My church's intern minister preached her first service with us this past Sunday, on the topic of vocation. The Call to Worship was Mary Oliver's Wild Geese. The text that's stayed with me all week, however, is the excerpt she read from Howard Thurman's The Sound of the Genuine. There were several audible reactions in the congregation -- not quite gasps, but sharp "someone said that?" inhalations -- as she read aloud these words:

There is something in every one of you that waits, listens for the genuine in yourself--and if you can not hear it, you will never find whatever it is for which you are searching and if you hear it and then do not follow it, it was better that you had never been born. You are the only you that has ever lived; your idiom is the only idiom of its kind in all the existences, and if you cannot hear the sound of the genuine in you, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.

In reading the entire speech (delivered to a graduating class at a women's college in 1980), the section that grabbed me the most was this one:

If I were to ask you what is the thing that you desire most in life this afternoon, you would say a lot of things off the top of your head, most of which you wouldn't believe. But you would think that you were saying the things that I thought you ought to think that you should say. But I think that if you were stripped to whatever there is in you that is literal and irreducible and you tried to answer that question, it may be something like this:

I want to feel that I am thoroughly and completely understood so that now and then I can take my guard down and look out around me and not feel that I will be destroyed with my defenses down.

I want to feel completely vulnerable, completely naked, completely exposed and absolutely secure. This is what you look for in your children when you have them. This is what you look for in your husband if you get one. That I can run the risk of radical exposure and know that the eye that beholds my vulnerability will not step on me. That I can feel secure in my awareness of the active presence of my own idiom in me.

So as I live my life then, this is what I am trying to fulfill. It doesn't matter whether I become a doctor, lawyer, housewife, that I'm secure because I hear the sound of the genuine in myself, and having learned to listen to that, I can become quiet enough, still enough to hear the sound of the genuine in you.

Yesterday, I was telling a friend about a discussion at Havi's about what goes into the books that we are -- the things that we discover to be non-negotiable no matter how often we get told they shouldn't matter, or how much we might ourselves wish otherwise (I'm still mourning some of the shoes I've given away, but I really, truly cannot wear heels taller than 1.5 inch. Also, I feel tons better when I eat Israeli-style breakfasts -- chopped cucumber, hummous, etc. -- instead of breads and dairy. And so on).

As Havi emphasizes, "Having an Absolutely Absolutely doesn't mean you can't change it later.... At the same time, there is value in taking certain pieces of information so seriously that -- just for now -- they get an Absolutely Absolutely. It lets you experiment with the things that aren't as precarious. To use the absolutely absolutely to create some extra padding, extra safety."

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Monday was National Coming Out Day. I outlined an entry during my Talking Library shift and then, well, the week did its usual running away from me. But for what they're worth, a few notes: the most reaction I've ever received in response to a sermon has been to Unicorns, Hippogriffs, and Bisexuals; earlier this year, Holling Smith-Borne spoke on transgender experience and issues in a service titled Beyond Male and Female; and last week, when I first read Ocean Vuong's It Gets Better... NOW, my immediate reaction was hand-in-the-air Preach.

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Last but not least, some publication news: microcosms featured a little horror poem by me yesterday, and I received a surprise contract in the mail: Chronicle will be publishing a prayer journal next fall that will reprint my "Prayer for Perspective" (currently anthologized in Serenity Prayers). Other authors quoted in the journal include the late Forrest Church and Rabbi Nachman of Breslov -- I am inordinately thrilled by the company my words will be keeping. :-)