“When you get your ‘Who am I?’ question right, your ‘What should I do?’ questions tend to take care of themselves.” --Father Richard Rohr
This past weekend, at the United Church of Christ of Vermillion, SD, I was formally ordained to ministry in the UCC. A vanload of our Watertown folks drove down for the service and got to see me dissolve into messy tears as my “cloud of witnesses” gathered round me to affirm my call and empower me to do the amazing, frustrating, ridiculous, magical work of ministry.
We talk about “calling” and “vocation” (which is just the Latin word for the same thing) a lot in my line of work. I believe that every one of us has a calling—at least one!—in this world. Our Great Calling is to “become ourselves,” to paraphrase the poet May Sarton. Once we are able to do that, our practical vocation will become self-evident, as Father Richard suggests in this week’s quote.
In that spirit, I offer the following poem, which I wrote Summer 2017 at the Mulberry Bend Overlook on the Missouri River, just south of Vermillion (pictured above). May we be as the River is: nothing more (or less) than itself, rolling ever, ever on toward the Ocean that is both our source and our goal.
Blessin’s, --Tom
…
THE MISSOURI NEAR MULBERRY BEND
The old maps show that this generous farmland
with its windbreaks of cottonwood
and oak was once upon a time
the Riverbed, before it shifted
two miles to the south and west.
For creatures as small and mutable
as humans (like me) to consider
that the River might not be next year
where it was this year
is a parable of Buddhist impermanence--
yet the change is not as drastic as it
seems. Even a deviation of several miles
is mostly cosmetic: a River will
overtop her banks and carve out
new channels, when conditions
and the seasons call for it, but she
will not alter, in any fundamental way,
her course to the Sea. She will
just keep rolling on
into What Must Be, with all
the graciousness, the self-assurance
of one who knows what she was born
to do and does it--and in her wake,
these visions of plenty and green.
That's how it is with those who pursue
truly their calling: the rest of us
finally have the proof we needed,
and bloom ourselves for joy
that we have seen, at last, a life
lived as it was meant to be.
…
QUESTIONS FOR THE WEEK: What is your calling? How can spiritual community support you living into your vocation?
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