Do You See Your Calling?

I would have titled today's reading, "It's Not About Me." And it is no more about my holiness than it is about my happiness.

On one of my early posts, a friend commented that God seemed to be sending her the same message in a variety of ways. I feel like that today. My book group was responsible for the service at church today. We had read a book by Kathleen Norris last summer, called Acedia & Me. Acedia is a kind of spiritual lethargy, a not caring, a cousin to depression. A friend and I gave companion homilies, and another member of the book group led the congregation in Lectio Divina -- a special method of reading Scripture which encourages audience participation -- on the passage from Jonah where Jonah is inside the fish.

For my homily, I invited the congregation to journey with me to the belly of the fish. In 1998, I spent two weeks as an outpatient on a psychiatric ward of a Seattle hospital. That was the belly of my whale, and his hide was opaque. It was pitch black inside. I could not see God. I could not hear God. I was terribly disoriented from being tossed this way and that, and I didn't like the way it smelled -- like rotting things, like hundreds of mistakes multiplying on each other, like sin. But how did I get there? I was not running from my duty as Jonah was. No, I was running headlong into duty, like an overzealous Pharisee (redundancy intended). I was extremely concerned with my own whiteness. I might even have used Oswald's satirical words: "What I want is anything God can do for me to make me more desirable in my own eyes." And so, to save me, God threw me into the sea and sent a giant fish to swallow me.

Unfortunately, unlike Jonah, I did not learn my lesson after one trip to the fish's belly. My entire adult life has been a traversing back and forth between striving after righteousness and despair at my failure. Last summer, however, when my book group read Acedia & Me, I began to sense that God was breaking the cycle, suggesting a better way: relationship with him. Eventually, that led me to this pilgrimage with Oswald.

"Our calling is not primarily to be holy men and women, but to be proclaimers of the Gospel of God" -- Oswald. It's not about me -- my happiness or my holiness -- but about Him and his holiness and about how it made him happy to redeem us.

"It's all about you, Jesus. It's all about you."