August 5, 2018
I want to thank David Dorsey for inviting me to speak today. The last time I gave a teaching, it was the last Sunday 8th Day met in the “back room” of the Potter’s House before we moved to the Festival Center. I also want to thank Kate Lasso, my friend and spiritual director, who encouraged me to accept David’s invitation. It is always a rich learning experience to prepare a teaching.
Last Sunday Richard and I went to see the movie Mama Mia! Here We Go Again. For those of you who don’t know about Mama Mia, it was a musical stage play which was later made into a movie starring Meryl Streep. It is a story about a carefree woman, Streep, who moves to Greece in the 1970’s, falls in love, and has a daughter. The story incorporates the incredibly infectious music of the super group from Sweden, ABBA. I lived in Southern California in the 1970’s and ABBA was part of the sound track of that era.
When I go to the movies, I almost always become completely immersed in the feelings and atmosphere of the movie I am attending. While watching Mama Mia last weekend, I started to cry. It is a comedy with music, intended to make the audience smile, laugh, and sing along. Why was I crying?
When I tell people I have had over 30 years of therapy, and needed every session, I am NOT joking. What I felt in that movie theatre was the old, familiar sadness that was my constant companion for most of my life. Watching a loving mother sing about her devotion to her child never fails to touch that raw place deep inside of me no amount of therapy can completely erase. It also is part of why I love polar bears so much. They are VERY devoted mothers.
I was left at the hospital in Southern Illinois on the day of my birth. In 1950, there was no soft music, birthing coaches, or the husband at the bedside. My birth mother, a frightened and traumatized date-rape victim, was 15 years old. She went to a hospital emergency room in a cab, driven by her mother’s brother. She was “knocked out” and I was born. She never saw or held me and did not even know whether I was a boy or a girl until I found her 35 years later. My birth parents did not know each other well and my birth father, who was 6 years older than my mother, joined the military and was sent to Korea shortly after finding out about her pregnancy. I believe he joined the military to escape the gossip in the small town where they lived.
Until June of this year, I had never met anyone from my birth father’s family. Finding cousins through Ancestry.com has been a blessing of the computer age. Social justice has yet to reach adult adoptees who are denied their birth information by law and practice in most states in the US. I was adopted by a loving couple who told me I was “chosen” which I imagined meant they walked into a room full of babies and picked me from those on offer. In actuality, the doctor who delivered me in the emergency room facilitated my adoption. He bragged to me, when I called him decades later, that he had arranged 1,500 adoptions. I didn’t know, until I met my birth mother, Jean, that everything the doctor told me was a lie. It is amazing how many older adoptees tell search stories that are almost always filled with hospitals burning down, records destroyed by floods, and court house files being lost. It is difficult to explain to those who know their own birth story, and look like those who raised them, the sadness that can accompany adoption. No one gives a child away when things are going well.
I am sure you are wondering how this relates to our scriptures for today and call.
In our Gospel reading today from John, the people followed Jesus and the disciples to Capernaum. They questioned Jesus because they were astounded by the miracle of the loaves and fishes and Jesus said: (John 26-29, 31-35)
“In all truth I tell you, you are looking for me not because you have seen the signs but because you have had all the bread you wanted to eat. Do not work for food that goes bad, but work for food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of man will give you, for on him the Father, God himself, has set his seal.”
Then they said to him, “What must we do if we are to carry out God’s work?” Jesus answered them: “This is carrying out God’s work: you must believe in the one he has sent.” So they said, “our fathers ate manna in the desert; as scripture says: He gave them bread from heaven to eat.”
Jesus answered them: ….”it is my Father who gives you the bread from heaven, the true bread; … and gives life to the world. I am the bread of life. No one who comes to me will ever hunger; no one who believes in me will ever thirst.”
God’s abundance and abundant love is all around us. I see and experience both in this community. I am fed every Sunday when we pass the Peace and pray together during Community Prayers, and my thirst is quenched when I hear someone else bring a teaching from their heart.
In Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, Chapter 4: 1, 4-7, 12, 15-16; he says
I, the prisoner in the Lord, urge you therefore to lead a life worthy of the vocation to which you were called. There is one Body, one Spirit, just as one hope is the goal of your calling by God. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God and Father of all, through all and within all. On each one of us God’s favour has been bestowed in whatever way Christ allotted it. …to knit God’s holy people together for the work of service to build up the Body of Christ. If we live by the truth and in love, we shall grow completely into Christ, who is the head by whom the whole Body is fitted and joined together, every joint adding its strength, for each individual part to work according to its function. So the body grows until it has built itself up in love.
I grew up feeling worthless. If my own mother gave me away, I must not be important. I was about five or six years old when I found out I was adopted. My parents, adoptive brother, and I attended the Methodist Church. When we sang “Jesus Loves Me” in Sunday school, I wondered if God thought I was worth something. I talked to God a lot and believed He heard my prayers. In Psalm 139:13-16 it says
You created my inmost self, knit me together in my mother’s womb. For so many marvels I thank you; a wonder am I, and all your works are wonders. You knew me through and through, my being held no secrets from you, when I was being formed in secret, textured in the depths of the earth. Your eyes could see my embryo. In your book all my days were inscribed, every one that was fixed is there.
When a child feels alone, he or she talks to angels, imaginary friends, or God, just to dispel the fear and darkness. I don’t know why I had a deep faith at such a young age, but I experienced many traumatic events before the age of eight. And I know it was God and his angels who helped me survive.
Elizabeth O’Connor was one of the small band of radical Christians, alongside Mary & Gordon Cosby, who helped found the Church of the Saviour. I came to Church of the Saviour when I was invited to 8th Day in 1984 by my friend, Kent Beduhn, when we were both social work students at Catholic University. I was introduced to the concept of call from reading Elizabeth’s books as well as in 8th Day ‘s School of Christian Living classes. I have gone through several iterations of what I thought of as my call. I may hold a record, with Tom Brown, of waiting the most years before becoming a Covenant Member of 8th Day. Because of my early life, I have a deep yearning for connection, yet I fear intimacy. It was more than 2 decades before I was ready to join a mission group and I felt called by the mission of Retreat. I truly love Dayspring but being a part of that mission group didn’t work out for reasons I don’t have time to explain this morning. Then I joined the Banyan Tree Mission Group and that didn’t work out for other reasons. But the Community of 8th Day has been a very important part of my life. It is where I have been anchored and encouraged to fly.
Today, I believe my call is to the Arctic and the preservation of polar bears. My love of all things polar bear started when I first visited the Arctic in 2010. Churchill, Manitoba, Canada, is called the “polar bear capital of the world”. I went to Churchill to photograph the polar bears. Little did I know it would be a trip that would change my life. That trip combined my love of photography and my fascination with wildlife. As I watched the polar bears every day, outside the specialized trailer where we stayed, I fell in love with the majestic “ice bears” as well as the austere beauty of the Arctic. There are few trees, it is cold, and usually overcast. Even in 2010, there was little snow in November. But felt my heart leap inside my chest as I listened to the naturalists explain the plight of the polar bear if we didn’t do something to reverse climate change. Without ice, polar bears can not hunt for their primary food, ringed and bearded seals. If female polar bears do not have sufficient food, they will not get pregnant nor can they nurse their cubs if their weight drops too low.
You are probably asking yourself, how can raising awareness about polar bears and the Arctic be a calling? There are days when I ask myself the same question, but as I prepare to leave in ten days for another photography trip, this time to Norway and Franz Josef Land, Russia, I am more certain about this call than I was in 2016, when I last photographed my “beloved bears” in Alaska.
In the early days of the Church of the Saviour, Gordon Cosby, as quoted by Elizabeth O’Connor in Call to Commitment, talked about call when he said “the person knows himself to be grasped by God for a task that only he can do and the Church must have done.” Marjory Bankson, in The Call to the Soul, writes “call is specific, urgent, and separates me from the crowd.” She goes on to say “call is an invitation to wholeness, a spiritual prompting to complete the work of love that we are here to do. Attending to call implies belief in the Greater Being and the possibility of making connections with the unseen realm of Spirit that holds all things together.”
Elizabeth also writes about call and gifts in The Eighth Day of Creation published in 1971. In the early days of Church of the Saviour people were asked “what are your gifts?” She wrote “another way of asking that question is, “What is your call?” Elizabeth so eloquently describes call by writing “In our wishes, small urgings, dreams, and fantasies, we are given intimations of the way we are to go. We can learn our way only by taking seriously the sign that we see and the small voice we hear. These we must treasure up in our hearts and ponder over. The code we are to decipher is written into our genes and sent out to us, as it were, from the core of our beings.” In Cry Pain, Cry Hope, published in 1987, Elizabeth writes “I thought the important subject was gifts…if only we could identify our gifts, and begin using them …our world would be restored. Now I’m not so sure. Even for extraordinary folk, call determines whether or how they use their gifts.” She goes on to write, “To see visions or to hear call without being faithful to one’s most ardent yearnings is utterly impossible.”
Call feels impossible, is written into our DNA, comes to us in dreams and visions, and it urges us forward, on a journey whose end we can’t see. I am grateful I found the Church of the Saviour and 8th Day, places where the impossible becomes doable, where my envisioned dreams are encouraged, and my journey is celebrated.
Today I am a part of several Communities: social work, the high-rise building where I live, 8th Day, and the community of the Arctic, which includes the flora and fauna that reside there – especially polar bears. Spending time in the midst of the polar bears, at a safe distance of course, gives me a sense of joy which is difficult to describe. I cannot imagine a world without polar bears, but, sadly, I know that day may come. Climate change, with its extreme weather, heat, droughts, wildfires, coastal erosion, and extinction of many species of plants and animals, is real.
Climate change is the crisis of our age and my call is to use my photography, my knowledge and love of polar bears, gained from my trips to the Arctic, to tell anyone who will listen about the polar bears and the precarious future they face. I am an artist, educator, activist, and dreamer. If God calls me, a woman who was created in violence, abandoned, and abused, She calls you as well. Let’s take on what feels like an insurmountable crisis together. God surely will accompany us on our journey.
I want to close with a poem by the late Irish poet, John O’Donohue:
You can trust the promise of this opening: Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning that is at one with your life’s desire. Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk; Soon you will be at home in a new rhythm, for your soul senses the world that awaits you.