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Book Review One
Book Review Two
Author Profile
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Let Your Life Speak
Listening for the Voice of Vocation
Parker J. Palmer
117 pages
Jossey-Bass, 2000
Retail Price: $18.00
See Amazon’s discounted price
Allowing the “external voices” of parents, teachers, or society to choose your vocation will lead to disappointment and failure, declares Parker Palmer. It’s only by “letting your life” speak —a time honored Quaker admonition—that you can successfully determine not only “the standards by which you must live, but the standards by which you cannot help but live.”
With wisdom, compassion, and gentle humor, Palmer invites the reader 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 other 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.
Parker J. Palmer is a highly respected writer and traveling teacher who works independently on issues of education, community, spirituality, and social change; he offers workshops, lectures and retreats in the United States and abroad.
Other Books by Parker J. Palmer:
The Active Life
The Company of Strangers
Caring for the Commonweal (coeditor)
The Promise of Paradox
To Know As We Are Known
Book Review One
Parker Palmer is first and foremost a teacher applying his art through writing, facilitation, lecturing, and leading retreats. His doctorate in sociology grounds him in the principles of human behavior; his membership as a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quaker) informs his theology; and his wrestling with depression provides depth to his spirituality.
He has been frequently recognized for his contributions to higher education, for his writing, and for contributions to community development. This, his eighth book, demonstrates a growing mastery of the spiritual dimension of life -- his and ours. It comes at great price. Having gone deep inside himself, he emerges with a wisdom born of great suffering succeeded by greater joy.
This is a gem of a little book - thoughtful and insightful, full of meaning and purpose. It is the kind of book you wish you read before graduation and entry into the world of work. This book is a gift to be given to children and grandchildren and anyone giving serious thought to his/her vocation.
Let Your Life Speak, simple as it is profound, explores three central ideas:
1) Finding the true self - a demanding and difficult task with a lifelong path of twists and turns, but essential work.
2) Life is a journey from darkness to light - doors close and open and "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."
3) The metaphors of life "often become reality, transmuting themselves from language into the living of our lives." Life can be viewed as chance, a battle, a game or the "master metaphor of our era" as manufacturing -- making time, friends, making money, or love. Palmer prefers the metaphor of seasons of growth, decline, and new life and of comfort and challenge in the cycle of seasons.
I believe this little book - 117 pages - will become a classic. It is a wisdom book filled with insight born of experience that is filled with sunshine after a thunderstorm. Two months after reading it I find myself reflecting back on it time and time again.
R. Paul Nelson, President Emeritus, Aquinas College, Grand Rapids, MI
Book Review Two
I knew I had met Parker Palmer before. As soon as I began reading Let Your Life Speak, I recognized his resonant wisdom and elegant turns of phrase: "Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you;" or "Our national myth is about the endless defiance of limits."
I dug out a dog-eared copy of a magazine article, saved because it had explored so well those existential issues we wrestle with in the dark of night. Yep. Parker Palmer. I was glad to meet him again.
Let Your Life Speak is a collection of Palmer's essays and speeches that circle around the theme of vocation - a broad word examined here in its most expansive sense. As is his wont, he dips deeply into his own life experience and emerges with helpful substance and unconventional views.
Palmer's theme is that our limits teach us as much about who we are as our gifts. A door slammed shut is as instructive as one thrown wide. He explores the necessity of truthtelling, the importance of community ("Whose am I?"), and the play of paradox and ambiguity.
While the book as a whole is loosely woven and has some chronological bumps and repetitions, it is a sweet piece of work from someone who has lived consciously and thought deeply. It will leave you satisfied with plenty of cud to chew.
Author Profile
Parker Palmer: Educator, Quaker, and Contrarian
Palmer's work is rich because he has so often followed the rocky and less-traveled road. He has taken risks; he has failed; he has struggled to find his place in the world. And because he is naturally eloquent and reflective, he transforms his vocational detours and dead-ends into a banquet of insight.
It's hard to add much to his biography since so much is already in his book. He became a gifted student (following haphazard high school years) and was singled out by teachers and mentors for a promising career in academia. He was actively involved in urban renewal and was a sociology professor at Georgetown University when he detoured into what became a 10-year sabbatical at Pendle Hill, a Quaker community near Philadelphia. This is where the intense inner journey began.
He takes us through his mid-life bouts of major depression, from which he emerged with an unflinching view of reality and an unconventional (as well as what has become a highly successful and nationally recognized) vocation for educating educators and shaking up their institutions.
That much is in his book.
What is harder to ferret out are the other players in his personal landscape - the parents and siblings, the children and significant others who must have accompanied him on the journey. They are silent. Palmer does this deliberately.
While he is brutally revealing about his own experience, he refuses to tell other people's stories. "I frankly resent writers who decide to speak intimately about their own experience and in the process decide to tell you all about family members who may or may not want that story to be told."
The person he is free to write about is his father, who died some years ago. And he does so with utmost tenderness. Palmer was raised in a white, upper-middle-class suburb of Chicago. His father, Max J. Palmer, worked for the same company for 50 years, ultimately as its owner and Chairman of the Board.
But what he modeled for his son was compassion and generosity. Although the younger Palmer embarked on a different and circuitous vocational path, the elder Palmer "never put pressure on me to be one thing or another. I think theologians call it unconditional love. They say it mainly comes from God."
Palmer found his own God in the silence of the Quaker meetings at Pendle Hill. Until then, faith and the experience of God had been an intellectual exercise. But Quakers believe that God also speaks in "continuing revelation" within the details of daily life. "In the silence, I was able to reconstruct my faith life in a way that just wouldn't have happened otherwise," he says. "It was a much more direct experience of how God was working in my life."
And Palmer found his "true self" - the self that is of God - among other places, in the darkest realms of depression. His viewpoint, again, is unconventional. From that painful, debilitating period, Palmer learned, as he says, to tell the truth about himself. To go into darkness in order to find firm ground to stand upon. "It's a mystery," he says of the experience. "I had to enter into it as fully as I was able. Try to understand what it was trying to tell me about who I was and to try not to fight that knowledge. "
From the ashes of his illusions, Palmer constructed a vocation more true to his nature. He is a recognized national leader with the books and speaking engagements, the board positions and honorary degrees to prove it. He is founder of the Fetzer Institute's Teacher Formation Project. But more important, he has wrung wisdom and truth from difficult experience and deep thought, and he has used that also to instruct.
Now Palmer is preparing to take a new step in his life journey. He has chosen a date, he has prepared successors, and soon he will leave the public arena of appearances and applause for a quieter, more solitary work. He is planning to retire.
"I don't want to be a 70-year-old man who doesn't know who he is when the books are out of print and the audiences are no longer applauding. I've decided to retire in order to make space for whatever else is out there.
"I've honored the one side," he says, "and now I'm glad for a chance to honor the other."
Kate Convissor writes for regional and national magazines such as St. Anthony Messenger, Catholic Digest, Working Mother, and Christian Parenting Today. She also writes for online publications such as Juggle (www.jugglezine.com) and Salon (www.salonmag.com)
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