hearing the call

so i've been thinking about vocation -- and jotting ideas into a file to maybe make it into a blog someday -- but probably not because it got too long -- and I already impose enough with my rambling ideas -- and as a result of me thinking about vocation --

i asked Harry to clarify what he meant when, in church last sunday he offhandedly corrected himself,

"when i decided to become a pastor. well...what am i saying...i didn't decide to become a minister..."

and then off he went in another direction.

so he said -- no, he was called by God.

AND it turns out -- had an experience where he *heard* God.

Now I know that some of you readers have had such experiences -- but I have not. I like the Frederich Buechner sense of hearing God THROUGH your own story -- the countours of your life -- in retrospect revealing a shape of God's revelation to you....

But that's as good as it gets for me, folks. I'm interested in how others have experienced this notion of God's "CALL" --

Harry described it as a pure clear thought. Like no other mental clarity that he's experienced. I'd definitely take that.

I've had the argument with my dad & david -- that moderns (and I am one -- like it or not) cannot hear the voice of God because the selective attention that we've trained our brains for is only attending to the bits of reality that conform to the scientific vision....

Sort of a cultural-lenses argument. but i'm willing to surrender these lenses -- if i could find a way to do so that would make me think that possibly i could hear something genuine and authentic (eg. i'm leery of being trained to speak in tongues or be slain in the spirit...as I'm afraid that such experiences may just be physiological experiences...on the other hand C.S. Lewis' retelling of the Cupid / Psyche myth -- in Til We Have Faces ...and or...the way the stable door functions in The Last Battle ... may suggest that i need to let go of my stranglehold on rationality to surf the experience before I can even get to the magic?)

I WANT magic. I WANT the divine -- and I want it in a more immediate package than I've encountered thus far.

You know the first scene in Slacker where Richard Linklater's character talks about how all the decisions in our lives end up being other roads in other realities that we never get to know about. I thought of writing a quest story about a guy who is me who just gives up on rationality in hopes of finding God. I guess he'd leave his job and town and everything. Wouldn't he?

peace~
andrew