Spiritual Inspiration: Pick Up The Phone, It Might Be God Calling

By Christina Baldwin

All my life, I have believed that there is a necessary interaction that occurs between a person and the Divine. This interaction does not come only to prophets, Bodhisatvas, and other great spiritual masters, it comes also to us: ordinary people in our ordinary lives. It is part of our natural human capacity to call out one of the thousand names of God. And it is part of our human capacity to perceive and interpret the response.

Call and response is perhaps the oldest impulse we know. Humankind has always looked up and bowed down before the mysteries of the universe and asked God to become present. Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed - religions arise from a lineage of trembling prophets who understood that, if summoned, God might actually appear.

Their stories say these were ordinary men and women who were pulled out of their ordinary lives into the service of what they summoned forth. Knowing this, we stand in our own ordinariness and surmise that God might also actually appear to us and break us open to the life of service hiding within everyday details. What an amazing opportunity we have, to discover our own language of call and God’s own language of response - and to take responsibility, that as the times we live through become less ordinary, we ourselves become less ordinary in response to the needs of the times.

My family tells a story that when I was a girl of five, I set about scribbling furiously on a large sheet of paper my mother had put down on the floor. Crayons scattered around me, tongue stuck out in concentration, I worked the colours onto the page. The texture of the linoleum came up through the paper, adding surprise designs to my drawing, which seemed to appear like magic.

My mother wandered by and asked me, “What are you drawing?”? “A picture of God,” I replied. My mother knelt down to deliver her disappointing news as gently as possible. “Oh honey, you can’t do that. Nobody knows what God looks like.”? I hear that I did not even lift my gaze from the enthralment of my artwork as I informed her, “They will, as soon as I’m done with my drawing.”?

Sometimes, I think of the connection to the spirit as being like a phone line. The connection is always open: it’s our half of the relationship to stay available for incoming calls. Sometimes, I turn the ringer off. Sometimes, I ignore the ringing. Sometimes, I pick up the phone with suspicion. Sometimes, I hang up in anger. Sometimes, I get impatient at the interruption.

Sometimes, I have no idea how to respond. The problem is not in the sending, but in the receiving. And unlike a lot of other calls, the one from the spirit is the one we are hoping to receive. Once, I was deep in conversation with a friend when the phone rang. I ignored it, thinking I was being polite.

Jerry stopped his thought mid-sentence and asked, “Aren’t you going to get the phone? Maybe God is calling you.”? I looked at him in amazement, reached for the receiver, and tentatively said, “˜Hello...?’ I don’t remember who was calling, but I have never forgotten Jerry’s message to stay curious, to see if I can decode the Divine in everyday interactions. We have in ourselves some mysterious ability, in ordinary moments and moments of extreme, to speak with the voice of God.

No matter how ambivalent we are, no matter how liberal or conservative our religious and spiritual views, our longing for active relationship with something greater than ourselves cannot be forever denied.