Stalking my calling

 

I was not stalking my calling, but hunting up a poem, when I stumbled across my copy of "Living like Weasels" from Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard. (I'm doing a brief reading at commencement in May, and was looking for my copy of this poem by astronomer Becky Elson, which I love, but is it too dark for commencement?)

If you haven't read it, it reads like a bloodthirsty take on Mary Oliver's poem The Summer Day. The one with the line about "your one wild and precious life." (And which I am definitely not reading at commencement.)

The whole weasel essay is a joy, science and language and imagery all tangled together like the wild roses and poison ivy around Hollins Pond. Or snapped into a single whole like Dillard's mind and the weasel's. 

She opens with the story of an eagle found with the dry skull of a weasel clamped onto its neck, driven by its predatory instincts to bite even as it became prey. To do as it must, to do as it was meant to do — bite — even in extremis.

Dillard closes the essay by mulling  about vocation. "We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience — even of silence — by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse...I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you...Seize it and let it seize you up aloft..." 

In these last few weeks of teaching I seem to be stalking my calling again, looking for the tender spot, for the pulse point, and the willingness to seize it, letting it grasp me as I grasp it. To do — to be — as I was meant to be.

The world is full of marvels…and things that sting.

The world is full of marvels. I saw Portuguese men o’war (is that really the right plural, surely it isn’t “Portuguese man o’wars”?) on the beach over spring break. Or I am almost sure that’s what the translucent balloons dotting the shoreline were. (I had somehow imagined them to be much larger, based on some real life account I had read when I was a kid.) I was sure enough that I didn’t touch them. Men o’war or not, I have a healthy aversion to jellyfish. I’ve been stung before.

So I was surprised to find they aren’t jellyfish at all, but siphonophores. They aren’t a single individual but a colony of clones, genetically identical but each individual manifesting a different function. A marvel indeed.  

Of all things, it made me think of the passage in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor 12:12): we are one body in Christ, though each of us manifests that differently in service to the whole. What would a homily framed around stinging groups of clones and Paul's letter look like? or better yet, sound like? I'm doing an 8 week course in preaching, so homilies are on my mind.

It also brought to mind Frederick Buechner: “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.”

But perhaps be cautious about what you touch?

To Be Seen

To Be Seen

The neurologist pulled her chair around to face me. Then she gently told me that the difficulties I had been having writing equations on the blackboard and tying my shoes were not arthritis but the result of an incurable, progressive neurological disease. Oh.

I left her office feeling curiously relieved—grateful for the small mercies she offered to ease the symptoms, but thankful above all because she had so clearly seen my affliction. So often our sufferings go unseen by those around us. We fear, perhaps, that God does not see our struggles either.

But from the opening antiphon to the Gospel, all of today’s readings promise us otherwise. We are seen, we are known, and, even in the face of mortal danger, we are held close by God, who Isaiah tells us delights—exults!—in his people.

Unlike the heart-stricken father in John’s Gospel, I do not come to God these days seeking a miracle, or even signs and wonders. I come to see. And I come yearning to be seen.

St. Augustine said of the Eucharist: See who you are, become what you see. So I stand before the altar and see Christ lifted on the cross, suffering and fearing he was abandoned. I see who I am, suffering and afraid of what the future might hold—and know I am not alone. I hold out my hands and realize that I am seen in return, called forth from the depths of the netherworld, bound not only to the cross, but promised life. I am seen in my affliction. That is miracle enough, so I believe.

Michelle Francl-Donnay is a wife and mother, a professor of chemistry, and an adjunct scholar at the Vatican Observatory. She is author of Prayer: Biblical Wisdom for Seeking God in the Little Rock Scripture Study Alive in the Word series. michellefrancldonnay.com. 

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This reflection appeared in the March 2026 issue of Give Us This Day and is used with permission.

The reflection had its roots in the Entrance Antiphon: "As for me, I trust in the Lord. Let me be glad and rejoice in your mercy, for you have seen my affliction." The psalm for the day is the one that I could not stop running through my head the terrible night that Tom died. The dance of tears and joy, of fear and trust. And I kept thinking in the Gospel about the long walk home that the father in the Gospel had, not knowing whether his son lived, had his miracle been granted? Would he still have believed if his son had died?

Putting on the brakes

I have stomped on the brakes, and stepped into spring break. The lawn is still dotted with pockets of snow, even though the bitter cold has finally broken. I longed for warmth that didn’t involve putting on so many layers I felt like a toddler decked out in a snow suit, unable to move. So the three of us — me, Math Man and his golf clubs — went somewhere warm, driving to the airport in a bubble of early morning fog and mist, by lunch we were having lunch and watching whales breach from a perch on the cliffs in a warm place with cool breezes. Like magic.

No email, I told Math Man. No desire for a mad crazy sightseeing schedule. Beach walks, good meals and rest. I realized by the second day that I had activated my “retreat” mode. Rest, pray, read. Walk. Repeat. Lean into the quiet and the sound of the waves. Float. Take some advice from Ireneus: rest in the hand of God.

When we return there will be 7 weeks left of my teaching career. Then I will be stepping on the brakes again, far more firmly. Eighteen more lectures to give, four more recitation sessions to run. A final exam and on the 5th of May, after the final exam, it’s a wrap. Except for the grading. And the packing. 

Is it a journey or am I spelunking?

 

The term “your Parkinson’s journey” crops up in a lot of the reading I’ve been doing and the podcasts I’ve been listening to as I try to better understand what I am facing. The term felt awkward to me and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. Then I heard it used to refer to the late Eric Dane’s course of ALS. That is when I realized that journeys are a generally a two-way affair. You go on a journey, only to return home. ALS is not a journey, there is no return to normal, there is only catastrophe ahead. Nor is Parkinson’s a journey. It will progress — slowly, I pray — but it’s not going backwards. So, no, not a journey.

So maybe it’s more like a pilgrimage, I mused. You go somewhere, the going isn’t smooth and along the way you are changed. But even pilgrims go back home, the blisters and galls memories, not ever present realities.

In some ways I feel like a refugee who has been resettled in a place she did not chose, unable to return home. Or like my great-grandmothers who immigrated, never returning home, not even for a short visit. 

Maybe this is an expedition deep inside the earth? I read a piece about veteran coal miners who report that most of the time they crawl through the tunnels they don’t think about the enormous weight that is above them, hundreds, sometimes thousands of feet of rock. But every once in a while, that literally crushing reality asserts itself. Everything could collapse. Most of the time I’m not ruminating on Parkinson’s, but there are moments when I feel the future’s weight, and worry that I might be crushed.

Or maybe it is more like treading water over the Marianas trench, you float, as long as you keep moving just under the surface. It’s exhausting. But there are seven miles of water below you, nothing to stop you from sinking into those depths, so you perforce keep moving.