On “hearing the Call” beyond prayer and meditation

I hear the call. Perhaps best to say I sense the pull of a call. Feel the pulling of it, a calling that groans as it waits for me to respond before I run away into death. At first glance it feels energetically as a call to ministry, to be a pastor to the people for God.

Am not clear exactly what this call is. It is clearly spiritual, mystical, divinely directed. By The One God above all other gods and goddesses? Or by those spirit guides and guardian angels? My spirit guides and guardian angels? Do such spiritual beings exist? I know they do, but how many? Are they one and the same? How many deities are truly divine aspects of a greater Oneness we call God, a god without gender or ethnicity or even good pronouns? How many deities are biological entities from other planets, dimensions, and vibrational densities our awed ancestors erroneously deified in our long ago past? Or perhaps these “aliens” fooled us? Deceived us?

Once upon a long time ago, while but a teenager outside on a sunny day in Virginia farm country, I was startled to hear a faint but clear command in my mind, with instructions that came down “from above” in what we would call a download today. The communication was brief and abrupt. Felt it had come down from somewhere up in Outer Space. As my whole family, including myself, had a dramatic encounter with a gigantic metallic sphere UFO only a few years earlier, I couldn’t help but wonder. In addition blends of awe, fear, pride, and anxiety were felt. Found out many years later about controversial cutting-edge technologies called “Voice of God” technology with rumors of a Voice of Allah weapon used experimentally in the Global Long War on Terror. These were defense industry plans and development of directed sound projections, one of which culminated in the LRAD weapon, the Long Range Acoustic Device. So if the Americans and supposedly a few other nations were doing this, why not NHIs or Non-Human Intelligences far more advanced than us humans?

See, I first felt the call as a child. And as a preteen when I rejected Christianity for an agnostic, science-based science religion of my own creation. Again between my senior year in high school and my freshman year in college. Later broke with that and moved into over the next few decades explorations and practices of Wicca and other NeoPagan traditions, Gnosticism, Ceremonial Magick, Shamanism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and even felt the Hand of Allah transport me into the world of Islam. Over time, I outgrew all of them to identify as,”Spiritual not Religious.” Eventually rediscovered Christianity via the Anabaptist Mennonites, especially its more liberal wing of conferences, and via reading John Philip Newell’s The Great Search together with Cole Arthur Riley’s Black Liturgies. So I’ve come full circle and chose to surrender to mystery, ambiguity, awaiting with some trepidation to what may be called forth next.

Ah, see how easily I went “up into my head,” into the mind of thought and the ego of self?

So back to soul and spirit. This call, this pull, do I surrender to this pull? Or do I submit to the pull?

What am I called to do? In what ways shall it be expressed? How shall it manifest?

Am I called to ministry? To clergy? Once thought so, and such positions felt too constrained, too limited, too comfortable. My church, my temple, my mosque, my grove , my synagogue, my circle is the whole world. What must be said is beyond the boundaries of religions and politics and tribes and nations and economies and languages. Beyond the boundaries of merely being human. And it is for every human, and, indeed, for all life. After all, we do live within a biosphere, as part of a biosphere, down inside Planet Earth, down upon the crust of this small, blue globe at the bottom of an ocean of gas, dust, and magnetism.

Am I instead called forth to be a prophet? To give speeches about the future and shout at people doing stupid things? Who listens to prophets anymore? If anything false prophets excel at capturing attention to further misdirect humanity. Or am I to be a mystic, presenting a clarity that only leaves people further perplexed? Ah, just another strange man babbling away day and night?

I must sit awhile to open up to God so I may fully listen more deeply.

Ah, out of time and lashed by the clock. For now I run late and must hurry hurry hurry to prep for work and go to my job. 

P.S. Written on the bus ride home from work and afterwards at my desk:

For me, I think and feel it’s OK to feel afraid. Fear is normal, and we have such an emotion for a reason. Yes? And…don’t let fear stop you. Don’t let fear alone stop you. Learn to distinguish between fear as False Evidence Appearing Real all made up in the mind versus the runaway truck speeding at you. Or ignoring consequences of potentially hazardous actions in certain conditions, such as scrambling without protection over steep, ice-glazed rocks across a frozen waterfall on a hike. Having written down all of those words, it’s better to go forth with a clear mind guided by presence, intention, and purpose than to muddle into the unknown either scared or lost in bliss. If unable to get to clarity & presence, I stop and turn away. Such perception and opinion arise from lessons learned during life’s often messy events. I said the same thing repeatedly to my own daughters as they grew up as well to those I’ve mentored: “Hey, it’s OK to feel scared, and don’t let fear alone stop you.”

Yet when I hear the call, I do not feel present, deliberate, or on purpose with a mission. Instead I feel uncertain, uncomfortable, preferring, I’m ashamed to say, to stay in my comfort zone with its known discomforts. That’s fear. What sometimes compels me to fight, to stand up and go forth into battle even if wielding the tools on nonviolence, are the visions of both what is possible and necessary to make the world a better place for all. Yet it is fleeting, beaten down, worn down, battered into silence. Until it rises up again as kundalini serpent to phoenix bird. Rarely do I freeze, however, but I do run away hoping if I ignore the call time shall pass, it’ll be too late for me to stand up to be ridiculed and dismissed, be too late to fight or even freeze. Oh, no…fawn, fawning, to fawn…as in flee, fight, freeze, or fawn. Oh my goodness, am I fawning? Putting my head down, averting eye contact, pretending to be invisible, going along with the currents of whatever river is flowing? Isn’t fawning the worse kind of fear? Fear of facing the consequences of fighting or fleeing to escape? Fawning is what so many humans do in the early phases of every new dictatorship as tyranny establishes itself. So many fawn as to deny it and pretend there is only flight or flight, and freeze. This fawn is no baby deer.

Even so, I still “hear the call.” I feel it in my bones, in my aging body, echoing around in my aging mind.

Still in the “don’t know what to do” excusitis phase, tho. I go back to being busy, struggling to determine my next steps. At least I got this far. At least I got this far, dammit! Here I am.

William Dudley Bass
Tuesday 18 March 2024
Shoreline/Seattle, Washington 
USA
Earth
Sol

Copyright © 2025 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.