| What are you going to be when you grow up? |
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When you ask a small child what they want to be when the grow up, the answers are often drawn from a pool of ten or so favourite traditional children’s career choices. Fireman, ballerina, nurse or doctor, train driver, footballer, vet, the usual suspects make their presence felt. Sometimes the answers can go against the trends, and sometimes they can verge on surrealist visions that would compete with the best of Dali’s dreams.
I have had children tell me that they wanted to be a train, or a fairy and one small girl insisted that when she grew up she was to become a mouse.
The two boys that we read about today, Samuel and Jesus, both have their own unique sense of who they are called to be. They are to be prophets, religious scholars, teachers and questioners, they are to be men of God, shining out in the world.
One of the differences between the two, that the readings focused on today, is that Samuel’s parents were instrumental in leading and encouraging their son to live out his calling -Samuel’s mother left him as a thanksgiving on the steps of the temple when he was three years old and every year journeys to visit him carrying with her a wee linen liturgical gown that she has sewed.
Whereas Mary and Joseph were distressed and confused by their son’s behaviour and his hunger to sit at the feet of the Rabbi’s – ‘Child why have you treated us this way’ Mary cries, ‘Look, your Father and I have been searching for you with great anxiety’
I don’t know if you can remember back to what or who it was that you felt called to be when you were little or what your parents were like about your dream? Maybe you have actually grown up to become what you hoped? Or maybe that dream is long faded and as you remember it now you feel.. Feel what…? Relief or sadness, a wry smile or a bitter taste, maybe a wild anger or even confusion, so far away is that dream now that you can’t even remember what it was?
The bible is filled with folk who grow up to be what God has called them to be, disciples and prophets abound, but for many of us who live outside of these ancient stories this is sadly not often the case.
Most people make do, settle down, do as needs must, heave that cotton, lift that bale… I will always remember my Grandpa, my Poppy, who had to leave school at 12, looking down at his long thin fingers, those same fingers that cuts down the Blackwood Forests of Daylesford, and saying ‘I could have been a surgeon, look at those fingers, I could been a doctor, look at these hands’
Jesus and Samuel both live out the calling that hums inside them – one is supported by his community to do this, the other is not but both live the calling out with passion and certitude. And both allow themselves to be part of a bigger story than just their own individual narratives.
This is radical stuff indeed, particularly in the context of our own secular society. In the west we have chosen to understand the human personality as being something that is limited to linear biography and to the individual consciousness. Such a concept of the self is quite different to the one that many ancient peoples had.
For these folk the human psyche was made up, not just of biographical, historical detail but also of group consciousness and God or spirit story. In this way some indigenous tribes associate their personal calling not just with their own desires or the desires of their parents but also with a particular totem, natural symbol or animal. Jesus and Samuel both carried inside them the desires of their God, of their people and of themselves.
God has desires for each and every one of us, a desire that we become the most whole (holy) version of ourselves that we can possibly be and our people, our culture, also has desires of us. The challenge is discern where these desires meet with our own sense of purpose and to discard the rest... because our culture desires many things and not all of them are holy. It desires us to consume in vast quantities goods which we neither need nor can afford, it desires that we compete and that we ‘play the game’, it desires that we ignore the impact of our consumption, be it of things or land or forests or oceans or human dignity…
We are about to enter into a new year and in the contemplation space that lies before us I invite you to cast your mind back to your original childhood desire. What did you want for yourself and for the world?
Is this what you want still? How can you work towards making this manifest? What does God want you to be when you grow up? Comments (0)
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