dear hilary: call out

Dear Hilary,What makes a calling big (and none of this bullshit about how we are all called to big things and I should just be thankful for the thousands of gifts I have right now)? Real talk: what does it mean to be called?Love,Over ItDear Over It,So, you want to real talk. We can real talk. We can sit down here, in this space - let me buy you a cup of coffee (dry cappuccino or mocha something or cider, if you want to feel like fall) - and we can real talk.I could look up calling in the dictionary and talk about the sense of desire for work. But you'd probably see through that, right? Tell me that anyone can look up and parse a definition?I could tell you the lilting words of the many wise writers that calling is about the sense of doing what you cannot not do, that it is about gladness meeting need, that the world and you meet in a field somewhere, literal or metaphorical or imagined, and hash it out, and you emerge with a sense that you have purpose. But from what you ask me, from the way your question sounded when I first read it, you'd ask for more than that, too, right? You want something else. You want more.Here is more: you aren't supposed to fake a contentment in your life just because others appear to have found it. On the road to the unfolding of your calling there is nothing more problematic than trying to pretend you have found it before you have, to tell yourself the lie that this is all you have been given so you better sit down and play at peace and joy because you won't get anything else. Peace and joy aren't playthings. They're things you hunger after with your whole heart and mind and body and things you fight for (and sometimes with) and the thing I want to tell you is that you cannot fake your way to a calling.So why don't you wrestle?Why don't you hang on with your limbs and stray thoughts tangled together, with everything you have, to the question what is my calling? Why aren't you fighting harder for a way through the thicket, or standing at the edge of things and shouting that you want to know where God is and where He is going, that you are tired of living in the pretend of "already-finding-contentment" because that's not gratitude, really, is it? We both know that. We both know that it is better to go out and holler in a field that there is nothing you know right now than to sit on the concrete sidewalk and be wounded by what you haven't actually wrestled with.Peace and joy more often arrive fiery. Peace and joy aren't pretty feelings, they're movements in and around you. Contentment is about a stillness that comes both without and within, about a listening to God, about a listening to yourself. Your letter to me tells me that you haven't shouted much about it. And we are both like this. I cup the questions of big calling or wild calling in my hands and run in the woods with them, careful like I'm holding a baby bird that will break. But the question isn't fragile. And God is not.And the truth is, I am not, either.We are both wild and brave enough to face the question of a big calling, without the comfort of trying to make ourselves content with what we see. We are both brave enough to launch out and say, "THIS I LOVE" or "THIS I CHERISH" or "THIS, THIS, GOD, DO YOU SEE ME?" and wait for an answer.It is a long story in the Bible of people who strive with God, who go out into the field to yell and holler and ask.You have to do that before you can get still enough to hear an answer. And being called?Maybe for us, maybe for you, it means actually more about how you are calling out to God and asking to be called back to. Maybe it is about the sound of your voice meeting the Word, being silenced and changed by it. Maybe rather than worrying that you have or don't have a big calling, or what it even means (because I doubt anyone can tell you the feeling or the way you know or the kind of thing that it is)you can call out -Do you see me? And hold that up, and hear.Love,hilary

when i am twenty-three

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? - Mary OliverI end my work day fifteen minutes early so that I can go for a run in the woods. I'm so angry I think I can't quite see straight - angry at myself first, because I fell for a story that wasn't coming true, angry at how when I preached him as a wild gift to my closest friend in the car one afternoon at a red light, God was whispering the truth and I didn't believe it. But my feet move my heart. The prayer, anger to desperate to confused, finally makes it way to the still waters. "God," I pace before, palms opened skyward, "I promised You that this life was Yours. Here. So take it back from me, this life for You, take it back into the mystery of Your will.Tell me - --It is the first time any reader I didn't know from my college days ever emailed me a question for dear hilary. I am sitting on my bed thinking about how I need to probably try to write something again, because it has been weeks and didn't I say I would be better, and not get so discouraged, and not let the poems fall through my fingers because of my fear? They tap out the email with a gentleness, a trust, and in the blackened night blanketed with stars I hear a glimmer that maybe I shouldn't forsake writing - maybe I should just wait.What is it --She and I find five hours on her couch with tea not enough time, because the things that pass between us are so widely varied, journeying among us, our stories keeping us company as afternoons fade to evening, as I look at her in surprise, again and again, because her wisdom is gentler than most. We talked once about the space in conflict, how mediators must create the conversation's parameters but not participate, and we wonder together about what kind of heart you must have to do such work, and I tell her then, that a part of me is so hungry to do just that, but how could I begin? How could I be a builder of spaces and homes for conversations? She smiles, shakes her head, reaches for her teacup. "But of course you already do this."you plan to do --And somewhere, in April, in a bar where I stole a reserved seat at the bar from a couple who apparently decided to wait, or at least, I hope that's what they did, over the rim of my martini glass, I told her in hushed laughter and surprise that this man, I was falling for him, had been for a lot longer than I had admitted, and now what was I to do, feeling the way I did, him so far away and me here, drinking this, in this bar? And she laughed bright in the crowded space, her hand briefly closing over mine. "You tell the truth." We laughed and laughed that night, about the way that I brought Lizzy Bennet to life, about how love is always out ahead of us, beckoning us forward. In the car that night on my way home, I whispered, "I see a little better who you might want me to be, I think." And God said, "Hilary, you are Mine."with your one --There aren't words enough for the way this year has unfolded. Perhaps there will never be, and I cling to the older, better question because it is a kind of promise, on its own, that I don't ever stop asking or need to stop asking about this life, all tangled by belonging and wandering and returning. And I cannot stop wondering, not now a year later, about what we inherit from our former selves and what we give them in return, about how we love, and where, and untamed spaces we go running into all for the sake of love.wild and precious life? --Oh, it is a wild and precious life, Mary Oliver, and I'm grateful alongside you.Love,hilary