Tag: vocation

The blessings and curses of name calling

David Herbert2 Comments

 

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What shall we call her? How does she want to be known?

“To all God’s beloved, who are called to be saints.” Romans 1:7

In the wake of the London stabbings a Yemeni Muslim, Tam, living in London posted on her blog:

I moved to England in 2000 and I had a few months of peace and a promise of a new life in a civilised country where people were nice then boom, 9/11 happened.  We became the most hated people alive real quick that year. And by we, I mean muslims. Sure, nothing major happened to me, but the comments were there, the minor physical attacks were there. I was always on edge. Always looking behind my back. I westernised myself as much as possible not even to fit in, but to become invisible. I did not want to become anyone’s target. I refused to wear the hijab for the longest time for this very reason. From America to Paris and everywhere in between, the world fell apart in terms of these horrific attacks in the name of Islam. We became that neighbour everyone bitched about and ganged up on.

Having just finished watching a video of Police instructing people in a bar to get down for their own safety, my ever so alert ears picked up the dulcet tones of a not so gentle man saying, “fucking muslim cunts.” And honestly my heart bled.

She said her heart bleeds when she hears such things because that is what she hears herself being called.

What we are called matters. And what we call others matters.

The names we are given show us our parents’ pride and joy. Why did they give us the names they gave us? What was the meaning they wanted to convey to us? Why did we choose certain names for our children, or our pets? What was the meaning we wanted to convey? What were the terms of endearment? How did we want our children to think of themselves when we so named them?

I’ve been called many things. Apparently the midwife who delivered me referred to me as “the philosopher” – based on my first reactions to seeing the light of day. She may have been right, or that recollection by my mother may have shaped me. That first call, that first ID may be the cause of this post. Who knows? We will be inclined to live up to any good name we are given. But we are likely to be brought down or live down to any bad call.

I was delighted to read some praise in my recent work review/appraisal. I was called indefatigable. (Why use two syllables when six would do?) It was actually “indefatigably good humoured”. I don’t expect the person who wrote that remembers using that word, nor do I expect that person to realise the effect that has had on me in my ordinary everyday existence. In those words is loaded appreciation and encouragement. I am grateful for the thought which went into the feedback to my review, for the moments my reviewer has given to thinking “what shall I call him?”.

I also know that it is not strictly true. I know myself. I do get tired, I do get pissed off. And God knows me better than my reviewers. He knows it’s not true. But I do find encouragement in the half-truth and the potential. And I do find a meaningful calling. So if I am called “indefatigably good humoured” that becomes a calling. It is who I must try to be if I am going to live up to my name and calling. I now think, “Fancy being called that. That is something to live up to.” My name might actually improve my humour and that may become a blessing to others.

The names we call one another can be positive strokes. Being called David, being called “indefatigably ….” are positive strokes. We all need those. But some of the names people are called, the names that they are known by, are cruelly demeaning and damaging.

It does matter what we call one another. The names we give to one another, the ways we refer to one another carries meaning. It is important. Not just annually, in such things as reviews, but in the daily, everyday ordinariness of our transactions. We remember the names we are called. They don’t just ring in our ears but in our heart of hearts.

 

We shouldn’t be shy in our name calling. If someone has been good or helpful, we should tell them. If they haven’t been we should try to discern, with the help of those three, Faith, Hope and Love, what they could be. If we are not sure what to call someone we should simply ask them: “What do you want to be called? What do you want to be known as?” We might be in a position to help them become more widely known as just that – and that is about helping people respond to their vocation.

In our prayer we listen for God’s call, to what he wants to make of us. Henri Nouwen spoke about the blessing we can expect to hear in prayer. This is how he heard God’s call: “You are my beloved, on you my favour rests”. He wrote in Life of the Beloved:

 

We are beloved. We are intimately loved long before our parents, teachers, spouses, children and friends loved or wounded us….

Being the Beloved expresses the core truth of our existence.

Listening to that voice with great inner attentiveness, I hear at my center words that say, “I have called you by name, from the very beginning.  You are mine and I am yours. You are my Beloved, on you my favour rests.”

We also listen to what others call us in our day to day dealings with others. We invest a lot in our reputation. We want to hear a blessing in the names people are making for us.

What are the blessings and curses of our name calling?

What shall we call one another?

Broken: stunning, timely and beautiful BBC drama

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For “Broken” read “broke”.
For “Broken” read “society terribly broken”.
For “Broken” read “heartbreaking”.
For “Broken” read “compassion”.

Broken is a six part drama by Jimmy McGovern set in the north of England (filmed in Liverpool). It is Daniel Blake-bleak. You can watch it on BBC iPlayer.

There are many great performances. Sean Bean makes an excellent priest (playing Father Michael Kerrigan) and Anna Friel plays the part of a single mother well past the end of her tether. They do “broken” very well.

We only get hints about the reasons for Father Michael’s brokenness. He has been shamed and shaming and he is willing to break himself for the rest of his life. We see his brokenness mending as he seeks to make amends for his past, and we see the brokenness around him mending through his offering.

The parish could be any urban area in northern England. It is poverty stricken. The people walk, they don’t drive. The shops are closed. The only shops left open are the betting shops – their gaming machines having bled the community dry reducing people to dire debt and desperation.

Sam Wollaston, in his review for the Guardian, is right when he says: “This is a portrait of poverty in forgotten Britain, minimum pay and zero hours, crisis, debt and desperation.”

This is where people live and where they stay. Father Michael also sounds like a man who isn’t going anywhere. He has a strong regional accent. He sounds as if he comes from somewhere. It isn’t surprising that the priest and people love one another dearly. They might be from different places, but they both belong somewhere – as opposed to the urban metropolitans who could belong anywhere and often can’t be trusted because of that. (See note below about the Anywhere and Somewhere tribes.)

Father Michael is the person people turn to – they rely on him. They trust him above all others. But he is not the “heroic leader”. He is wounded himself, shamed and vulnerable, hoping for heaven. He is unassuming, self-effacing. He knows “it’s easy to forget Christ’s here, giving us strength, easing our pain,” and so he lights a candle as he invites people to open the heart of their troubles.

I could be critical. It is very clerical. But is that liberalism speaking? Is that the criticism of a metropolitan who could belong anywhere. There is no criticism from the people who are THERE, broken. He can be trusted. He is there. He is on their side utterly. They need someone to be on their side. The institutions they should be able to rely on repeatedly let them down. They need his ministry.

Christina played by Anna Friel is desperately poor. Just when we think she can go no lower her mother with whom she lives (and who helps share the living costs) dies. She pretends that she is still alive so she can claim her mother’s next pension payment. She’s arrested. Father Michael goes to court as her character witness. He calls her “this wonderful woman” who does everything for her children. I have no doubt that anybody would ever have called her “wonderful” before, but there was evident integrity in Father Michael’s statement. He uncovered the truth through his love and practical wisdom.

There is a moving scene n the confessional. A woman confesses that she is going to kill herself because she has stolen a vast amount from her employer (to feed her gambling addition). She recognises Father Michael’s vulnerability and witnesses his own confession.

We need more drama like this. We need to know more about people like Christina. We need to understand how wonderful they are. We need her to have more of a say in our national life. We need more priests like Sean Bean. We need more people to know they are “wonderful”. We need as much as ever to find our way through brokenness, and we need our Prime Ministers to learn from the witness of the faithful ministers in our broken communities.

I wonder how many priests, having watched this, will be left wondering how far they have moved from their calling – going somewhere else. And I wonder how many will be left wondering whether they are called to be priests – at any rate, whether they are good enough to be a friend broken for others somewhere just like that.

NOTE: David Goodhart in The Road to Somewhere: the populist revolt and the future of politics (2017) claims that there are two tribes, the Anywheres and the Somewheres. The Anywheres are light in their attachments “to larger group identities, including national ones; they value autonomy and self-realisation before stability, community and tradition”.  The Somewheres are grounded in place, uneasy with the modern world, experiencing change as loss. Goodhart used this theory to explain Brexit decision.

The gateway where hope and history rhyme

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Migrant Mother - Dorothea Lange 1936
Migrant Mother – Dorothea Lange 1936

In her beautiful blog, Maria Popova describes Reverend Victoria Stafford’s meditation in The Small Work in the Great Work (in the collection The Impossible Will Take a Little While: Perseverance and Hope in Troubled Times) as “gorgeous”. Stafford is “interested in what Seamus Heaney calls the meeting point of hope and history, where what has happened is met by what we make of it. What has happened is met midstream by people who are … spiritual beings and all that implies from creativity, imagination, crazy wisdom, passionate compassion, selfless courage, and radical reverence for life.” Here is how Heaney puts it in The Cure at Troy where hope and history rhyme:

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker’s father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.

History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.

Popova frames her post with Dorothea Lange’s iconic photograph of Migrant Mother. The woman moved by Lange is possibly a Californian pea picker in the Great Depression. Perhaps Popova has been prompted to turn to this photo by Stafford’s anecdote:

“I have a friend who traffics in words. She is not a minister, but a psychiatrist in the health clinic at a prestigious women’s college. We were sitting once not long after a student she had known and counselled,  had committed suicide… My friend, the doctor, the healer, held the loss very closely in those first few days, not unprofessionally, but deeply, fully – as you or I would have, had this been someone in our care.

At one point (with tears streaming down her face), she looked up in defiance (this is the only word for it) and spoke explicitly of her vocation, as if out of the ashes of that day she were renewing a vow or making a new covenant (and I think she was). She spoke explicitly of her vocation, and of yours and mine. She said, “You know I cannot save them. I am not here to save anybody or to save the world. All I can do – what I am called to do – is to plant myself at the gates of Hope. Sometimes they come in; sometimes they walk by. But I stand there every day and I call out till my lungs are sore with calling, and beckon and urge them toward beautiful life and love.”

Michael Sadgrove also claims the “gate” as the standpoint for Christian ministry. Considering Job in his book Wisdom and Ministry, Sadgrove asks about the piety required of those who are called to be friends and comforters to those who have to endure pain, and says that we don’t stand apart from suffering humanity, but face the world as it is. “We must often sit among the ahses where Job is, and must always go outside the gate to the place of the skull, where Jesus is.”

Opening the gate of Hope at the meeting point of  hope and history begins with holding a moment (as in Lange’s photo) closely and deeply, and meeting that with all that we are. For me, this is a passionate rendition of all the pastoral cycle seeks to do in theological reflection and pastoral practice. The final word goes to Victoria Stafford: “Whatever our vocation, we stand, beckoning and calling, singing and shouting, planted at the gates of Hope.” There we see the world “as it is and as it could be; the place from which you glimpse not only struggle, but joy in the struggle” Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother is in the public domain.

Wearing other people’s faces

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Parker Palmer has a lot of sensible things to say about vocation in Let your life speak. The book has the strapline – “Listening for the Voice of Vocation”.

Palmer refers to vocation not “as a goal to be achieved”, but as a “gift to be received”. It is about understanding the selfhood given to us by God at birth. Palmer refers to Rabbi Zusya, who as an old man said “In the coming world, they will not ask: ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me: ‘Why were you not Zusya?'”

As we grow we are trained into acceptability and finish up “wearing other people’s faces”. The deepest vocational question becomes not “what ought I to do with my life?” but “who am I? What is my nature?” The misunderstanding of vocation arises around the confusion between doing and being. Dave Walker’s cartoon on the hierarchy of vocation illustrates (and mocks) the “doing” – though unfortunately that remains the pre-occupation (a good word for this context!).

Palmer highlights the definition of vocation by Frederick Buechner. He describes vocation as “the place where your deep gladness meets with the world’s deep need.” When vocation is just masquerading as that great damage is caused. Another quote – this time from Rumi: “If you are here unfaithfully with us you’re causing terrible damage.”

Now I become myself.
It’s taken time, many years and places.
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces …

Now I become myself by May Sarton from Collected Poems