The Church has too often told us what to do and failed to help us become who we can be. The new forms of the Church will be shaped by the need of every man to become the person he canbecome. It is our common humanity that we affirm, our need of one another, and above all our sonship--we are joint heirs with Christ. It is the glorious freedom of the sons of God to which all men are called that our structures are to proclaim.
The outward journey (mission) is determined in part by the gifts discovered in the inward journey (meditation). The story of the buried talents is the story of how seriously God considers the matter of unused gifts. This is what psychiatry calls "unlived" life, which takes its terrible toll--"even that which you have will be taken away."
There are a thousand warnings, however, to the man who walks away from himself and his own destiny. Restlessness, sleepless nights, discontent, anger, meaninglessness, boredom--these are the cries of the violated self. Through our suffering we are called back to our own truth: to turn and be healed.
We can walk, however, beyond the hearing of the voice that calls, into a land of apathy, complacency, not caring--there is a place beyond the point of safe return. "You will hear and hear, but never understand: you will look and look, but never see" (Matt. 13:14, NEB)
Harvey Moore was brought up by missionary parents, who raised him in the doctrine of service. He had an aptitude for mathematics, and he reasoned that he could serve through being an engineer. He gave himself wholeheartedly to this end, but no peace came to him. "When you are made to feel guilty," he said, "nothing is enough. There is no pleasure in giving. One gives through 'oughtness,' and must strain after new ways to give."
This
turned him to medicine, because it seemed
to him a greater field of service. In preparatory studies, he stumbled
on the field of anthropology, and it captured his attention because he
wanted to know the "why" of life, but again for the wrong reasons. "Having
to justify all I did, I was rationalizing that I would be of even greater
service if I could unravel the reason 'why.' I
was seeking what is impossible to know. The knowing I wanted would make
me God.
"I began to get intimations that none of the things I had been doing were for me. In trying to penetrate the mystery of the universe, I was banging my head against a wall. There came a day when I was content to wonder at life. As for engineering and medicine, they were not for me, either. Up until then I had been asking, 'What should I do?' Now I began to ask ,'What do I want to do?' I had always gotten joy out of painting and for the first time I was asking myself what would give me joy. Working with my hands gave me joy. I did not know that I could create with my hands. I just knew that using them gave me pleasure and that this was what I wanted to do."
The pursuit of his own "selfish" ends placed on him a burden of guilt that was to weigh upon him for many years. No one had ever told him that surrender to what is written into the fabric of our lives is surrender to the will of God. Part of him knew it, and this part became strong enough to do battle with the part that did not know, and to take up the cross that every man bears in his becoming.
Harvey has found the task that is his to do, which is to say that he has heard a call. In response to a call a man can lay down his life. Why is this so? Because he finds his life. The sacrificial life becomes truly worthwhile to him who is discovering the treasure hidden in his own being. He can sell all he has to unearth it. He can gamble and lose. There comes to the "called" man an internal freedom that lets him take the risks involved in following a way. Each day he moves closer to his "true self" and in this comes strength.
Harvey Moore's home, studio, and bronze-casting
factory are all in a one-room garage in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. 
The
roof leaks when it rains. There are no carpeted
floors, only cement underfoot. The furniture is a desk and bed in
one partitioned corner. The rest of the room is
working space.
Harvey's story does not end with the fact that he has become a recognized sculptor. Only hesistantly should this achievement be mentioned, for the man who is on the journey of becoming fully human does not have to succeed. The adventure is not in the arriving, but in the journey--the "now" of life.
When Harvey found a congregation that confirmed him as an artist, and gave to its people the freedom to be, he was able to move back into the life of the Church and to belong to a missionary people, a people who provide the structures in which others are free to realize their essential selves. For Harvey, the missionary structure right now is the classes he gives in sculpture at The Potter's House Workshop.
It is as we give ourselves unreservedly to what we understand as truth that we come to a new kind of knowing. Maybe we learn with a certainty what is not for us, so that we become open to hearing the call which before had only reached us as a muffled sound. This is the call of God in Christ--the call to share in God's mission of reconciliation to His world, which can happen only to the extent that there is a reconciling action within us. Webster defines "reconcile" as "to cause to be friendly again." We need to become friendly again toward ourselves, and not to be weighted with guilt by the heretical doctrine that labels the meditative man selfish or self-centered.
The mission-oriented evangelists have cried against the churches huddling in buildings, ministering to their own, but the words do not fit the churches we see. They do not need to be rescued from self-centeredness. They need to discover and nurture the talents in their people that will give them authentic missions.
Wally Wilson is another person in our community who discovered his mission by daring to face the discontent in his own life. This led him to ponder that radical question of what he would like to do. He made a simple discovery. He wanted to cut hair. Contrary to opinion in some places, he felt a haircut made a person feel good. Inflationary prices made him also think that haircutting could be a real ministry to the poor. He was not at all dismayed to find that a barbering course required a thousand hours to complete. We were all better informed on the intricacies of barbering by the time Wally was licensed to cut hair.
Almost
two years went by before Wally had opportunity to use his new skill. It
came when his work took him to the mountains of North Carolina for seven
months of the year. At the little church where he went to worship he met
the mountain people, and through them be came
acquainted with the poverty that surrounded the resort area where he was
living.
He embarked then on his ministry by helping some of the people paint and fix up their houses. Soon he was using his evenings and weekends barbering and painting. Wally has now been designated as our church's first missionary to the mountain people of North Carolina and authorized to spend his tithe in his work. Part of his assignment is the keeping of a diary and a monthly report to our church on his spiritual disciplines and missionary activities.
In a class in our School of Christian Living, Gordon Cosby was speaking on the subject of Christian vocation He said in summarizing that the primary task and primary mission of the Christian is to call forth the gifts of others. "We are not sent into the world in order to make people good. We are not sent to encourage them to do their duty. The reason people have resisted the Gospel is that we have gone out to make people good, to help them to do their duty, to impose new burdens on them, rather than calling forth the gift which is the essence of the person himself." How do we do this? "We begin," Gordon said, "by exercising our own gifts. The person who is having the time of his life doing what he is doing has a way of calling forth the deeps of another. Such a person is Good News. He is not saying the good news. He is the good news. He is the embodiment of the freedom of the new humanity. The person who exercises his own gift in freedom can allow the Holy Spirit to do in others what He wants to do."
The discovery of the real self is the way to the treasure hidden in
a field. The gift a person brings to another is the gift of himself. Talents
are the expression of this self. It is the way the self is sent into the
world to use the materials of the world, and to
be the bearer of the spirit of God, and--paradoxically--it is the
way the self not only remains behind, but is catapulted into the future,
for in the creative act the new breaks forth, and the prophetic word is
heard.