Let Your Life Speak...

Have you ever read a book and wanted to underline everything? I am currently reading one of those books: Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation by Parker Palmer. It was recommended to me by a friend and fellow spiritual director when we met for peer supervision last week. I started reading it for my work with a directee but only a page in I realized that this is a book for me. Here are a few quotes that I pulled out to give you a taste:

"Ask me whether what I have done is my life." (p. 1)

"...the life I am living is not the same as the life that wants to live in me." (p. 2)

"Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent." (p. 3)

"What a long time it can take to become the person one has always been! How often in the process we mask ourselves in faces that are not our own. How much dissolving and shaking of ego we must endure before we discover our deep identity - the true self within every human being that is the seed of authentic vocation." (p. 9)

In speaking about his infant granddaughter Palmer says, "She did not show up as raw material to be shaped into whatever image the world might want her to take. She arrived with her own gifted form, with the shape of her own sacred soul. Biblical faith calls it the image of God in which we are all created. Thomas Merton calls it true self. Quakers call it the inner light, or 'that of God' in every person. The humanist tradition calls it identity and integrity. No matter what you call it, it is a pearl of great price." (p. 11)

"Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic self-hood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be." (p. 16)

"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.'" (p. 25)

The words on these pages are striking a chord deep within me. He is putting into words what I have sometimes fought but always known to be true. And so fitting that I am reading this book just days before I embark on my pilgrimage to Dingman's Ferry, PA to begin Gestalt Pastoral Care training.