Thursday, December 25, 2014

Let Your Life Speak: Finding the Deep Gladness that Meets the World's Deep Need

67862Parker Palmer in Let Your Life Speak invites the reader to consider and to follow deeply one's identity or sense of "calling" via the telling of his own story and with an illumination of various thoughts, texts, and poetry that support the premise that genuine vocation joins self and service. Detecting, pursuing and actualizing such vocation can become "the place where your deep gladness meets the worlds's deep need" (quoting F Buechner). Palmer is not unrealistic showing that such of life pursuit does not come without a "journey into darkness", for he interprets the path of vocational discovery (genuine sense of "calling") via his own human experience of movements out of incompatible places of employment (trial and error perhaps) and depression (deep spiritual/psychological experiences that require support). He takes on the American myth (e.g., consumerism) with a simple but elegant metaphor of the ecology of life and draws out the human dimension of "spirituality" as an often missing component that is antithetical to the common "power of positive thinking." Like a plant the spiritual journey that finds authentic vocation "will turn inward and downward toward the hardest realities of our lives, rather than outward and upward toward abstraction, idealization, and exhortation." In the end, which is only the start, we may discover in the words of Robert Frost  ("Two Tramps in Mud Time"),  

      My object in living is to unite
      My avocation and my vocation
      As my two eyes make one in sight.
      Only where love and need are one,
      And the work is play for mortal stakes,
      Is the deed ever really done
      For heaven and the future’s sakes.


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