Birthmarks

Ink Stains

The  thanksgivings of
humming-new
images or ideas
that linger with me
while they test their wings,
still damp with the
blue love of birth.

c. MperiodPress 


I wrote this after noticing my hands yesterday as I penned several pages in my journal.  I looked down and saw the filled in fingerprints of thumb and index finger and random splotch on my left hand from an errant drip in the inking of my pen.  It didn't bother me..these were the birthmarks of words, ideas, images brought forth from listening for them, and setting them onto the page...which, really, is only a resting place...

This experience came back to me this morning as I consider this Good Shepherd/Vocation Sunday in the liturgical cycle.  I thought about the shepherd who knows all the sheep...how the shepherd must somehow bear the mark of each one in eye and heart to be able to distinguish one from another.  And likewise, each sheep bears the mark of the shepherd's voice, likely the first human voice to welcome it into the world.  

Each is bound to the other.

Likewise, we are each borne in the eye and heart and hand of God...and we each bear the mark of God in our very being-ness...the creative expression and image of God in our self and all that incorporates.  I find myself considering my own vocation and how it is as though through time and circumstance, prayer and discernment, challenge and acceptance, that there is not so much distance there as there once was.  Love is the indelible mark that names us as God's own and I have learned to give in to my desire for that Love...in a sense, to let Love respond to Love.  There is a sense of wholeness, an ever growing  "union and conformity with the Heart of Jesus," as our Constitutions puts it, that comes from responding to the call of Love.  Responding again and again and again...because the call of God is unceasing, ever inviting, enticing, challenging, and the deepest sense of home that I know.  

And it seems that this Vocations Sunday is all about that...the invitation to finding that deep home in God.  Listening from there. Responding from there.  And letting what is birthed from that rest in the world, take wing in the hearts of others, and bring us all a little further along the journey.