Thanks to my new therapist’s recommendation, Ryan Sharp, I’m reading Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak. It’s epic. I’ve got a variety of things going on in my life. And everything seems full of transition and flux. And in the midst of that I feel as if I’m actually beginning to develop an inward life. I’m really wrestling with “vocation” and direction. I’m beginning to settle into some much more realistic expectations for myself and life than perhaps I have been living with over the past few years.
Palmer writes . . .
“The altitude at which I was living had been achieved by at least four means. First, I had been trained as an intellectual not only to think – an activity I greatly value – but also to live largely in my head, the place in the human body farthest from the ground. Second, I had embraced a form of Christian faith devoted to less to the experience of God than to abstractions about God, a fact that now baffles me: how did so many disembodied concepts emerge from a tradition whose central commitment is to “the Word became flesh”?
Third, my altitude had been achieved by my ego, an inflated ego that led me to think more of myself than was warranted in order to mask my fear that I was less than I should have been. Finally, it had been achieved by my ethic, a distorted ethic that led me to live by images of who I ought to be or what I ought to do, rather than by insight into my own reality, into what was true and possible and life-giving for me.
Florida Scott Maxwell put it in terms more elegant than mine: You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done . . . you are fierce with reality.” I now know myself to be a person of weakness and strength, liability and giftedness, darkness and light. I now know that to be whole means to reject none of it but to embrace all of it.”
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8 Comments
You might have to redo your expectations again after your baby is born
i’m reading this right now too.
very good read.
I think your therapist (and mine!) is a one-trick pony– he recommended that same book to me. But I have to say that it is a really great book, and has helped me a lot.
i’ve been finding that i embody the very thing i am coming to detest, oddly enough. as i come into a deep distrust of ideologies i find more and more that i am an idealist, a dreamer. i suffer the same affliction – the temptation to live in my head rather than in my life. just today i was given an opportunity to face life in a slightly more upfront way and it really helped me to see clearly just how much i am ruled by my ideas. i’m praying for more compassion and situated-ness.
dude-
glad to see that Palmer’s stuff is getting around. I blogged about it a few months ago. laura just finished it! it was as you say an experiment in truth!
can’t wait to see you soon!
jc
excellent quote, josh! i will have to check that book out. thanks.
Ah, Josh-son, you are now fierce with reality.
powerful stuff, and as usual, your transparency aids and abets(sp?) others in their journey.
thanks.
I love it. Lets move in together.