How We are Called

In the spring of 2020 when people around the world were taking to the streets to cry out that Black Lives Matter, my Facebook feed was full of calls to action. Many voices declared that there was only one right thing to do, and one right way to do it, and any other approach was wasting precious time. And of course we all wanted to do the best, right thing- perhaps you also agonized about whether you were doing the best thing or the right thing or were doing enough , or wondered why no one else heard the same call you felt so passionately in your heart. Today I want to offer a heart-centered approach to that discernment.

As I was struggling with this discernment myself, I coincidentally picked up a novel my friend had recommended, Starry River of the Sky the story of a young boy (Rendi) who has run away from home and hides out in a remote village where he hears a strange crying that no one else hears. Our young hero’s deepest desire, his deepest need is to return home to his family, a need he doesn’t even recognize in himself. But because of his own deep need he is the only one who can hear that same need from the one who is crying out for help.

I recognized in Rendi’s story a truth I’ve experienced in my own life- that when something is alive for me, is hard for me, I am sensitive to it in the world around me. Sometimes I wonder why no one else is aware of the calling that I am feeling so acutely.

For example, when I was young, I often felt left out- standing on the edge of things and not being welcomed in, or even, in some rough times, being actively excluded. Being singled out as one who was unwelcome, like those terrible lunchtimes in the junior high school cafeteria, created in me a special sensitivity to welcoming and exclusion. It itches me like a mosquito bite when a newcomer walks into yoga class and there is no space for them to put their mat. I wonder, how could anyone see a newcomer walk into the room and not move to make a place for them? This is one of the reasons I like being a minister, because everyone is welcome here; together we strive together to make this a continuously more welcoming and inclusive community.

But even in this small community, where we all affirm the same principles, we each hear different cries. One person may hear clearly the needs of hungry neighbors, another’s heart resonates with the isolation of elders who are home-bound. Some hear the cry of the earth, or the anguish of institutional racism. No one of us could respond to all those needs in a passionate, skillful and sustained way, so I believe that the health and healing of our world requires that we all respond differently, like the many organs in the body. We need a great complexity and diversity of responses to suffering. We need, for example, people who hear the emerging news of crisis and grab their pack and head for the front lines. We need the folks who stay behind and care for loved ones in the hospital, or raise our children. We need people to pivot quickly in our emerging changing world, we also need people who sound a steady drumbeat for a cause over years and decades as it comes in and out of fashion. We can’t possibly respond to or even feel every need; the world is too big, and we can only be the finite human beings that we are. But each of us can listen for the call we hear, and do what is ours to do.

So how do you know what is yours to do? "When is the best time to do things? Who is the most important one? What is the right thing to do?" Jon Muth's  The Three Questions,  a retelling of a story by the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, provides a simple yet profound answer. We do good for the one who is standing at our side right now. The story does not consider, however our global context. His story does not help us know how to respond to the suffering in Ukraine. Because the person at our side tends to be someone like us, we might miss the calls for help that come from far away, that come from outside our social circle. If we are white and living in a majority white community, how does it call us to help end racism? This is especially important in considering our own privilege- how privilege can isolate us form the suffering and oppression of people different than us. If we only help those at our side, this approach would tend to keep our resources in our already highly resourced communities.
Perhaps the unique stirrings of our compassion can brings folks “in front of us” in our hearts, that might not be next to us in body. Could we think more broadly about “the one you are with,” “the one who is standing at your side?” Perhaps the heart creates such links in this ever widening global community. This is how it happened for Rendi, the young boy in our story:

“And suddenly in that moment, Rendi’s secret wish was revealed, a wish he didn’t even know he had. Because when Rendi looked into the toad’s eyes, he knew why the toad cried. The toad wished to go home. And Rendi could hear those cries because he did too.”

Psychologist John Neafsey describes that same phenomenon, in his book Act Justly, Love Tenderly. He writes “Paradoxically, there is a way that personal experiences of suffering can make us sensitive to the suffering of others. The memory of our own pain, even if our personal experience is not identical or equivalent, enables us to empathize and identify with the “stranger.” [here he refers to the story of exodus “you shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the heart of a stranger, because you were strangers in the land of Egypt (ex 23:9)] he continues: “We were once strangers ourselves and so we know what it feels like to be a stranger.” 

That feeling of compassion, of “suffering with” can be the beginning of a call that we are especially suited to hear. We not only have the capacity to hear another’s suffering, but when we respond out of our own suffering, our own experience might assist our discernment about what might really help. If we know something about grief, perhaps we can help someone else who is grieving. If we know something about loneliness, perhaps we are uniquely able to support someone who is lonely.

When we listen to the call of the heart, sometimes we ourselves are transformed. Consider our hero Rendi, who heard the moaning of the moon. In listening to those moanings he knew himself better. He had been trying to not listen to his own inner moanings of missing home, but through listening with compassion to another, he knew his own self better. Both he and the magical toad and the whole community were healed.

The challenge with this kind of calling, however, is that we can over-identify with the one we feel called to help. Sometimes, to protect our own hearts from their pain and vulnerability, it feels safer to project all our suffering, our own inner discomfort onto another. We feel powerless, so when the person we are trying to help won’t take our advice, it amplifies our own inner discomfort. When our hearts are involved, we have to pay special attention to our own inner movements, and listen carefully to those we are wanting to help. It is important to discern “what is my story, and what is theirs?” This is why all spiritual directors have a supervisor we talk to regularly, so that if we are listening to someone and we notice that we are feeling impatient or powerless or frustrated or sad, we are invited look at what is being activated in our own hearts, what is touched in our own story by another’s story. When we can tease apart what is ours, and what is theirs, we can be more skillful in helping them and helping ourselves.

But what can we do when our hearts are stirred by the suffering in Ukraine these days, and we feel so far away and helpless? The instinct is to shut down our hearts, to protect them from our compassionate suffering. Buddhist activist Joanna Macy has grounded her work in the truth that “psychic numbing, while hindering our ability to process and respond to social realities surrounding us, also …depletes the resilience and imagination needed for fresh vision and strategies.” Writer Ipek Burnett builds on Macy’s work saying: “In feeling pain for the world, one realized that collective problems far exceed private wants related to individual welfare and well-being. ‘Pain for the world – the outrage and the sorrow – breaks us open to a larger sense of who we are.’” 

“What can we do?” we wonder helplessly. Burnett suggests that simply allowing our hearts to cry out in what she calls an “aesthetic response” has its own value to ourselves and to our culture. She writes: “The aesthetic response marks the first instant of that heart awakening – simply noticing the wrongness, expressing the outrage and anguish. It is about congruency and integrity. One may not know what must be done about most economic political, ecological dilemmas, but the immediate emotional experience and embodied reaction may be exactly the place to begin for public action.”  Simply allowing that emotional response to move in our hearts is the first step toward seeing our individual and collective problems, and to imagining solutions.

How are we called to help heal this suffering world? I invite you to begin simply by listening to the cry of your own heart. We don’t need to know that the one thing we do today will end the war in Ukraine, but like the boy with 3 questions, we help the turtle who is tired, and perhaps this leads us to hear the cry of the panda who was injured in the story, which leads us to find the panda’s missing child. We listen with our own bruised and broken hearts, to the cries that are ours to hear. And perhaps in so doing our own hearts will heal and grow, Increasing the field of compassion in ourselves, in our communities and in the world.

"Remember then that there is only one important time, and that time is now. The most important one is always the one you are with. And the most important thing to do is to do good for the one who is standing at your side. For these,… are the answers to what is most important in this world

This is why we are here" (Jon Muth The Three Questions)