Thank you to my dear friend Bess Piñon for recently sharing the audio version of Calling and Wholeness in our women's circle. The voice and wisdom held here is so profound, powerful, and needed. I wept as I listened. Deepest bow, as always, to Krista Tippett — and to all who inspire us to recognize and root ever more deeply into our calling and to let this be the gift that our wholeness as human beings brings forth in our hurting, beautiful world. We do indeed have it in us to become wise. May it be so. 🙏💗 Molly
On Being with Krista Tippett
Calling and Wholeness
In
the modern western world, vocation was equated with work. But each of
us has callings, not merely to be professionals, but to be friends,
neighbors, colleagues, family, citizens, lovers of the world. Each of
us imprints the people in the world around us, breath to breath and
hour to hour, as much in who we are and how we are present as in
whatever we do. And just as there are callings for a life, there are
callings for our time.
Hello
again.
I
love a line of a poem by the late William Stafford. The poem is
titled “Vocation,” and the sentence is, “Your job is to find
out what the world is trying to be.” Now, I could make a compelling
case that the world right now is doing its best to turn inwards and
hurtle backwards. But this poetry breaks my heart open.
The
language of vocation is really important to me, and I take it as a
pointer for the way forward. It comes from the Latin “vocari,”
“calling,” which is a word we use a lot at On Being. In Western
culture, in the world I was born into, vocation was equated with work
and with job title. But we are called not merely to be professionals,
but to be friends, neighbors, colleagues, family, citizens, lovers of
the world. We are called to creativity and caring and play and
service for which we will never be paid — or never be paid enough —
but which will make life worth living. And each of us imprints the
people in the world around us, breath to breath and hour to hour, as
much in who we are and how we are present as in whatever we do.
And
just as there are callings for a life, there are callings for our
time. Some of us are called to place our bodies before other bodies
on the front line of danger. There are so many front lines of danger
in our young century. But there are other, quieter callings that are
as necessary to the health of our communal soul and to make the
beyond of danger and the beyond of division more muscular and more
real.
Some
of us are called to be bridge people, staking out the vast ground in
the middle and heart of our life together, where there is meaningful
difference but no desire for animosity. Some of us are called to be
patient calmers of fear. This calling is so tender and so urgent if
what we truly want is to coax our own best selves and the best selves
of others into the light.
There
are many ways to analyze the crises and the tumult of our world.
There are political ways of analyzing and economic ways of analyzing.
But one way of seeing our world and the incredible toxicity and
polarization is that it is pain and fear on the loose, pain and fear
metastasized. So these callings I’m describing about how we live
into the fullness of our humanity become essential to generative
forward movement on any of the great issues of our time.
“Issues”
is too small a word for what we have to meet. Whether and how we rise
to our ecological, racial, economic, social reckonings will mean the
difference between whether we flourish and grow or whether we perhaps
merely survive, as a species. And in these last years, it’s come to
seem to me that the end of all of this aspiring, what we’re called
to collectively, is nothing less than the possibility of wholeness —
to figure out what it means to be whole human beings, with whole
institutions, living in whole societies. Wholeness does not mean
perfection. Being whole will not mean that we are less strange, but
that we turn and structure towards what is life-giving, that we can
become conscious of our complexity and our strangeness and work with
them — as creatures who also have it in us to become wise.
That’s
our name, after all, homo sapiens — “the creatures who are wise.”
We have so far to go to live into that, and we may not get there. But
across my life of conversation I have seen, experienced, learned that
wisdom and wholeness emerge in lives and in places precisely in
moments like this one — ours is writ large — when human beings
have to hold seemingly opposing realities in a creative tension and
interplay: power and frailty, birth and death, pain and hope, beauty
and brokenness, mystery and conviction, calm and fierceness, mine and
yours.
The
invitation here is to open wide your powerful, reality-shifting
imagination, your heart, your energy, your will, to the possibility
of wholeness — how to live into that. This brings us full circle
back to seeing and participating in the generative story, the
generative landscape, of our time. It comes back, too, to that simple
practice of taking in the good, because again, there is so much
learning and wisdom unfolding all around, right alongside our
better-publicized dysfunction and decay.
In
science we are being shown how wholeness functions, how vitality
happens, with words and disciplines that we did not possess when I
was born, and others that are a century old: neuroscience, social
psychology, “ecosystem,” “microbiome,” “tectonic shift.”
Evolutionary biologists in our day are rediscovering or discovering
for the first time humanity’s superpower of cooperation. They are
telling a completely different story than the one the West was built
around — the story that we as a species have always progressed by
competing and fighting and winning. It is simply not true.
In
the name of that story, we perfected systems for making an “us”
and an “other.” We made of the natural world an “other.” But
now, on frontiers of seeing inside our brains and our bodies, we are
grasping that we are also capable of change our whole lives long and
that we have inhabited ecosystems — our bodies themselves are
ecosystems — while we organized around parts. It even turns out
that we are linked in our cells to cosmic time — the life and death
of stars. Every generation of our species has looked up at the night
sky and wondered where we came from; we are the generation that
learns definitively that you and I and everyone you see is actually
made of stardust.
Every
surface of fracture in our world notwithstanding, for us all of life
is being revealed in its insistence on wholeness: the organic
interplay between our bodies, the natural world, the lives we make,
the worlds we create. It is the calling of callings to make that
vivid and practical and real, starting inside ourselves and with the
lives we’ve been given.
So
I’m going to end there. Thank you for being here, for being with
me, for being with each other. Until we meet again.
Please
go here for the original:
https://onbeing.org/programs/calling-and-wholeness/
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