The Echo Within: Finding Your True Calling - Softcover

Robert Benson has written more than a dozen books about the discovery of the sacred in the midst of our ordinary lives, including Between the Dreaming and the Coming True, Home By Another Way, and Digging In. His work has been critically acclaimed in a wide range of publications from The New York Times and USA Today to Spirituality & Health and The Benedectine Review. He is an alumnus of The Upper Room’s Academy for Spiritual Formation and was recently named a Living Spiritual Teacher by Spirituality&Practice.com. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

One

Listening
My life is a listening, His is a speaking.
My salvation is to hear and respond.
—THOMAS MERTON

IT WAS EARLY FALL, and it was late afternoon, and I was
walking through old Carolina pines with a new friend.
We were near the ocean, near enough to hear the surf
as we walked along a broad path through the forest.

I say I was with a new friend. I only spent five days
with him, and I had never seen him before and have
not seen him since. He and I were two of about sixty
people at a retreat, and I was the speaker.

“I think I am being called to go to seminary,” my
new friend said. “Do you think I am?”

He was wrestling with a question that almost
always arises whenever questions of calling are being
raised. He was hoping I could tell him if he was being
called by God to do a particular thing or if he was
wanting to do it for his own reasons and giving God
the credit. (Or the blame, perhaps?) He wanted me to
look into the future and tell him which choice would
be the right one. He was hoping I was a lot more than
a speaker; he was hoping I was a prophet.

For a while I did the wisest thing I know to do in
such a situation, which is to keep my mouth shut and
listen.

We walked for a bit longer, and he talked a little
more, and I tried to pay careful attention to the story
he was telling me. We stopped for a moment to watch
the sea and to listen to the surf.

“Sometimes,” he said, “I cannot tell if it is God
telling me this or if I am just talking to myself.”

We watched the sea for a while.

“Exactly what does God’s voice sound like?” I
asked him. “And how do you recognize that voice
when you hear it?”

My new friend looked at me as though perhaps he
should not be wasting his time with a guy who suddenly
did not appear to be so prophetic after all.

I had clever follow-up questions too. “Does God
sound like James Earl Jones or Helen Mirren? What if
God sounds like Judi Dench or George Burns? What
if God’s voice is shrill and hard to listen to? What if
God sounds like Truman Capote? What if the voice
sounds like your own voice?”

These were not unreasonable questions to me on
that day and are still not on this day. My new friend
looked at me as though I had gone from being not as
smart as he had hoped to being a smart aleck instead.

But I had a reason for asking those questions.

—

People go away on spiritual retreat for all kinds of reasons.
I am one of those people. I think it is a good idea
to go away for a while to listen for, and maybe even to,
God.

It was my father who taught me to love going on
retreat. He led so many of them that his father once
asked him if he should not go on an advance for a
change.

I think a retreat can be especially helpful when you
are wrestling with some particular thing in your life.
Having a leader or a teacher or a speaker there is a nice
bonus, but it is not always the point. As the years go
by, I go to fewer and fewer retreats where there is a
speaker. Sometimes it is easier to listen for the voice of
God if there is not someone else talking all the time.