Let Your Life Speak

Let your life speak. It’s an old Quaker saying and the title of Parker Palmer’s 1999 book that I’ve probably read five times and given away many more times over. Palmer begins with a poem and a penetrating statement, “Ask me whether what I have done is my life.” It begs the question, “Is the life I’m living the one that I want to live?”

This question has all the trappings of a New Year’s resolution. Do I really want to be a couch potato or would I rather be fit? Do I really want to watch all this mindless TV or should I read more books?  In the end, these are all very easy questions to answer. Of course we’d like to exercise more, eat less, read more, complain less, spend more time with family and less time on Facebook.

But this is not what Palmer is getting at. The central thrust of Palmer’s book has less to do with what you’d like your life to be and more to do with what your life wants you to be. It is not about becoming more disciplined and stalwart so as to procure the life that you’ve always wanted, even if that life is a very religious one. A true life worth living is not primarily a product of self-determination and hard work (two values which are highly prized in our culture).

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.[1]

Palmer reminds us that life has a voice of its own and this voice commonly eludes even our loftiest ideals and heroes. Sure, we have the best intentions. Many of our resolutions are inspired by the witness of great figures like Pope Francis, Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King Jr. In this light, we commonly mistake the idea of “letting your life speak” with gathering all the most laudable values and traits of these people and setting our minds to imitating them.

These intentions are no doubt "good," but they, like many of our New Year’s resolutions, seldom work. “The results were rarely admirable,” Palmer says, “often laughable, and sometimes grotesque. But always they were unreal, a distortion of my true self – as must be the case when one lives from the outside in, not the inside out.”[2] My true self, living inside out, the Real.

What Palmer is getting at is something that he learned from Thomas Merton - Trappist monk, Catholic thinker and one of Palmer’s favorite authors.[3] Underneath the deafening cacophony of our own plans and visions, beyond the proud confines of our self-made identity, aside from all the distractions and confusions of postmodern life, there is a “hidden wholeness” that calls out to us.[4] It is the voice of Wisdom, the Logos, the Christ, and it is begging for an audience.

If we could let go of our own obsession with what we think is the meaning of it all, we might be able to hear His call and follow Him in His mysterious, cosmic dance. We do not have to go very far to catch echoes of that dancing.[5]

In this New Year, I pray that you and I might quiet ourselves just long enough to hear the faint echoes of this eternal dance, to allow our hearts and our limbs to be animated not by the drumbeats of power, popularity and prestige (or maybe our own "good" intentions), but by the rhythms of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. “Since we live by the Spirit,” Paul says,  “let us keep in step with the Spirit.”[6] I don’t want to spend 2014 “marching to my own drummer,” but following the sacred song of our Savior and dancing in step to the glorious symphony of God’s kingdom.  

Our lives are speaking. The real question is: Are you listening?

---

[1] Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2000), 3.

[2] Ibid.

[3] I’ll never forget the experience of Parker Palmer reading Thomas Merton aloud to me during a private visit to his home in Madison, WI. His eyes were ablaze as his deep and gentle voice floated melodious Mertonian insights across his study. I seriously had to ask myself, “Is this really happening right now?!!!”

[4] Thomas Merton, “Hagia Sophia,” in Thomas P. McDonnell, ed., A Thomas Merton Reader (New York: Doubleday, 1974, 1989), 506.

[5] Thomas Merton, “The General Dance,” in Thomas P. McDonnel, ed., A Thomas Merton Reader (New York: Doubleday, 1974, 1989), 504.

[6] Galatians 5:25.