Recently, while doing section work, I chanced across Parker J. Palmer’s gem of a book Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. The title alone resonated with me. Being in my mid-twenties and still searching for a way to be self-sufficient as well as sustained both spiritually and temperamentally in my work, finding Palmer’s book was something like the still, small voice of God.
Discovering that he also had written a book considered a classic in the field of education—The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life—was even further evidence that Palmer’s was a voice I would be spending a good deal of time with in the coming months. Slated to teach my first class in the fall, I’ve been in need of some encouragement, insight, and awareness of the joys and pitfalls of teaching vocationally. After finishing Let Your Life Speak, I dove into The Courage to Teach, and have found Palmer’s wisdom enormously calming and enlightening. If there is only word one I could use to describe Palmer’s work, it is just that: wise.
Palmer is a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quaker), and he has dedicated his life to teaching, education, and writing about the necessity of our inner lives existing in harmony with our outward vocations. He also leads retreats for the Center of Courage and Renewal. Let Your Life Speak is Palmer’s personal account of his descent into depression and the awakening and insight gleaned from his journey out of that darkness. Ultimately, this experience had enormous implications on his vision of vocation. Let Your Life Speak is most definitely not a how-to book, which is one of the reasons why it is so appealing to me. Authors of how-to books too often promote their work as definitive for the human race and its problems, and nothing about such claims gets at the complexity and unpredictability of being alive. Palmer states:
“But what is true for me is not necessarily true for others. I am not writing a prescription—I am simply telling my story. If it illumines your story, or the story of someone you care about, I will be grateful. If it helps you or someone you care about turn suffering into guidance for vocation, I will be more grateful still” (58).
Such an approach proves that Palmer is conscious of the power of plain storytelling, and also aware of his limits.
The idea of our human limits is one thing that Palmer stresses in his approach to vocation. All of us possess gifts, and all of us have limits. When we ignore our limits and pursue work unsuited to our authentic selves, we cause “violence…to others and ourselves by working in ways that violate our souls” (The Courage to Teach, 30). For a long time, Palmer worked in such a way.
He says, “I was in my early thirties when I began, literally, to wake up to questions about my vocation. By all appearances, things were going well, but the soul does not put much stock in appearances. Seeking a path more purposeful than accumulating wealth, holding power, winning at competition, or securing a career, I had started to understand that it is indeed possible to live a life other than one’s own” (2). It was during this period that Palmer came across the Quaker saying, “Let your life speak.”
Palmer admits that his initial thoughts on letting his life speak were misguided:
“I found those words encouraging, and I thought I understood what they meant: ‘Let the highest truths and values guide you. Live up to those demanding standards in everything you do.’…So I lined up the loftiest ideals I could find and set out to achieve them. The results were rarely admirable, often laughable, and sometimes grotesque. But always they were unreal, a distortion of my true self—as must be the case when one lives from the outside in, not the inside out.” (2-3).
Much of Palmer’s focus is on our inner selves—a place he feels we are consistently failing to do much necessary work, be it with our families or in the workplace. Inner work allows us to acknowledge our limits as well as our gifts, to become more secure and aware of our authentic selves and our imperfections:
“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…[H]ow often I phone a business or professional office and hear, ‘Dr. Jones’s office—this is Nancy speaking.’ The boss has a title and a last name but the person (usually a woman) who answers the phone has neither, because the boss has decreed that it will be that way” (86).
Such passages from Palmer not only encourage us to discover and live out our authentic selves, but also induce us toward compassion—a characteristic we are desperate for in a 21st century wracked with greed, despair, and a need for purpose and meaning.
Let Your Life Speak has encouraged me to continue pursuing and working toward those avenues of work I feel are suited to my authentic self: writing, reading, thinking, and soon teaching. Being in my mid-twenties, the pressure has increased to be making more money, to do work considered more “professional” or “grown up.” Being the son of a lawyer, there have been times when I’ve felt pushed to fall in line and join the “family business.” I am certain that to separate my work from my heart would lead to what Palmer deems a violence against myself and ultimately others.
“There are times when we must work for money rather than meaning, and we may never have the luxury of quitting a job because it does not make us glad. But that does not release us from continually checking the violence we do to others and ourselves by working in ways that violate our souls…What brings more security in the long run: holding this job or honoring my soul?” (The Courage to Teach, 30).
For anyone who cares about the impact and meaning of their work, I hope you will give Palmer’s words a chance to seep into your heart, and perhaps enhance your ability and desire to live from there outward, instead of the other way around. Though Palmer is adamant in his claim not to have a monopoly on some universal truth, I am certain his words speak to our basic human needs. We would do well to listen and apply. -Ellis
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