Vocation: Calling by "Little" Name

“John!” 

I was walking from the art fair last Sunday toward our car.  I turned, looked back to look where I had just been, from where (I thought) I’d heard my name called.  I saw no one looking my way, no sign that anyone had called me.  John’s a pretty common name; I supposed that it was some other “John” being hailed, or maybe it was just my imagination.

I remember, some time after my dad had died, hearing his voice speak my name.  “Johnny.”  Just my name, nothing more.  But it was the diminutive, intimate “Johnny”, and not the formal, literal “John.”  We had become close, my dad and I, in the years when his congestive heart failure gradually wore him down.  From some well inside me kindness flowed out weekend after weekend, kindness to him and to my mom, his worn caregiver.  I was a patient listener, encouraging and consoling.  And in return for this, my dad had begun to call me “Johnny”, the name he had called me as a small child.

My mom came to visit us for a few days after he had died.  Hearing Kathy refer to me as “Johnny” she looked intently at me, with the kind of quiet, happy curiosity of a child looking at a Christmas package.  Perhaps the word to describe her look would be “wonder”.  “Kathy called you ‘Johnny’”, she exclaimed.  “That’s niiiiiiice.”  That statement of hers comes back to me again and again.  She used to call my dad “Frank,” but old photos of him when they were courting were marked “Frankie”.  There is only one time I heard her call him “Frankie.”  It was one of the times early in his twenty years of being a heart patient that we thought he was going to die.  She had taken his unresponsive face in her hands, put her cheek next to his, and said, “Ohhh, Frankie, don’t leave me.”  Her voice was like a little girl’s, soft and high-pitched. 

Frederick Buechner in his book Secrets in the Dark speaks of vocation as a calling to us, like “a phone ringing in the night” that we “have to answer somehow or, at considerable cost, not answer.”  But he also describes vocation as calling us like a child running up to us, happy to see us, reaching up to us like my granddaughters run to me, like my daughters and son used to do. 

Vocation is being called not only by name, but by the diminutive form of our name, the familiar, intimate name we were called as children, or as lovers.  It calls to our little, real self, not puffed up or grown yet, not sophisticated or calculating or posturing or adapting.   When we turn our faces to the thing that called us, we see something that finds us not only adequate, but wonderful.  It calls us not to something beyond ourselves, but to some well within ourselves, waiting for us to dip into it and to offer it to whoever is calling us by that name we were called when we were a child.

Maybe that voice I'd heard on Sunday was calling me to consider what had called to me in that day's experience, as I did in my blog yesterday.  Yeah, I think that's it. 

When do you hear something calling you, calling the child in you, the self who has been your companion since forever?

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.