Vocation Envy

When I started blogging I given to understand that it was free. Not so ... reading other people's recommended choices of books and music has helped me help Amazon to survive the economic downturn. Even with the chance to 'try before I buy' for the music on Spotify, it is still a pricey endeavour. Maybe this says much about by consumer mentality and the need to possess but more of that another day. The point is, the various reviews have finally pushed me out to buy 'Leonard Cohen live in London.' And I've got vocation envy.

Cohen is manifestly gifted and surely called by God to offer his sometimes less than optimistic commentary on the world, in the hope that some of us will wake up and discover what's been going on around us. He is a poet and a prophet, with a gift for language and perception as well as a strong melody, and I must admit that I am jealous. Jealous in the sense that the 2 CDs I've been listening to, cover the lifetime of his work (there's a few songs I would have liked to be included but were not) and they stand the test of time ... touching thousands of lives. Now I have no ambitions for filling the O2 auditorium when i am 70+ years old, so that people can listen to my top 10 sermons ... ( yes i know you will be grateful) but I do wish there was something less ephemeral about the words I try to script and deliver every week. Maybe I should follow Jim Gordon's advice and leave a Haiku summary of the sermon on every chair.

I do remember Martyn Joseph singing at my ordination and I recall what he said in his prelude: He reflected that he did not envy the preacher's task at all ... he only had to write 10 or 15 new things a year and then got to deliver them over and over again ... not for him need to come up with something fresh and insightful 2 or 3 times a week for every week of the year. I guess I'm somewhat jealous of the way the words of songs like Turn me Tender can touch me and others again and again and go on doing so for a life time.

But then again, by being present every week in the same place and with the same people I am privileged to watch the fellowship I serve, change down through the years. I am part of deepening relationships and growing commitment and regular expressions of grace that I am not so sure I'd know if i were in London tonight, Manhattan tomorrow and then Berlin on Friday.

So maybe I am not so jealous after all ... maybe I am glad that each of has their own calling and that i have my own 'small corner' in which 'my light must shine' and if the light from others occasionally finds its way to me ... then i should pray for them and hope that some of what just might shine out through me, will find its way to others too. After all, the gifts God gives us and the calling heaven issues, are not supposed to place us in a league of competition. The secret is to give thanks for our diversity and to inhabit who we are.

As Mary Oliver says of Praying

It doesn't have to be

the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just

pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which

another voice may speak.