RESPONSIVE READING
#567 To Be of Use
Marge Piercy

READING
Now I Become Myself
Parker Palmer

How do you find the right work, the work that you alone are called to do? The first step is to ask a different question... What a long time it can take to become the person one has always been. How often in the process we mask ourselves in faces that are not our own. How much dissolving and shaking of ego we must endure before we discover our deep identity — the true self within every human being that is the seed of authentic vocation.

I first learned about vocation growing up in the church. I value much about the religious tradition in which I was raised: its humility about its own convictions, its respect for the world's diversity, its concern for justice. But the idea of vocation I picked up in those circles created distortion until I grew strong enough to discard it. I mean the idea that vocation, or calling, comes from a voice external to ourselves, a voice of moral demand that asks us to become someone we are not yet — someone different, someone better, someone just beyond our reach.

That concept of vocation 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. It is a notion that made me feel inadequate to the task of living my own life, creating guilt about the distance between who I was and who I was supposed to be, leaving me exhausted as I labored to close the gap. Today I understand vocation quite differently — not as a goal to be achieved but as a gift to be received. Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice “out there” calling me to become something I am not. It comes from a voice “in here” calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God.

SERMON

Sometime early in my time in seminary, a minister – a respected minister, dynamic, prophetic, well-liked man, someone who I liked, and someone who was by all accounts very good at being a minister, in other words, someone not easily dismissed – this man told the twenty or so of us aspirants the story of his calling. He had left his home and had journeyed throughout the Far East and by this I mean Nepal and India and China, not Truro. He spent much of his time not wandering but sitting, not taking pictures but taking note, studying with Buddhist monks. His time abroad was long and rich and he had made plans to stay there, but still had some questions about what should come next. One day he went for a hike up a tall mountain and sat high on the edge of a cliff to meditate. As the sun was setting, he heard a voice say, “Go home and serve your people.” And he knew in that moment what the voice was saying was go back to the United States and become a minister.

I was enthralled, we all were, but after a couple of beats, my mood sank as I developed a haunting inferiority complex. Why had no voice spoken to me? I’d seen some great sunsets, no voice. I’d been at high altitudes, no voice. I suddenly doubted that I had a true calling at all and for the rest of my time in seminary, I swear I had my ear half-cocked listening for some voice that might come telling me to go serve my people.

It hasn’t, I don’t mind saying now. Turns out whoever, whatever calls me doesn’t always speak English and even when it does is pretty soft-spoken. Whatever, whoever’s calling doesn’t talk that way, in fact doesn’t say much at all, but something - a whole universe of somethings - in me smiles when I get it, and slowly by stepping from one smile to the next, my calling, my vocation as Parker Palmer calls it in our reading, is revealing itself to me and I am stepping deeper into my ministry.

Kate Braestrup is an ordained UU minister who serves as a chaplain in the Maine State Park Service and her new book, Here If You Need Me, is has been on the New York Times bestseller list lately. Her book is about living out her particular call as a chaplain, which in part began with her husband’s death. Her husband was a state trooper who had been studying for Unitarian Univeralist ministry when he was killed in a car accident. In her book she describes sitting in her living room in the hour after being told about her husbands death and hearing the doorbell ring. A friend answers the door and standing there is a spit shiny, smiling well-meaning young man, asking, “Have you heard the Good News?” Being at a loss for a reasonable response given the situation, the friend closes the door on the young man. A few minutes later the doorbell rings again and Reverend Braestrup answers it.

It was my neighbor, an elderly woman I had exchanged no more than a dozen words with in the ten years I’d lived in Thamoston. She had potholders on her hands, which held a pan of brownies still hot from the oven, and tears were rolling down her cheeks. “I just heard,” she said.

That pan of brownies was, it later turned out, the leading edge of a tsunami of food that came to my children and me, a wave that did not recede for many moths after Drew’s death. I didn’t know that my family and I would be fed three meals a day for weeks and weeks. I did not anticipate that neighborhood men would come to drywall the playroom, build bookshelves, mow the lawn, get the oil changed in my car. I did not know that my house would be cleaned and the laundry done, that I would have embraces and listening ears, that I would not be abandoned to do the labor of mourning alone. All I knew was that my neighbor was standing on the front stoop with her brownies and her tears: she WAS the Good News…

“I wish I could do more,” my neighbor said, and all I could think as I gazed at her, shining before me in the electric air, was What more need there be on earth than this? Than you?¹

Marge Piercy says, “The work is common as mud,” and if by work she means ministry, which I think she does, it is common as mud. It is making brownies. One of the things that really drew me to this church was that I could see that you know that and live that. In the short time I have been here I have watched a variety of ministries being played out with tremendous heart, dedication, and sincerity. At this church, I knew that I could truly share in ministry, which is how it ought to be. And while I am sure there are times when we all think, “I wish I could do more,” your EFFORT to be present to what the real needs are in each other, in the church, and in the world in whatever small or enormous way suits you IS the work and it sometimes seems as common as mud, but it often coaxes one more heart beat into life. I think of the last line of a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson that hung in my bedroom as a kid, “To know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived, this is to have succeeded.” In making your pan of brownies, painting the sanctuary, being faithful to the monthly Peace Vigil, you may be seeing to your ministry.

A story gets told, and I think it must be true, that a man who was studying rocket science – seriously, rocket science – at Stanford took a break to travel in India. Somehow in his traveling, he ended up spending time working with Mother Theresa’s order. He was very moved by what he saw and the immediacy of the suffering and also by the work that he was able to participate in. He announced that he was going to give up his career as a rocket scientist and stay to serve the poor in Calcutta. At this, the story goes, Mother Teresa shook her wise and wrinkled face at him and said that no, he was not going to stay in India. He was going to go back to wherever it was he was from and do whatever it was he was doing, and he was going to do it with love. If he was a teacher he would teach with love, if he was a banker, he would bank with love, if he was a father he would father with love, etc.

The notion that ministry, as a calling, is not just for ministers is a corner stone of our tradition. Martin Luther started it during the Reformation when he argued that access to the Bible, to the word of God, should not belong only to clergy. Remember, this is back when it was most common for mass to be delivered in a language only priests understood and when the Bible was written in Greek and was to be studied by learned clergy who would then tell you about it. Martin Luther said no, that instead we all belonged to “priesthood of all believers”. That is, we should be granted direct access to God and his word. In this way, we Unitarian Universalists are true Protestants and our theological legacy has been to live out that premise more and more radically, relying on our experiences and each other for blessings, for communion, for salvation.

Ministry has been described in many ways, but they all seem to be getting at the same thing. Unitarian Universalist minister Victoria Safford, in her sermon to the annual General Assembly of Unitarian Universalists this year, described it as the act of holding and beholding. I call it the art of being there. Being there for a moment, a person, a beauty, a pain…However you can do that, however you can right your little boat so that it can float you in the great sea of mystery and take some others on board – however you can be there…that is your ministry.

You each have avenues through which you are able to do this in the world, ways in which you are best able to be THERE. This is your calling. Fredric Buechner, the Presbyterian novelist and theologian said that a calling is where a person’s deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger. This is your calling, your avenue to ministry, and you may or may not have heard it yet or you may have heard it and have turned away from it for one reason or another. One thing I am learning though is that in order to even hear your calling, much less respond to it, you need to know your gladness lies and there’s the rub.

My colleague Angela once said that things shifted for her in her ministry when she realized that she needed to be less about being good at ministry and more about being good at being Angela. The answer to the question, what is ministry exactly, depends on who you are. I mean really who you are, right down next to your bones. If ministry is the art of being there, the trick is that YOU have to show up. You. Not your mom, not your teacher from fourth grade, not your boss, you. In order to answer the question what is my ministry and hear your calling, you really need to begin with the question “Who am I?”

Douglas Steere, a Quaker teacher, tells us that the question “Who am I?” inevitably draws us into the question, “Whose am I?” because we only have identity in relationship. So, whose are you? Who’s calling? Better: who will you listen to? Do you belong to all the voices in your head that clutter your ability to move freely in the world with shame and doubt.? I believe you do belong to those voices, but they live in a chorus of voices many of whom are sitting here in these pews trying with all their might to drown out the nay-sayers with this beautiful songs of praise.

When I ask myself “Whose am I?” I know that the truest answer to that, to whom I am accountable, is to all of it, and that’s no small thing. And when I get it right, when I’ve listened well, not with my ears but with my being, it’s like all of it, including all of you is smiling in me.

At one point in her book a woman who she had ministered to says to Reverend Braestrup, “It’s so cool that the warden service has a chaplain to keep us from freaking out.”

To which she responds, “’I’m not really here to keep you from freaking out. I’m here to be with you while you freak out,’ or grieve or laugh or suffer or sing. It is a ministry of presence. It is showing up with a loving heart. And it is really, really cool."²

The great thing about church, the thing that I think brings so many of you here, is that it offers the opportunity to practice showing up. Participating in a congregation is spiritual PRACTICE. You get to practice being there and experiment with what allows you to hear your calling most. You get to reflect with others about what it feels like to get it right and how hard it is to do so. You are offered that chorus of voices trying to remind you that the answer to “whose are you” is “ours”, is the earth’s, is everyone’s at once. Our job here is to practice beholding and holding, to practice being there, so that we can better, more authentically bless each other and the world. And that is really, really cool.

^{1 & 2} Braestrup, Kate. "Here If You Need Me". Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 2007.