Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

by Parker J. Palmer

Today I understand vocation quite differently-not as a goal to be achieved but as a gift to be received. Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice "out there" calling me to become something I am not. It comes from a voice "in here" calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God.

"Here is a sketch of who you were from your earliest days in this world. It is not a definitive picture-only you can draw that. But it was sketched by a person who loves you very much. Perhaps these notes will help you do sooner something your grandfather did only later: remember who you were when you first arrived and reclaim the gift of true self."

Hidden in my desire to become a naval aviator was something more complex: a personal engagement with the problem of violence that expressed itself at first in military fantasies and then, over a period of many years, resolved itself in the pacifism I aspire to today.

closely imitates my story

we do not find our callings by conforming ourselves to some abstract moral code. We find our callings by claiming authentic selfhood, by being who we are, by dwelling in the world as Zusya rather than straining to be Moses.

Frederick Buechner asserts when he defines vocation as "the place where your deep gladness meets the world's deep need"3

The Quaker teacher Douglas Steere was fond of saying that the ancient human question "Who am l?" leads inevitably to the equally important question "Whose am l?"-for there is no selfhood outside of relationship. We must ask the question of selfhood and answer it as honestly as we can, no matter where it takes us. Only as we do so can we discover the community of our lives.

What I learned about vocation is how one's values can do battle with one's heart. I felt morally compelled to work on the urban crisis, but doing so went against a growing sense that teaching might be my vocation. My heart wanted to keep teaching, but nay ethics-laced liberally with ego-told me I was supposed to save the city. How could I reconcile the contradiction between the two?

Today I serve education from outside the institution-where my pathology is less likely to get triggered-rather than from the inside, where I waste energy on anger instead of investing it in hope. This pathology, which took me years to recognize, is my tendency to get so conflicted with the way people use power in institutions that I spend more time being angry at them than I spend on my real work.

I needed to work outside of institutional crosscurrents and constraints. This is not an indictment of institutions; it is a statement of my limitations.

Never thought of it in this way before

that is not an indictment of Inc. It is simply a truth about who I am and how I am rightfully related to the world, an ecological truth of the sort that can point toward true vocation.

"If you are here unfaithfully with its, you're causing terrible damage."

If we are unfaithful to true self, we will extract a price from others. We will make promises we cannot keep, build houses from flimsy stuff, conjure dreams that devolve into nightmares, and other people will suffer-if we are unfaithful to true self.

The social systems in which these people must survive often try to force them to live in a way untrue to who they are. If you are poor, you are supposed to accept, with gratitude, half a loaf or less; if you are black, you are supposed to suffer racism without protest; if you are gay, you are supposed to pretend that you are not. You and I may not know, but we can at least imagine, how tempting it would be to mask one's truth in situations of this sort-because the system threatens punishment if one does not.