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Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation, by Parker J. Palmer
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With wisdom, compassion, and gentle humor, Parker J. Palmer invites us to listen to the inner teacher and follow its leadings toward a sense of meaning and purpose. Telling stories from his own life and the lives of others who have made a difference, he shares insights gained from darkness and depression as well as fulfillment and joy, illuminating a pathway toward vocation for all who seek the true calling of their lives.
- Sales Rank: #9291 in Books
- Color: Pink
- Brand: Hyperion EA
- Model: 1022138
- Published on: 1999-09-10
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.30" h x .60" w x 5.30" l, .42 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 128 pages
Features
Amazon.com Review
The old Quaker adage, "Let your life speak," spoke to author Parker J. Palmer when he was in his early 30s. It summoned him to a higher purpose, so he decided that henceforth he would live a nobler life. "I lined up the most elevated ideals I could find and set out to achieve them," he writes. "The results were rarely admirable, often laughable, and sometimes grotesque.... I had simply found a 'noble' way of living a life that was not my own, a life spent imitating heroes instead of listening to my heart."
Thirty years later, Palmer now understands that learning to let his life speak means "living the life that wants to live in me." It involves creating the kind of quiet, trusting conditions that allow a soul to speak its truth. It also means tuning out the noisy preconceived ideas about what a vocation should and shouldn't be so that we can better hear the call of our wild souls. There are no how-to formulas in this extremely unpretentious and well-written book, just fireside wisdom from an elder who is willing to share his mistakes and stories as he learned to live a life worth speaking about. --Gail Hudson
From Publishers Weekly
A gifted academic who formerly combined a college teaching career with community organizing, Palmer took a year's sabbatical to live at the "intentional" Quaker community of Pendle Hill in Pennsylvania. Instead of leaving at year's end, he became the community's dean of studies and remained there for 10 years. Palmer (The Courage to Teach) shares the lessons of his vocational and spiritual journey, discussing his own burnout and intense depression with exceptional candor and clarity. In essays that previously appeared in spiritual or educational journals and have been reworked to fit into this slim volume, he suggests that individuals are most authentic when they follow their natural talents and limitations, as his own story demonstrates. Since hearing one's "calling" requires introspection and self-knowledge (as suggested by the eponymous Quaker expression), Palmer encourages inner work such as journal-writing, meditation and prayer. Recognizing that his philosophy is at odds with popular, essentially American attitudes about self-actualization and following one's dreams, Palmer calls vocation "a gift, not a goal." He deftly illustrates his point with examples from the lives of people he admires, such as Rosa Parks, Annie Dillard and Vaclav Havel. A quiet but memorable addition to the inspirational field, this book has the quality of a finely worked homily. The writing displays a gentle wisdom and economy of style that leaves the reader curious for more insight into the author's Quaker philosophy. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
News Flash! Utne Reader names Parker J. Palmer as one of "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World"--people who, in the editor's words, "don't just think out loud but who walk their talk on a daily basis." See the October-November 2011 print or online issue.
"Parker Palmer's writing is like a high country stream-clear, vital, honest. If your life seems to be passing you by, or you cannot see the way ahead, immerse yourself in the wisdom of these pages and allow it to carry you toward a more attentive relationship with your deeper, truer self." (John S. Mogabgab, editor, Weavings Journal)
"An exuberant and passionate book. I was deeply moved and I cannot, nor do I want to, shake off the haunting questions that it raises for me. This book penetrates the soul, and it will definitely stir you to explore more of your own inner territory. What an extraordinary achievement." (Jim Kouzes, coauthor, The Leadership Challenge and Encouraging the Heart; chairman, Tom Peters Group/Learning Systems)
"At a time when our culture is seeking a new language for expressing the spirit in everyday life, Parker Palmer is our leading voice of clarity and wisdom. In Let Your Life Speak, Palmer continues to deepen our ways of understanding the relationships between the inner life of spirit and the outer life of action." (Rob Lehman, president, The Fetzer Institute)
"In our search for authentic vocation, this book should be the starting point and deserves a prominent place in every home, school, and college. It is vintage Parker Palmer, providing his unique insight to the interconnectedness of selfhood and vocation with eloquence and personal experience." (Doug Orr, president, Warren Wilson College)
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
precious wildness
By David A. Baer
Parker Palmer’s graceful little book LET YOUR LIFE SPEAK is the best work I’ve ever read on discernment and vocation.
In six chapters and just under 120 elegantly written pages, Palmer presses home the point that vocation emerges from within us and that we must listen carefully to our own lives if we are to discover it. Taking on someone else’s concept of calling or subjecting ourselves to an external and alien set of values and objectives will do violence to ourselves and to our usefulness—Palmer would probably avoid the word—to our community and our world. Throughout, the author’s rooting in Quaker patterns and rhythms is evident, but this book is anything but sectarian and will be welcomed—indeed, has been welcomed, for it was published in the year 2000—by readers of many faiths and perhaps of none.
Chapter I, ‘Listening to Life’, argues that one’s life is worthy of study and profoundly worth listening to. ‘The soul is like a wild animal—tough, resilient, savvy, self-sufficient, and yet exceedingly shy. If we want to see a wild animal, the last thing we should do is go crashing through the woods, shouting for the creature to come out. But if we are willing to walk quietly into the woods and sit silently for an hour or two at the base of a tree, the creature we are waiting for may well emerge, and out of the corner of an eye we will catch a glimpse of the precious wildness we seek.’
In his second chapter (‘Now I Become Myself’), Palmer initiates in earnest the autobiographical transparency that he will sustain through the book, lending to his lines an authenticity that is arguably their most compelling feature. After having tried and failed over several episodes to forge a sense of vocational and personal identity, Parker writes that ‘(t)today I understand vocation quite differently—not as a goal to be achieved but as a gift to be received. Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice “out there” calling me to become something I am not. It comes from a voice “in here” calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God.’
The author urge us not to ‘wear other people’s faces’ and to realize that ‘(t)he 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?”.’
Yet Palmer does not imagine that this discovery of one’s true self occurs often without pain. ‘Most of us’, he avers, ‘arrive at a sense of self and vocation only after a long journey through alien lands … before we come to that center, full of light, we 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.’ This ultimate qualifier is another item that, to this reader’s ears, lends the ring of truth to Palmer’s adventure. I say this because my own journeying after true vocation has, like Palmer’s, led me through both sunlight and darkness, yet I cannot say that any of the miles traveled has been entirely dark, entirely bleak, and certainly not entirely regrettable. Unlike many more mechanical treatments of the topic, Palmer’s notion of vocational discovery leads him to value the path rather than merely the destination.
One finds, in this second and longest of Palmer’s chapters, refreshingly important roles to be played by fear, failure, and ordinariness. In my view, this makes LET YOUR LIFE SPEAK accessible to those of us who resonate with Palmer’s journey but could never write so elegantly of our own.
Chapter III is titled ‘When Way Closes’. The missing article is not a typo, but rather a nod to the Quaker sense of ‘Way’. In the discourse of the Friends, we learn, ‘way opens’ and ‘way closes’. Palmer traces a givenness to vocation, a created anchoring in our persons that does not make all things possible. Instead, the way each of us is both opens doors and closes doors. Sometimes the closing brings embarrassment and shame.
‘It would be nice if our limits did not reveal themselves in such embarrassing ways as getting fired from a job. But 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.’
Palmer develops the role played by our limitations by counterposing the ‘oughts’ that we often heed in our vocational adventure to the ‘ecology of life’ in which we find a proper place to stand and to be. In this third chapter, this Christian reader finds the theological undergirding to Palmer’s prose that the author often touches upon only lightly. It is, for Palmer, the ‘God of reality’ who ‘dwells quietly in the root system of the very nature of things’. He speaks easily of ‘one’s created nature’. When one finally comes to rest within this ecology burnout is not the inevitable outcome of passionate labor. Rather, ‘(w)hen the gift I give to the other is integral to my own nature, when it comes from a place of organic reality within me, it will renew itself—and me—even as I give it away.’
‘All the Way Down’ (Chapter IV) suggests that an excruciating read lies just ahead and the title does not deceive, for in this fourth chapter Palmer sketches out for us his two debilitating experiences of depression. Neither reducing nor simplifying the causes of depression—in fact he calls the thing a ‘mystery’—Palmer managed in his own suffering to find his way to viewing depression as his friend. It took him all the way down to where it was safe to stand. Following upon his previous description of ‘the God of reality’, Parker borrows Tillich’s description of God as the ground of being: ’I had always imagined God to be in the same general direction was everything else I valued: up … I had to be forced underground before I could understand that the way to God is not up but down.’
Thankfully, Palmer does not write prescriptively about the ways (plural) into depression nor the ways (again, note the plural) out. His own recovery remains something of a mystery, captured in the magnificent poem with which he graces the conclusion of Chapter IV. Yet for him, his submission to the vocational ‘oughts’ by which he permitted himself for years to be hounded prepared the way down in the darkness. There he found not only God, but himself as well.
Chapter V (‘Leading from Within’) now turns outward to the damage and the health that a leader can bring to the wider community and, indeed, to the world. We project both shadows and light onto the world. ‘A good leader is intensely aware of the interplay of inner shadow and light, lest the act of leadership do more harm than good.’
In this chapter, any hint that vocation is essentially a narcissistic pursuit evaporates. For Palmer, vocation begins within but eventually projects itself onto one’s world. He writes insightfully of the ways leaders fashion a community from misguided starting points and, happily, also via the freedom that comes from authentic vocation. Let me single out at some length a few of Parker’s words on fear as motivator:
‘As one who is no stranger to fear, I have had to read those words with care so as not to twist them into a discouraging counsel of perfection. “Be not afraid” does not mean we cannot have fear. Everyone has fear, and people who embrace the call to leadership often find fear abounding. Instead, the words say we do not need to be the fear we have. We do not have to lead from a place of fear, thereby engendering a world in which fear is multiplied.
We have places of fear inside of us, but we have other places as well—places with names like trust and hope and faith. We can choose to lead from one of those places, to stand on ground that is not riddled with the fault lines of fear, to move toward others from a place of promise instead of anxiety. As we stand in one of those places, fear may remain close at hand and our spirits may still tremble. But now we stand on ground that will support us, ground from which we may lead others towards a more trustworthy, more hopeful, more faithful way of being in the world.’
This reviewer—like Palmer, no stranger to fear—thrills to such a sound and realistic assessment of the kind of ‘fearlessness’ that embraces reality and yet dares to lead, unparalyzed.
In his concluding chapter (VI, ‘There is a Season’), Palmer departs from his now familiar approach to speak of how ‘the quest for selfhood and vocation’ follow the recurring patterns and rhythms of the four seasons. This chapter alone would justify keeping Let Your Life Speak within arm’s reach, to be read and re-read at the calendar’s and the seasons’ turnings.
One can hardly read Palmer’s exceedingly transparent work on vocation and then write for others about it without a bit of transparency of his own. After twelve years of leadership in a relatively prominent position—at least for the proportions of this review’s little world—I recently hit the wall at the end of a particularly grueling vocational mile. This is not without its emotional violence, its sense of failure and disillusionment, its return to the root considerations of vocational identity, and its forceful requirement to look again and to look within for wisdom about next steps. For me, each page of Palmer’s LET YOUR LIFE SPEAK brought both balm and direction. Many brought exhilaration as well.
I offer this review in hopes that Palmer will be a bit more widely read for those, like me, who find a wise mentor the doctor’s very order.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Heart-warming and inspiring
By jdb
What a heart-warming, gentle, affirming, and inspiring little book this is. I think it will be hard for me to review this book without engaging in a "what it has meant to me" discourse. This isn't a bad thing, but I think before starting down that path, I should share a few of the technical specifics about this book first.
As I mentioned in my opening statements, this is a small book...physically small and then only slightly over one hundred pages including notes and credits. Don't let the size fool you; Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation is a very rich and spiritually deep book. Palmer shares in the introduction that Let Your Life Speak consists primarily as a collection of essays appearing in other publications from the past decade (1990-2000?). He goes on to state the essays have been rewritten (some substantially) so this book would be "coherent whole" and not just a collection of articles. It is my opinion that Mr. Palmer succeeded in his goal. I found the book very organic and flowing in the spirit of its intent.
The book traces Parker's journey of self-discovery with honest, transparency, and humility. Fitting, it seems, for a book of this nature and caliber. Perhaps "self-discovery" might be a misleading way of portraying the journey unfolded in Let Your Life Speak. The measure of discovery is found in the unraveling of the true-self and the false-self. We are told in the pursuit of the Christian faith that "God has a plan and purpose for your life..." While this teaching about personal and vocational purpose for our lives may be true, discovering it in the truest context of God's plan can be perplexing at times. Each person's journey may not be the same and the discovery of the true-self as we pertain to the image of God may be unique to each of us, but there are some similarity and common experience that lead us to and through these discoveries of the true self. Palmer's journey provides an inspiring parallel for us to examine our own journey...both the inner and the vocational---which are not necessarily separate or mutually exclusive.
"The figure calling to me all those years was, I believe, what Thomas Merton calls "true self." This is not the ego self that wants to inflate us (or deflate us, another from of self-distortion), not the intellectual self that wants to hover above the mess of life in clear but ungrounded ideas, not the ethical self that wants to live by some abstract moral code. It is the self-planted in us by the God who made us in God's own image-- the self that wants nothing more, or less, than for us to be who we were created to be... True self is true friend. One ignores or rejects such friendship only at one's peril." Parker Palmer; Let Your Life Speak
I have benefited greatly from the writings of other spiritual masters on this topic (John of the Cross, Teresa Avila, Thomas Merton, and M. Basil Pennington to name a few). Palmer's voice and experience bring fresh insight to these masters as well as sharing practical relevance with them as well. I found the teaching of this little book to be a great addition to my library and a worthy example of the disciple who is truly seeking to answer the question: "Is the life I am living the same as the life that wants to live in me?" I make the assumption; right or wrong, that the life Parker refers to is the Christ-life. Honestly seeking to surrender to the life Christ desires to live in and through us is the sum of what discipleship is about in my understanding. Let Your Life Speak is very helpful in gently walking the seeker along in this process.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
The Clearness Committee Creates Chaos
By John W. Pearson
Yikes. It's almost December--and then we'll blink and raise a glass to the New Year, and do it all over again--expecting different results. Yikes, again.
So...before you grieve another year of unfulfilled promises to yourself (career-wise or other)--invest 109 pages in your calling. Read. Reflect. Listen. Pray. Discern. Jump.
Parker Palmer's stunning quick-read, "Let Your Life Speak," will help you think backwards and forwards. And his confession--that he failed to listen to his heart and squandered valuable years--is a warning to all of us (no matter how many candles on our last cake)...that vocation and calling matter.
He begins:
-- "...a funny thing happened on the way to my vocation."
--He was guided by Frederick Buechner's inspiring insight: "The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."
He confesses:
--"I had simply found a `noble' way to live a life that was not my own, a life spent imitating heroes instead of listening to my heart."
He learned:
--"Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent."
--"My youthful understanding of `Let your life speak' led me to conjure up the highest values I could imagine and then try to conform my life to them whether they were mine or not."
He adds: "If that sounds like what we are supposed to do with values, it is because that is what we are too often taught. There is a simplistic brand of moralism among us that wants to reduce the ethical life to making a list, checking it twice--against the index in some best-selling book of virtues, perhaps--and then trying very hard to be not naughty but nice."
He explains the book's subtitle, "Listening for the Voice of Vocation" with this:
--"Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening."
--"Vocation [rooted in the Latin for `voice'] does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am."
Parker Palmer's Quaker roots add color and authenticity to this remarkable little book--a collection of essays, edited into a book-length gem.
It's tough to narrow down my favorites stories--I read most of them to my wife, Joanne--but certainly these two:
Favorite Story #1: The Clearness Committee.
A presidential search committee for a small educational institution invited Palmer for an interview. "So as is the custom in the Quaker community, I called on half a dozen trusted friends to help me discern my vocation by means of a `clearness committee,' a process in which the group refrains from giving you advice but spends three hours asking you honest, open questions to help discover your inner truth. (Looking back, of course, it is clear that my real intent in convening this group was not to discern anything but to brag about being offered a job I had already decided to accept!)
Gulp! One stunning question rocked his world (see pages 44-46)--and he said no to a career-enhancing opportunity.
Favorite Story #2: Outward Bound.
Hanging from a cliff, 110 feet above ground in his first Outward Bound experience (more like "Outward Down"), Palmer had a profound moment (pages 82-85). Later he reflected, "I chose the weeklong course at Hurricane Island, off the coast of Maine. I should have known from that name what was in store for me; next time I will sign up for the course at Happy Gardens or Pleasant Valley!"
He describes five shadow-casting monsters: First, "insecurity about identity and worth." Next, "the belief that the universe is a battleground, hostile to human interests."
The third one is a real poke-in-the-ribs. "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."
The fourth shadow 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."
The fifth shadow that leaders project is, "paradoxically, the denial of death itself." He's savvy! "Leaders who participate in this denial often demand that the people around them keep resuscitating things that are no longer alive." If you're working on a strategic plan right now, you must read pages 89 to 91!
Think about this:
"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." So...who is helping you identify your potholes--and how might that impact your "true self" vocation?
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