Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

by Parker J. Palmer

This is what the poet knows and what every wisdom tradition teaches: there is a great gulf between the way my ego wants to identify me, with its protective masks and self-serving fictions, and my true self.

We listen for guidance everywhere except from within.

The soul speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting, and trustworthy conditions.

True vocation joins self and service, as Frederick Buechner asserts when he defines vocation as "the place where your deep gladness meets the world's deep need"3

But something in me yearned to experience communion, not competition, and that something might never have made itself known had burnout not forced me to seek another way.

Vocation at its deepest level is, "This is something I can't not do, for reasons I'm unable to explain to anyone else and don't fully understand myself but that are nonetheless compelling."

Here, I think, is another clue to finding true self and vocation: we must withdraw the negative projections we make on people and situations-projections that serve mainly to mask our fears about ourselves-and acknowledge and embrace our own liabilities and limits.

They have come to understand that no punishment anyone might inflict on them could possibly be worse than the punishment they inflict on themselves by conspiring in their own diminishment.

But every journey, honestly undertaken, stands a chance of taking us toward the place where our deep gladness meets the world's deep need.

Part of me treasures the hopefulness of this American legacy. But when I consistently refuse to take no for an answer, I miss the vital clues to my identity that arise when way closes-and I am more likely both to exceed my limits and to do harm to others in the process.

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.

We create scarcity by fearfully accepting it as law and by competing with others