The Call of a Lifetime. A Slow Listening.

Our call is not to get things done. The purpose of our living is not to accomplish things.

We live and breathe within an intense temptation in our time and place to believe that what is not true is precisely the case.

But our call, instead, is to engage in projects of lasting significance, whose beginning we did not witness and whose end we will never see. Our call is to take our own place, as one of many, of no singular significance ourselves, but still vital to the whole. Our call is to do our part to move forward the human enterprise, to recognize and celebrate and sacrifice for the generations-long undertakings that deepen our appreciation of the dignity of all and the worth of every individual.

“Carpe diem”? No. Rather seize your life as a whole, as one piece of fabric woven into the whole God-given story of humankind on the surface of this planet in the midst of the swirling galaxies.

Or perhaps better: seize this day, yes. But only as one in the company of all the days that have gone before and all those yet to come. Let this day take its place among them all. But let it not reign in tyranny over any of the others.

The things that clamor for your attention today are petty noise-makers striving to drown out an eternal song, one that is deeper and lasts forever, whose first note was struck by the Spirit at creation.

It is only in humming that tune, simple and harmonious and lasting through all todays, that you or I will know ourselves as children of God, as brothers and sisters of one another, and as fellow laborers in the work – not of accomplishing anything today – but of becoming over a lifetime and more one with the one project of God.

For today and for the rest of your days, the world will be calling you – through any of its innumerable agents – to do more, to be more, to talk more, to plan more, to make more.

No.

Your call is set your compass by a further horizon, one that you cannot even see with the naked eye, but that your heart and mind know is there. Keep your focus there and you will move at the just pace in the just direction toward your true goal.

(And yes admittedly, drive a number of folks batty in the process).

J. McGinty
1/21/15