Call and Response

Three stages have marked the progression of my function in this world. First I tried to fit within the dense maze of functions outlined by society and institution. Towards a new awareness, I tried to serve humanity from inner guidance and motivation. Ultimately I hit bottom, received a calling of an entirely different nature and responded.

After high school I moved to Utrecht, a popular university city, where I studied general social sciences for my first, and cultural anthropology for my second and third year. My dad wanted me to go straight to college after high school, while all I wanted was to travel or make music. What I really desired was the spiritual experience that I associated with traveling and making music, since both had led me to transcendent moments before. My plans to travel, however, remained too vague to be taken seriously, by my parents or myself. And I ruled out enrolling at a music conservatory. I chose to believe that musical theory training would take all spontaneity out of the act of making music. And based on my dad’s career and experience in the field, music would never provide me with a stable income. Not knowing or finding what I really wanted to be or do, I compromised. Cultural anthropology came close to my dream of traveling and while still serving the world’s terms and my parents’s expectations.

In Utrecht I made some new friends and had new experiences. I lived in student rooms for a couple of years and for the couple of months during my last phase, I lived out of a squatted school building. Then I went to Galway Ireland for a self-directed anthropology research on traditional Irish song and music. When I returned, my life in university-city quickly disbanded. The school building I lived in had become a drug colony. Furthermore I could and would not adjust to the faculty environment. I felt lifeless every time I drove the bus in to the university complex.

I made my escape and moved back to my home town partly out of nostalgia for my earlier adolescent life which really was a retreat to fetus position. Still registered at the university for my third year, I hardly attended the classes anymore. I procrastinated writing the research paper that would allow me to continue my studies at the university. I never wrote it and finally I quit.

Confused and mildly depressed, I didn’t really know how to go on. I rented a room in a big student house, parallel to the railroad, close to the station, with my only window facing the street. I was born in this small city and was too familiar with it to feel comfortable. Most of my gang had moved to different cities like I had done. I returned to something that wasn’t really there to go back to.  
The population of the inner city had always been pretty much white (autochthon was the politically correct word used at the time) quite unlike the neighborhoods I had lived in when I studied in Utrecht. Hence I was surprised to see and hear people from numerous nationalities walk and talk past my window. I felt a peculiar excitement and somehow wanted to get involved. I soon learned a refugee centre had opened one and a half miles away from me. I visited the centre, told the receptionist I was a musician, and hooked up with two resident musicians. I decided to volunteer at the centre to stimulate musical activities. One thing led to another, and I organized a benefit concert to generate funds to buy instruments and equipment for the centre.

Inspired and for the first time since long motivated from within, the voices of parents and worldly institutions from without ceased to play in my head.  One moment I distinctly remember. I walked into the city as if I was on a sacred mission of some kind. What I associated with that sacred feeling was the idealistic thought that I was building a bridge between the refugees in isolation and the inner city population. Even though a nice rationalization, it felt more was going on still. I had caught a glimpse of genuine purpose, a quest for a different state of mind.
During the organization of the benefit I often felt guided on an intuitive level while being practical and productive. But at this moment I felt watched and groomed for a larger function by some spiritual force that was tentatively making itself known to me.

The night of the benefit concert came. I had worked real hard to organize it. I had found the perfect venue; I booked all the bands, I had formed a band at the refugee centre, I helped finding sponsors and I did some of the publicity. The evening was a great success. Among a line up of six bands I had programmed my own dad with his Simon and Garfunkel and Everly Brothers duo extended to a band formation, and my own Just Walkin’ blues band. The concert room was packed and we raised a budget sufficient to buy all the musical gear we wanted for the refugee centre.

I fell in a deep hole, for three months I had lived towards this event. I had been possessed by it. Now I felt empty and unmotivated for anything new. The world felt extremely dead to me again.

I made one more reluctant attempt at compromise with the world by starting vocational studies to become a social cultural worker. I drove a hard bargain to enter the third year, the year of internship, and thus gained the prospect of completing a four year curriculum in two.

I arranged for an internship at the refugee centre where I had volunteered the previous year. I slowly but surely lost my sense of freedom and purpose I had enjoyed as a volunteer. Trying to regain that freedom I isolated myself little by little from the team of social and institutional workers within which I had started my internship. I ran from wall into wall towards the end and became dysfunctional. The last months at the centre felt worse than doing time in prison; everything about me was in conflict. My internship had failed.  

The universe called on me twice. Twice I was lifted out of my body. Not taken away from it but plugged into a source field of universal energy that flushed through me like a tidal wave. The call I then responded to, and for the consequent function I was to fulfill God took me and turned my face exactly in the opposite direction. A direction I had no intention of taking; inwards and then out. Eyes and arms wide open to the world of healing possibilities. The light got a lot clearer.

My function now is one of forgiveness, mostly of myself. How much and how long could I possibly hate, despise and condemn myself? I have had my share of these utterly useless yet convincing twin brothers, guilt and fear.  The time has come to be free.

The central function of God and His universe is to create. Creation is mindful of itself. Creation communicates with and cares for what it creates. Communication happens on an abstract level. Creation relates with itself through active giving and active receiving. God calls I respond or willfully delay. God calls to be at one with me. God wants to have all channels of life open to Him.

Life is a promise of fulfillment, an immaculate conception anticipating a future of full fruition. By immaculate I don’t mean virgin but rather fearless, conceived without obstacles. In human existence, however, my true potential is hindered by fear, guilt and anxiety.  Yet the pure form of communication still is one of call and response.