The Sacred Calls - Dorothy Hunt

 How does the Sacred call to you?  Through deep longing?
Through loving? Through the birth of an infant or the death of
a beloved friend?  Through the silence of a forest or the 
magnificence of waves crashing at sea? Through a teacher or
teaching? A guru or a God?  A scripture or a spiritual tradition?
Through art, poetry, music? Playing with your dog, sitting with your
cat? Through a meditation practice or practice of service?  Or
does the Sacred calling come when you are most desperate, most
vulnerable, unable to know what to do, where to go, how to address
the pain you are suffering or the suffering you see all around you?

Does it call you to your knees when you don't know where else
to turn?

What if the Sacred is actually calling us every moment: Come; see!
See what you are, what this moment is.  Come back Home.
Return - again and again and again!

Many of us think that a sacred calling is a calling to "do," but my
sense is that the Sacred calls us to "be," calls us to surrender to
Being, and in the "being" the doing happens spontaneously.  It is
Being, rather than self, that is always becoming.  Whether we
resonate with the idea of a Supreme Being, or simply Being Itself,
surrender is a humbling act of acknowledging that the human mind
cannot fathom the Mystery of the universe, cannot "know" its Source
as an object, and in innumerable ways each day, does not even
know how to accept the moment it finds itself experiencing.  The
mind does not know how to surrender.  Yet over time, and with
Grace, it may discover its own limitations in the face of the Unknown
and let go of its illusion of control, its illusion of separation, its 
illusion of a self.  It may become so emptied of its false identity,
that Truth simply moves itself without anyone to know how or why
or when.

It seems to me that the Unnamable is here having a human
experience, and yet in the deepest place in our hearts, we may
sense that this  expression called "human" Being is called by the
 Sacred to experience the Sacred as what we are, what life is. 
It appears the Sacred enjoys this dance with Itself.  In this dance,
we are invited to find out what is here when all we have believed
 about ourselves - the ways we have identified with thought,
feeling, body, memory, image - falls away, or is stripped away, or
 simply melts in its encounter with the Sacred. When all the forms
 of thought, memory, feeling, etc. have disappeared, what is left?

Being a human expression of life does not mean we have no
perception of choice, or of moving toward or away from our
experience of the Sacred, toward or away from what is most true
within.  Rather than a calling to be something, perhaps the Sacred
is calling to us to be, to see, to respond from what is most
sacred within us.  Perhaps the Sacred calling calls us to come out
of hiding - hiding our true self, hiding our true radiance, hiding
the Light that is here shining....

How does the Sacred call to you?  What does it beckon you to
discover, to sense, to be?  Perhaps the Sacred calling is not your
life's work, but discovering who/what is actually living life - your
life, to be precise!  You may discover there is no moment where we
can actually divide life into sacred and secular, holy and unholy.
Dream, dreamer and dreamed may disappear into What has no
name, no attributes and yet continually calls from itself to itself
within our own experience to be, to see, to love.

Dorothy Hunt
Buddhist Teacher

with thanks to No Mind's Land

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering