The Mystery of Depression

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Source: Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation by Parker Palmer (2000)

Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (2/2)

Page 86-91

The first shadow-casting monster is insecurity about identity and worth. Many leaders have an extroverted personality that makes this shadow hard to see. But extroversion sometimes develops a way to cope with self-doubt: we plunge into external activity to prove that we are worthy – or simply to evade the question. There is a well-known form of this syndrome, especially among men, in which our identity becomes so dependent on performing some external role that we become depressed, and even die, when that role is taken away.	These leaders posses a gift available to all who take an inner journey: the knowledge that identity does not depend on the role we play or the power it gives us over others. It depends only on the simple fact that we are children of God, valued in and for ourselves. When a leader is grounded in that knowledge, what happens in the family, the office, the classroom, the hospital can be life-giving for all concerned.
A second shadow inside many of us is the belief that the universe is a battleground, hostile to human interests. Notice how often we use images of warfare as we go about our work, especially in organizations. We talk about tactics and strategies, allies and enemies, wins and losses, “do or die”. If we fail to be fiercely competitive, the imagery suggest, we will surely lose, because the world we live in is essentially a vast combat zone.	The gift we receive on the inner journey is the insight that the universe is working together for good. The structure of reality is not the structure of a battle. Reality is not out to get anybody. Yes, there is death, but it is part of the cycle of life, a great harmony comes into our lives. The spiritual truth that harmony is more fundamental than warfare in the nature of reality ity itself could transform  this leadership shadow – and transform our institutions as well.
A third shadow among leaders is “functional atheism”, the belief that ultimate responsibility for everything rests with us. This is the unconscious, unexamined conviction that if anything decent is going to happen here, we are the ones who must make it happen – a conviction held even by people who talk a good game about God. This shadow causes pathology on every level of our lives. It leads us to impose our will on others, stressing our relationships, sometimes to the point of breaking. It often eventuates in burnout, depression, and despair, as we learn that the world will not bend our will and we become embittered about that fact. Functional atheism is the shadow that drives collective frenzy as well. It explains why the average group can tolerate no more than fifteen seconds of silence: if we are not making noise, we believe, nothing good is happening and something must be dying.	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 load but can share it with others, liberating us and empowering them. We learn that sometimes we are free to lay the load down altogether. The great community asks us to do only what we are able and trust the rest to other hands.
A fourth shadow within and among us is fear, especially our fear of the natural chaos of life. Many of us – parents and teachers and CEOs – are deeply devoted to eliminating all remnants of chaos from the world. We want to organize and orchestrate things so thoroughly that messiness will never bubble up around us and threaten to overwhelm us.	The insight we received on the inner journey is that chaos is the precondition to creativity: as every creation myth has it, life itself emerged from the void. Even what has been created needs to be returned to chaos from time to time so that it can be regenerated in more vital form. When a leader fears chaos so deeply as to try to eliminate it, the shadow of death will fall across everything that leader approaches – for the ultimate answer to all of life’s messiness is death.
My final example of the shadows that leaders project is paradoxically, the denial of death itself. Though we sometimes kill things off well before their time, we also live in denial of the fact that all things must die in due course. Leaders who participate in the 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 support to accommodate the insecurities of a leader who does not want anything to die on his or her watch.	A good scientist does not fear the death of a hypothesis, because that “failure” clarifies the steps that need to be taken toward truth, sometimes more than a hypothesis that succeeds. 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 received 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 times is due, we create the conditions under which new life can emerge.

Page 91

1) First, we could lift up the value of “inner work”. That phrase should become commonplace in families, schools, and religious institutions, at least, helping us understand that inner work is as real as outer work and involves skills one can develop, skills like journaling, reflecting reading, spiritual friendship, meditation and prayer.

2) Second, we could spread the word that inner work, though it is a deeply personal matter, is not necessarily a private matter: inner work can be helped along in community. Indeed, doing inner work together is a vital counterpoint doing it alone. Left to our own devices, we my delude our-selves in ways that others can help us correct.

3) Third, we can remind each other of the dominant role that fear plays in our lives, of all the ways that fear forecloses the potentials I have explored in this chapter.

“Be not afraid” does not mean we cannot have fear. Everyone has fear, and people who embrace the call to leadership often find fear abounding. Instead, the words say we do not need to be the fear we have. We do not have to lead from a place of fear, thereby endangering a world in which fear is multiplied.

We have places of fear inside of us, but we have other places as well – places with names like trust and hope and faith. We can choose to lead from one of those places, to stand on ground that is not riddled with fault lines of rear, to move toward others from a place of promise instead of anxiety. As we stand in one of those places, fear may remain close at hand and our spirits may still tremble. But now we stand on ground that will support us, ground from which we can lead others toward a more trustworthy, more hopeful, more faithful way of being the world.

Page 96

Seasons is a wise metaphor for the movement of life, I think. It suggests that life is neither a battlefield nor a game of chance but something infinitely richer, more promising, more real. The notion that our lives are like the eternal cycle of the seasons does not deny the struggle or the joy, the loss of the gain, the darkness or the light, but encourages us to embrace it all – and to find in all of it opportunities for growth.

Page 96-97

If we lived close to nature in an agricultural society, the seasons as metaphor and fact would continually frame our lives. But eh master metaphor of our era does not come from agriculture – it comes from manufacturing. We do not believe that we “grow” our lives - we believe that we “make” them. Just listen to how we use the word in everyday speech: we make time, make friends, make meaning, make money, make a living, make love.

I once hear Alan Watts observe that a Chinese child will ask, “How does a baby grow?” But an American child will ask, “How do you make a baby?” Form an early age, we absorb our culture’s arrogant conviction that we manufacture everything, reducing the world to more “raw material” that lacks all value until we impose our designs and labor on it.

Page 100-109

Autumn

Autumn constantly reminds me that my daily dyings are necessary precursors to new life. If I try to “make” a life that defies the diminishments of autumn, the life I end up with will be artificial, at best, and utterly colourless as well. But when I yield to the endless interplay of living and dying, dying and living, the life I am given will be real and colourful, fruitful and whole.

Winter

Nature is not dead in winter – it has gone underground to renew itself and prepare for spring. Winter is the time when we are admonished, and even inclined, to do the same for ourselves.

When my father was alive, I confused the teaching with the teacher. My teacher is gone now, but the grace is still there – and my clarity about that fact has allowed his teaching to take deeper root in me. Winter clears the landscape, however brutally, giving us a chance to see ourselves and each other more clearly, to see the very ground of our being.

Our inward winters take many forms – failure, betrayal, depressions, death. But every one of them, in my experience, yields to the same advice: “The winters will drive you crazy until you learn to get out into them.” Until we enter boldly into the fears we most want to avoid, those fears will dominate our lives. But when we walk directly into them – protected from frostbite by the warm grab of friendship or inner discipline or spiritual guidance – we can learn what they have to each us. Then we discover once again that the cycle of the seasons is trustworthy and life-giving, even in the most dismaying season of all.

Spring

I love the fact that the word humus – the decayed vegetable matter that feeds the roots of plants – comes from the same root that gives rise to the word humility. It is a blessed etymology. It helps me understand that the humiliating events of life, the events that leave “mud on my face” or that “make my name mud”, may create the fertile soil in which something new can grow.

Summer

Here is a summertime truth: abundance is a communal act, the joint creation of an incredibly complex ecology in which each part functions on behalf of the whole and, in return, is sustained by the whole. Community doesn’t just create abundance – community is abundance. If we could learn that equation from the world of nature, the human might be transformed.

Summer is the season when all the promissory notes of autumn and winter and spring come due, and each year the debts are repaid with compound interest. In summer, it is hard to remember that we had ever doubted the natural process, had ever ceded death the last word, had ever lost faith in the powers of new life. Summer is a reminder that our faith is not nearly as strong as the things we process to have faith in – a reminder that for this single season, at least, we might cease our anxious machinations and give ourselves to the abiding and abundant grace of our common life.

Source: Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation by Parker Palmer (2000)

Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1/2)

Page 4-5

Vocation does not come from wilfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about – quite apart from what I would like it to be about – or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions.

That insight is hidden in the word vocation itself, which is rooted in the Latin for “voice”. Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. I must listen for the truth and values at the heart my own identity, not the standards by which I must live – but the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life.

Page 6

My life is not only about my strengths and virtues; it is also about my liabilities and my limits, my trespasses and my shadow. An inevitable though often ignored dimension of the quest for “wholeness” is that we must embrace what we dislike or find shameful about ourselves as well as what we are confident and proud of.

Page 10

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 fulfil the original selfhood given me at birth by God.

Page 15

As noble as that may sound, 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. The deepest vocational question is not “What ought I to do with my life?” It is the more elemental and demanding “Who am I? What is my nature?”

Page 17

As I learn more about the seed of true self that was planted when I was born, I also learn more about the ecosystem in which I was planted – the network of communal relations in which I am called to live responsively, accountably and joyfully with beings of every sort. Only when I know both seed and system, self and community, can I embody the great commandment to love both my neighbour and myself.

Page 18

The experience of darkness has been essential to my calling into selfhood, and telling the truth about that fact helps me to stay in the light. But I want to tell that truth for another reason as well: many young people today journey in the dark, as the young always have, and we elders do them a disservice when we withhold the shadowy parts of our lives.

Page 21

In fact, I could have done no other: teaching, I was coming to understand, is my native way of being in the world. Make me a cleric or a CEO, a poet or a politico, and teaching is what I will do. Teaching is the heart of my vocation and will manifest itself in any role I play.

Page 25

Vocation at its deepest level is not, “Oh, boy, do I want to go to this strange place where I have to learn a new way to live and where no one, including me, understands what I’m doing.” 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.”

Page 29

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.

Page 30

Self-care is never a selfish act – it is simple good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer to others. Anytime we can listen to true self and give it the care it requires, we do so not only for ourselves but for the many others whose lives we touch.

Page 47-48

It took me a long time to understand that although everyone needs to be loved, I cannot be the source of that gift to everyone who asks me for it. There are some relations in which I am capable of love and others in which I am not. To pretend otherwise, to put out promissory notes I am unable to honor, is to damage my own integrity and that of the person in need – all in the name of love.

Page 48-49

When I give something I do not possess, I give a false and dangerous gift, a gift that looks like love but is in reality, loveless – a gift given more from my need to prove myself than from the other’s need to be cared for. That kind of giving is not only loveless but faithless, based on the arrogant and mistaken notion that God has no way of channelling love to the other except through me. Yes, we are created in and for community, to be there, in love, for one another. But community cuts both ways: when we reach the limits of our own capacity to love, community means trusting that someone else will be available to the person in need.

Page 54

There is as much guidance in way that closes behind us as there is in way that opens ahead of us. The opening may reveal our potentials while the losing may reveal our limits – two dies of the same coin, the coin called identity. In the spiritual domain, identity is coin of the realm, and we can learn much about our identity by examining either side of the coin.

Page 55

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 limitation in ways that do not distort our nature, and we must trust and use our gifts in ways that fulfil the potential 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.

Page 82

Annie Dillard offers a powerful image of the inner journey and tells us what might happen if we were to take it. But why would anybody want to take a journey of that sort, with its multiple difficulties and dangers? Everything in us cries out against it – which is why we externalize everything. It is so much easier to deal with the external world, to spend our lives manipulating material and institutions and other people instead of dealing with our own souls. We like to talk about the outer world as if it were infinitely complex and demanding, but it is a cakewalk (很容易做的事) compared to the labyrinth (错综复杂) of our inner lives!

Page 84-85

But then she shouted ten words I hope never to forget, words whose impact and meaning I can still feel: “If you can’t get out of it, get into it!”

I had long believed in the concept of “the word become flesh,” but until that moment, I had not experienced it. May teacher spoke words so compelling that they bypassed my mind, went into flesh, and animated my legs and feet. No helicopter would come to rescue me; the instructor on the cliff would not pull me up with the rope; there was no parachute in my backpack to float me to the ground. There was no way out of my dilemma except to get into it – so my feet started to move, and in a few minutes I made it safely down.

Why would anyone want to embark on the daunting inner journey about which Annie Dillard writes? Because there is no way out of one’s inner life, so one had better get into it. On the inward and downward spiritual journey, the only way out is in and through.

Source: Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation by Parker Palmer (2000)

Interpretation Learning – June 2016 (4)

NO	ENGLISH	CHINESE
1	Wrestle	角力
2	Empower	受权
3	Entrust	委托
4	Anchor	挂锚
5	Convict	知罪
6	Indignant	愤怒
7	Youth worker	青年工作者
8	Use up the soil in vain	白佔土地
9	Mess	过失
10	Coloured	着色
11	Exploitative	利用
12	Disillusioned	灰心
13	Reach	接触
14	Disillusioned	灰心
15	Stickability to their commitment	持守
16	Rigid	缺乏伸缩性
17	Faith relevant to reality	信仰与现实有关联吗
18	Liturgy	方式
19	Dysfunctional	功能失调
20	Charging the community	指示
21	Lavishly sharing	毫无保留/大方地分享
22	Walking in the others’ shoes	设身处地，为他人着想
23	Era	世纪
24	Cat-Theologians	关于自我的神学家
25	Patriarchal	重男
26	Hurricane	飓风
27	Wronged	误了

Interpretation Learning – June 2016 (3)

NO	ENGLISH	CHINESE
1	The peanuts aren't crisp any more. become soft and soggy; no longer crisp	漏风[错] 皮[对] 酥脆的东西受潮后变韧 花生皮了。
2	Standard	规范
3	Hole, Cave	窟窿 [kū long]
4		须要 vs 需要 「須」、「需」皆有需要、需求之意，但因詞性不同，而有不同用法。「必須」的「須」為副詞，後可接動詞，如：「必須走」；「必需」的「需」為動詞，後可接受詞，如：「必需品」。另「需求」、「需要」等詞，為動詞並列，宜用「需」。

如何作讲台翻译工作坊 Interpretation Workshop

Source: 如何作讲台翻译工作坊 by Dr. Lee Ken Ang, 18.06.2016.

Interpretation Learning – June 2016 (2)

NO	ENGLISH	CHINESE
1	Acts 16: 24 When he received these orders, he put them in the inner cell and fastened their feet in the stocks.	使 徒 行 傳 16:24 禁 卒 领 了 这 样 的 命 ， 就 把 他 们 下 在 内 监 里 ， 两 脚 上 了 木 狗 。
2	Acts 16: 26 Suddenly there was such a violent earthquake that the foundations of the prison were shaken. At once all the prison doors flew open, and everyone’s chains came loose.	使 徒 行 傳 16:26 忽 然 ， 地 大 震 动 ， 甚 至 监 牢 的 地 基 都 摇 动 了 ， 监 门 立 刻 全 开 ， 众 囚 犯 的 锁 炼 也 都 松 开 了 。