Listening With All Our Mind
Listening to Ourselves
Reflection By Scott Stoner
Once you start approaching your body with curiosity rather than with fear, everything shifts.
- Bessel van der Kolk
The Mind quadrant of the Living Compass includes Vocation and Organization. We will focus on vocation in this reflection.
You may associate vocation with people who live a religious life as their chosen profession, such as priests and nuns. In truth, we all have a voca- tion, a calling in life. God has given each of us a unique set of gifts, as well as a unique role to fill in the world. Each of us is called to use our gifts and fulfill our roles in a way that honors and serves God.
It is also worth noting that our vocation is often separate from our paid work. Our vocation can be expressed in our relationships with friends, family, neighbors, and volunteer or service work that we may do. Our vocation can also shift over our lifetime, as we continue to encounter new opportunities to both clarify and express our gifts.
Frederick Buechner, author and theologian, wrote that “the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” Combining this with the quote above from Dorothy Day, we see that when we are living out our own unique vocation, we feel a deep sense of joy. As 1 Corinthians 12 also reminds us, “there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit,” and so, too, there are a variety of ways we can express our vocation throughout our lifetime.
Making It Personal: Today I invite you to listen to your experience of vocation in your life right now. How are you feeling about where your gifts and the needs of the world are intersecting? Are you feeling the joy Buechner describes in this area of your life? If not, is there a shift that perhaps you are being called to make?
Follow along with us this Lent season with our daily devotional and engage in discussion in our closed facebook group moderated by Robbin Brent, Jan Kwiatowski, and Scott Stoner.
In this group, participants will have a chance to share their responses to the prompts in the daily readings, and also the chance to receive additional material for reflection.