Essays
Learning to Listen (2003) Craig Loya
These days, I often run into a question that I've come to dread: "What made you want to become a priest?" It's a fair question, really. In mainstream American society, priests are often regarded with suspicion, or even outright contempt (or of course there's the opposite: unbridled reverence). At the very least, they're seen as a bit of an oddity. The word itself sounds ancient, outdated, even boding, and people quite understandably wonder what would make someone actually want to choose such a profession. So it's not that I fault a person for asking, and it's not that I don't want to answer the question. What bothers me is that I know my response is not going to be very satisfying. Everything made me want to become a priest – everything that has ever happened to me, everything I've ever been interested in, everything I've been good at, everything I've ever wanted to do. There is no simple, short, and polite answer to the question. There's no one supernatural experience I can point to, or a single mystical moment I can describe.
Saying that everything made me want to become a priest, however, is different than saying I've always wanted to be a priest. I haven't. My ability to hear God's call in my life was the result of a gradual process whereby I learned to read my experiences, my world, and the stirrings of my own heart as a story complete with themes, motifs, crises, and symbolic moments and events. The better I was able to read this story, the more I came to understand myself and who I needed and wanted to become.
I learned to listen to God's voice through the more or less commonplace experience of going to college. And I went to an ordinary liberal arts college with a rather loose religious affiliation; it was not as if someone were shoving doctrine down my throat for four years. It was just college. But my immersion in the liberal arts tradition opened my ears so that I was able to hear the voice of God. I had no idea that this is what had happened until the whole thing was over and done with.
Most people do not think of themselves as being "called" by God. Those who claim that God speaks to them are, at best, priests or ministers who have little in common with the lives of most people, or they are religious fanatics, or at worst, violent crazies. When I arrived at Hastings College in the fall of 1995, I didn't think much about God calling me. I knew I wanted to be an actor, and I didn't think God had anything to do with that at all. I was receiving a scholarship for theater, and I didn't hesitate to declare myself a major. I was set to go and that was that. And for the first year or so that's what I did. I became deeply involved in college theatrics, and I spent most of my time in the theater building, thinking about theater, and taking theater classes.
In the fall of my sophomore year, however, a strange thing began to happen. I began actually to enjoy the other classes I had to take – you know, the dreaded LAP core. I took an English course that excited me, and I took a religion course that challenged just about everything I thought I knew about the Bible and the Christian faith. I continued to be active in the college's theater department, but I gradually became involved in more and more curricular and extra-curricular activities. Yet it didn't seem like I was getting involved in a lot of different things; rather, I was studying the same things, but from different perspectives and on different levels. And stories seemed to be the center that was holding it all together. After all, to study literature is to study the stories people tell; theater is essentially proclaiming these same kinds of stories through actions rather than print; religion looks at the ways cultures have placed these human stories in a grander, cosmic context, relating them to a power greater than any one person or group. Even outside the disciplines of the humanities – in the hard and social sciences – everything seemed to be about stories. Suddenly my chemistry experiments were a way of analyzing the narratives of the elemental world, and politics was a way of acting out the human drama in terms of government policies, laws, and social contracts.
As I became more and more enthused about all of these connections and ideas, I began to develop something approaching a friendship with several of my professors. A few of them suggested that I think about graduate school and pursuing a career in teaching. This made sense; if being a teacher was anything like my experience of being a student, I was in. And so my desire to become an actor was gradually transformed into my desire to be a teacher. I was so in love with what was happening around me – all of the ideas and connections and patterns that were emerging in my understanding of the world – and teaching seemed like a good way to extend this process over a lifetime.
Of course, faith had to be thrown into the mix. I can't imagine that anyone would choose my current off-center profession without actually believing in what he or she is preaching. Before college, faith had always been an ebbing and flowing presence in my life, but it took a new turn and a new character during the four years I was learning how to listen. I began to see God in places and ways I would have never guessed: in the surprising faith of friends, in the fictional and dramatic characters I continued to obsess over, in the assured faith of the elders and emeriti who worshiped every week at the First Presbyterian Church. We who are heirs of the Enlightenment are always and in various ways being told that critical thought is the great exposer of the lie of faith. But not only was I learning that God could take my scrutiny, I was also realizing, much to my surprise, that God could actually be found in the very process of critical thought itself.
If there were ever a mystical moment when God's voice came crashing from the heavens, it happened during my sophomore year while I was trying to kill some time at my part-time job. I was working at a small bookstore in town and, as was often the case, I was a little bored. I was leafing through the religion shelves and picked up a Book of Common Prayer, which is the main source of worship and belief for the Episcopal Church. In those pages I happened upon the service for the ordination of a priest, and as I read the words the bishop says to the ordinand just before the sacred moment, it all made sense. "Now you are called to work as a pastor, priest, and teacher...." That was it. This is what had been happening to me and what I'd been trying to figure out all along. The professors who had been guiding me through ideas and decisions with a healthy dose of friendship had really been like pastors to me, and it was precisely this part of their job – the way their truth-seeking was inseparable from their relationships – that had made me want to do what they do. A priest is a lot like a principal character in the drama of the Church's worship, whereby the story of the faith is played out over and over to ground God's people ever more deeply in its truth. And the teaching office of ordained ministry meant that I would be able to continue sharing ideas and connections the way I thought I would as a teacher. So there it was, and there I was: pastor, priest, and teacher.
My car happened to be in the shop that evening and so I asked a friend to pick me up from work. When I got in his car, without really even thinking about it, I said, "I'm going to be a priest." I don't remember exactly what he said in response, but I remember he took me much more seriously than I had taken myself. That's the thing about God's voice: you don't always recognize it for what it is. I certainly didn't think of it as God's voice at the time. God's call comes softly and imperceptibly at first. It starts as a pulling, a restlessness maybe, that gradually begins to fill more and more of our minds and our lives.
Indeed, it is only by reading my life backward from where I am now that I fully realize how significant that moment was. I continued to wrestle with what I was going to do. Sometimes I felt like being a priest, sometimes I felt like being an English professor, and sometimes I felt like selling real estate because that's what a certain character in one of my favorite books happened to do. Even though God's voice spoke so clearly in that moment, I still wasn't done learning how to listen and how to hear. So the process continued. I knew I would need to go to graduate school to do any of these things, so I put my energy into applying and deciding where to go rather than deciding for certain what I really wanted to do.
Just as everything seemed to fit together in the ordained office of pastor, priest, and teacher, so did everything come together for me at Yale Divinity School. I knew I wanted to study either religion or literature, so that made my choice pretty easy. Also, there was an Episcopal seminary fully integrated into this otherwise non-denominational school. If I went to Yale, all of my options remained in front of me. Like so many others, I had managed to find a graduate school that would prolong the college life I loved so much.
My time at Yale continued to tune me in to God's voice speaking through the events and connections and coincidences of life. A discussion in class, an unlikely friendship, a moment of what felt like pure joy, a week of utter frustration – all of these kinds of experiences that cycle constantly through our lives began to pull me in bigger and smaller ways. Toward what, exactly, I still wasn't sure, but it was all starting to make sense, even though I couldn't tell what the sense might be. Still, I was beginning to trust the smaller moments where I felt pushed or pulled by something that was going on within or around me.
I didn't have anything to do the summer after my second year of divinity school, and one evening I just happened to hear a presentation about an internship opportunity with the Episcopal Church on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. It sounded interesting enough, so I signed up, not expecting anything, really, apart from filling some down time during the summer. But over the course of those few months I fell in love with the place, and with the people who lived there. I fell in love with the particular challenges and issues that go along with ministering and communicating the gospel between and across cultures. I fell in love with the smallness of the churches and with the depth of relationships, the spiritual communion, that was possible in them. Because it is rural and very isolated, South Dakota is not the most attractive place for clergy to relocate, and so they were short of priests to serve the churches of the diocese. As it turned out, the church's peculiar needs corresponded exactly with my strengths. As Frederick Buechner says, "the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." On the Rosebud Reservation I had found both my joy and my place in the world's great hunger. A process that had begun as a vague and half-serious notion on a boring night in a bookstore was finding its specific fulfillment in a way and in a place I would have never imagined. By this time, I had learned to recognize God's voice when it was screaming at me.
Upon returning to Yale, I made arrangements to begin my ordained ministry on the Rosebud, and within the year everything was in place. So here I am, still struggling to listen and respond to this calling, wherever it might be heard and wherever it might lead. Listening and hearing are tools that I have been given by my various educational experiences. Some days I am better at using them than others, but I know the voice is always there. Eight years ago, when I arrived at Hastings College, I wanted to be an actor. While I was at Hastings, God spoke to me through events and people, and often in contexts that had little to do with "religion." Or perhaps a better way to describe what happened to me at Hastings is that I learned how to listen to God's voice in the story of my life.
While I was in college – when I was an English major, a religion major, and a theater student – there was another question I came to dread as much as the one I fear now. Whenever I would tell someone what I was studying, they would inevitably follow up with, "So, what are you going to do with that?" College students, especially liberal arts students who have very broadly defined majors and take courses in just about everything imaginable, have always feared this question from parents and from other concerned parties. I'm not sure there is a completely honest or satisfying answer that can be given in response. The fact of the matter is that a liberal arts education isn't really something you do anything with. A liberal arts education teaches a person how to read the world, how to read his or her life, and how to listen. When we listen to our lives we will most likely want to do all kinds of things, and hopefully we will do all kinds of different things over the course of the lives we have been given. What someone does to earn a living should be a consequence of his or her particular vocation, not its exact equivalent. Who we are and where we find our joy will lead us to what we must do, and if we know who we are, we can also trust that we are doing the right thing.
So there is only one question that really counts in the end: who am I called to be? A liberal arts education, when it is faithfully bestowed and mindfully attained, forces us to confront this question head on. "Who am I called to be?" The good news is that there is usually no one right answer Ð indeed, there may be several. At different points in our lives we are called to be different things. Our job is to learn how to listen for a call as we read our lives and our world. And a person does not necessarily have to affirm that God is the source in order for it to be a legitimate calling. The spirit of life beckons us wherever and whenever we are. A person can ignore it, to be sure (and I suspect that too often this is the case), but the liberal arts will do their best to prevent this. The liberal arts say that you must listen and you must hear. And this, finally, is their gift.
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Learning to Listen (2003) Craig Loya
These days, I often run into a question that I've come to dread: "What made you want to become a priest?" It's a fair question, really. In mainstream American society, priests are often regarded with suspicion, or even outright contempt (or of course there's the opposite: unbridled reverence). At the very least, they're seen as a bit of an oddity. The word itself sounds ancient, outdated, even boding, and people quite understandably wonder what would make someone actually want to choose such a profession. So it's not that I fault a person for asking, and it's not that I don't want to answer the question. What bothers me is that I know my response is not going to be very satisfying. Everything made me want to become a priest – everything that has ever happened to me, everything I've ever been interested in, everything I've been good at, everything I've ever wanted to do. There is no simple, short, and polite answer to the question. There's no one supernatural experience I can point to, or a single mystical moment I can describe.
Saying that everything made me want to become a priest, however, is different than saying I've always wanted to be a priest. I haven't. My ability to hear God's call in my life was the result of a gradual process whereby I learned to read my experiences, my world, and the stirrings of my own heart as a story complete with themes, motifs, crises, and symbolic moments and events. The better I was able to read this story, the more I came to understand myself and who I needed and wanted to become.
I learned to listen to God's voice through the more or less commonplace experience of going to college. And I went to an ordinary liberal arts college with a rather loose religious affiliation; it was not as if someone were shoving doctrine down my throat for four years. It was just college. But my immersion in the liberal arts tradition opened my ears so that I was able to hear the voice of God. I had no idea that this is what had happened until the whole thing was over and done with.
Most people do not think of themselves as being "called" by God. Those who claim that God speaks to them are, at best, priests or ministers who have little in common with the lives of most people, or they are religious fanatics, or at worst, violent crazies. When I arrived at Hastings College in the fall of 1995, I didn't think much about God calling me. I knew I wanted to be an actor, and I didn't think God had anything to do with that at all. I was receiving a scholarship for theater, and I didn't hesitate to declare myself a major. I was set to go and that was that. And for the first year or so that's what I did. I became deeply involved in college theatrics, and I spent most of my time in the theater building, thinking about theater, and taking theater classes.
In the fall of my sophomore year, however, a strange thing began to happen. I began actually to enjoy the other classes I had to take – you know, the dreaded LAP core. I took an English course that excited me, and I took a religion course that challenged just about everything I thought I knew about the Bible and the Christian faith. I continued to be active in the college's theater department, but I gradually became involved in more and more curricular and extra-curricular activities. Yet it didn't seem like I was getting involved in a lot of different things; rather, I was studying the same things, but from different perspectives and on different levels. And stories seemed to be the center that was holding it all together. After all, to study literature is to study the stories people tell; theater is essentially proclaiming these same kinds of stories through actions rather than print; religion looks at the ways cultures have placed these human stories in a grander, cosmic context, relating them to a power greater than any one person or group. Even outside the disciplines of the humanities – in the hard and social sciences – everything seemed to be about stories. Suddenly my chemistry experiments were a way of analyzing the narratives of the elemental world, and politics was a way of acting out the human drama in terms of government policies, laws, and social contracts.
As I became more and more enthused about all of these connections and ideas, I began to develop something approaching a friendship with several of my professors. A few of them suggested that I think about graduate school and pursuing a career in teaching. This made sense; if being a teacher was anything like my experience of being a student, I was in. And so my desire to become an actor was gradually transformed into my desire to be a teacher. I was so in love with what was happening around me – all of the ideas and connections and patterns that were emerging in my understanding of the world – and teaching seemed like a good way to extend this process over a lifetime.
Of course, faith had to be thrown into the mix. I can't imagine that anyone would choose my current off-center profession without actually believing in what he or she is preaching. Before college, faith had always been an ebbing and flowing presence in my life, but it took a new turn and a new character during the four years I was learning how to listen. I began to see God in places and ways I would have never guessed: in the surprising faith of friends, in the fictional and dramatic characters I continued to obsess over, in the assured faith of the elders and emeriti who worshiped every week at the First Presbyterian Church. We who are heirs of the Enlightenment are always and in various ways being told that critical thought is the great exposer of the lie of faith. But not only was I learning that God could take my scrutiny, I was also realizing, much to my surprise, that God could actually be found in the very process of critical thought itself.
If there were ever a mystical moment when God's voice came crashing from the heavens, it happened during my sophomore year while I was trying to kill some time at my part-time job. I was working at a small bookstore in town and, as was often the case, I was a little bored. I was leafing through the religion shelves and picked up a Book of Common Prayer, which is the main source of worship and belief for the Episcopal Church. In those pages I happened upon the service for the ordination of a priest, and as I read the words the bishop says to the ordinand just before the sacred moment, it all made sense. "Now you are called to work as a pastor, priest, and teacher...." That was it. This is what had been happening to me and what I'd been trying to figure out all along. The professors who had been guiding me through ideas and decisions with a healthy dose of friendship had really been like pastors to me, and it was precisely this part of their job – the way their truth-seeking was inseparable from their relationships – that had made me want to do what they do. A priest is a lot like a principal character in the drama of the Church's worship, whereby the story of the faith is played out over and over to ground God's people ever more deeply in its truth. And the teaching office of ordained ministry meant that I would be able to continue sharing ideas and connections the way I thought I would as a teacher. So there it was, and there I was: pastor, priest, and teacher.
My car happened to be in the shop that evening and so I asked a friend to pick me up from work. When I got in his car, without really even thinking about it, I said, "I'm going to be a priest." I don't remember exactly what he said in response, but I remember he took me much more seriously than I had taken myself. That's the thing about God's voice: you don't always recognize it for what it is. I certainly didn't think of it as God's voice at the time. God's call comes softly and imperceptibly at first. It starts as a pulling, a restlessness maybe, that gradually begins to fill more and more of our minds and our lives.
Indeed, it is only by reading my life backward from where I am now that I fully realize how significant that moment was. I continued to wrestle with what I was going to do. Sometimes I felt like being a priest, sometimes I felt like being an English professor, and sometimes I felt like selling real estate because that's what a certain character in one of my favorite books happened to do. Even though God's voice spoke so clearly in that moment, I still wasn't done learning how to listen and how to hear. So the process continued. I knew I would need to go to graduate school to do any of these things, so I put my energy into applying and deciding where to go rather than deciding for certain what I really wanted to do.
Just as everything seemed to fit together in the ordained office of pastor, priest, and teacher, so did everything come together for me at Yale Divinity School. I knew I wanted to study either religion or literature, so that made my choice pretty easy. Also, there was an Episcopal seminary fully integrated into this otherwise non-denominational school. If I went to Yale, all of my options remained in front of me. Like so many others, I had managed to find a graduate school that would prolong the college life I loved so much.
My time at Yale continued to tune me in to God's voice speaking through the events and connections and coincidences of life. A discussion in class, an unlikely friendship, a moment of what felt like pure joy, a week of utter frustration – all of these kinds of experiences that cycle constantly through our lives began to pull me in bigger and smaller ways. Toward what, exactly, I still wasn't sure, but it was all starting to make sense, even though I couldn't tell what the sense might be. Still, I was beginning to trust the smaller moments where I felt pushed or pulled by something that was going on within or around me.
I didn't have anything to do the summer after my second year of divinity school, and one evening I just happened to hear a presentation about an internship opportunity with the Episcopal Church on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. It sounded interesting enough, so I signed up, not expecting anything, really, apart from filling some down time during the summer. But over the course of those few months I fell in love with the place, and with the people who lived there. I fell in love with the particular challenges and issues that go along with ministering and communicating the gospel between and across cultures. I fell in love with the smallness of the churches and with the depth of relationships, the spiritual communion, that was possible in them. Because it is rural and very isolated, South Dakota is not the most attractive place for clergy to relocate, and so they were short of priests to serve the churches of the diocese. As it turned out, the church's peculiar needs corresponded exactly with my strengths. As Frederick Buechner says, "the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." On the Rosebud Reservation I had found both my joy and my place in the world's great hunger. A process that had begun as a vague and half-serious notion on a boring night in a bookstore was finding its specific fulfillment in a way and in a place I would have never imagined. By this time, I had learned to recognize God's voice when it was screaming at me.
Upon returning to Yale, I made arrangements to begin my ordained ministry on the Rosebud, and within the year everything was in place. So here I am, still struggling to listen and respond to this calling, wherever it might be heard and wherever it might lead. Listening and hearing are tools that I have been given by my various educational experiences. Some days I am better at using them than others, but I know the voice is always there. Eight years ago, when I arrived at Hastings College, I wanted to be an actor. While I was at Hastings, God spoke to me through events and people, and often in contexts that had little to do with "religion." Or perhaps a better way to describe what happened to me at Hastings is that I learned how to listen to God's voice in the story of my life.
While I was in college – when I was an English major, a religion major, and a theater student – there was another question I came to dread as much as the one I fear now. Whenever I would tell someone what I was studying, they would inevitably follow up with, "So, what are you going to do with that?" College students, especially liberal arts students who have very broadly defined majors and take courses in just about everything imaginable, have always feared this question from parents and from other concerned parties. I'm not sure there is a completely honest or satisfying answer that can be given in response. The fact of the matter is that a liberal arts education isn't really something you do anything with. A liberal arts education teaches a person how to read the world, how to read his or her life, and how to listen. When we listen to our lives we will most likely want to do all kinds of things, and hopefully we will do all kinds of different things over the course of the lives we have been given. What someone does to earn a living should be a consequence of his or her particular vocation, not its exact equivalent. Who we are and where we find our joy will lead us to what we must do, and if we know who we are, we can also trust that we are doing the right thing.
So there is only one question that really counts in the end: who am I called to be? A liberal arts education, when it is faithfully bestowed and mindfully attained, forces us to confront this question head on. "Who am I called to be?" The good news is that there is usually no one right answer Ð indeed, there may be several. At different points in our lives we are called to be different things. Our job is to learn how to listen for a call as we read our lives and our world. And a person does not necessarily have to affirm that God is the source in order for it to be a legitimate calling. The spirit of life beckons us wherever and whenever we are. A person can ignore it, to be sure (and I suspect that too often this is the case), but the liberal arts will do their best to prevent this. The liberal arts say that you must listen and you must hear. And this, finally, is their gift.
