We all come into the world with unique potentials. When one of these potentials seems to stand out, claim our attention and engage our emotions, we may be looking at a “call,” telling us that we can use that ripened potential in a positive way. We can find the vocation that is related to our deepest self, a path that will help that self to unfold.
My call to making and teaching art grew out of childhood experiences and ripened through the years. My mother delighted in nature and my grandmother had a wildflower garden. Together, we noticed flower and leaf shapes, different habitats in sun-drenched soil, lichen-covered rocks, and the dark rich soil of squishy wetlands. We noticed the variety of birds, butterflies and bugs–all parts of the grand assortment of summer wildlife.
Although there was some recognition of my interest in color and design, I graduated from college with a degree in Education and minor in Group Work. As the Program Director for teens at a small YWCA, I realized it was the creative work with teens and younger children that spoke to my spirit. I enjoyed teaching. And I enjoyed art.
Sooooo, I resigned my job at the Y, and became a secretary at Columbia Teachers College, in order to get tuition-free credits in Art Education. That done, I moved to Philadelphia, where I taught art at an elementary school in a diversely populated neighborhood. The most rewarding part of my teaching was seeing the uniqueness of each student’s noticings and how they chose to express those noticings.
After I had taught for three years, and co-directed an art program at a summer camp, I was making plans for further education when I met John Adams, the older brother of a friend of mine. We married, and though I continued to teach, my life at home was family-centered. John
came with twins, boy and girl in 8th grade; an older boy in 12th grade, and we later adopted an almost 9-year-old girl. Life was full of family!
John died before I retired from teaching. With the family launched, retirement brought me to another turning point in my call. A friend mentioned Christ House, a residential medical facility in Washington, serving ill or injured homeless men. She wondered if I might be interested in offering a weekly art workshop there. And so I began doing that in 1993.
Most residents of Christ House had little experience with self-expression in art, so I usually demonstrate how to use a particular medium, and then invite the participants to experiment. Occasionally, we will have a “how-to” session, but I want to encourage art that comes from a feeling place rather than building skills. An assortment of materials on the art cart allows for different kinds of projects: tempera paints, watercolors, colored markers, pastels, colored tissue paper, rubber stamps and blank cards and envelopes. I want to help these men find their voices through art.
Although each week was a challenge (materials, parking, inviting participants from their sick-beds), I noticed how good I felt while helping the men at Christ House–and how empty or sad I felt when I left. Over the 25 years that I have been privileged to offer the weekly workshop at Christ House, there has been a mysterious healing inside of me. Now I feel whole, healed and more at home in the world.
In Cry Pain, Cry Hope, Elizabeth O’Connor writes: “Every single one of us has a “good work” to do in life. This good work not only accomplishes something needed in the world, but completes something in us… The work we do in the world, when it is true vocation, always corresponds in some mysterious way to the work that goes on within us.’’ My experience at Christ House certainly confirms that–in myself and in the men too.
-Jean Adams, Seekers Church, Christ House volunteer
Jean Adams taught in the public school system for 27 years before she began volunteering at Christ House.
