A Love That Will Not Let Us Go

Several months ago, a good friend and colleague of mine, the Rev. Rob Eller-Isaacs had the occasion to spend a weekend with Reverend Dr. James Forbes - the senior minister of Riverside Church - an intentionally interdenominational and interracial religious community in New York City - a church you may remember as the place Martin Luther King chose to come out against the Vietnam War. Over the course of Rob's weekend, with Rev. Forbes - the good minister told many stories - but one story in particular stuck out to me even in its re-telling. "Time was, Rev. Forbes said, when a small group of friends that included Cornel West met regularly for lunch at the Riverside Church. Now Cornel West is an internationally known writer and speaker whose work focuses on issues of racial justice. Well, Cornel came to lunch one day and announced that he had been offered a Distinguished Professorship at Harvard. He wanted to know whether his friends thought he should accept the invitation. One of the guests at the table scoffed and said, 'Cornel, if you keep changing jobs all the time, folks will think you're unstable.' West quickly replied, 'I'm not concerned about that. What I care about is my project. My project is all that really matters."

My project is all that really matters. That line has been ringing in my ears - rolling around in my mind ever since I first heard this story. My project is all that really matters. A project, my friend Rob says, "is a binding purpose which frames and guides one's life." A binding purpose which frames and guides one's life.

As an outsider, it is plain to see that Cornel's project focuses on sharing the facts of today's world as he realizes his ongoing mission for racial equity and recognition of democracy as a spiritual force. Cornel undoubtedly heard and answered the call of his true vocation. Regardless of how others might perceive him or the obstacles he might encounter, Cornel knows clearly that he answers now to the project, the particular project that has taken shape in his particular body in this particular time and place.

I believe that we all have just such a project. A thread, perhaps, as we heard about earlier in our readings, a thread that we follow that goes among things that change -but it does not change. A thread perhaps that is hard for others to see, but a thread that while you hold it you can't get lost. I believe that we each have just such a thread, just such a project. A particular project that longs to come into being through our particular bodies and lives in this particular time - and I believe that if we live awake and aware in this world - if we honestly ask ourselves the question, what is my project - that we will ultimately and undoubtedly hear the call of a binding purpose longing to take shape in our lives.

For many of us - the search for our calling, for our project - comes first from discomfort - a vague ache, a longing, or an itch, an agitation in our bodies, our minds, or our souls - something inside of us saying this is not how I want to spend my life. This is not what really matters to me. When this agitation comes alive in our lives - most of us first try to quiet the discomfort in an evasive way - by watching more tv, turning to a few drinks in the evening after work, or by turning away from the activities and the people that connect us deeply with ourselves and with the world. But if we allow ourselves to feel it - that discomfort, that agitation that exists both with our own lives and also with the realities of the world we live in - if we allow ourselves to feel it, this discomfort can be the very thing that saves us.

Martin Luther King Jr. knew this truth, and I remember clearly the words of his address, The American Dream. He said, "Certainly all of us want to live a well-adjusted life in order to avoid the neurotic personality. But I say to you, there are certain things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I call upon all men of good will to be maladjusted...let me say that I never did intend to adjust to the evils of segregation and discrimination. I never did intend to adjust myself to religious bigotry. I never did intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never did intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism, and the self-defeating effects of physical violence. And I call upon all men of good will to be maladjusted because it may well be that the salvation of our world lies in the hands of the maladjusted."[1] It may well be, I believe along with Dr. King, that the salvation of the world - and the salvation of each of us as individuals - lies in the hands of the maladjusted.

That maladjustment that Dr. King spoke of, that agitation, that something inside of us that will not allow us to sink into the quicksand of apathy and powerlessness, that will not allow us to live entire lives of quiet desperation - that love and faith in ourselves and in the world that will not let us go - that love and faith is a reliable guide as we discover and live into the binding purpose that longs to take shape in our lives.

Parker Palmer, a gentle teacher and guide to others - tells the story of searching for his project this way. "I was in my early thirties when I began, literally to wake up to questions about my vocation. By all appearances, things were going well, but the soul does not put much stock in appearances. Seeking a path more purposeful than accumulating wealth, holding power, winning at competition, or securing a career, I had started to understand that it is indeed possible to live a life other than one's own. Fearful that I was doing just that - but uncertain about the deeper, truer life I sensed hidden inside me, uncertain whether it was real or trustworthy or within reach - I would snap awake in the middle of the night and stare for long hours at the ceiling. Then I ran across the old Quaker saying, 'Let your life speak.' I found those words encouraging, and I thought I understood what they meant: 'Let the highest truths and values guide you. Live up to those demanding standards in everything you do.' Because I had heroes at the time who seemed to be doing exactly that, this exhortation had incarnate meaning for me - it meant living a life like that of Martin Luther King Jr. of Rosa Parks or Mahatma Gandhi or Dorothy Day, a life of high purpose.

So I lined up the loftiest ideals I could find and set out to achieve them. The results were rarely admirable, often laughable, and sometimes grotesque. But always they were unreal, a distortion of my true self - as must be the case when one lives from the outside in, not the inside out. I had simply found a 'noble' way to live a life that was not my own, a life spent imitating heroes instead of listening to my heart."[2]

As much as we might wish it were different - we cannot, as Parker Palmer found, will a particular calling into being. No matter how much we might like to choose our callings based on finances, respect, or even, as Parker did, on noble ideals - in the end our projects are as unique and varied as we are as individuals - and I believe that rather than trying to shape our lives to fit a particular direction, we are called instead to listen carefully to the particular project and longing that takes shape in our particular lives - informed and drawn out of us by our unique talents and interests.

From his own experience Parker tells us that, "Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about - quite apart from what I would like it to be about- or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions."[3] And I could not agree more. Listening, rather than willing, must come first in our search for true vocation - as we learn to live our lives from the inside out, rather than from the outside in.

In our particular culture and in our particular time - in a culture that assigns our value based on our appearances, our accumulation of toys, our ability to seamlessly fit in - in this kind of culture, learning to live from the inside out, rather than from the outside in - is no easy task. So if you are finding yourself struggling with the enormity of the challenge I am laying out for us today, you are absolutely right - finding and living out your true vocation is no easy task - and it is not something that can be done alone.

But it is something that can be done - and it is something that can be done not just by people like Cornel West or Martin Luther King or Dorothy Day. Many of us do it all the time - and we do it because we lean on others, because we allow ourselves to feel not only the discomfort and agitation that comes when we allow illusions of greed or success to be our guide, but also when we allow ourselves to be led by the unparalleled satisfaction that comes from living out exactly who we are. We find and live into our projects because something inside of us and perhaps even something outside of us calls us forward with a love that will not let us go.

That love that will not let us go - sometimes it takes the shape of family and friends and mentors telling us with all their hearts that they believe in us - that they really see us and who we might become. Sometimes that love takes the shape of our Universalist ancestors reminding us that no one is lost, that no one is without purpose, that all are worthy of nurturing the divine spark within. Sometimes that love takes the shape of a quiet creative voice within, urging us on toward a seemingly impossible goal. Whatever shape that love takes in our lives - it is a love that we desperately need, and it is a love that we can offer one another.

Author and doctor Rachel Naomi Remen shares this story in her book, Kitchen Table Wisdom. "In the beginning of December the year I was thirteen, my father declared bankruptcy. That was the year we all made our Christmas presents...Despite the stress in the household, on Christmas morning the living room was much as always, the familiar decorations out and the coffee table heaped with presents, only wrapped this year in the sporting green section of the newspaper and tied with lat year's red ribbon. Among them lay a small velvet box.

Even at thirteen, I knew that such a box was not likely to contain something homemade. I looked at it with suspicion. My father smiled. "It's for you," he told me. "Open it."

Inside were a pair of twenty-four karat gold earrings. They were exquisite. I stared at them in silence, bewildered, feeling the weight of my homeliness, my shyness, my hopeless difference from my classmates who easily joked and flirted and laughed. "Aren't you going to try them on?" prompted my father, so I took them into the bathroom, closed the door, and put them on my ears. Cautiously I looked into the mirror. My sallow, pimply face and lank hair, oily before it even dried from a shower, looked much as always. The earrings looked absurd.

Tearing them from my ears, I rushed back into the living room and flung them on the floor. "How could you do this?" I shrieked at my father. "Why are you making fun of me? Take them back. They look stupid. I'm too ugly to wear them. How could you waste all this money?" Then I burst into tears. My father said nothing until I had cried myself out. Then he passed me his clean, folded handkerchief. "I know they don't look right now," he said quietly. "I bought them because someday they will suit you perfectly."

I am truly grateful to have survived my adolescence, she writes. At some of its lowest moments, I would get out the box and look at the earrings. My father had spent a hundred dollars he did not have because he believed in the person I was becoming. It was something to hold on to."[4]

Rachel's father gave her something to hold on to - a different image of herself, a sense of possibility of what and who she might become. He knew that beauty and confidence and a feeling of wholeness were just a matter of time for his daughter. He knew that he could hold out that vision for her in his gaze of hopeful expectancy - he knew that his faith could stand in for her own in those difficult years of adolescence - he trusted in Rachel's potential and possibility, and in doing so he taught her to trust as well.

This same woman acknowledges that when she enters a room today - she stops conversation. Her beauty has indeed caught up with her - and the woman her father once saw as he gazed at her - the persimmon tree hidden in the marrow of the seed - has truly grown and blossomed.

Often it is from each other that we first draw the strength to imagine ourselves differently, to believe in the potential and possibility that others see for us, as they hold us as we cannot always hold ourselves, - steady in their gaze of hopeful expectancy - or closely and carefully as the father held his son in the poem this morning. Checking traffic twice - avoiding puddles, hearing the hum of the boy's dream deep inside of him.

That hum of a dream deep inside of each one of us - following and living into that dream is no easy task.

It takes time, of course. It takes learning a new way of being, it takes learning to listen deeply and allowing ourselves to feel. It takes growing in courage and growing in faith - learning to see the possibility and potential in others, in ourselves, and in the world. But when we hold out hope for one another - when we carry one another as the father carried his son across the street in the rain, when we hold one another as Rachel Naomi Remen's father held her in his gaze of hopeful expectancy, when we trust that the thread exists, that the spark of the divine lives in each one of us - longing to take shape in our particular lives in this particular time and place - when we believe with the help of each other that wholeness and clarity are possible for us not only to discover and imagine, but to live into as well - then the task ahead becomes possible - and our projects begin to take shape in our lives. May we all be so blessed.

May it be so, and Amen.

Jen Crow, Associate Minister
February 26, 2006

1. James M. Washington, ed. A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Harper San Francisco: 1986), 216.
2. Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. (Jossey Bass, Inc.: San Francisco: 2000), 2-3.
3. Ibid., 4.
4. Rachel Naomi Remen, Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal. (Riverhead Books: New York: 1996), 221-222.