Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

by Parker J. Palmer

Buechner's definition starts with the self and moves toward the needs of the world: it begins, wisely, where vocation begins-not in what the world needs (which is everything), but in the nature of the human self, in what brings the self joy, the deep joy of knowing that we are here on earth to be the gifts that God created.

Yes, there is death, but it is part of the cycle of life, and when we learn to move gracefully with that cycle, a great harmony conies into our lives. The

"functional atheism,"

the belief that ultimate responsibility for everythi...

leads us to impose our will on others, stressing our relationships, sometimes t...

The gift we receive on the inner journey is the knowledge that ours is not the only act in town. Not only are there other acts out there, but some of them are even better than ours, at least occasionally! We learn that we need not carry the whole loa...

Leaders who participate in this denial often demand that the people around them keep resuscitating things that are no longer alive. Projects and programs that should have been unplugged long ago are kept on life

The best leaders in every setting reward people for taking worthwhile risks even if they are likely to fail. These leaders know that the death of an initiative-if it was tested for good reasons-is always a source of new learning.

The gift we receive on the inner journey is the knowledge that death finally comes to everything-and yet death does not have the final word. By allowing something to die when its time is due, we create the conditions under which new life can emerge.

Since we can't...

of it, we must get i...

But how a community offers such help is a critical question. We are surrounded by communities based on the practice of "setting each other straight"-an ultimately totalitarian practice bound to drive the shy soul into hiding.

The key to this form of community involves holding a paradox-the paradox of having relationships in which we protect each other's aloneness. We must come together in ways that respect the solitude of the soil], that avoid the unconscious violence we do when we try to save each other, that evoke our capacity to hold another life without dishonoring its mystery, never trying to coerce the other into meeting our own needs.

It is no accident that all of the world's wisdom traditions address the fact of fear, for all of them originated in the human struggle to overcome this ancient enemy.

"Be not afraid."

"Be not afraid" does not mean we cannot have fear. Everyone has fear, and people who embrace the call to leade...

Instead, the words say we do not need to be t...

We do not have to lead from a place of fear, thereby engendering a world in which fe...

The seasonal metaphor deepens our understanding of the others. Seeds move through their life stages in an endless cycle of

We create scarcity by fearfully accepting it as law and by competing with others for resources as if we were stranded in the Sahara at the last oasis.

In the human world, abundance does not happen automatically. It is created when we have the sense to choose cornmunity, to come together to celebrate and share our common store.

"Of course we must learn to live in community with each other. After all, it is only good biology." Biology, the discipline that was once driven by anxious metaphors like "survival of the fittest" and "nature red in tooth and claw," now has a new metaphor-community. Death has not ceased, of course, but now it is understood as a legacy to the community of abundant life.