There is a young woman at church who is beginning her first year of teaching. It’s about a month into the school year and I keep meaning to ask her if she’s had the dream yet—the dreaded teacher dream. I’ve known teachers who have left the profession and years later still have the teacher dream.
The teacher dream is always a variation of this: you’re the teacher, standing in front of the class and none of the kids are listening. They won’t stop talking. They’re being belligerent. I had one dream where my kids didn’t even show up to class. I found them in the library with another teacher who had given them cookies.
The teacher dream is always a lack of control dream.
Lately it seems I’ve been having ten teacher dreams a night.
Except now, thrown into the mix, is the dreaded church dream. And every one of my church dreams seems to follow this pattern: I’m late to church. I have responsibilities. I’m the LEM or the Lector. I have to be at church on time and the world is conspiring to keep me away. In the church dream, something is always keeping me from doing what needs to be done.
I’m clearly at a transitional point in my life, a time when I am beginning to make the transition from the profession of teaching to the profession of pastoring. That transition is apparent in my dreams. (Though as I said previous, I’m sure the teaching dream will stay with me the rest of my life.)
I was reminded of that transitional period yesterday when I started reading one of the books for my first seminary class. It’s called Let Your Life Speak by Parker J. Palmer. And interestingly enough, Palmer is an author I’m familiar with. When I first started teaching, I read his book The Courage to Teach. It is a must read for any teacher.
I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that Palmer’s books should appear in the two professions that have marked my adult life. Both teaching and pastoring are vocations. And without a doubt, the skills that I have learned as a teacher will carry with me when I become a priest.
But while I have at times loved teaching, it has not been a vocation for me. Palmer writes that a vocation is “something I can’t not do, for reasons I’m unable to explain to anyone else and don’t fully understand myself but that are nonetheless compelling.”
It’s “something I can’t not do.”
Really these words are what boil down the call to me. There have been a lot of things in my life that I have wanted to do. When I was little I wanted to be a paleontologist and a fireman and a lawyer and an aeronautical engineer. Even in college, I switched majors time and time again from social studies education, to journalism, to linguistics and then finally to creative writing and literature.
But there is no hole in my heart from failing to become a paleontologist. There is no sense of loss from not becoming an astronaut. There was never any compulsion to be those things.
There is a compulsion to be a priest. It is something that I can’t ignore. The only other thing in my life that I have ever felt the same way about is writing and the Lord know that I will be writing up a storm when I am priest.
I know that when I first told my friends and family that I was going to be a priest that they didn’t fully understand it. And that’s all right because they’ve still been very supportive. Even now, a year later, I can only still tell them Palmer’s words.
In the end it’s something that I can’t not do.
