The Worshipful Wanderer: That What It's All About

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Reading:

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I've been circling for thousands of years
and I still don't know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?

- Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours, I, 2

The last several years of my life have felt a lot like doing the hokey-pokey. I imagine you are all familiar with that beloved children's song.

You put your right foot in,
you put your right foot out.
You put your right foot in
and you shake it all about.
You do the hokey-pokey
and you turn yourself around.
That’s what it’s all about.

Most of my adult life has been like this as I’ve attempted to live into some sense of purpose. It has been a slow, at times cautious sequence of mini-steps interspersed with sudden, all-engaging action. Trying things out with different parts of myself, of my being, shaking it out, and turning myself around all in the same moment.

The process of testing the waters, of searching out our calling often starts early in our lives. We look for clues all around us as to who we are, who we might become, what we are called to do in this world.

In my senior year of high school, I received some surprising news in regards to my life’s vocation. As part of our preparation to embark upon our impending lives as young adults, we were required to take an exam that would measure our aptitudes and dispositions in order to determine what line of work we were most suited for. Many of you have probably taken a similar type of test at one point or another. At the time, I was applying for colleges and thought I might be interested in architecture or urban planning. Many of you know I am from Chicago, and I was a city girl through and through. I was very excited to see exactly what career path I had in store for me. The results of the test came back with the surprising news that I should put all my efforts into becoming: a forest ranger. Not exactly what I was expecting.

No, I didn’t end up studying environmental management or spending any summers living in a cabin in the woods. My vocational trajectory has not followed a clear, linear path to a career with the National Park Service.

But, what I recall so vividly from that day taking that test, Filling in those little bubbles with my #2 pencil, and then receiving the results was the anticipation. The yearning for a clue.

We are all looking for clues.

Indicators.

Direction.

Do I turn right or left?

Do I follow this path or another?

And this searching happens at many different points in our lives. At natural points of ending and beginning, like moving from one city to another. Transitioning through different parts of our education. Ending a career and beginning retirement. At times we welcome these forks in the road, And at other points this change is thrust upon us and we can feel as if we’re drifting about without any real anchor.

At all these moments, we search for some guiding way forward. Often we look for a set of straightforward steps that will take us out of the murkiness and right onto that next thing.

For the most part, I have resisted any attempts at mapping out my career plans in any clear way. In a former life, I led leadership trainings. And one of the tools we used was called a “personal political leadership plan.” PPLP for short. This plan asked you to envision where you’d like to be in five years’ time and to plot out, point by point, how you would arrive at this place.

A suggestion was made that we, as staff, create our own PPLPs. That we envision where we’d be in five years and plot out our futures.

I rejected the thought of this with every fiber of my being and flat out refused to do one.

You could say I was simply afraid. Afraid of the not-knowing. Afraid of my own uncertainty and what that might say about my lack of inner direction. Afraid that my plotted course would require changes I didn’t want to make.

But, I believe my resistance held another meaning. I also had some sense that this particular process would not help me listen to my innermost voice. To my heart’s call.

It is true that sometimes the clues we grab onto lead us away from our true purpose. We can choose to walk down paths that appear to be leading in the right direction and yet end up making us feel even more lost.

Yet, these “mis-directions” are part of the journey as well. We can find opportunity and meaning in these unexpected side roads.

The educator and writer Parker Palmer tells of his time of searching at Pendle Hill, the Quaker study and retreat center over in Wallingford. Feeling lost and in need of guidance, he consulted Ruth,

an older Quaker woman in the community. In her wise manner, she said to him

“…in sixty-plus years of living, way has never opened in front of me…But a lot of way has closed behind me, and that’s had the same guiding effect.”[1]

Reflecting on that interaction, Parker writes, “there is as much guidance in what does not and cannot happen in my life as there is in what can and does.”[2]

My path to ministry involved some way closing behind me.

After a few years working in Washington, DC with that leadership training organization, I had a feeling that it was time for a change. I didn’t find as much fulfillment in my work and was growing increasingly restless. Although I had resisted the notion of plotting out my future, I still fell into the trap of letting logic reign. And, my head told me that business school was a rational next step. I could learn about systems and organizational management and effective social change. I did the research, collected information. Yet, all along something felt a bit off. I didn’t do all that well on my exams. And, in the end, I didn’t get into any of the business schools I had applied to. So, instead of pursuing the clear, point A to point B, business school would have offered, I enrolled in seminary.

No, seminary wasn’t the consolation prize in all of this. Far from it. It was in fact what I felt nudged towards but would only give partial attention. I felt nudged enough to submit applications not only to business school but to divinity schools as well. So, at the same time I had opened the door wide open to the possibility of the fast track to organizational leadership I had gently cracked a window and was peering through it at a life of deeper faith commitment.

As way opens and closes, our lives can take on many shapes.

Rainer Maria Rilke offers us another image or shape to consider in our reading today. He writes,

I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not complete this last one but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower. I've been circling for thousands of years and I still don't know:
am I a falcon, a storm,
or a great song?

I love this image.

For me, this circling not only liberates us from traditional notions of how we progress through life. But it also alludes to that center around which we live and move and have our being.

That central meaning and purpose.

Sometimes we only catch a glimpse of what this central meaning is. A clue falls into our laps without our even asking.

A few years after the forest ranger prediction, I was living and working on a farming collective in a fairly remote part of Nicaragua. My purpose there had little to do with environmental stewardship yet walking through forests became an almost daily activity. On one particular afternoon, I was working alongside the 14-year-old daughter of one of the women who owned a part of this farming collective. We were engaged in the somewhat tedious task of clearing land with machetes. For some weeks, I had been suffering from a deep melancholy and near depression. I felt completely lost and displaced. I deeply questioned what I was doing there and whether I had made a huge mistake. Yet, I kept at it. Nurturing relationships and throwing myself into life as a farmhand.

That afternoon, we quietly went about our work, bent low, thwacking away at the tangle of weeds that came up to our knees. It may have been stormy that day, I don’t really recall, but all of a sudden, there was a rush of wind that seemed to shake the trees from their tall leafy tops all the way down to their thick bases. I stopped what I was doing and looked straight up into the trees. In this moment of awe

I felt as if the wind had a message. As if it was beckoning me with its roar to wake up, to feel life’s call.

In the forest that day, I didn’t hear a voice calling to me. This was no Samuel moment. Samuel, the prophet from the Hebrew scriptures, who was startled awake in the depths of night by God’s calling to him.

No, this was no Samuel moment. No direct message from the Divine instructing me in what to do next with my life.

So, what was it exactly?

I believe, as Rilke writes, that I was circling around the primordial tower and getting close enough that I could see and feel that deepest calling to life with clarity.

It has taken many more years of living for this deep calling to take its shape. Grappling with questions of how best to contribute to the vast movement for social change. My search has taken me to New Mexico motivating young people to participate in our democratic system as voters. To Massachusetts to organize nursing home workers and home health care aides for their rights in the workplace. To Washington, DC training people in a variety of roles in politics and nonprofits…

All the while, I was circling and searching.

And, I didn’t know I was looking for Unitarian Universalism. Yet, it was in Unitarian Universalist community that I was reminded of that feeling, that deep sense of call that I encountered in that forest in Nicaragua. I couldn’t shake the feeling that this is exactly where I belonged. It’s what nudged me towards seminary as resistant as I may have been.

Over time I’ve come to realize that this listening and paying attention is part of the journey as well. Listening to the hush of our souls.

We all listen in different ways. You might find that taking solitary walks is your best way of being in tune. Or, reading great literature. We may each listen in a variety of ways depending on our mood or the season of our lives.

Listening in community, in relationship with others has become an essential way that I listen for that deep call.

One of these moments happened for me while I was at a service at All Souls Church in DC.

During a child dedication one Sunday, the minister turned to the grandmother of one of the babies being dedicated that morning, and asked her the standard question during this ritual, “do you dedicate yourself to this child and her parents?” Usually, the response to this question during the ceremony is a predictable “yes.” But, in this instance, the woman turned her gaze lovingly upon her grandchild and declared: “Con toda mi vida.” With all my life.

With all my life.

Isn’t THIS what we are after? To find that to which we so gladly might dedicate our whole self.

Con toda mi vida.

What is it for you?

What is it that calls that deepest part of your heart?

If you haven’t gotten the sense yet, I don’t believe it is at all easy or straightforward to identify this central purpose.

I have arrived at some conclusions now. That I am committed to strengthening lives of faith – mine and others’. That I am called to respond with loving action to the world’s needs.

These conclusions are evolving as I imagine yours are as well.

And, no matter what shape our lives take over time – straight line, squiggly line, broad circles, mountain peaks and valleys – We put our whole selves in, Turning ourselves around, Shaking ourselves about.

Listening for the ways we can say ‘yes'

Con toda mi vida.

With all my life.

{delivered at Unitarian Society of Germantown, September 23, 2012}