If I
were ever to discover a new direction, I thought, it would be at Pendle Hill, a
community rooted in prayer, study, and a vision of human possibility. But when I
arrived and started sharing my vocational quandary, people responded with a
traditional Quaker counsel that, despite their good intentions, left me even
more discouraged. “Have faith,” they said, “and way will open.”
“I have faith,” I thought to myself. “What I don’t have is time to wait for ‘way’ to open. I’m approaching middle age at warp speed, and I have yet to find a vocational path that feels right. The only way that’s opened so far is the wrong way.”
After a few months of deepening frustration, I took my troubles to an older Quaker woman well known for her thoughtfulness and candor. “Ruth,” I said, “people keep telling me that ‘way will open.’ Well, I sit in the silence, I pray, I listen for my calling, but way is not opening. I’ve been trying to find my vocation for a long time, and I still don’t have the foggiest idea of what I’m meant to do. Way may open for other people, but it’s sure not opening for me.”
Ruth’s reply was a model of Quaker plain-speaking. “I’m a birthright Friend,” she said somberly, “and in sixtyplus years of living, way has never opened in front of me.” She paused, and I started sinking into despair. Was this wise woman telling me that the Quaker concept of God’s guidance was a hoax?
Then she spoke again, this time with a grin. “But a lot of way has closed behind me, and that’s had the same guiding effect.”
I laughed with her, laughed loud and long, the kind of laughter that comes when a simple truth exposes your heart for the needlessly neurotic mess it has become. Ruth’s honesty gave me a new way to look at my vocational journey, and my experience has long since confirmed the lesson she taught me that day: there is as much guidance in what does not and cannot happen in my life as there is in what can and does – maybe more.
Limitations
Like many middle-class Americans, especially those who are white and male, I was raised in a subculture that insisted I could do anything I wanted to do, be anything I wanted to be, if I were willing to make the effort. The message was that both the universe and I were without limits, given enough energy and commitment on my part. God made things that way, and all I had to do was to get with the program.
My troubles began, of course, when I started to slam into my limitations, especially in the form of failure. I can still touch the shame I felt when, in the summer before I started graduate school at Berkeley, I experienced my first serious comeuppance: I was fired from my research assistantship in sociology. Having been a golden boy through grade school, high school, and college, I was devastated by this sudden turn of fate. Not only was my source of summer income gone, but my entire graduate career seemed in jeopardy; the professor I had come to Berkeley to study with was the director of the project from which I had been fired. My sense of identity, and my concept of the universe, crumbled around my feet for the first, but not last, time. What had happened to my limitless self in a limitless world?
The culture I was raised in suggested an answer: I had not worked hard enough at my job to keep it, let alone succeed. I regret to report that there is some truth in that answer. Another research assistant and I had made frequent, disrespectful, and (apparently) audible jokes about the project on which we were working. We goofed off so much that our supervisor got bent out of shape, as perhaps did some of the data we were punching into IBM counter-sorter cards.
My associate and I had rationalized our behavior with the juvenile notion that the project was a joke long before we started making jokes about it. Today, thirty years later, my inner adolescent – which is less wise but more tenacious than the infamous “inner child” – still clings to the belief that we may well have•been right! Whatever merit this twisted rationale may have, it is true that I did not work hard enough to keep that job, and so I lost it.
Who I Am
But that truth does not go deep enough – not if I am to discover the meaning of “way closing” behind me. I was fired because that job had little or nothing to do with who I am, with my true nature and gifts, with what I care and do not care about. My resort to adolescent rebellion reflected that simple fact.
I apologize, belatedly, for my immaturity, for the grief I gave my supervisor, and for whatever damage I may have done to the data. None of that is to my credit. But I was laughing to keep myself sane. Perhaps the research I was doing was what a good sociologist “ought” to do, but it felt meaningless to me, and I felt fraudulent doing it. Those feelings were harbingers of things to come, things that eventually led me out of the profession altogether.
Obviously, I should have dealt with my feelings more directly and exercised more self-control. Either I should have quit that job under my own steam or settled in and done the work properly. But sometimes the “shoulds” do not work because the life one is living runs crosswise to the grain of one’s soul. At that time in my life, I had no feeling for the grain of my soul and no sense of which way was crosswise. Not knowing what was driving me, I behaved with blind but blissful unconsciousness – and reality responded by giving me a big and hard-to-take clue about who I am: way closed behind me.
Neither that job nor any job like it was in the cards for me, given the hand I was dealt at birth. That may sound like sinfully fatalistic thinking or, worse, a self-serving excuse. But I believe it embodies a simple, healthy, and lifegiving truth about vocation. Each of us arrives here with a nature, which means both limits and potentials. We can learn as much about our nature by running into our limits as by experiencing our potentials. That, I think, is what Ruth and life were trying to teach me.
It would be nice if our limits did not reveal themselves in such embarrassing ways as getting fired from a job. But if you are like me and don’t readily admit your limits, embarrassment may be the only way to get your attention. I go on full alert only when I am blocked or get derailed or flat-out fail. Then, finally, I may be forced to face my nature and find out whether I can make something of both my gifts and my limitations.
It is important to distinguish between two kinds of limitations: those that come with selfhood and those that are imposed by people or political forces hell-bent on keeping us “in our place.” I do not ask everyone who gets fired to conclude that it was the work of a gracious God offering clues to one’s true vocation. Sometimes it is the work of a pathological boss or a corporate culture, getting rid of people whose propensity for truth-telling threatens the status quo. Sometimes it is the result of an economic system that robs the poor of their jobs so that the rich can get richer still. Like everything else in the spiritual life, getting guidance from way closing requires thoughtful discernment.
Vocational Integrity
Our problem as Americans – at least, among my race and gender – is that we resist the very idea of limits, regarding limits of all sorts as temporary and regrettable impositions on our lives. Our national myth is about the endless defiance of limits: opening the western frontier, breaking the speed of sound, dropping people on the moon, discovering “cyberspace” at the very moment when we have filled old fashioned space with so much junk that we can barely move. We refuse to take no for an answer.
Part of me treasures the hopefulness of this American legacy. But when I consistently refuse to take no for an answer, I miss the vital clues to my identity that arise when way closes – and I am more likely both to exceed my limits and to do harm to others in the process.
A few years ago, I was introduced at a conference as a “recovering sociologist.” The line got a good laugh, but it also snapped me back to my ignominious failure in the summer before I began graduate school. My soul needed to recover from the misfit between sociology and itself. But before that could happen, my ego needed to deal with its shame. I had to get through graduate school and prove, however briefly, that I could succeed as a professor of sociology – even though that path took me directly into vocational despair.
The despair that took me from teaching sociology at Georgetown to the community at Pendle Hill contained a call to vocational integrity. Had I not followed my despair, and had Ruth not helped me understand it, I might have continued to pursue a work that was not mine to do, causing further harm to myself, to the people and projects with which I worked, and to a profession that is well worth doing – by those who are called to do it.
Excerpted from Let Your Life Speak by Parker J. Palmer C 2000. Published by Jossey-Bass a Wiley Company (www.josseybass.com)
Let Your Life Speak is available from Faith At Work Resources.
Parker J. Palmer is a writer, teacher and activist. He is a senior associate of the American Association for Higher Education and senior adviser to the Fetzer Institute. In 1998, he was named one of the thirty most influential senior leaders in higher education. He is a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quaker) and lives in Madison WI.