There are some places in the world that once you’ve seen them they never leave you. They are like people you’ve loved; they occupy a part of you and speak to you even if you never have the chance to see them again.
And then there are some people of whom you can say the same. I’ve thought about the romantic tales of despondent lovers who never recover from the death of their beloved: Robert Baldwin (here in Canada) or Edgar Allan Poe, to name just two that spring to mind. I think of Romeo and Juliet and the lyric in the Beach Boys’ pneumatic and achingly beautiful song “God Only Knows”: “If you should ever leave me/ Oh, life would still go on, believe me/ But the world could show nothing to me/ So what good would living do me?”
The same can be said of our relationships with the land. In colonial history there are tales of Aboriginals who were kidnapped by European explorers, taken to Europe to remain, and who never got over their exile and died. Nicholas Black Elk (in Black Elk Speaks) recounts a stunningly moving vision he had as a child of being taken from away his home and brought across the water. This was part of a visionary “illness” he experienced that forewarned him of the suffering that was to come to his people on the Great Plains. I’ve never forgotten it.
All of this is about something probably very familiar to you. I think most of us can relate to the experience of profound feelings of love and even the fleeting moments of completeness we feel with another person. Perhaps many of us have also known the experience of communion with a place (is that personal or impersonal?). In religion, the devout talk about God as the beloved and completeness through divine grace (personal and impersonal?).
So, speaking of personal and impersonal experiences of love and grace. . . what exactly is a “Calling”? I would define it thus: the experience of a persistent and urgent need to see a task to completion. The task is perennial; it is a responsibility that is never met and a burden that, like the stone of Sisyphus, keeps rolling down the mountain. If you have a calling your life is directed toward pushing that stone. And you push that stone alone.
I think the idea of a calling relates to the experience of love intimately. A “called person” feels her energies and longing directed toward a point. That point is always close at hand, like a memory of someone or some place. There are times -speaking now of myself- that I am sure that I am here to do one thing. And that thing is always right there beside me, or in front of me, no matter how alone I am. It’s a strange experience because it is feels very real but is completely immaterial.
When I think about people and places that matter to me a curious element enters the picture. In my heart and in my head these people and places are images that glisten in the mind and slide before my eyes. Their presence is real and the variety of emotions they evoke can’t be put down in a simple descriptive sentence or paragraph. But their presence there -inside of me- is about me and not about them. They come to me because something inside of me wants and needs them. I call them to me without even consciously doing so. They are the opposite of fealty to an idea and yet . . . I live with the idea of them.
I think it is easier to be loyal to a calling because its source is unknown. When in doubt, you can say the source is yourself, faute de mieux. Or the source is divine and then you are simply serving. This is all quite odd, of course. Read Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling about Abraham, Isaac and God and then, like a good modern, you’ll think a calling is probably maniacal if not criminal.
But a calling is about love, above all, because it is about mystery. I find when I love and experience love I am in the midst of a similar mystery.
Jeremy Nathan Marks
