Finding our voice

One aspect of calling – where one's vocation intersects with one's work – is finding one's voice. Many people, I believe, have a sense of dislocation because they are not able to express the deepest insights and passions of their hearts in ways that bring them satisfaction. They yearn to do so, but don't feel they have the words or ability to command attention that allows them to gain a hearing in their wider community. I hope that we would be able to find opportunities to make our own contributions to community, without hesitation or fear that our words are inadequate.

Beginning with the narrative of an Alaskan teacher's role in a small community school, Elaine's Circle by Bob Katz, I came across the following:

Elaine loved to tell stories to her kids. These stories were not the kind that normally captivate grade-schoolers. They were not fantasies or fictions or tales of legendary figures or neatly wrapped parables capped by edifying homilies. They were mostly just tales drawn from her own experience, accounts of events that had occurred to her or to her family or close friends – which she possessed in ever-expanding numbers. The story might involve a wicked teacher she had had when she was girl in a one-room farm community schoolhouse, or her younger brother Ron's exploits as a competitive curler (yes, curler!), or the German prisoners of war housed on her farm, or the black bear that had started making itself comfortable beneath her side deck. THere was not much deliberation to these stories. The words were improvised, the flow was improvised, and the points of emphasis depended on a host of variables, including topics they were studying in class, events in the world at large, the weather front swooping into the valley just outside the big glass windows of their classroom. Strangely, Elaine rarely knew she was going to launch into a story until the moment arose. Then, suddenly, she was telling it, and twenty-six eager faces tilted toward her, hanging on her every word.

For a woman of an almost congenital modesty that had led her to conclude, wrongly, that most other people lived far more dramatic lives and therefore had far more important things to say, this penchant for storytelling was a bit surprising. Elaine herself had not even known it was in her. She'd always been the perfect listener. She'd listened, rapt, to the flowing and convoluted tales told by her father and mother and especially by her older sister, who could spin out stories so irresistible and fraught with dizzying twists and turns that family members in a hurry to get somewhere on time made a point of avoiding her lest they get snagged for an hour they did not have to spare. Her sister Norma was the storyteller. Elaine certainly never thought of herself that way.

Until she became a teacher. Then, something clicked. As with all magical occurrences, it was probably a confluence of factors – the forgiving nature of children, the special license in having a captive audience that was hers alone, subtle developments in her own emerging sense of self – that contributed to the transformation. But transformation was certainly the word for it. Seemingly overnight, Elaine went from being an undemonstrative woman with a nearly inaudible voice and a habitual urge to dodge attention into a mesmerizing showstopper who constantly left a roomful of fresh-faced youngsters pleading impatiently, “Please, please, Mrs. Moore. Please, tell us more!”

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