 Mahud was a simple man who lived in a small village and made his living by selling vegetables at a busy market. He was comfortable enough and liked his work. But one day the angel Khabir appeared to him and told him to jump in the river. Without thinking about it, Mahud leaped into the flowing water.
He was carried downstream until a man on shore threw him a rope and pulled him out. The man offered Mahud a job in his fishing business and a small room where he could live. Mahud appreciated the man’s kindness and took the job and worked at it, rather happily, for three years. Then Khabir appeared to him once more and told him to move on.
Mahud obeyed immediately and walked from village to village until in one place a man offered him a job in his fabric shop. This was new to Mahud, but he took the job and learned the trade and worked there relatively happily until the angel appeared again and sent him on. Mahud worked at odd jobs for years in this manner, always moving along when the angel instructed.
When Mahud was an old man, he had gained the reputation of a holy man. People began coming to him with their illnesses and worries, begging him for cure and counsel. One day a visitor to his village asked him, ‘Mahud, how did you get to where you are now?’
Mahud thought for a moment and said, ‘It’s difficult to say.’
Obedience to the call
It’s difficult to say because Mahud’s only talent was his openness to the directives coming from the angel whose name means ‘The All Aware’. Mahud had the precious ability to recognize the call to move on and the openness of heart to follow it.
This is a story about calling and obedience to the call. But let’s remember that at root obedience means ‘listening’. To find your way you have to pay close attention to the signs about when to change your job, when to get unstuck and re-enter the flow of life, and when to retire to a life of healing and teaching.
Unfortunately for us, perhaps, an angel isn’t going to physically appear and tell us what to do next. But the angel of the story does represent something that is real for all of us: a sense of destiny, vocation, and direction. The word vocation comes from the Latin word vox, voice. A vocation is a call.
A calling is the sense that you are on this earth for a reason, that you have a destiny, no matter how great or small. Those who look at life more soberly might question whether such an attitude is warranted. It may seem naive. But the sense of calling doesn’t necessarily require belief in the supernatural and it doesn’t have to be naive.
A calling is a sensation or intuition that life wants something from you. It can give meaning to the smallest acts and helps create a strong identity. If you have a reason for being, you don’t feel entirely aimless. You know who you are and what to do.
In a culture where existential anxiety – the worry that nothing is of value and nothing makes sense – is still the order of the day, these are valuable realisations.
Those who believe in God or a higher power or in the intelligence of nature and life have little trouble recognizing the legitimacy of a sense of calling, but still they might feel it lacking in their own lives. Their problem may be that they put too much wishfulness into their belief, expecting life to serve them their destiny in clear and concrete terms. They may want specific direction without the quest and search and sorting out that is also part of the human condition.
Monks are forever talking about their vocation. They don’t talk about talents or wishes; they speak of being called. Work that requires complete dedication, like that of a monk, is so vast in scope that a mere aptitude isn’t sufficient to explain a person’s choice of profession. That could be true of a doctor or politician who feels called to be of service to humankind.
A sense of destiny
The story of Mahud suggests that any kind of job is a calling, no matter how ordinary. Maybe we elevate certain work, like that of doctors and politicians, and refer to it as a calling, overlooking the vocation to whatever work is our destiny. Most of us live within relatively narrow perimeters and enjoy a small life. There is beauty and satisfaction in that smallness, partly because the least significant of lives can still have cosmic proportions for the meaning and purpose they offer.
A person who shows special skill at a small craft, such as making wooden bowls or simple jewellery, is engaged in universal values of beauty and expressiveness. A bookkeeper or an accountant plays a role in the financial vitality of a community and even a nation. Honesty and care are as important in small things as they are in big things. A sense of destiny gives profound significance to the insignificant things we do.
It’s tempting to inflate the notion of calling, to imagine it as a great revelation on a mountaintop, a once-and-for-all pronouncement of who we are and what we are to do. But Mahud has several ‘callings’, which together lead him to an unexpected ultimate life work: healing, counselling, and holiness.
At the end, Mahud’s openness to his many callings leads him to develop into a character of extraordinary depth and power, so much so that people come to him for help. He has gathered together no coherent set of skills from his work that would explain his effectiveness as a healer. Only his openness to destiny has given him his ultimate life work, and at that point it’s clear that the work he has done has been not just simple labour, but internal development of character. The two are inseparable: the work that we do and the opus of the soul.
From A Life at Work ©2008 by Thomas Moore, published by Piatkus.
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