Welcome to the final episode of our series with Dr. Bonnie Miller-McLemore, and today we are talking about ways of blessing our callings. What a delight to continue our exploration of Bonnie’s new book Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies about Calling from Oxford Press. In this week’s chat, Bonnie once again reads from her book. In our conversation we consider lost and relinquished callings, the power of cogwheeling, and ways we can bless our callings even when regret or remorse are woven into our stories.
Listen or watch to learn more.
HOLY WEEK
Sharing a conversation about relinquished callings in Holy Week seems fitting. The stories of Jesus are filled with the full range of human experience. They hold connection, joy, and passion to regret, betrayal, and loss. Passion week mirrors the dilemmas and costs of a life of faith.
I think in John 15, a speech of Jesus in the passion story, we see so many powerful reversals. This one is a kind of relinquishment of calling as I read it. We have many words of Jesus calling on disciples to love and serve one another. Yet here Jesus relinquishes a calling.
15 I do not call you servants/slaves any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing, but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Abba/Amma.
No longer are followers of Jesus called to powerless or ignorant, in their discipleship. Now Jesus says “I have called you friends.” This is a calling of knowing and empowerment. This is an enduring calling even now, to you and me.
How are our vocations shifted and changed when we embrace our calling as one of friendship, knowing, and empowerment? How do we relinquish callings that keep us in ignorance or disempowerment? And how do we serve each other from the power of love and friendship?
RELINQUISHED CALLINGS
In her chapter on Relinquished Callings” Bonnie says:
To say it again, relinquishing callings requires review and retelling of our lives, a going backward over life to go forward, a reversal and renewal of calling in a different form and direction: what Franciscan author Richard Rohr calls “falling upward.” (145)
This week, I hope you will consider all of your callings anew and afresh. Examine your callings in light of the Jesus stories of reversal, change, and turning things upside down. Remember through all of it that Jesus has called you friend. And that calling is a source of love and sustenance through all other shifts to your life of calling.
We cannot escape the challenges, losses, blockades, or reversals of calling. Jesus did not escape them as he laments in the rest of John 15. Neither can we. Yet even through the lowest of life’s moments, we are not alone. And God’s calling of and to love hums along beneath all else. May you sense that love this week. And every week.
Read or listen to Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”
