Sent to our church when I was little, the young pastor remembered me before I remembered him. My first mentor. His apprentice. Helping him lead a retreat in the mountains of North Carolina, which I had done for years, I stood in front of the old wooden altar where I first heard the voice of the Divine. No longer one of the little ones in his care. “You connect better with these young people than I do now. You teach.” Not a hand-me-down, but a new garment offered in my fashion, cut and sewn to my shape and style. The sound of his voice and the stories he told opened within me like wild flowers as I spoke. Like the cascading foxglove and the unfurled rose, it was my time to bloom. This is the pattern.
The young rabbi never asked to be on a pedestal,but asks us to take and receive the universal call to go and do likewise, carrying the message where he cannot.* This call follows the seams and the ancient threads that hold them. We remember that we are the green shoots born of seeds carefully planted. When the entire world, and all that is in it, are welcomed and loved in their own fashion, everything will be saved.
As our hands and feet swing and strike the same ground of being, this field of love, we become the hands and feet of God. If Christ, and its consciousness, needs it done, we in bloom will do the doing. A cascading call, passed down like bounty from the garden in which every good thing grows. Following the threads of your own spiritual garment, made in your fashion, each of us woven into better selves. This is the greater thing.
