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)
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