Biography
The Rev. Linda Loving is Pastor of The House of Hope Presbyterian Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. Linda studied to be an actress at the University of Michigan and worked as the Director of Communications at a hospital in Milwaukee before she heard the call to ministry and became a pastor in 1984. She's a former Associate Pastor at the historic Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago, and served later as Senior Pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Oakland, California. Linda continues to act and travels widely to perform a one-woman show based on the life of Julian of Norwich. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"Call: A Taste of Understanding" 
A reading from the Book of Exodus:

Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, "I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up." When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, "Moses, Moses!" And he said, "Here I am." then he said, "Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground." He said further, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.

The Word of the Lord.

"How did you first feel called to ministry?" A question often asked of us most obviously in this profession. Sometimes it's an idle question; small talk from strangers trying to be polite and seem interested, while they scan the room for someone safer to talk to. Sometimes it's a probing question, asked by someone earnestly seeking signposts in their own discernment.

Stories of call. Moses saw a burning bush; Isaiah experienced an earthquake in the temple; Saint Paul was temporarily blinded and thrown to the ground. High drama examples from scripture.

And from the early church, eleventh century mystic Hildegard of Bingen (a favorite of mine) describes her experience as: "a burning light of tremendous brightness coming from heaven poured into my entire mind. Like a flame that does not burn but enkindles, it inflamed my entire heart...just like the sun that warms an object with its rays...All of a sudden I was able to taste of the understanding..." ı

I always feel my own story of call pales in comparison. No special effects. Just a "knowing" one Saturday morning in February as I sat in my living room in the winter sun on my black couch with my French roast coffee. A knowing. A moment of knowing, which so often can only be identified in retrospect. A knowing, or in the lovely words of Hildegard of Bingen, a "taste of understanding." For some it is a burning bush; for some a cup of French roast coffee.

It's interesting to note that students in theological seminaries tend to split fifty-fifty on the call experience: those with moments of high drama and those with quieter "aha's." About half and half. And what about you and your sense of call? The question of call of course is hardly limited to prophets and those in professional ministry! Each and every one of us struggles to know the shape of our life's work; what it is that is distinctly ours to do in the tapestry of creation. I use a phrase from the poetry of Mary Oliver regularly: "tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" God is constantly calling us into being...call is not a one time event. God is not just some Cosmic Career Counselor picking us up by the scruff of the neck and plopping us into this office or that church or this MBA program or that factory. God is constantly calling us into being who it is that we alone can be ... the one thing in life which cannot possibly be delegated!

There is an Hasidic tale about Rabbi Zusya. When he was an old man, he said, "In the coming world, they will not ask me: ‘Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: ‘Why were you not Zusya?'"ıı
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

In her book about listening to the voice of the spirit, Christina Baldwin helpfully poses two questions to the soul: "What do you want me to do?" and "How do I need to change in order to do it?" ııı Call inevitably means change, and resistance can naturally and quickly set in.

Throughout the Bible people of faith protest that they do not have the courage or the words or the power to accomplish what God asks of them. Many of the great prophets respond to God's call by parading their inadequacies and anxieties in order to avoid God's demands. Moses' litany included phrases such as: "Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?" and "they will not believe me or listen to my voice" and "oh, my Lord, I am not eloquent...but I am slow of speech and of tongue" and in spite of all of God's reassurances Moses final counter "Oh my Lord, send I pray some other person." The mighty prophet Jeremiah protested, "Ah, Lord God! Behold, I do not know how to speak for I am only a youth." And the response of Isaiah to the appearance of God, "Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips."

You and I are in remarkable company if we feel a certain resistance when it comes to change; when it comes to God's call. We come up with all the reasons we can't do what is truly possible with God. Yet no one of us wants to be less than who we are, who we fully can be. We long for Hildegard's "taste of understanding"...that knowing; that yes; that stirring which belongs to our soul alone—our one wild and precious life. Ask God: "What do you want me to do?" and "How do I need to change in order to do it?" Dare to ask daily...and you might experience a taste of understanding with or without the burning bush.

It is up to us to ask—up to each and every one of us; each and every wild and precious life. "There is no one but us," writes Annie Dillard in "Holy the Firm."

"There is no one to send,
nor a clean hand nor a pure heart
on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us,
a generation comforting ourselves with the notion
that we have come at an awkward time,
that our innocent fathers are all dead as if innocence had ever been
and our children busy and troubled,
and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready
having each of us chosen wrongly,
made a false start, failed,
yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures,
and grown exhausted unable to seek the thread, weak, and involved.
But there is not one but us.
There never has been."ıV

And so let us seek that thread that we are in the tapestry of creation. There is no one to send but us. God is counting on us; calling to us to, to become the servants only we can be. May God grant us a taste of understanding and may we respond with all that we are.

Amen.


 ı. Bowie, Fiona and Oliver Davies, eds, Hildegard of Bingen: Mystical Writings New York: Crossroad, 1990.
 ıı Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim: The Early Masters, New York: Schocken Books 1975.
 ııı Christina Baldwin, The Seven Whispers, Listening to the Voice of the Spirit, New World Library, Novato 2002.
ıV Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm, Harper Collins Publishers Inc. New York, 1997.

Interview with Linda Loving
Interviewed by Lydia Talbot

Lydia Talbot: Linda, your gripping message on God's calling which came to you as a revelatory, epiphanous moment over a cup of French roast coffee.

Linda Loving: With emphasis on the French roast.

Talbot:  And you're still drinking it.

Loving:  To this day. I wouldn't mess with that formula!

Talbot:  But what's the real difference between calling as a matter of faith, which it was for you, and choosing a career?

Loving:  I always feel that God's hand is in it all. I think in our culture we're so focused on finding the right niche, but the fact of the matter is, that niche changes over time. Did I read recently that people have seven careers in their lives now? That's what they are estimating. So it's just a re-labeling for me, for people of faith. You think in terms of livelihood and career but God's hand is always in the choosing and a blessing of what it is that matches your gifts to what needs to be done. The phrase I always use with myself and with my staff, friends, and colleagues is: What makes your heart sing? For me that is one of the ways that I get at knowing what God is lining me up for the next thing.

Talbot:  One of the things that makes your heart sing is theater and acting. The dialogue between the church and the arts seems to be at the heart of what you do in ministry, Linda. You told me before this show that your performance of the one woman show of Julian of Norwich, you can't let her go. You've been doing this for years, but you can't let her go. What's that about?

Loving:  Well, it's about call, I'm afraid! Every time I try to put this play on the shelf something happens. I do one more performance and someone comes up and says, "I have found God in this. I have found a new way to live in the world because of how this ancient, medieval woman lived and wrote." And to me that again is this intersection of God's call in everyday life: a complete stranger that I'm not going to see again greeting me after a performance. How do you keep listening to the voices that are around you everyday that you might not take in?

Talbot:  You've recently written and directed a reader's theater on Esther. What intrigues you about her story?

Loving:  Oh, Esther is so fascinating because there is that great line in the middle of the book when she's challenged. Mordecai says to her, "Who knows but that you have come to the kingdom for just such a time as this?" It's that same moment of you can't put it on the shelf. God is going to use you. Actually, the reader's theater is another way to make Scripture come alive. I just took the exact words from the Book of Esther and broke them into voices of narration and the different characters. It's a book that typically doesn't get read much, but it comes to complete life in hearing these different voices. Too often we use this velvet toned, "I will now read the scripture" and everyone goes to sleep! So I'm always looking for ways to bring it to life, Lydia. Whether it's through drama or reader's theater or even teaching seminarians how to read scripture that connects their gut and their heads.

Talbot:  For most people it's not a moment of high drama as in Scripture, Moses and the burning bush. There are quiet moments, but you say it's up to us to ask God. What is that? A lot of people are afraid of failure.

Loving:  We are also afraid of what God wants us to do. A lot of it is about fear, our resistence to call. I think that you said the right word when you said the quiet moments. How many of us create the pockets of space in our lives that are quiet, where we are listening, where we stop the whirring of our own agendas, egos, and dreams and really listen to what might be coming in, whether it be from a stranger greeting you or from God?

Talbot: And that wonderful phrase you used, ‘the taste of understanding," from Hildegard of Bingen. How did you discover that?

Loving:  I was wandering around in a book that described the saints. I came across this phrase and maybe it was the connection with the French roast coffee that made we think, "Oh yes, a taste of understanding!" But the other reason I liked the phrase, Lydia, is so often we want the whole thing. We want the burning bush, we want God's voice, and we want the blueprint. That's not how God calls us most of the time.

Talbot:  Receptivity is a key component, isn't it? To be receptive, to listen.

Loving:  And also to trust; to trust that there is a plan that we are to live into. I believe that there's lots of wiggle room in the plan, even though I'm Presbyterian and we have the Predestination thing! There is a lot of wiggle room, I think.

Talbot:  A plan to live into. I must ask you, are there moments as you ponder over a cup of fresh, French roast coffee, what God's calling you to do for the rest of your, to paraphrase poet Mary Oliver, "one wild and precious life"?

Loving:  Yes, absolutely. It's a mistake to think, "Ah, here I am. I've arrived. Now I've got it. This is the job"— a mistake for anybody to be thinking that way. It is evolving, unfolding. It's bound to be filled with surprises.

Talbot:  Do you have a clue as to what it is for you?

Loving:  No, but the discipline, Lydia, is to keep asking the question. Is this right? Is this it? And as we move through the rhythms of our lives, the questions change shape.

Talbot: Thank you so much for helping us see that changing shape in our lives, Linda Loving.

Loving:  It's a joy.