When I was a kid, our family would spend a good portion of our summers at the family cottage on Georgian Bay. It was a beachfront cottage on the eastern side of the Bay, with miles of soft sand along the shoreline. My siblings and I would spend hours on the beach digging holes, constructing sand castles and creatures, filling our hands with globs of wet sand dripped delicately from our fore-fingers to create elaborate drip-castles. There was an ice-cream store a short walk away in both directions, and we often meandered down the beach after supper for our ‘post-prandial’ walk (as my mother liked to say) for a scoop of cotton candy or bubble-gum or chocolate fudge ice cream. Along the way, we always stopped to admire messages some other kid had written in the sand, jump into a hole someone else had dug, see how long our footprints would take to disappear in the waves, or investigate the bands of iron-rich black sand that sometimes streaked through the pale golden landscape.
Often, our sand adventures included digging a hole a short distance from the water’s edge. We would have competitions to see who could dig to water first. We always dug with our hands and I can still remember that gritty feeling of sand beneath my nails and the gentle scratch of it against my knuckles as I scooped handful after handful of sand up and out of my hole. I remember the feeling of anticipation as I dug, sprawled out on my belly, my arm reaching down into the depths towards water. Deeper down, the sand darkened and got heavier and cooler. And then the moistened sand glimmer would appear and I knew I was there.
But the most satisfying part of hole-digging wasn’t in that initial dig to create the hole, it was in what happened to the hole after it had been dug. As soon as water began to fill the hole the sides started to erode and the hole grew larger and larger. The more I dug, the more the bottom of the walls at and below the waterline would erode and deep cracks would begin to form up along the walls. Soon enough, those cracks began to gape and I would witness avalanche after avalanche as sections of the walls slid down into the water. This was what hole-digging was really all about! Dig, scoop, plop a glop around the top, scoop, plop, take a moment to drip a castle along the rim, scoop, plop, AVALANCHE! Repeat. It didn’t take long for what began as a hole that only my arm could fit into to turn into an open pit the size of a crop circle.
I was lying in bed the other night unable to sleep and thinking about life, my life, and this is the memory that came to mind. I thought that rather odd as these childhood memories are old and seldom revisited. While I have struggled a little bit over the past few years to figure out what I am supposed to be doing with myself, my life hasn’t been so traumatic as to bring to mind the mountains crumbling into the sea. Quite the opposite in fact. I have a job (well, I did before COVID lockdown), a solid and stable family life, amazing kids, too many hobbies, a roof over my head and enough money to put food on the table. My family and friends are in relative good health. I live in a country where I have access to and benefit from freedom upon freedom.
But lying there in bed thinking about digging in the sand, I experienced an acute awareness of something that has eluded me for months. Over the last many months, feelings of inertia have hovered about me like Pig Pen’s cloud of dust. This fog is heavy and hazy and I lack a clear sense of how to emerge. Pig Pen aside, the feeling is more like how the crew of the starship Enterprise must feel when they get stuck in an obscure nebulae that their sensors can’t penetrate beyond and their engines have mysteriously failed and no matter how much recalibrating of the aft nacelles and external sensor arrays they attempt, they are good and truly stuck.
What does digging sand holes and obscure nebulae have to do with that moment of enlightenment that struck me as I lay there insomnolent? Somewhere in the recesses of my brain, my unconscious mind began to make some connections I had thus far been unable to make, and in fact would never have occurred to me to make. Over the last 3 years I have experienced five very significant losses: my job as a minister and the deaths of my favourite aunt, a very close friend, and two grandparents. All of a sudden I saw these losses as those yawning fissures in the sand wall that inevitably caused the whole thing to crack and slide and disappear down into the sandy water below. And I began to wonder if my stuck-ness might have something to do with grief.
Grief. I suppose I have never considered myself to be the grieving type, though I have no idea what the grieving type is or if there is even such a thing. I have conducted countless funerals with compassion. I have walked the dying journey with numerous people and their families. I have counseled others in grief and have held many a hand through losses of various kinds. I have been able to recognize and name grief in others. For myself, I have experienced loss of many types and have been able to move through them without the same kind of boot-sucking slogginess that I presently feel. And yet, something inside me suspects that the losses I have experienced over the last few years are somehow connected to however I will move forward into whatever is next with respect to my vocation.
Both grief and vocation have to do with the shaping of identity and legacy. Who I am influences (perhaps even determines) what I do and how I do it. None of us are ourselves by ourselves as the people and experiences of our lives continually shape and reshape who we are and how we are present in our relationships and communities. But the converse is true as well; when some of those people and experiences are lost or gone or damaged, we are likewise reshaped and changed. Experiencing loss isn’t just an external event that is visited (inflicted) upon a person, but is also an internal transformation of the self. Vocation has something to do with the unique ways that self is called to be in the world, using its gifts and skills, finding place and purpose for itself and goodness and peace and dignity for others.
Grief and vocation. It’s an odd pairing, but perhaps there is something to it.