An Origin Story of Divine Vocation
An Invitation to a Lenten Journey with our Divine Story
During this Lenten season, we’re inviting a journey into the divine story. The divine story is not something we read in a book, but one we live every day. It is not just about Jesus, but Christ living in us. It is about our true Origin and our Eternal Life coming into the here and now.
We are invited to release the lesser stories we tell about ourselves, letting go of the limited ways we see who we are.
How can we uncover and embrace more fully our true nature, our divine essence, who we truly are?
May we enter into stories that live not just in the past, but in the fullness of life still to come. Telling the stories of our divine vocation, living and expressing here and now.
Beginnings
Paul Smith walked into the French café and surveyed the tables. He was tall and dignified, even in his oversized flannel shirt. He carried himself with the sort of inner strength that gathers up over time. His manner—perceptible right from the start—held the substance of many years of conscious living.
I stood to catch his eyes, recognizing him from the photo on the jacket cover of his book, Integral Christianity. We shook hands and exchanged introductions. His smile was warm and genuine.
He turned his attention to the pastry case and ordered a cup of tea. As we sat down, he asked me about my story and why I wanted to meet with him.
I told him the long version. I knew from reading his book that he would understand. His deep listening and eager questions helped ease the guarded reservations I so often held around my most precious spiritual experiences and longings. Not everyone understands. Most hadn’t before.
In the years after, we often reflected that even then in that first meeting, we both sensed we had already known each other. Half-jokingly, I once said we had met a thousand years before. He said that was probably an underestimate. Who can measure the depth of time in the eternal?
He told me about his new book, coming out later that month, Is Your God Big Enough, Close Enough, You Enough? He had been wondering what he was going to do next, not feeling that he had any more books in him.
It turns out, there was something else waiting to be conceived with him at the ripe age of 80.
We spoke of the loneliness that so often accompanies this evolving faith journey. He told me about the hundreds who, like me, had emailed him in response to his writings. People from all over the world, asking about where to find a church or others who were trying to live an evolving, mystical way of Christian spirituality. For so many years, he sent his replies with apologies and without solutions.
I told him about a technology called “Zoom” and new ways of community happening on the internet—this was pre-COVID. I saw a new opening happening, a great evolution unbinding us in unprecedented ways from the limitations of geography. A dream and a vision. Just a whisper in a quiet café.
At end of our time, we shared in our first meditation practice together, as we would continue to do every time we met weekly for the next seven years. Right there, amidst the hum and clatter around us, we went into silence together.
Something happened between us. An opening. A channel flowing between our hearts, full of light and energy so palpable it astounded us both when we shared about it afterward. We had both felt the same heart connection we would later call “WeSpace.” And we would feel it again, many times through the years. That, and more, in this deep mystical bond.
It was the first time we met. Person to person. Face to face. Heart to heart. But it wasn’t the starting point. It wasn’t even really new in so many ways. It all actually felt so entirely familiar.
The origin of this connection existed long before. Or rather, long ahead. In the anytime reality of the eternal, which mystical presence reveals to us in surprising ways. Just as it appeared between two souls in Kansas City on a late summer afternoon, meeting heart-to-heart. Soul-to-soul.
This was a beginning.
I stood on the backside of the mountain. I hadn’t traversed over it—no, the path had been down and through. Emerging from a dark night of eight years, the horizon stretched far in front of me now.
The way ahead stretched out into two very distinct landscapes.
On one side, the desert. An open landscape of bare rock and sand stretching out to the horizon. It was empty, clear, and expansive.
Throughout my early life, I had often felt the pull to “the desert.” To step back from the world and find a place outside of the many trappings of society. I read the Desert Fathers and Mothers of early Christianity, the Anabaptists, and the mystics of many monastic orders. I visited monasteries and intentional community expressions like Taizé, L’Arche, and Reba Place Fellowship.
Largely from the inner tension of the shadow I held between escaping and engaging—serving in love, I tried to do both. I was part of starting a New Monastic intentionally community in a very under-served and violent neighborhood of the city. I lived there with ten or so others for five years. It was admirable. It was idealistic. And it wasn’t born out of the truth of my soul. It didn’t come from who I truly am and what is mine to do in this life.
From where I now stood, on the mountainside, the long dark night had buried that spiritual ego grandiosity and falsity in me. The desert was not my path.
On the other side, a vast blight of terrible overgrowth. A tangled thicket of an impassable woodland, rotting and bare of greenery and life. I knew this represented the systems of the world. The jumbled chaos of all that surrounds us, entangling us in so many forms of trappings and snares. The “less than” life to the full possible in divine vitality.
In the midst of the blight, I could see several enclaves of light. A few small areas that had been carved out, with fires built for respite and support amidst the madness. A part of me longed to join one of these islands of spiritual sanity and bask in the shared warmth they held.
This time though, I would not betray my soul. I would not tamp down or cover over the deep calling that spoke to me now. I knew—as both a strong intuition and a great longing—that I had to give myself to being a part of finding and traversing beyond. And I knew that would require waymaking, carving out new pathways through. For myself and for others.
Years after experiencing this mystical vision, I read this quote from one of the original founders of “Integral,” Sri Aurobindo:
“Seeking to embrace all life in itself [puts one] in the position not of a pilgrim following the highroad to the destination, but of a pathfinder hewing a way through a virgin forest.”
This call and way of living came from the truth of who I really am, my divine essence, and who I was to become—and am still becoming. It is of the “pioneering” aspect of my soul. A touchstone of my essential self, which helps me understand more fully how this core element of who I am informs the true nature of my divine vocation.
I wrestled with all that this would require, the difficulty it would entail, the struggle it would bring for myself and my family. My first child was just three months old at the time. What would be the cost of following this path?
I knew the cost of not following it would be far greater to my soul.
I would not settle for a lesser story of my life.
While on the precipice, one of those human angel messengers you meet just once gave me the word I needed to move through my fear and hesitation.
“Sometimes you have to build the bridge,” he said.
I took a step down the mountainside toward the blight. I started out alone, but I wouldn’t be for long.
This was a beginning.
What is your origin story of divine vocation?
When did you receive the calling of how you might offer your true voice in the world in this life?
Maybe you are still receiving it, as we all are. It evolves and changes throughout our lives, yet is always rooted in the deep substance of our divine essence—who we really truly are at our core. In our soul. And how we might live and express from this utmost truth of our being.
It is why we have the longing.
Do you know of what I speak?
Have you felt it deep in your bones and in your aching heart?
Or perhaps you’ve felt the burning resonance of the deep joy that comes when you are living in congruence with the truth of your soul and why you’re here on this earth. Living in the joy-filled timbre of the sound of your divine vocation expressing in the world.
What are your beginnings?
Living Our Origin Stories Now
Why do we tell origin stories?
I believe it’s because we all long to know who we truly are, where we have come from, and why we live the way we do.
The root of our desire for self-understanding is not selfish or narcissistic, I don’t think. Sure, we can get caught up in the fancies of what makes us special or different from others. But there’s something deeper that we continue to search for and hope to recognize more and more.
On some level, perhaps one of the deepest, we are a mystery to ourselves. We have each one of us been covered over by layers of personality, piles of experiences, and masses of information. We have been taught and trained. Guided and led. Who we have become is always a vast web, with some lines tracing back to our beginnings, many interwoven with others in ways both true and false. And still more stretching ahead into who we are yet to be.
We have been using the language of “divine essence” to describe this fundamental, core reality of who we are. This is our ontological nature, the truth of our being, in God. We might also refer to this as our “essential self.” On an individual level, it is our precious personhood, who we are born to be in the uniqueness and gift of our soul. We also have a communal essence, for we are all also interbeing at the deepest levels, which we’ll consider more in a future writing.
Origin stories are not something to mythologize and revere—for ourselves or for others. Nor are they necessarily guiding principles or patterns to emulate and try to recreate. At their best, they are stories that might inspire, call us forth, and help reveal something of our own origins. At their worst, they become a form of externalization, a vicarious betrayal of ourselves and our own true calling.
Stories are always limited reflections as well. They tell only a few angles of the many-faceted diamond that is our life. And our penchant is often to reflect the cleanest surfaces.
Paul also carried many wounds and scars, along with his decades of growth, learning, and wisdom. I have shadows throughout my own journey certainly, as well. The wounds, the traumas, the lackings we all have are part of each of our origin stories. Though sometimes we even feel these are the real story, that we are defined by our suffering because it goes so deep and has shaped us so much. While there is a layer of truth here certainly, our deepest essence and true origin lie deeper than our sufferings.
We all have our stories, but our divine essence is not bound to the past. Our Living Origin is the ongoing life force of our divine vitality. It is the “ever-present origin” that continuously springs up in us at any and every moment. This is the ongoing and “here and now” truth of our living Source reality.
Our origin stories may point to times when this truth was especially present. We were energized by a particular calling or turn in the road. A choice and a thousand more after. To look back on those past moments in a way that distances us from the living origin alive in us now is to displace the ever-present truth of God-Being-Us, which is never a one-time event.
And that is the point of the origin story. It is not about bygone glory days, but the beginning of a new way of being that continues on and on. The superhero doesn’t sit around telling stories about the past. They keep drawing upon and living in their power to make a difference now. We may not think of ourselves as superheroes, but our divine vocation is how we make a difference in this life.
From the deeper truth of Origin, the core of our divine essence—who we truly are in God—we are able to let our lives speak with our true voice. We sing the song that arises from the depths of our soul longings. Voicing our essential part in the divine and human Christophany choir of hope, healing, and loving evolution.
Beginning
The first WeSpace group gathered together in Paul’s apartment in the spring of 2018.
Some of us knew each other well, like David and Paul. Others were meeting for the first time, like Marcia and Connie. We weren’t sure what to expect or where this would all go, but we met with hope and anticipation—and perhaps some trepidation.
It was the edge of a new unknown. A step into the forest. A whisper of a dream.
Unknowingly, we were welcoming a beginning of a new communal calling. An expression of collective divine vocation beckoning to come into form in new way. The communal origin of a way of WeSpace built on mystical presence, loving trust, and sacred possibility.
It was in this group that the first forms of Whole-Body Mystical Awakening, Resonating Prayer, and other practices were explored and developed. And it was here that the bond of deep, authentic relationship would ground us in spiritual communion. Whatever it was we were doing, we were doing it together.
We met for nearly a year before starting our first online WeSpace groups. And the ever-widening and enfolding circles of generative communion would only grow from there. A community whose heart and soul would embody the passion of divine love for this life, for this world, for a better future. The call to loving evolution through our divine becoming, as embodied mystical incarnations of Christ, together.
The living origin of the still-becoming divine vocation of Integral Christian Network.
On that bright spring day, we told one another our stories. We opened up to where we came from, who we were, and left unspoken so much of what might still be before us.
Because we didn’t yet know. How could we?
We closed our eyes to pray and meditate together, opening to the spirit’s call.
This was a beginning.
It was only just beginning.
Our Living Origin
For our Lenten journey, we invite you into inhabiting your own Living Origin.
Our origin stories have many beginnings. Jesus’ baptism and 40 days in the desert are two of his, which are the key parts of the story of Lent. And we know that his divine origin was present from the very beginning, rooted deeper than the unfolding events of his life. This is the “Living Origin” that is ever-present and always sourcing us in every moment. We’ll explore this more in the next Beckoning offering in a few weeks.
Next week, as our “Becoming” invitation, we’ll offer a process to aid in expressing your origin story of divine vocation, to tell of your beginnings.
For today, we invite you to make the space to hold and reflect on the following questions:
What are some of the beginnings of your origin story? Recalling those, not just as past events but a living part of who you are still, what do you feel and sense through them in this moment now?
How clear is your connection to the Living Origin in your life? How have you felt it moving in your body and in your life?
Statement of WeCreating Authorship
This article was WeCreated with authoring by Luke Healy and editing support by Robert Martin and Beth Biery.
All of the wisdom, creativity, and spiritual emergence in ICN comes from the communal field of wisdom and spirit speaking in and through the “We.”
All text in this article is human-authored without the use of AI, according to our AI policy: 0 out of 10
All Images are open-source, used with permission, or created by ICN