These will be questions, furthermore, that will lead you to others whose lives are propelled by the same questions, and from each you will receive “oh, never an answer,” as writer P.L. Travers says, “but a spark of instructive fire.”
A PATH BETWEEN TWO QUESTIONS
The critical challenge of discernment----knowing whether our calls are true or false, knowing how and when to respond to them, knowing whether a call really belongs to us or not----requires that we also tread a path between two essential questions: one, “What is right for me?” and two, “Where am I willing to be led?” Discernment also requires that we ask these two questions continually and devotedly, in hopes that by doing so Providence will, in due course, be alerted to our desires and answers will find us.
In stone sculpting, a stone is tapped lightly with a hammer to see if it’s “true.” If it emits a dull tone, there are faults running through it that will crack the stone apart when you work on it. A clear ring, one that hangs in the air for a moment, means it’s true, has integrity, and, most importantly, will hold up under repeated blows. We must know this same information about our callings, and it takes continual “tapping in” to do so.
Thus we cannot know whether a cigar is indeed just a cigar without studying it. We cannot declare a happenstance “just a coincidence” without looking at whether it corresponds to a theme or an issue in our lives. We cannot know whether the voices we hear are those of inner guides or just the babble in Babylon, without submitting to the ceaseless thrum of our own intuitions over a period of time.
If you’re bored with your work, for instance, does that mean you need to leave it or change it? Does falling in love with Someone Else signal that your marriage needs dissolution or attention? If you didn’t get the job, does that mean you weren’t supposed to pursue the career, or that the rejection is a test of your resolve? If you can’t get pregnant, is it that you’re not meant to, you’re meant to redefine parenting, or that it’s a medical problem that means nothing? Is a calling true if it’s propelled, in part, by a desire to prove something? If you’re afraid, does it suggest the need for courage and a leap of faith, or a backing-up and re-evaluation? How do you know when you’re procrastinating or when the answer you seek simply hasn’t revealed itself to you yet?
The channels through which callings come----whether dreams and symptoms or intuitions and accidents----are like oracles of any kind. They aren’t meant to be treated as psychic vending machines, merely dispensing information. They are to be approached for dialogue, entered into in the spirit of co-respondence and what the poet William Butler Yeats called “radical innocence.” Their answers are typically metaphoric, paradoxical, poetic and dreamlike, and require reflection and conversation.
SHAKEN UP
Recently, an acquaintance of mine who has searched for many years for a sense of direction and mission, revealed that he was waiting for “an unshakable vision.” I immediately thought of the work of the Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his theory of what he calls “dissipative structures,” a somewhat lumpy way of saying that friction is a fundamental property of nature and nothing grows without it----not mountains, not pearls, not people.
It is precisely the quality of fragility, he says, the capacity for being “shaken up,” that is paradoxically the key to growth. Any structure----whether at the molecular, chemical, physical, social or psychological level----that is insulated from disturbance is also protected from change. It becomes stagnant. If a vision----if anything----is true to life, to the imperatives of creation and evolution, it won’t be unshakable.
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