Profession, Vocation, Avocation

The joke goes adults ask children what they want to be when they grow up because they are looking for ideas.
And this joke resonates, I think, because so many of us are not doing what we would like to be doing so much of the time.
In my life so far I have had three professions. A hero of my first gig, Anthony Bourdain, once shared that there is a man that lives in his brain who would like to do no more than sit in bed smoking pot and watching cartoons all day; his entire life has been a series of stratagems to outwit and outlast this guy. It may be useful to remember that Tony hung himself in a luxury hotel suite in France after creating perhaps the best job show business has ever devised.
Poor Tony.

So it’s a valid question: “What in the hell am I supposed to do with myself?”
Here at Jubilee! we don’t have much in the way of dogma but if we were to lay out our creed certainly somewhere in there would be this phrase from Frederick Buechner: “Your calling, your vocation, lies where your deep passion, your deep gladness, and the world’s deep, deep hunger meet.”
The Japanese have an elegant word for this: Ikigai. The junction between that which you are good at, that which you enjoy doing, that which you can be paid for, and that which the world truly needs.
Creation Spirituality teaches us that God created the World.
And it was good.
God created you.
And it was good.
In the unfolding ongoing creation of the ever expanding universe you were given certain talents and passions and charged with the divine task of co-creation.
And that is good.
You were also given, or perhaps more accurately, you have developed certain liabilities that inform your work in the world.
A certain thorn in the side.
A box of darkness, that allows you, if you are brave enough to face the shadow of it, to better serve the dark and broken places of the world.
Have you ever noticed that in answering the question, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” children often go towards the darkness? They want to be firefighters, police officers, doctors, they do not shy away from the hero’s journey. The bedtime stories they most enjoy feature dragons, fire, and long journeys bereft of luxury hotel suites.
I once heard a rabbi describe the Big Bang, the cosmological fact of the universes’ expanding at a rate of 73 parsecs per second per second, as a great outpouring and individual imbuing of God’s light. An expansive imbuing in of each of us and every created thing with light to inform the darkness She could not see in creating it. To shine Ikigai in us all …

Straight Man

Each night, closing my eyes, the I, I know I know, dissolves
Returning to the cosmos.
My liver, done with the days atrocities,
Slips, Eve’s rib style, from my body and dances across the galaxy.
My very cells evanesce into neutrinos and spin tales of wiggly delight
*In strings of time dating to the 10,000 year man and beyond … *

It’s all I can do to keep from giggling
playing straight to you, Beloved.
My co-conspirator:
Headliner to Wonder.

I look forward to your answer to my question.