Believe in Your Calling

Ana has been struggling, as many teenagers do, with her identity. I remember reading somewhere that though all of us struggle from time to time, wondering where we fit and what our end is, teenagers often deal with major identity shifts or crises several times a day. To me, this explains a lot: from mood shifts to obsessive comparisions with others, to idealization of pop stars, actors, and the popular girl or the tough guy, to the sometimes painful levels of navel-gazing that is is self-absorption, not self-awareness. It is not necessarily calculating absorption, though;  it is more like a castaway who, floating on a piece of wood in the Atlantic, scans the the line where the ocean meets the sky, desperate for the sign of anything more substantial to hang on to--land or ship. 

This is often the cross of those teenage years: The awareness of themselves as a part of of a larger world crashes into the dream world that is childhood. It is like a death and birth, like the deaths and births that we all go through in different times and stages of life, until our final death and birth into a different order of things. 

Entering formal school for the first time as a young teenager--and a school with high standards and uniforms and the whole nine yards--has been yet another challenge to Ana's identity struggles. The picture of herself that she had painted in homeschooling, small-town Wyoming has been set next to a wider world, a more exacting and city-challenging world--a girls' prep school. What circle of hell is that, you wonder?

Okay, I know, that was really mean of us. 

But analagous to how God believes in us, I believe in Ana, in all my children--they are, with all their faults, ready and willing to take things on, to go Frodo, as I call it. So I have had hope as I walk through this new challenge with Ana, to help her in her shifting sea of daily identity crises and hormonal shifts--for girls are indeed like flowers, too--flowers, as I know well (being a florist of a kind) are the direct precursors to fruit, and they are often extremely delicate, sensitive to subtle changes in weather and nutrients--their beauty is essentially in the sensitivity of the part of the plant that can close itself at night and is easily bruised by the hand, even the oil of the fingers in some cases. It is their sensitivity that somehow, enables them to be fruit-bearers, signs of fruit; as if they are like receptors for the plant, those who must suffer this sensitivity will be a sign: They will flower or die for the sake of bearing fruit, for the sake of another life.

So add this sensitivity to normal teenage identity crisis, and you have a major cross--not only for the child, but also for parents and siblings. We bear with each other and it not just toleration; it is an opportunity to grow in love, to lay one's life down for the other, to become more Christ and less self...but laying one's life down for a moody teenager has been more often too hard for me, in my physical, spiritual, and moral weaknesses--remember, I'm a hormonally challenged middle-aged woman going through the opposite process: out of that sensitivity of physical fruit-bearing time into becoming a Really Cool Battle Axe. 

Hopefully, I will become a flower of sensitivity on a new plane, a fruit-bearing mother on a higher level, as the physical sign of this fades. And though I kind of like the Battle Axe state, perhaps it is within Ana's struggles with identity that I can again become loving. 

And sometimes the little details about a child's life come together to form an epiphany, a sudden realization that every hair on our head has been known from before, and when it would grow, when it would fall. 

So, I've been listening to different expressions of identity crisis every day in the car after school, as we drive through Cherrybrook, Castle Hill, Baulkham Hills, Winston Hills, and finally Old Toongabbie where we live. Some days I've just had enough; some part of me has been worried about her, deeply worried, because she, like me, tends to overthink, to dig too damn deep at all hours. I feel it with her, and remember it--but she is a sweeter, kinder soul, a shining and more innocent and truthful soul, a receptive and loving soul, than me. I could blow it all off more easily, or make sarcastic jokes to protect myself. Ana is not sarcastic; her large brown eyes are symbolic of a large soul, sometimes too open to the world around her. She's the kind of flower you'd like to keep in a greenhouse. Her downside is the same sensitivity that makes her beautiful. Her question, over and over, underneath there, underneath the "I don't have anything to offer that others don't have" or "How am I special?" or "Will I reach my dreams?" is simply: "Who am I? What is my special thing?"

Today, in the midst of some stress and suffering, I was tired, as we drove through the 8 am traffic up to Tangara School for Girls. Then in the midst of Sophie singing some pop song, the epiphany came. I saw the thick bushes which line the drop off/pick up parkinglot, bushes standing guard around quiet spaces covered in gum tree leaves, untrodden by the hundreds of girls coming to school. As Ana was moaning about something to do with school, I remembered St. Therese of Liseux who also did not like school, or felt so often like a fish out of water. Looking at the bushes by the classrooms, I said, "St. Therese would hide in the bushes near her school, Ana."

I thought of St. Therese, hiding in the bushes because she felt so inadequate or afraid of the girls in her school. I thought of how, in school, the comparisons with others becomes a means to identity, but also can be a distraction. I thought of St. Therese as she begged her father to let her come home; and I wondered what would have happened to her had she, like I did, tried to 'fit in' or 'play and win the game.' I played in high school and had some success, on some level. But at what cost? 

I turned to Ana and said, "You must believe in your calling. You, like St. Therese, have a calling to something--some purpose that no one else can articulate or fulfill. Your life has a reason, and you must believe in it."

The words were flowing out, almost from somewhere else, and her big eyes were totally focused on me; a moment where it is soul talking to soul with no distraction, no struggle with words. And like things of God, they are so simple that we wonder why it took so long to see it or know it--as if the pieces that are already there suddenly fit together.

I told her about St. Therese, who willed to leave the way of comparison with others, that way of gaining identity, but who instead struggled to find her place in a convent, who found her calling after struggling with herself, with the pettiness of herself and others, in little daily tasks and exchanges, who found the deepest, largest vocation in the small stuff of life, not in comparison with others. She knew she'd never win that game, and more importantly, had she tried to fit in with the world, or even the others in the convent, the identity of the Little Flower would probably have been segewayed into something quite different. She found that she was meant to be Love in the heart of the Church....a profound calling, a calling so profound that it can be found and done in the smallest of tasks and words. In that she became not a competitor with others, but a source of life for them.

I told Ana, "You must believe in your calling, that you indeed have a calling; that God cares about you that much...and I get frustrated with Him sometimes because He doesn't tell us directly. Dang."

"Mom, maybe if He just told us, we'd reject it."

Yes, I thought. So instead God creates deep desires in us--it is the activities and people and things that we love with a selfless love, the things we would rather be able to do with no pay, and would be happy to go on doing even if no one knew or cared. That is one clue...others are coming from adversity, from having to do things and suffer things that we don't like--these can also give us an understanding of what we do love, and helps us gain the virtue to attain it. 

As Ana opened the car door to go off to another day of school, I said, "It is no accident that you were named after St. Therese." Ana put her gentle hand on my shoulder and then was gone--hopefully not to hide in the bushes but to find herself by looking for God, for His calling, like a lover, across the deep waters inside her.

Finding one's calling is like Teresa of Avila's way of prayer--

"Teresa saw prayer as a garden made for God. We are the gardeners, and we must tend the plants and water them. God's job is to pull the weeds so the good seed can grow.She believed there are four ways to water the plants, or four stages of praying. With each stage, we do less and less of the work until we reach a place of perfect union with God where He becomes the Gardener"(www.christianbooks.com).

The calling is full-grown when we can't tell if God is doing it, or we are doing it, that it doesn't matter to us, any longer, if we are getting credit for it, but know well that the true joy of it, the success of it, comes from the Gardener. 

To get there?

 From Thomas a Kempis:

Sit thou down always in the lowest room and thou shalt be

the lowest. For the highest saints of God are least in their own

sight, and the more glorious they are, so much the lowlier are

they in themselves; full of grace and heavenly glory, they are

not desirous of vain-glory; resting on God and strong in His

might, they cannot be lifted up in any wise. And they who

ascribe unto God all the good which they have received, “seek not

glory one of another, but the glory which cometh from God only,”

and they desire that God shall be praised in Himself and in all

His Saints above all things, and they are always striving for

this very thing.

Thirst for excellence, but for the glory of God, and then it is a calling: and you have found an identity that was set for you from eternity, an identity that cannot be shaken or ripped from you, because it is also in God.