What’s Your Divine Origin Story?
This week’s rhythm of loving evolution: Becoming
We engage in processes of becoming to deepen the transformative work and play of evolution, participating in our growth from divine being, as God is beckoning us here and now.
The Becoming offerings below invite us into personal and communal deepening in our divine becoming. They can be practiced in WeSpace groups and our daily lives today and throughout the week ahead. Rather than one-time experiences, we encourage ongoing and repeated practice to better support our growth and evolution.
If you missed it last week, we encourage you first to read the article informing these processes:
“An Origin Story of Divine Vocation”
Lenten Journey with your 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.
This week, we invite you to tell your origin story of divine vocation. Or, in other words, the story of the ways you’ve been called in your life.
How has God summoned you to be and to move throughout your years?
How have you received the “true names” of your most essential being—the names of your soul?
What is the deeper spiritual story of your life?
The processes below are meant to serve as aides in how we tell our story.
Every time we tell our story, it is new. There are elements we feel compelled to include, and others we feel ready to let go of or go deeper. Telling our story always includes releasing lesser stories and embracing new ways of understanding our journey.
Creating a Spiritual Timeline
One way that we can begin to tell our story is by recognizing the significant moments and events that have occurred along the way. Highlighting these markers can help clarify the movement over time of how we have been called throughout our lives, and the steps we have taken in response.
This is an invitation in that realm—listening deeply for moments possibly related (though not always obviously) to divine vocation. Not “here’s what I have done in my life,” but here are moments of deep resonant connection, of resourcing, of knowing, of agency, of inspiration, of passion.
As we are calling forth the foundational and fundamental movements of divine story, who we truly are, we offer this tool of a DNA helix graphic on which to write. This simple diagram might serve as an aide to reveal patterns and spiraling integrations of origin and vocation in your life. If you find it helpful, you can even think of it as coding expressions of your divine DNA.
The helix graphic can be a place to help recognize and record divine moments throughout your life.
Feel free to use it however you feel drawn, highlighting moments, experiences, callings, names, aspirations, and more.
How has God summoned you to be and to move throughout your years?
You can access a pdf version of the DNA Helix graphic here
or image version here:
Being Called by Our True Names
A timeline, like the one above, can help us reveal sequentially the unfolding and development of our divine story of time, throughout our lives. This can help us recognize how we have been growing and becoming in so many ways, through so many events, over time.
In another way, we can welcome the truth of our divine origin story in a deep and timeless way through the names we are given—or even those we choose.
We have our birth name given to us, which might hold resonance or meaning. And we also may have experiences of being given a new name.
“I will give them a white stone inscribed with a new name, known only to the one who receives it.” (Rev. 2:17)
Our true names may come with meaning known only to us. They may come with mystery and unknowing. They often speak in some way to who we truly are and why we are here in this life. We might think of them as the names of our soul.
Archetypal names can be portals to this true naming. Perhaps you found some resonance with some of those offered in connection to divine vocation like bridge maker, healer, changemaker, loving disrupter, or others?
These are so much more than the job titles and roles we’ve held in our lives in our working vocations.
We might feel the shift from how we answer the question “What do you do?” to “Who am I?”
This is the core question of our divine vocation, because as we have been emphasizing, it is less defined by what we do and is more about who we are—living the truth of our being. We are called to be who we truly are. Our true name. Our summons to the Really Real.
If you feel drawn, you can set the intention to welcome a receiving of new or true names.
How do we open to receiving these names?
Perhaps receiving deeply who and how you are comes in simple felt sense, or through resonating prayer.
Or, reviewing your timeline, you might open to receiving a sense of naming that has been present underneath these events and movements of your life.
These deep names can come at any time, whispered by spirit through a still small voice, or speaking through the voice of another.
If you already have one or more, consider how they speak to your soul essence, your divine story, and the expression of your divine vocation in your life.
How have you received the “true names” of your most essential being—the names of your soul?
Our Living Origin in Community
For our Lenten journey, we are inviting you to inhabit your own Living Origin. This is the way of Origin that is more than just beginnings and what happened in the past, but the ever-present energy force of the divine source flowing into our being at any and every moment, like a wellspring.
One way that we tap into this deeper source is through the communal. Your personal story is in so many ways uniquely yours, and it does not belong solely to “you.” It is rooted and lived out in community, in the world.
As you have named and articulated your spiritual timeline and welcomed your true names, you might intentionally share with your WeSpace group or a few others with whom you have a trusting, loving connection. Holding this together in a shared space of presence, with a few others, can open up and reveal more about your/our story.
Come with the intention of being with our stories in a way where deep is meeting deep.
Welcome any way of revealing together with the inquiry:
What is the deeper spiritual story of your life?
As you hold a timeline or series of events, open to spirit speaking and revealing wisdom, patterns, and most importantly affirmations of our journey as it is held in communion. Be with it and each other in the posture of deep appreciation, first and foremost.
Then, as we re-member our communal selves and true being together, we re-connect more fully with our divine origin.
And as we submerge in this Really Real, resting in its fullness and truth, we might find areas to release that are of our lesser stories, from our constricted places. We might find deeper movements and ways of naming the origin-al movements of God in our lives.
