Strange to review an almost 14 year old book; but this is a
timeless book and worth knowing about.
Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation is a short book
by Quaker theologian Parker Palmer. I
picked up to give to my niece, started peeking in it and wound up reading the
whole 109 pages (i.e. it is a quick read).
While good for anyone looking at vocation issues, I found it just a very
lovely description of the life struggle to live in faithfulness to the
Divine. One of the things I most
appreciated is his own very sincere and humble sharing of his own struggles
with vocation, confrontations with his own ego and public acknowledgment of
struggles with clinical depression (which I think few well known people are
willing to do.)
In the first chapter on Listening to Life, he describes the
process of listening to the events of our life as a way of hearing God’s
whispering to us. In the 2nd
chapter he explores the idea of our true self and leaving behind pretense or
the strivings of the ego for attention and releasing false selves. The third chapter, the Way Closes, is one of
my favorite as he here puts forth the idea of discernment that it is not all
doors opening that show us directions, but also some that close behind us (with
a thump)! A nice quote from this
chapter: “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.”
P. 55
Chapter IV however, is my favorite because as a therapist I
have a deep appreciation for how he talks about depression and his attempt to
get others to understand what is helpful and what is not in another’s response
to depression. He helpfully lists the
following as not useful: 1)sympathy 2)efforts to “cheer one up” – alienating
because the depressed person cannot get there 3)Being told what a good person
one is or all the good one has done (alienating because it has no bearing on
the present suffering) 4) saying one knows exactly how the other feels (as he
points out we never really do and so it simply rings false all that follows afterwards,
and potentially invalidates what ones friend is experiencing 5) advising giving
(which he adds sets the giver free not the receiver) He argues for the rejecting of simplistic
solutions and for the embracing of mystery.
He describes responses that were helpful saying: ”It is a love in which we represent God’s love to a suffering person, a
God who does not ‘fix’ us but gives us strength by suffering with us. By
standing respectfully and faithfully at the borders of another’s solitude, we
may mediate the love of God to a person who needs something deeper than any
human being can give.” P. 64 He also argues for seeing depression as a
path down, but to understand that as a path to “the Ground of Our
Being”…meaning a path to God.
In the fifth chapter on Leadings from Within, he discusses
what leadership really is (as leadership is a critical part of his life path) He also shares somewhat humorously a time he
learned the real meaning of the Outward Bound motto: “If you can’t get out of it, get into it!”
and the usefulness of applying this to certain spots in life. In talking about certain dark truths that
leaders must face I especially appreciated the third that he named “functional
atheism, the belief that ultimate responsibility for everything rests with
us”. This I recognize as an aspect of my
own “God who” disease brought on by fear, followed by the rapid forgetting that
there is a Divine Creator of this
universe! He also makes a lovely
argument for bringing the work of the spiritual life into the public realm.
I must confess the last chapter is my least favorite (maybe
it is last for a reason?). He attempts
to use the movement thru the seasons: fall, winter, spring and summer as a
metaphor for the movement of our lives on a spiritual journey. But somehow I simply did not find what was
said in this chapter to be very enlightening.
Overall this book with personal examples and vulnerable
honesty helps us understand the journey to find and to change vocation as an
ultimately spiritual journey and gives us the encouragement to face the journey
as mystical journey.
