Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak:
Listening for the voice of vocation (Jossey-Bass, 2000)
Parker Palmer is an educator, consultant and writer. He’s also a Quaker. His writings are difficult to pigeon hole. They could easily fit under several categories such as spirituality, vocational guidance, or ‘understanding ourselves’. He has a unique style. When I first read some of Palmer’s writings, I instantly recognised that this was a man with much to say. His wordsmith skills and deep insight remind me of Eugene Peterson. You read a page or two and its enough to chew on for quite some time. His capacity to connect with any reader (not just Christian) desiring to reflect deeply on life and one’s own journey through it, reminds me of Scott Peck.
I’d categorise him as a wise guide on the road to the examined life. He causes me to reflect deeply on how God has uniquely shaped me and encourages me to get in contact with my deepest longings and desires.
Let Your Life Speak is an exceptionally honest and autobiographical book. Palmer opens the door of his soul, allowing the reader to see him not as “the great wise one” but as a vulnerable, broken and often struggling person, who has been to the depths of depression and lostness more than once in his life. He tells his story with such profound vulnerability and humility, that you recognise very quickly he has rich wisdom to share – if we might just take the time to listen.
The main theme of Palmer’s book revolves around the Quaker phrase, “Let your life speak”. Implicit in this is the challenge to live the life that only we can live; to not attempt to live someone else’s life – however noble our motives might be to do so, but rather to “listen to our own hearts” and to learn what it is that we have been uniquely shaped to be and do. As Palmer notes, “Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you.”
If there are distant echoes here of Gnostic or New Age sentiments that cause us to flinch and go “hold on a minute!” then I can empathize. However, I keep reminding myself that while not explicit in his writing, Parker’s own context is thoroughly Christian – albeit of a tradition that is somewhat foreign to most of us. Fundamental to his perspective is that a personal creator God has made and shaped us quite uniquely. The clues to finding our God-given vocation (or SoulPurpose) are to be found in the distinct patterns of personality, motivations, passions, gifts, values and ways of relating that are so deeply ingrained in us. Each of us need help from one another, and from our Creator, to discover what those fingerprints are. If “letting our lives speak” means creating the environment to get in touch with how God has uniquely shaped us, then count me in. With help from each other, and in prayerful dependence on God, this is the kind of business we should be engaging in.
In one part of the book Parker candidly tells the story of making a significant vocational decision in his life. He had been invited to become the president of an educational institution. Despite being fairly certain that he should take it, he called together several trusted friends to help him discern his future. This “clearness committee” (a Quaker term) embarked on a process of asking honest and open questions for three hours, while refraining from giving Palmer any advice. The purpose of such a group is to help the person find for themselves what the right thing is to do.
“Halfway into the process, someone asked a question that sounded easier yet but turned out to be very hard: ‘What would you like most about being a president?’” After some hesitation Palmer began responding with some of the things he would not like about being president. The friend who asked the question gently reminded him that he was not answering the question. Eventually, Palmer responded with his most honest, bedrock answer, “I guess what I’d like most is getting my picture in the paper with the word president under it.”
Palmer continues the story, “I was sitting with seasoned Quakers who knew that though my answer was laughable, my mortal soul was clearly at stake! They did not laugh at all but went into a long and serious silence – a silence in which I could only sweat and inwardly groan. Finally my questioner broke the silence with a question that cracked all of us up – and cracked me open: ‘Parker, can you think of an easier way to get your picture in the paper?’
“By then it was obvious, even to me, that my desire to be president had much more to do with my ego than with the ecology of my life.” As a result he withdrew his name from consideration, realizing that it would have been a very bad fit for both himself, and the school.
The approach of finding vocational direction by helping each other to listen well to our own “lives” is one that is much more indirective than most of us have been taught – and feel comfortable with. Of course, this is the Quaker way. It grates against the highly directional counsel and advice we’re used to dispensing – particularly within the evangelical community. As he notes, “We are surrounded by communities based on the practice of ‘setting each other straight’ – an ultimately totalitarian practice bound to drive the shy soul into hiding.” But Palmer challenges that and his perspective is worth listening to.
Take for example, his reflections on trying to ‘help’ someone, like himself, with depression:
“One of the hardest things we must do sometimes is to be present to another person’s pain without trying to ‘fix’ it, to simply stand respectfully at the edge of that person’s mystery and misery. Standing there, we feel useless and powerless, which is exactly how a depressed person feels – and our unconscious need as Job’s comforters is to reassure ourselves that we are not like the sad soul before us.
In an effort to avoid those feelings, I give advice, which sets me, not you, free. If you take my advice, you may get well – and if you don’t get well, I did the best I could.” (page 63)
Leadership
My ‘favourite’ chapter is entitled “Leading from within”. (By ‘favourite’ I really mean ‘most challenging’!) This is a sobering read. Here’s some extended extracts from it:
“A leader is someone with the power to project either shadow or light onto some part of the world and onto the lives of the people who dwell there. A leader shapes the ethos in which others must live, an ethos as light-filled as heaven or as shadowy as hell. A good leader is intensely aware of the interplay of inner shadow and light, lest the act of leadership do more harm than good.
I think, for example, of teachers who create the conditions under which young people must spend so many hours: some shine a light that allows new growth to flourish, while others cast a shadow under which seedlings die. I think of parents who generate similar effects in the lives of their families or of clergy who do the same to entire congregations.
…Leadership is hard work for which one is regularly criticized and rarely rewarded, so it is understandable that we need to bolster ourselves with positive thoughts. But by failing to look at our shadows, we feed a dangerous delusion that leaders too often indulge: that our efforts are always well intended, our power is always benign, and the problem is always in those difficult people whom we are trying to lead!
Those of us who readily embrace leadership, especially public leadership, tend toward extroversion, which often means ignoring what is happening inside ourselves. If we have any sort of inner life, we ‘compartmentalise’ it, walling it off from our public work. This of course, allows the shadow to grow unchecked until it emerges, larger than life…Leaders not only need the technical skills to manage the external world but also the spiritual skills to journey inward toward the source of both shadow and light.
(Palmer then uses Annie Dillard’s imagery of the ‘monsters’ we have to ride – taking us inward and downward toward the hardest realities of our lives.)
Why must we go in and down? Because as we do so, we will meet the darkness that we carry within ourselves – the ultimate source of the shadows that we project onto other people. If we do not understand that the enemy is within, we will find a thousand ways of making someone ‘out there’ into the enemy, becoming leaders who oppress rather than liberate people.
(Palmer then describes five such monsters he has had to ride in his own quest for transformation)
The first shadow-casting monster is insecurity about identity and worth. Many leaders have an extroverted personality that makes this shadow hard to see. But extroversion sometimes develops as a way to cope with self-doubt: we plunge into external activity to prove we are worthy – or simply to evade the question. There is a well-known form of this syndrome, especially among men, in which our identity becomes so dependent on performing some external role that we become depressed, and even die, when that role is taken away.
When we are insecure about our own identities, we create settings that deprive other people of their identities as a way of buttressing our own….
There are dynamics in all kinds of institutions that deprive the many of their identity so the few can enhance their own, as if identity were a zero-sum game, a win-lose situation. Look into a classroom, for example, where an insecure teacher is forcing students to be passive stenographers of the teacher’s store of knowledge, leaving the teacher with more sense of selfhood and the vulnerable students with less….
A second shadow inside many of us is the belief that the universe is a battleground, hostile to human interests…Unfortunately, life is full of self-fulfilling prophecies. The tragedy of this inner shadow, our fear of losing a fight, is that it helps create conditions where people feel compelled to live as if they were at war.
A third shadow common among leaders is ‘functional atheism’, the belief that ultimate responsibility for everything rests with us. This is the unconscious, unexamined conviction that if anything decent is going to happen here, we are the ones who must make it happen – a conviction held even by people who talk a good game about God.
This shadow causes pathology on every level of our lives. It leads us to impose our will on others, stressing our relationships, sometimes to the point of breaking. It often eventuates in burnout, depression and despair, as we learn that the world will not bend to our will…
The gift we receive on the inner journey is the knowledge that ours is not the only act in town. Not only are there other acts out there, but some of them are even better than ours, at least occasionally! We learn that we need not carry the whole load but can share it with others, liberating us and empowering them. We learn that sometimes we are free to lay the load down altogether. The great community asks us to do only what we are able and trust the rest to other hands.
A fourth shadow within and among us is fear, especially our fear of the natural chaos of life. Many of us – parents and teachers and CEOs – are deeply devoted to eliminating all remnants of chaos from the world. We want to organize and orchestrate things so thoroughly that messiness will never bubble up around us and threaten to overwhelm us (for ‘messiness’ read dissent, innovation, challenge and change). In families and churches and corporations, this shadow is projected as rigidity of rules and procedures, creating an ethos that is imprisoning rather than empowering…
The insight we receive on the inner journey is that chaos is the precondition to creativity…
My final example of the shadows that leaders project is, paradoxically, the denial of death itself. Though we sometimes kill things off well before their time, we also live in denial of the fact that all things must die in due course. Leaders who participate in this denial often demand that the people around them keep resuscitating things that are no longer alive. Projects and programmes that should have been unplugged long ago are kept on life support to accommodate the insecurities of a leader who does not want anything to die on his or her watch.
Within our denial of death lurks fear of another sort: the fear of failure. In most organizations, failure means a pink slip in your box, even if that failure, that ‘little death’, was suffered in the service of high purpose…The best leaders in every setting reward people for taking worthwhile risks even if they are likely to fail. These leaders know that the death of an initiative – if it was tested for good reasons – is always a source of new learning.
The gift we receive on the inner journey is the knowledge that death finally comes to everything – and yet death does not have the final word. By allowing something to die when its time is due, we create the conditions under which new life can emerge.”
Some other smaller pearls
On self-care
“…self-care is never a selfish act – it is simply good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer to others.” (30)
On burnout…
“Though usually regarded as the result of trying to give too much, burnout in my experience results from trying to give what I do not possess – the ultimate in giving too little!” (49)
On our limitations…
“Each of us arrives here with a nature, which means both limits and potentials. We can learn as much about our nature by running into our limits as by experiencing our potentials….if you are like me and don’t readily admit your limits, embarrassment may be the only way to get your attention. I go on full alert only when I am blocked or get derailed or flat-out fail. Then, finally, I may be forced to face my nature and find out whether I can make something of both my gifts and my limitations.
It is important to distinguish between two kinds of limitations: those that come with selfhood and those that are imposed by people or political forces hell-bent on keeping us ‘in our place’. I do not ask everyone who gets fired to conclude that it was the work of a gracious God offering clues to one’s true vocation. Sometimes it is the work of a pathological boss or a corporate culture, getting rid of people whose propensity for truth-telling threatens the status quo. Sometimes it is the result of an economic system that robs the poor of their jobs so that the rich can get richer still. Like everything else in the spiritual life, getting guidance from way closing (editing note: a term he uses for finding vocational guidance through what does not and cannot happen in one’s life) requires thoughtful discernment.
Our problem as Americans – at least, among my race and gender – is that we resist the very idea of limits, regarding limits of all sorts as temporary and regrettable impositions on our lives.” (41-2)
“…limitations and liabilities are the flip side of our gifts, how a particular weakness is the inevitable trade-off for a particular strength. We will become better teachers not by trying to fill the potholes in our souls but by knowing them so well that we can avoid falling into them.” (52)
On our inner lives
“We like to talk about the outer world as if it were infinitely complex and demanding, but it is a cakewalk compared to the labyrinth of our inner lives!” (82)
On transformation
“We are here not only to transform the world but also to be transformed.” (97)
On autumn
“Autumn constantly reminds me that my daily dyings are necessary precursors to new life.” (100)
Other books by Parker Palmer worth reading
The Courage to Teach
A Hidden Wholeness
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