[The
Great G Minor Symphony, No. 40, by Mozart] was written in the final years of
Mozart's life, when things were not going well. An infant daughter had died a
few weeks earlier, he had moved into a cheaper apartment, and he was begging
friends and acquaintances for loans. But in the summer of 1788, he wrote his
last three symphonies: Symphony Number 39 in E-Flat, Symphony in G Minor, and
the Jupiter symphony. It is not known for sure whether Mozart ever
heard any of these symphonies performed.
The Writer’s
Almanac for July 25, 2014
I sat with my sponsor for ordination, T. Hartley Hall IV, at
a table in the church hall of First Presbyterian Church, Nashville and listened
to the Rev. Fred P. Zitzmann tell me that he didn’t think I was called to ministry. I have
asked myself from time to time in the more than 35 years since whether he was
right.
In my tradition of faith, people never tire of explaining
the nature of a call to ministry. A call, the boilerplate explanation goes, is
composed of three parts: personal
conviction, the possession of the requisite gifts and aptitudes and, finally,
the confirmation of the community of faith as represented by members of a
presbytery committee. On that day many years ago, Fred was saying to me and
Hartley that, as a member of the presbytery committee with the power to say yea
or nay, he was reluctant to concede the third part.
Like most terms and phrases the church uses when it presumes to describe the ways of God with human beings, call, calling or vocation is a notoriously ambiguous and politically malleable idea. Eventually, the Presbytery of Middle
Tennessee formally confirmed that I had a call. When I think of it now in retrospect, this seems like no big
whoop, but then it seemed to represent the validation of my whole life. The
bureaucratic way was finally clear for the Presbytery of Western Kentucky to
ordain me to the ministry of word and sacrament, and so it did on Friday
evening, July 25, 1980 at First Presbyterian Church of Auburn, Kentucky. For those who mark such things, July 25 is the feast of St. James on the church calendar. Hartley
preached the sermon that evening from the First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians, chapter four.
With
me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human
court. I do not even judge myself. I am not aware of anything against myself, but
I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me. Therefore do not
pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to
light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart.
Just so.
Saying what a calling or vocation is not is easier than
saying what it is. It is not a successful
career in the church or anywhere else.
It is not being paid well or, more often, poorly for performing certain
services. It is not identifiable by clothing or uniform or social status or
public opinion or whether one summers in Maine, Montreat or Kanuga. It is not measurable according to any list of
goals and objectives that can, at the end of a funding term, be ticked off as
completed in the final report to an imagined cosmic grant maker.
What is it, then? Having a call implies a certain awareness
of a caller, an inchoate sense of that caller’s summons and a feeling of being
haunted by some mysterious sense of accountability when one does not respond to
that summons.
A calling is not, I say, an experience for any institution
to define or own or evaluate. It is more commonplace than religious people
would have you believe. It is simply finding – giving in and allowing oneself
to be guided to – and doing the thing or combination of things that a person
enjoys, is suited for or can’t not do. Just as Mozart found and did musical
composition, Hemingway found and did the writing of stories or my friend Sandy
Lynch found and does the building, repair and maintenance of anything heavy,
wet or broken.
So Fred, wherever you are, my memory of your pious pronouncement
on me still stings a bit, and reminds me that it is not for you or anyone else
to pass judgment. On this anniversary, it's only for me to ask whether I'm still listening. Just in case I get a call.
