Let Your Life Speak

"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."

~ Parker J. Palmer from Let Your Life Speak (page 3)

This book by Parker J. Palmer is "an insightful and moving meditation on finding one's calling...an openhearted gift to anyone who seeks to live authentically." (front flap) What follows are six of my favorite passages from the six chapters.

Listening to Life

"If I am to let my life speak things I want to hear, things I would gladly tell others, I must also let it speak things I do not what to hear and would never tell anyone else! My life is not only about my strengths and virtues; it is also about my liabilities and my limits, my trespasses and my shadow. An inevitable thought often ignored dimension of the quest for 'wholeness' is that we must embrace that we dislike or find shameful about ourselves as well as what we are confident and proud of. That is why the poet asks, 'ask me mistakes I have made.'" (pages 6-7)

Now I Become Myself

"What a long time it can take to become the person one has always 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 before we discover our deep identity - the true self within every human being that is the seed of authentic vocation." (page 9) "Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic self-hood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks - we will also find our path of authentic service in the world. True vocation joins self and service, as Frederick Beuchner asserts when he defines vocation as 'the place where your deep gladness meets the world's deep need.'" (page 16)

When Way Closes

"If we are to live our lives fully and well, we must learn to embrace the opposites, to live in a creative tension between our limits and our potentials. We must honor our limitations in ways that do not distort our nature, and we must trust and use our gifts in ways that fulfill the potentials God gave us. We must take the no of the way that closes and find the guidance it has to offer - and take the yes of the way that opens and respond with the yes of our lives." (page 55)

All the Way Down

"...depression demands that we reject simplistic answers, both 'religious' and 'scientific,' and learn to embrace mystery, something our culture resists. Mystery surrounds every deep experience of the human heart; the deeper we go into the heart's darkness or its light, the closer we get to the ultimate mystery of God. But our culture wants to turn mysteries into puzzles to be explained or problems to be solved, because maintaining the illusion that we can 'straighten things out' makes us feel powerful. Yet the mysteries never yield to solutions or fixes - and when we pretend they they do, life becomes not only the more banal but also more hopeless, because the fixes never work.

Embracing the mystery of depression does not mean passivity or resignation. It means moving into a field of forces that seems alien but is in fact one's deepest self. It means waiting, watching, listening, suffering, and gathering whatever self-knowledge one can - and then making choices based on that knowledge, no matter how difficult. One beings the slow walk back to health by choosing each day things that enliven one's selfhood and resisting things that do not." (page 60)

Note: I had to look up "banal." It means "clichéd; lacking in originality as to be obvious and boring."

Leading from Within

"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 can lead others toward a more trustworthy, more hopeful, more faithful way of being in the world." (page 94)

There Is a Season

"Here is a summertime truth: abundance is a communal act, the joint creation of an incredibly complex ecology in which each part functions on behalf of the whole and, in return, is sustained by the whole. Community doesn't just create abundance - community is abundance. If we could learn that equation from the world of nature, the human world might be transformed.

Summer is the season when all the promissory notes of autumn and winter and spring come due, and each year the debts are repaid with compound interest. In summer, it is hard to remember that we had ever doubted the natural process, had ever ceded death the last word, had ever lost faith in the power of new life. Summer is a reminder that our faith is not nearly as strong as the things we profess to have faith in - a reminder that for this single season, at least, we might cease our anxious machinations and give ourselves to the abiding and abundant grace of our common life." (pages 108-109)

May we all let our lives speak.