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  • No-Self and the Calling Given to Anyone:The Challenge of Mysticism
  • Mary Potter Engel (bio)

One morning as I was making the bed, a sheet of paper fell from the books stacked near my pillow. Picking it up, I read:

All the voices of the wood called "Muriel!"but it was soon solved; it was nothing, it was not for me.The words were a little like Mortal and More and Endureand a word like Real, a sound like Health or Hell.Then I saw what the calling was: it was the road I traveled, the cleartime and these colors of orchards, gold behind gold and the fullshadow behind each tree, and behind each slope. Not to methe calling, but to anyone, and at last I saw: wherethe road lay through sunlight and many voices and the marvelorchards, not for me, not for me, not for me.I came into my clear being; uncalled, alive, and sure.Nothing was speaking to me, but I offered and all was well.

And then I arrived at the powerful green hill.1

I had copied this poem months before, hoping it would help me understand the vocation of an artist. Until my twenties, I had been certain I was called to be a preacher. My evangelical community refused to ordain women, so I embarked on a career as a Christian feminist theologian and embraced a vocation as a teacher. At forty, I converted to Judaism and gave up my tenured seminary professorship. [End Page 143] After serving for a time as a lay leader of a Jewish congregation, wondering if I was really meant to be a rabbi, I began to write fiction. By my early fifties, I had published a novel and a collection of stories, but my true calling still eluded me. I searched Muriel Rukeyser's poem for clues. The opening lines I understood: Like many an adolescent, I had heard my name called in autumn woods and by rocky creeks; like many children and adults, I had experienced More and Mortal through nature. At the fifth line, "Then I saw what the calling was," my heart quickened and I seized on the next lines for the promised answer to my lifelong quest. But they made no sense. No calling for the poet, the artist? For any individual? Wasn't each of us, in the great democracy of spirit, called to a unique path of serving, as scholar, friend, comedian, something? Disenchanted, I stuffed the poem under my books.

The morning Rukeyser's poem fell open to me, I read it again. This time the poem's vision, "Not to me / the calling, but to anyone," came clear. I did not have a calling anymore than anyone else did, I suddenly realized. No one had a calling. Calling was not a specific set of responsibilities given to each individual—rabbinic duties for one, lay leadership for another; scholarly pursuits for her, activism for him. Calling was a way of being, a way of living with God. The calling was the road we travel through the marvel of the world. Blinded by "I," absorbed in "my," I had not seen that the calling could never be mine: It was ours. The Calling is all, "I" is nothing. To insist on being a separate self is to miss the Way.

What is the obstacle, kabbalist Adin Steinsaltz asks, to cleaving to God so one can serve in truth? "The existence of a separate self." Each person is challenged to become "a tool in God's hands," "a Chariot of the Shekinah. What is involved is a nullification of self."2 This language, typical of mystics, was anathema to me—in spite of assurances that to be a "vehicle of sanctity" is to know "the joy of release from the self."3 Alert to sexism's submersion of women's selves in the "common" good and intent on becoming a free and empowered self, I found all talk of vehicles and nullification of self just one more turn of the patriarchal screw.

I was also troubled by some feminists' attempts to redefine selfhood. In developing a...

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