Parker J. Palmer - Let your life speak: listening for the voice of vocation

A Hidden Wholeness

The Courage to Teach

The Courage to Teach: A Guide for Reflection and Renewal (with Rachel Livsey)

The Active Life

To Know As We Are Known

The Company of Strangers

The Promise of Paradox

Caring for the Commonweal (coeditor)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Palmer, Parker J.

Let your life speak: listening for the voice of vocation/

Parker J. Palmer.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-7879-4735-0 (acid-free)

1. VocationChristianity. I. Title.

BV4740 .P35 2000

248.4dc21 99-6467

For Heather Marie Palmer my granddaughter

May you always treasure true self

With the exception of , every chapter in this book originally appeared as an essay in some other publication during the past decade. I have rewritten all the essays, most of them substantially. My aim has been to create a real book not just a collection of articles about vocation, but a coherent exploration of a subject that engages many of us for the better part of our lives.

I mention the provenance of these pieces partly because I believe in truth in labeling and partly because the people who invited me to write the original essays, with all the trust that implies, are valued partners in my own vocation.

The unusual charge that accompanies the lectureship helped frame this book: reflect on your life story through the concept of vocationincluding lessons learned from disappointments and failures as well as successesand do so in a way that might speak to younger as well as older adults. I am grateful to my friend Doug Orr, president of the college, for extending the invitation; to Don and Ann Davidson for endowing a lectureship that invites this sort of reflection; and to the entire Warren Wilson community for receiving my words with such deep hospitality.

John, my good friend for many years, is one of the best companions a person could have along the way, and Weavingsthe journal he has raised up from its infancyis widely regarded as one of the finest periodicals of its kind.

Henri was a treasured friend and mentor to both John Mogabgab and me, and this chapter is testimony to the transcendent power of friendship. It explores my experience with depression, a subject I could not have dealt with so openly except for the support of friends still living and the spirit of a friend now gone.

I am grateful to my friend Max Case, executive director, for his invitation and encouragement. Indeed, I am grateful to the many campus ministers, priests, and rabbis across the country who helped me take first steps toward my calling thirty years ago, at a time when few in the academy were willing to entertain spiritual questions, at least not in publica situation that is, blessedly, different today.

I think of that pamphlet as Fetzers equivalent of the Hiltons pillow mintsand I think of Rob Lehman as a pioneer in empowering so many of us to explore the complex connections between inner and outer life.

Special thanks go to Sarah Polster, my editor at Jossey-Bass. She was the first to see that the question of vocation was at the heart of many of the essays I have written in recent years and to believe in their potential to become a real book. Her skillful editing has helped bring these essays together in a fabric more tightly woven than I could have achieved on my own.

My thanks also go to the other members of the Jossey-Bass staff who have been such superb partners in publishing: Carol Brown, Joanne Clapp Fullagar, Paula Goldstein, Danielle Neary, Johanna Vondeling, and Jennifer Whitney.

Much of the personal journey I trace in this book was made in the company of, and with the support of, members of my family, past and present. I did not include them in my narrative simply because their stories belong to them alone; the only tale I know how to tell, or have a right to tell, is my own. But I thought of my family often and with deep gratitude as I was writing about the parts of the journey we shared.

To Sally Palmer, Brent Palmer, Todd Palmer, and Carrie Palmer: thank you for all the love you have given me along the way.

To Heather Palmer: thank you for the new love and laughter you have brought into my lifethough Id be grateful if you would stop reminding me to eat my vegetables!

To Sharon Palmer: thank you for your gifted editing that is vital to my vocation as a writer and for the love that sustains me as I learn how to let my life speak.

Parker J. Palmer

Madison, Wisconsin
July 1999

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.
William Stafford, ASK ME

Ask me whether what I have done is my life. For some, those words will be nonsense, nothing more than a poets loose way with language and logic. Of course what I have done is my life! To what am I supposed to compare it?

But for others, and I am one, the poets words will be precise, piercing, and disquieting. They remind me of moments when it is clearif I have eyes to seethat the life I am living is not the same as the life that wants to live in me. In those moments I sometimes catch a glimpse of my true life, a life hidden like the river beneath the ice. And in the spirit of the poet, I wonder: What am I meant to do? Who am I meant to be?