Let Your Life Speak Parker Palmer Pdf Download UPDATED
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Excerpt from
Let Your Life Speak
Listening for the Voice of Vocation
by Parker J. Palmer
Published: Jossey-Bass Inc., 2000
Chapter Ii, Now I Become Myself, pg. ix-22
Next > (pg. 22-36)
A VISION OF VOCATION
With twenty-one words, carefully chosen and artfully woven,
May Sarton evokes the quest for vocation--at least, my quest
for vocation--with candor and precision:
Now I become myself.
It's taken time, many years and places.
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people'south faces. ...1
What a long time it tin can have to become the person one
has e'er been! How often in the process we mask ourselves
in faces that are not our own. How much dissolving and
shaking of ego we must endure earlier we notice our deep
identity--the true self within every man that is the
seed of accurate vocation.
I first learned well-nigh vocation growing up in the church building. I value much nigh the religious tradition in which I was raised: its humility about its own convictions, its respect for the earth'southward variety, its concern for justice. Only the thought of "vocation" I picked upward in those circles created distortion until
I grew strong enough to discard it. I mean the thought that vocation, or calling, comes from a voice external to ourselves, a vocalisation of moral demand that asks us to become someone we are non yet--someone different, someone better, someone just beyond our reach.
That concept of vocation is rooted in a deep distrust of
selfhood, in the belief that the sinful self will always be "cocky-ish" unless corrected by external forces of virtue. Information technology is a notion
that made me feel inadequate to the chore of living my own life,
creating guilt about the distance betwixt who I was and who
I was supposed to be, leaving me wearied as I labored to
close the gap.
Today I understand vocation quite differently--not every bit a
goal to exist accomplished simply as a souvenir to be received. Discovering
vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize simply
beyond my reach only accepting the treasure of true self I
already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice "out
there" calling me to go something I am not. It comes
from a vox "in here" calling me to be the person I was born
to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God.
It is a strange gift, this birthright gift of self. Accepting it
turns out to be fifty-fifty more enervating than attempting to become someone else! I have sometimes responded to that
demand by ignoring the gift, or hiding it, or fleeing from it, or
squandering it--and I remember I am not alone. There is a Hasidic
tale that reveals, with amazing brevity, both the universal tendency
to want to exist someone else and the ultimate importance of becoming
ane's self: Rabbi Zusya, when he was an old man, said, "In the coming
world, they will not ask me:'Why were yous not Moses?' They will enquire me:
'Why were yous not Zusya?"'2
If yous doubt that nosotros all get in in this world with gifts and
as a souvenir, pay attention to an infant or a very young child. A few
years ago, my daughter and her newborn baby came to alive
with me for a while. Watching my granddaughter from her
earliest days on world, I was able, in my early fifties, to see
something that had eluded me as a twenty-something parent:
my granddaughter arrived in the world as this kind of person
rather than that, or that, or that.
She did not show up as raw material to exist shaped into
whatever image the world might desire her to take. She arrived
with her own gifted grade, with the shape of her own sacred
soul. Biblical organized religion calls it the image of God in which we are
all created. Thomas Merton calls information technology true cocky. Quakers call information technology
the inner lite, or "that of God" in every person. The humanist tradition
calls it identity and integrity. No matter what y'all call it, information technology is a pearl of
great price.
In those early days of my granddaughter's life, I began
observing the inclinations and proclivities that were planted in her at nascence. I noticed, and I still notice, what she likes and dislikes, what she is drawn toward and repelled past, how she
moves, what she does, what she says.
I am gathering my observations in a letter. When my k-
daughter reaches her late teens or early twenties, I will make
sure that my letter finds its way to her, with a preface something
like this: "Here is a sketch of who you were from your earliest
days in this world. It is not a definitive picture--only you can
draw that. Only it was sketched past a person who loves you very
much. Peradventure these notes Willie aid you practice sooner something
your grandfather did simply later: call up who you were when
yous offset arrived and reclaim the gift of truthful self."
Nosotros make it in this world with birthright gifts--then nosotros
spend the first half of our lives abandoning them or letting moth-
ers disabuse us of them. As young people, we are surrounded
past expectations that may have petty to practice with who we really
are, expectations held by people who are non trying to discern
our selfhood but to fit us into slots. In families, schools, work-
places, and religious communities, we are trained abroad from
truthful self toward images of acceptability; nether social pressures
like racism and sexism our original shape is deformed beyond
recognition; and we ourselves, driven past fear, besides often betray
true cocky to proceeds the approval of others.
Nosotros are disabused of original giftedness in the first half of
our lives. Then -- if we are awake, aware, and able to admit our
loss -- we spend the second half trying to recover and reclaim
the gift we once possessed.
When nosotros lose runway of true self, how can we pick up the
trail? One way is to seek clues in stories from our younger
years, years when we lived closer to our birthright gifts. A few
years agone, I establish some clues to myself in a time motorcar of
sorts. A friend sent me a tattered re-create of my high school news--
paper from May 1957 in which I had been interviewed nearly
what I intended to do with my life. With the certainty to exist
expected of a high school senior, I told the interviewer that I
would become a naval aviator and then accept up a career in
advert.
I was indeed "wearing other people'south faces," and I can tell
you exactly whose they were. My father worked with a man
who had in one case been a navy pilot. He was Irish, charismatic,
romantic, full of the wild blue yonder and a fair share of the
blarney, and I wanted to be like him. The father of ane of my
boyhood friends was in advertising, and though I did not yearn
to have on his persona, which was likewise buttoned-down for my
taste, I did yearn for the fast auto and other large toys that
seemed to be the accessories of his selfhood!
These self-prophecies, at present over forty years former, seem
wildly misguided for a person who somewhen became a
Quaker, a would-be pacifist, a writer, and an activist. Taken
literally, they illustrate how early in life we can lose track of who
we are. But inspected through the lens of paradox, my want
to become an aviator and an advertiser contain clues to the
core of true self that would take many years to emerge: clues,
by definition, are coded and must be deciphered.
Hidden in my desire to become an "advertisement man" was a life-
long fascination with language and its power to persuade, the
aforementioned fascination that has kept me writing incessantly for
decades. Subconscious in my desire to get a naval aviator was
something more complex: a personal engagement with the
trouble of violence that expressed itself at offset in military
fantasies and so, over a period of many years, resolved itself in
the pacifism I aspire to today. When I flip the coin of identity
I held to then tightly in high school, I find the paradoxical
"opposite" that emerged equally the years went past.
If I become farther back, to an earlier stage of my life, the clues
need less deciphering to yield insight into my birthright gifts
and callings. In grade school, I became fascinated with the
mysteries of flight. Equally many boys did in those days, I spent end-
less hours, later schoolhouse and on weekends, designing, crafting,
flying, and (normally) crashing model airplanes made of delicate
balsa wood.
Dissimilar virtually boys, however, I likewise spent long hours creating
eight- and twelve-page books about aviation. I would plow
a canvass of paper sideways; draw a vertical line downward the centre;
brand diagrams of, say, the cross-section of a wing; roll the
sheet into a typewriter; and peck out a caption explaining how
air moving across an airfoil creates a vacuum that lifts the
aeroplane. Then I would fold that sheet in half along with several
others I had fabricated, staple the collection together down the
spine, and painstakingly illustrate the cover.
I had always thought that the significant of this paperwork
was obvious: fascinated with flight, I wanted to be a pilot, or
at least an aeronautical engineer. But recently, when I found
a couple of these literary artifacts in an old cardboard box, I
suddenly saw the truth, and information technology was more obvious than I had
imagined. I didn't desire to be a pilot or an aeronautical engi neer
or anything else related to aviation. I wanted to be an
author, to make books--a task I have been attempting from
the tertiary class to this very moment!
From the beginning, our lives lay down clues to selfhood
and vocation, though the clues may exist hard to decode. Merely
trying to interpret them is profoundly worthwhile--especially
when we are in our twenties or thirties or forties, feeling
profoundly lost, having wandered, or been dragged, far away from
our birthright gifts.
Those clues are helpful in counteracting the conventional
concept of vocation, which insists that our lives must exist
driven by "oughts." As noble as that may sound, nosotros practise not find
our callings past conforming ourselves to some abstract moral
code. We detect our callings by claiming authentic selfhood, by
being who nosotros are, by dwelling in the earth equally Zusya rather
than straining to be Moses. The deepest vocational question is
not "What ought I to do with my life?" It is the more elemental
and demanding "Who am I? What is my nature?"
Everything in the universe has a nature, which means
limits also as potentials, a truth well known by people who piece of work daily
with the things of the world. Making pottery, for
example, involves more than telling the clay what to become.
The clay presses back on the potter's hands, telling her what it
can and cannot do--and if she fails to heed, the consequence will
be both frail and ungainly. Engineering involves more than
telling materials what they must exercise. If the engineer does not
honor the nature of the steel or the wood or the stone, his failure
will go well beyond aesthetics: the span or the edifice
will plummet and put man life in peril.
The human being self also has a nature, limits as well as potentials.
If y'all seek vocation without understanding the material
you are working with, what you build with your life will be
ungainly and may well put lives in peril, your own and some
of those effectually yous. "Faking it" in the service of high values
is no virtue and has zero to practice with vocation. It is an
ignorant, sometimes big-headed, attempt to override one'south nature,
and it will e'er fail.
Our deepest calling is to grow into our ain accurate self-
hood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we
ought to be. As we exercise so, we volition not just observe the joy that every
homo beingness seeks -- we will also detect our path of authentic
service in the world. Truthful vocation joins self and service, equally
Frederick Buechner asserts when he defines vocation every bit "the
place where your deep gladness meets the world'due south deep need."3
Buechner'due south definition starts with the cocky and moves
toward the needs of the world: it begins, wisely, where vocation
begins--non in what the world needs (which is every- matter), but
in the nature of the human being self, in what brings the
self joy, the deep joy of knowing that we are hither on earth to
exist the gifts that God created.
Contrary to the conventions of our thinly moralistic culture,
this emphasis on gladness and selfhood is not selfish. The
Quaker teacher Douglas Steere was fond of saying that
the aboriginal human question "Who am I?" leads inevitably
to the equally important question "Whose am I?" -- for there
is no selfhood outside of relationship. Nosotros must ask the ques-
tion of selfhood and answer it as honestly equally nosotros can, no mat-
ter where it takes us. Only as we do so tin can we discover the
customs of our lives.
As I learn more about the seed of true self that was
planted when I was built-in, I too learn more near the ecosys-
tem in which I was planted -- the network of communal rela-
tions in which I am called to alive responsively, accountably,
and joyfully with beings of every sort. Only when I know both
seed and organization, self and customs, can I embody the great
commandment to love both my neighbour and myself.
JOURNEY INTO DARKNESS
Virtually of us get in at a sense of self and vocation merely after a
long journey through alien lands. But this journey bears no
resemblance to the trouble-gratis "travel packages" sold by the
tourism manufacture. Information technology is more akin to the aboriginal tradition of
pilgrimage -- "a transformative journey to a sacred center" full
of hardships, darkness, and peril.4
In the tradition of pilgrimage, those hardships are seen not
as accidental but as integral to the journey itself. Treacherous
terrain, bad weather, taking a autumn, getting lost -- challenges of
that sort, largely beyond our command, tin strip the ego of the
illusion that information technology is in charge and brand space for true cocky to
sally. If that happens, the pilgrim has a amend chance to
find the sacred center he or she seeks. Disabused of our illu-
sions by much travel and travail, we awaken one 24-hour interval to discover
that the sacred center is hither and now -- in every moment of
the journey, everywhere in the world around u.s., and deep
inside our ain hearts.
But before we come to that center, full of low-cal, nosotros must
travel in the dark. Darkness is not the whole of the story --
every pilgrimage has passages of loveliness and joy -- but it is
the part of the story most often left untold. When we finally
escape the darkness and stumble into the lite, information technology is tempting
to tell others that our promise never flagged, to deny those long
nights nosotros spent cowering in fear.
The feel of darkness has been essential to my com-
ing into selfhood, and telling the truth about that fact helps
me stay in the calorie-free. But I want to tell that truth for another
reason besides: many young people today journey in the dark,
every bit the young always have, and we elders practise them a disservice
when we withhold the shadowy parts of our lives. When I was young,
there were very few elders willing to talk about the
darkness; most of them pretended that success was all they had
ever known. As the darkness began to descend on me in my
early twenties, I thought I had developed a unique and termi-
nal case of failure. I did not realize that I had merely embarked
on a journey toward joining the homo race.
The story of my journey is no more than or less important
than anyone else's. It is simply the best source of data I have
on a discipline where generalizations often fail but truth may be
found in the details. I want to rehearse a few details of my trav-
els, and travails, extracting some insights about vocation equally I
go. I do so partly as an offering of honesty to the young and
partly as a reminder to anyone who needs it that the nuances
of personal experience contain much guidance toward self-
hood and vocation.
My journeying into darkness began in sunlit places. I grew
up in a Chicago suburb and went to Carleton College in
Minnesota, a splendid place where I found new faces to
habiliment -- faces more than like my own than the ones I donned in high
school, but still the faces of other people. Wearing one of
them, I went from college neither to the navy nor to Madison
Artery but to Matrimony Theological Seminary in New York City,
as certain that the ministry was now my calling as I had been
a few years before about advertising and aviation.
So it came as a great shock when, at the end of my starting time
yr, God spoke to me -- in the grade of mediocre grades and
massive misery -- and informed me that under no conditions
was I to become an ordained leader in His or Her church.
Always responsive to authority, as i was if raised in the fifties,
I left Union and went west, to the University of California at
Berkeley. In that location I spent much of the sixties working on a Ph.D.
in sociology and learning to be non quite so responsive to
authority.
Berkeley in the sixties was, of form, an astounding mix
of shadow and lite. But opposite to the current myth, many
of us were less seduced by the shadow than drawn by the
light, coming abroad from that time and place with a lifelong
sense of promise, a feeling for community, a passion for social
change.
Though I taught for ii years in the eye of graduate
school, discovering that I loved educational activity and was skillful at information technology,
my Berkeley experience left me convinced that a university
career would be a cop-out. I felt called instead to work on "the
urban crisis." So when I left Berkeley in the belatedly sixties --
a friend kept asking me, "Why do you want to get back to
America?" -- I also left bookish life. Indeed, I left on a white
horse (some might say a high horse), total of righteous indig-
nation about the academy'due south corruption, holding aloft the flam-
ing sword of truth. I moved to Washington, D.C., where I
became not a professor only a community organizer.
What I learned about the globe from that work was the
subject of an earlier volume.5 What I learned about vocation
is how 1's values tin do battle with one's heart. I felt
morally compelled to work on the urban crisis, merely doing and then
went against a growing sense that educational activity might be my voca-
tion. My heart wanted to keep teaching, but my ethics -- laced
liberally with ego - -told me I was supposed to save the urban center.
How could I reconcile the contradiction betwixt the two?
After 2 years of community organizing, with all its finan-
cial uncertainties, Georgetown University offered me a kinesthesia
post -- one that did non require me to get off my white horse
altogether: "We don't want you to be on campus all week long,"
said the dean. "We want you to get our students involved in the
customs. Here's a tenure-track position involving a mini-
mum of classes and no requirement to serve on committees.
Keep working in the community and take our students out
there with you."
The part almost no committees seemed similar a souvenir from
God, so I accepted Georgetown's offer and began involving
undergraduates in community organizing. Only I soon found
an even bigger gift hidden in this organization. By looking
anew at my community work through the lens of education, I
saw that as an organizer I had never stopped being a teacher --
I was simply teaching in a classroom without walls.
In fact, I could have done no other: instruction, I was com-
ing to empathise, is my native way of being in the earth.
Make me a cleric or a CEO, a poet or a pol, and educational activity
is what I volition do. Education is at the heart of my vocation and
will manifest itself in any role I play. Georgetown's invitation
immune me to have my first step toward embracing this truth,
toward a lifelong exploration of "instruction unplugged."
But even this way of reframing my work could not alter the
fact that there was a fundamental misfit between the rough-
and-tumble of organizing and my own overly sensitive nature.
Later on five years of disharmonize and competition, I burned out. I was
too thin-skinned to make a good community organizer -- my
vocational attain had exceeded my grasp. I had been driven
more by the "oughts" of the urban crisis than by a sense of true
self. Defective insight into my own limits and potentials, I had
allowed ego and ethics to lead me into a situation that my soul
could not abide.
I was disappointed in myself for not being tough plenty
to take the flak, disappointed and ashamed. But equally pilgrims
must detect if they are to complete their quest, we are led to
truth by our weaknesses as well equally our strengths. I needed to
leave community organizing for a reason I might never accept
acknowledged had I non been thin-skinned and burned-out: as
an organizer, I was trying to take people to a place where I had
never been myself -- a identify chosen community. If I wanted to
do community-related work with integrity, I needed a deeper
immersion in community than I had experienced to that indicate.
Side by side > (pg. 22-36)
Copyright ©2000 ( San Francisco, CA : Jossey-Bass Inc.)
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