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November 18, 2009
The Church and the “Vocation Crisis”
Two weeks ago Calling Congregations introduced a curriculum of practice with five congregations to nurture vocations through inter-generational conversation. These are practices which ask us to see ourselves and each other through the question, “Who am I? Who has God created me to be?” The movement of these practices allows participants to view themselves with an appreciative inward look, with the tender regard that God has for each of our lives. We tell stories of when we were noticed for our giftedness—whether that occurred through a church community or in some other place in our lives. Not the polished story, not all details but the story’s core where the compassion of God and the nurture of others is at work.
Creating the space for this kind of exploration is a kind of gathering of the community for a hearing of the word of God as it sounds through each of our lives. Sometimes (quite often, in fact) that word comes, indeed, through a “still, small voice” of appreciation, an affirmation of who we are but have kept hidden—even from ourselves. Sometimes it contains turbulent currents. Occasionally, there are earthquakes—tremors of self-recognition which upset the story-teller’s previously held values of who God is and what the kingdom should look like...and how they are called to look again at their lives for their giftedness, even if it occurs in distressing disguise. From one of the congregational teams represented at our event came the question, “In the midst of this practice, how do you prepare for emerging vocational crises?” What becomes of the sacred and hospitable space should something emerge out of these conversations that even the most careful holding of that space could not predict?
The poetic answer—and not a wrong one—is to say that Jesus is especially present to the “wild places” in our hearts and lives that beg for further exploration and cultivation, even healing. The other, practical answer is to have designated pastoral care-givers, “first responders,” who can be present with someone who, in visiting their story, goes to places in the heart they hadn’t felt with such force in a while. The French writer Leon Bloy said that “there are places in the human heart which do not yet exist and into the heart enters suffering that they may have being.” Or perhaps it is that the pain is the self-awakening question that life will ask in order that our whole selves may come into view. In any case, it is a matter of dealing with the real story that is there and entrusting it to a place of care. A colleague recently told me of a Sunday when a pastor decided to address abuse as a live social issue in the greater community. But she was careful to deploy several counselors in the congregation and to note their presence should anything bubble up from the lives of her hearers. Her planning was an instance of hearing with care even the unspoken stories.
Hearing stories—and people—into the room, into existence, is a great and care-filled honor that takes nothing less than a community to serve as their container. It takes a plurality of gifts that no single life (however gifted) can hold. If there is a vocation crisis in the church today, it may stem from our systemic inability to hear the truth of each others’ lives as they are—as well as for what they are becoming and what promise they may hold. There is a particular need to move beyond our theological and other pre-conceptions, our ways of hearing the other and his or her circumstances that may be burdened with moralism and the expectations of our upbringing. Thomas Keating is fond of saying that the kingdom of God is often present in circumstances that we would judge to be unacceptable. What treasures the church might recognize if we moved with the courage that Jesus had into the hospitable space between judgments and assumptions to hear the word of God as it sounds through the life of our neighbor.
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