Book Review by Steven Assarian, Business and Career Librarian
We can easily find advice about how to get a job. Vocation is something harder; it’s work, but it involves a summons to the work, a calling. It’s more philosophical, more high-brow, more “10-dollar word.”
Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak: Listening to the Voice of Vocation is a book about vocation. But it is not the book you might imagine. It is a book firmly rooted in the muck of life.
That’s why I love this book. That’s why you need to read it. If you were here, I would (lightly) shove this book into your hands. It’s weird to read a book like this, one that totally upends your conceptions but gets you closer to what’s real.
The truth that grounds this book is that we are limited human beings. There is work that is in us, and there’s work that is not. This distinction is largely out of our control.
I love that idea, because the lie that we can, in fact, do whatever we want is not liberating; it’s a cage. It traps us in the thinking that we can make our life, and build it however we see fit.
Parker Palmer is a writer and teacher whose books have sold millions. He’s seen success that few achieve. But he spends a great deal of time in this little book shedding light on his failures, the kinds of work he tried to do but wasn’t in him.
Wisdom—another 10 dollar word—comes from failure; but when you read about failure in modern literature, it is often failure on the way to triumph, i.e,. we tried dozens of ideas, and they all failed, but the last one worked and we’re all rich and famous. 
Parker’s story isn’t like that. He tried a number of things—sociologist, community organizer, scholar—and failed at a great many of them, not because they were stepping stones on his way to victory, but they were not his work to do, even if they were in the service of noble causes and ideas. He describes them as uncoverings of his limits.
Recognition of limitation is almost unheard of in career literature. But this is not career literature, not really; it is shelved in the 248s in our non-fiction collection, which is the classification for “Christian Experience and Practice”. This book’s foundation is the Quaker tradition that produced Palmer, which I find fascinating.
Quakers make a point to listen deeply as a spiritual practice, and their traditions reflect this. At one point, Parker convenes what’s called a “clearness committee” where a half-dozen trusted friends ask open-ended, honest questions to help a person discover their own inner truth. In particular, Parker was trying to decide whether or not he should take a particular job as a university president.
I won’t tell you what the outcome of that session was, although it was quite funny. But it is a perfect illustration of the book’s thesis: vocation comes from listening. It does not come from “making” or “building” as in making or building a career; it is asking yourself about the gifts that you have to bring forth into the world, as well as recognizing your liabilities, limits, and shadows.
Oftentimes, the things we are most proud of, the things that make us who we are, have both positive and negative aspects. For example, being agreeable and helpful is good; being a people-pleaser and a doormat are not. But both come from the same impulse inside you.
Our job, in Parker’s thinking, is not to cut out what we do not like, but to instead recognize and make peace with our flaws, because if we were to lose those, we would also do away with our strengths.
The book is full of insights like this. It is strange that a 117-page book (with endnotes) has so many interesting ideas packed into it. This is the first book I’ve read of Palmer’s, and I look forward to reading more of them.
I saw a lot of myself in this book—like Palmer, I also failed out of academia (although to be fair, I failed before I even got in the door, so there’s that). But I find that it is very hard to help someone well without first listening deeply to them. It is one of the great joys of my life that I can give people my full attention.
Too often, we do not think to listen to the small voices inside us, the ones that are telling us who we really are. I am, of course, as guilty of that as anyone. You cannot live an undivided life if you do not listen deeply.
And in the end, that is what Parker is trying to show us: a path to a life that reflects who we are inside. That may or may not be possible, but it is a good question to ponder.
And good questions are the way you get good answers.
As a librarian, that’s been my experience.
