Parker
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.
