actually stay at home for a while and take a break from my search for the perfect job.  During those years as an at-home mom, I remember hoping I could find a career that would make me as alive and happy as my husband.  He was—and is—an acupuncturist who loves his job—so much so that if he is feeling down, all he has to do is go to work and he feels better again.  I wanted a job like that!

I am sure some of you can relate to what I’m speaking about.  You know you have unique curiosities and gifts to share with the world, but no one job seems to feel quite right.  Or maybe your job doesn’t even exist anymore due to technological advances or the outsourcing of jobs so now you must find some other job—one that won’t suck the life out of your soul while also paying the bills.  I know a lot of us are in that exact spot right now.  And then there are those of us who yearn to contribute our gifts as a volunteer somewhere but don’t know where to start.  There are so many needs, after all, where does one focus one’s attention.

So—how do we find our vocation?  How DO we live an authentic life and share our gifts and passions with the world?  In the book entitled Discovering Your Personal Vocation, the authors tell us that the first step to answering these questions involves taking note of those experiences when we feel we are “all there.” By all there they mean: fully engaged and aware, feeling alive and feeling connected.

To illustrate this point, they tell a story about a man named David. When David was a mere sixteen years old, he traveled with his father to Bombay, India. As they left the train station, David accidentally tripped over a mother and her baby who were sleeping in the mud. On that day David felt “all there.”  Yes, he felt horrified by the conditions faced by this homeless mother and child.  Yet at the same time, he immediately sensed that his calling in this world had something to do with healing homelessness.

But like many of us, David ignored this insight, choosing instead to set it aside in pursuit of more realistic job opportunities.  He did other things for the next several years, often times in settings where his interest in homelessness was discouraged or even ridiculed. Not surprisingly, David started to experience severe depression.   During this time, he made several retreats in which he was asked to consider when he had felt closest to God.  Each time, his answer was the same: it was when he at the train station in Bombay.

Significantly, David came to realize that his moment of greatest closeness to God was also his moment of feeling all there within himself. Finally, at great personal risk, David gave up nearly everything in his life and started a non-profit corporation to help people without homes. Two years later his depression was gone, and he was winning local and state awards for his contributions to the community.   

Some might say that David is now living his God-given calling in life or that he’s finally living an authentic one. Others might say he has—to quote Frederick Beuchner—discovered that place where David’s gifts and passions intersected with the world's great needs.   I’d like to think there’s such an intersection for each one of us to discover in our lifetimes.

For centuries we have searched for the right term and understanding of everyone’s unique “call.”  In his book, The Soul’s Code, Psychologist James Hillman reminds us that this quest to understand the purpose of our life goes back at least as far as Plato.  In his most well-known work, The Republic, Plato writes that the soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we are born that holds an image or pattern of our potential.  It is the daimon, then, that nudges us when we forget why we are here. The Romans had a similar notion but they referred to it as our genius   Others speak of it as destiny. But whatever you want to call it, one thing is clear: our culture doesn’t always seem to help us discover it.  As a matter of fact, it quite often distracts us from listening for our highest purpose. Much of our education has been about hearing and memorizing what other people think as opposed to helping us discover what we think. We’re taught how to listen to others but not taught how to listen to what our own hearts yearn for. We are surrounded by expectations from our parents, teachers, friends and society. Rarely do these expectations have any connection with our true selves.

Society attempts to teach us that making a lot of money is what will make us happy and fulfilled. Yet the wise and the experienced know that deep joy and a rich life are only found through finding a vital connection to our true self. For example, I’ve watched people become wealthy. There’s a period at first when they’re filled with excitement. They feel they’ve made it, become successful and can do and have many things about which they’d once only dreamed. But it doesn’t take that long before the excitement wears off, and their hearts begin to ache for deeper meaning.

Famous Quaker writer and teacher Parker Palmer tells a story about the time when he realized that the life he was living was not the same as the life that wanted to live in him. So he began to ask himself, “What am I meant to do? Who am I meant to be?”  His life was so profoundly transformed by the answers he received that he wrote an entire book about it.  It is entitled: Let Your Life Speak (perhaps you’ve heard of it). In this book, Palmer tells us: “Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you.” He explains how too often we live our lives from the outside-in rather than the inside-out. We let the people and the world around us tell us who we are supposed to be instead of listening to our own inner yearnings.

I am here this morning to assure you that your truest meaning and purpose exists, and it is not so much about what you do as about who you are. Your calling is not simply an action you take, but is a gift you claim. When you were born, a gift was given to the world. Your life is a seed planted and longing to grow.

I want to acknowledge that your career may not be your calling. I know a lot of people who support themselves and their family through their job, but they find other places to live out their calling. They teach Sunday school or mentor students or create art on the weekends or after work. The point is they have discovered what their heart aches for and they find a way to live it.

The influential author and mythologist Joseph Campbell is regularly quoted as saying “Follow your bliss.” Too often this becomes a license for mere self-gratification. The full quotation is more revealing:

“To find your own way is to follow your bliss. This involves analysis, watching yourself and seeing where the real bliss is—not the quick little excitement, but real, deep, life-filling bliss.”

In other words, achieving some degree of bliss requires work—hopefully authentic and rewarding work, but it can be demanding.

“Vocation,” Parker Palmer tells us, “doesn’t come from willfulness. It comes from listening.” The word itself is rooted in the Latin word for ‘voice.’ A voice calling.  Pay very close attention to yourself and what is going on in your life. Ask yourself of every action or activity: “What is this trying to tell me? Does this take me toward or away from what I want? Where is my life attempting to go?” Only you will know what is true for you.

Frederick Buechner put it beautifully when he wrote:

Listen to your life.

See it for the fathomless mystery that it is.

In the boredom and pain of it

No less than in the excitement and gladness:

Touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it

Because in the last analysis all moments are key moments,

And life itself is grace.

May this be so for each and every one of you here.   Blessed be, Amen.

Prayer

Eternal One--

In our hungering for meaning,
In our yearning for justice,
May we look deep within the mystery of things 
and gather our strength.

May each of us proclaim,
the graceful power of life and love
and so may we live out our calling and live in hope. Amen.