No, no,” cried the evil spirits. Sleep, sleep, sleep!”

In recent weeks I feel as though I have called down the Furies. Victor Havel, the famous playwright, tells us, “we are all part of higher, mysterious entities against whom or which it is not advisable to blaspheme.” I am referring here to the my response to a call to engage in starting a church. Since coming to Chicago over the holidays , if only for the purposes of convalescing, I have felt like the great patron saint of “refused callings” is haunting my waking hours and yesterday it was time to face the specter and have a showdown.

In Lewis Carroll’s work Through the Looking Glass, Twedledum says, “ I’m very brave generally, only today, I happen to have a headache.” Call this the Jonah complex or refusing the soul’s enlargement, or just call it disobedience, but something is stirring in my soul that I cannot deny.

Abraham Maslow refers to the spiritual truancy of Jonah as “The evasion of one’s own growth, the setting of low levels of aspiration, the fear of doing what one is capable of doing, voluntary self crippling, pseudo-stupidity, mock humility.” In Arthur Koeslter’s Act of Creation, he says, “The guilt of Jonah was that he clung to the trivial, and tried to cultivate only his own little garden.

But let’s be real here for a moment. Everyone backs away from calling. “We all settle for less, hobble our own power and don’t speak to when spoken to in dreams,” according to Greg Levoy in Callings. Callings are always messengers of change and no one likes change regardless of what they say. Why? Because there is no guarantee that change will be change for the better, Levoy asserts. I have invested years in my current persona. A certain degree of resistance is probably healthy and my entire immune system is fighting against alien forces that will cause it stress and fear. But what is it I am trying to conserve.? I have honed a degree of skills and relationships over the years and why would I want to jeopardize those investments? All this change may tip over into anarchy. I could fail and look pretty stupid doing it.

Calling can often be a rope strung across the road at chest level. It is trying to separate us from something and it will use any means possible to do so. As I referred to in one of my previous musings, callings can come to us as seeming chaos. But chaos gets a bad rap. The Greeks felt chaos was the pure potential from which all things and beings emerged. Even the bible tells us that chaos existed before the creation of the world. This may imply a deeper truth here about the nature of calling, change, creativity and our responsibility to engage the chaos and calling as a good thing.

But like Moses we constantly say to ourselves “Who am I…to do this thing?” M. Scott Peck is probably one of my favorite authors. His seminal work The Road Less Traveled so succinctly tells us how much our souls and bodies suffer from the Jonah complex. If we were to really believe that God does call us, that He is distinct and particular about His calling, it would demand a much more diligent response, ”Peck says, “It would demand from us all we can possibly give. All that we have, our highest levels of awareness and commitment and loving activity, the constant push toward greater and greater wisdom and effectiveness, self improvement and spiritual growth. It is no wonder the idea is repugnant. It brings us face to face with our own laziness.”

Responding to calling also pushes us face to face with our limitations. It is often the case that we are unaware of our limitations until the letter arrives, until the request is made, until the jump out of the airplane is made and we are in a free fall or so it seems. No one knows the fears hidden in the depths of their hearts until the moment of obedience and response is demanded. Thus, we begin to offer up a litany of defense mechanisms from denial, distraction, repression, projection, procrastination, to down right disobedience like Jonah.

Calling represents our deepest yearnings and questions of the soul. This is why just moving towards them can cause such panic and fear. Something deep within knows the possible consequences and responsibilities that accompany the calling. This is why the act of denial is such a stronghold. The fear of knowing impacts the fear of doing. If we can just forget or repress our deepest longings, we will not need to respond to them.

This is not to down play the giants in the land. They are formidable. Financial issues, job changes, illness, children, family, all can offer up reasons to stay in our current position in life and not rock the boat as it were. Many callings do represent the possible losing of others in our lives. Stepping into something means stepping out of something else. But how long can we resist the resistance?

The hunger for authenticity is a holy longing. It is divine mandate tattooed on the soul and we are restless until we respond to its urgings. But change is so so difficult. We need others. And we need others to not pound us over the head with intense urgings to change – change – change. So in some ways resistance is a messenger telling us something vitally important as to what we hold dear, what we fear we are losing, what we are at risk of never experiencing again. But Carl Jung says it well when he tells us to watch and listen to our resistance. “We would have gained nothing, but would have lost as much as thinkers deprived of their doubt, or moralists deprived of their temptations, or the brave deprived of their fear. That would not be a cure. It would be an amputation.”

That is what this convalescing time in Chicago has done for me regarding the call to start this church. I have been forced to some degree into the “way of descent.” I have known the capitulations that arise from my desire to be liked, my fear of disappointing, my fear of failure, and my fear of financial ruin. I am now beginning to see that all significant change blossoms from the seeds of resistance.

In truth, I have felt this calling for years but I repressed its yearnings. As Greg Levoy reminds us, “If our resistance to a calling doesn’t take the form of outright refusal-whether it’s a quiet withdrawal from life or an obstinate stomp on the ground with a puff of dirt for an exclamaiton point – then it often puts us into a state of suspended animation, a kind of emotional agnosticism in which we neither confirm or deny the call but live in a nether world of maybes.”

Eric Misel, a world class creative coach, tells us in his book Fearless Creating that we “avoid the anxiety of saying yes and the guilt of saying no, though it isn’t a state of calmness and equilibrium and maddening equivocation. Prolonged, it is soul withdrawal and bone dissolving. It is vital that you clearly hear this deadly, silent, “no.” The damned seven-eights no that can steal decades from your life.”

I am beginning to now embrace resistance as a sign of a divine gift waiting for me to open up. It is a good omen of sorts. Mark Gerzon in Coming Into Our Own says that if it feels to safe it is probably not a calling. If it scares you, it probably is. Levoy adds the “the degree of resistance, too, is probably proportionate to the amount of power waiting to be unleashed and the satisfaction to be experienced once the no breaks through to yes and the call is followed, once you allow your passion and faith to wash you overboard and carry you to the shores of Nineveh to be expelled in a pool of ambergris.”

An ancient poet said, “I have spent my days stringing and unstringing my instrument while the song I came to sing remains unsung. Some may misinterpret, however the defense mechanisms our soul so cleverly throws up as we run from calling. There is a degree of laziness that many think might be the fruit of refusal and denial of calling. I have found quite the opposite. I have found that the refusal now throws me into a high degree of narcissism, busyness, and distractions. Workaholisim, for example is one of the accepted vices in our culture thus many running from Nineveh use their work to justify the avoidance. Unfortunately, the louder the calling the more your body must shout over the soul to keep it quiet. This is of course where depression, illness, and emotional collapse enter our current culture. I will write another piece on what my illness is teaching me but I know for sure it is teaching me to walk into the calling and don’t look back.

Unfortunately, the degree to which we must work, run, scream, be distracted to not hear the calling also gives us less energy to pursue it once it comes along. That is why I am convinced that often a degree of shutting down comes right before the emerging. It is the “broken open” concept. We are not opened willingly but through the power of this life to reveal to us what our souls have been telling us for years. “Listen to the Spirit of God!”

The restless noncompliance manifests itself in many forms. Levoy lists them in his book.
Hiding behind discernment… All the heat from the heart is filtered through the head and in the end is riddled with intellectual noncompliance. We pour over books, attend conferences, buy DVD series, and talk with trusted friends but in the end still remain stuck in non responsiveness.

We also wait for the perfect moment. By waiting for the right combination of money, timing, energy, education, freedom and ideal alignment of friends and family, we can throw our calling into a coma As the phrase goes, one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready, three to get ready, three to get ready…

We also tell ourselves grandiose lies. We can’t afford the change in our lives; we don’t have the skills or the money to risk the venture. Although all these things need to be taken into account when obeying a call, often they are stalling techniques to keep us on the hamster wheel. The real truth is we won’t afford it. We won’t re prioritize our lives, we won’t make the sacrifices, won’t forgo eating out in restaurants for six months or whatever it takes to walk into this new place.

Much of our self talk is self imposed. By abdicating the desires of our hearts we surrender out power to outside influences. It becomes the cosmic mother rapping our knuckles on the cookie jar when we reach for the goodies. We are denied for reasons we cannot control.

The results of this is that we become art critics rather than artists, school teachers rather than a parents, a reporter rather than a novelist, Levoy contends. When we replace one calling for another we are often deferring to deeply hidden voices of our family and friends. I am amazed at how much fear comes from those closest to you when you begin to step out into waters you have never traversed. Unfortunately, by listening to those voices, the calling then becomes a looming giant on the horizon and we become intimidated into paralysis. We sabotage ourselves by not mailing in the application, by avoiding making the call, by fearfully avoiding the person or persons we think may disagree with our emergence. If we play this game for a lifetime we can avoid much of the fear but our soul pays a price. These avoidances and distractions now call only part of us to the surface and we only know that part of our souls.

I for one have played the sour grapes approach where I allow all these distractions and people and experiences to be the reason I have not walked into the calling. The results of this is that I offer up only part of myself to my current engagements and in some cases I think people sense the partial presence my soul offers up. I can also look for reason for things to fall apart. I am on a fault finding mission hoping to find out why it is not right place for me. So I go looking for another place, but now, Simone Weil, the novelist said, “The danger is not that the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but that, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.”

A deep calling is a hunger that is only fed by the bread of heaven. Obeying my calling. I have watched many men over the years run from their calling by living a life that is unworthy of them hoping the hounds of heaven will leave them alone. But when God’s yes is louder than your no, there is no where else to go.

To feel inadequate is to be truly human. Most of the men I know carry with them a deep sense of professional and personal inadequacy. What would happen if I followed the desires of my heart and I failed? Then what? I would discover that I am indeed an imposter. So we live our lives making sure we live a safe distance from our calling and run from the voice of God.

I have found that to follow a true calling is to indeed to reveal the very things you have been hiding from in the past. This is the transition of descent to ascent. They go hand in hand. This is why we often fall apart just before we come together. Healing is often a by product of forced change. It is said that the body’s suffering are often the midwife of very great things and true transformation. To follow the calling of God on our lives we must face the message of fear and pain. Could it be an antidote of the American dream? Is our chronic busyness and extroversion a kind of hyper vigilance to keep us from hearing our truest callings?

It is my Christmas prayer that during this season we will listen to our deepest callings. Let us do what Annie Dillard urges us when she says, “The thing is to stalk your calling in a creative skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into the pulse.” The source of this call is the Father and He has much energy, healing, and transformation that accompanies His bidding. There is often a freedom in a seeming collapse. It is His healing love that brings us back into equilibrium. The release of passion now begins to pervade our entire beings and we begin to really see.

My calling has been to community for years. I have longed for vital substantial trusting relationships that would remain and grow in richness and beauty. I believe I have stepped into the threshold of that reality. This is a dream come true for me. I realize in my convalescing that I must be a community to myself as well. The disparate parts of my soul that have plagued me must be welcomed to the table as it were. I must create community in my own heart.

For years I have critiqued the church, stood apart from the fray and commented on leadership, programs, and the ways of organized religion. But deep inside something has been brewing for years and I smell its aroma in my inner most parts. It is not enough now for me to dream but to act. I must embrace this calling regardless of its outworking. Yes, I indeed want to change the world. There , I said it. I am crazy enough to believe that that is what Christ has called us to do. I have allowed particularity and pragmatism to hold off this dream for years. I am convinced it will be born from the imagination and passion. So the question remains, what am I wiling to do to make it happen? I realize that we are all very comfortable even complacent in our current lifestyles. There is always a trade off between security and passion. In Art and Fear, the authors tell us, “Fear about yourself digs into your ability to do your best work. While fears about what others think about you compromises your ability to do you own work.

I would hope that this Christmas my questions and statements could be taken as a gift. As the holiday reminds us of our Savoir it also reminds me of His words, “Go and make disciples.” I realize that this dream may take years to unfold. But I am compelled. I cannot spend the rest of my life regretting responding to His call. The world desperately needs the truth of Christ’s teaching on the Kingdom. I must respond. Matthew Fox said it well when he articulates….”if you get cut off from your passion, then where’s your compassion going to come from?”

Our deepest fears is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. But our playing small doesn’t serve the world. There nothing more enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.” Marianne Williamson

My prayer is that our return from Nineveh will then allow us to walk into our heart’s desired calling. Here is to the heart desired callings that await us- a community of like hearted men and women living life together.

-David Bunker