Parker Palmer describes a time in his life when he was searching
for the answer to the question that is at the top of your order of service: Is
the life I am living the same as the life that wants to live in me?
He had been at Georgetown teaching undergrads about community
service. He was stuck in his occupation. He was growing more convinced that he
was living someone else’s life. It came time for a sabbatical and he knew that
he needed to be back among an intentional community of Quakers, a community
rooted in prayer, study, and a vision of human possibility.
He received and accepted an offer to spend his sabbatical at
Pendle Hill. He treasured the idea of spending a year among his beloved
Quakers. Once he got to Pendle Hill, he would tell folks about his occupational
quandary and they would respond with a traditional Quaker saying. Have faith
and way will open.
In the midst of growing frustration, he considered this phrase,
Have faith and way will open. He thought to himself, "I have faith. 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 has opened so far is the wrong way."
He was 35. He had a Ph.D. and he wanted answers. He went to see
an old wise woman. He approached her and said, People keep telling me that way
will open. Well I sit in silence, I pray, I listen, but way is not opening. Way
may open for others, but it is not opening for me.
Her reply is beautiful. She told him, I’m a birthright Friend
and in sixty plus years of living, way has never opened in front of me. Parker
Palmer says that a feeling of dread started rising up in him.
Then she spoke again. A gentle grin appeared on her face. But a
lot of way has closed behind me, and that’s had the same guiding effect.
His one year sabbatical turned into a much greater opportunity.
He spent a decade at Pendle Hill. He reflects on this time in this way. My
anxiety about way not opening, the anxiety that kept me pounding on closed
doors, almost prevented me from seeing the secret hidden in plain sight: I was
already standing on the ground of my new life, ready to take the next step on
my journey, if only I would turn around see the landscape that lay before me.
I was already standing on the ground of my new life.
Have you experienced something like Parker Palmer describes?
Have you found yourself seeing nothing but closed doors, and
some time passes, and suddenly you look back and think: I was already standing
on the ground of my new life?
Parker Palmer was listening to all of the voices that said what
he should be. The essence of this book is what he came to realize over time.
That vocation grows out of a sense of identity.
Maybe you, like me, were taught that vocation was an act of
willfulness, a grim determination that one’s life will go this way or that,
whether it wants to or not. I was taught growing up that the self was full of
sin and that the soul would bow to the truth and goodness only under rugged
duress, and in that system vocation as grim determination makes some sense. But
that system makes little sense to me because I have come to see that the self
longs for wholeness, for shalom, and, in the face of that reality, vocation as
grim determination becomes counter-productive. When we come to see that the
self longs for wholeness and is at its core good, vocation then comes from
listening and well. The word vocation is rooted in the Latin for voice. Parker
Palmer writes in his book, before I can tell my life what I want to do with it,
I must listen to my life telling me who I am.
That takes courage and imagination. As an 18 year old, I left
Galesburg, Illinois and headed to the mountains of North Carolina to attend
college. While I was a freshman or maybe a sophomore, I came across Bret Easton
Ellis’ first novel, just published, entitled Less Than Zero. That book,
which is about a group of young college students who are, let’s say lost, just
knocked me out. I knew I was not hip enough or clever enough or beautiful
enough to be like the characters in that book, but Oh, did I ever want to be
Bret Easton Ellis. To just be able to tell the stories about people like that
would be enough for me. I did not leave my studies in political science behind
me, but I started hanging out with an experimental college on campus, 200
outcasts, writers and poets. I was attempting to live the life of someone other
than who I was!
In the middle to late 80s, there were a variety of authors, JB
Miller, Donna Tartt, Jay McInerney, all writing about a generation that was
lost. What I didn’t know at the time was that this was the great habit of all
generations—to say we are the most lost generation ever. Even more so, What I
didn’t realize was that the voice inside of me was not saying, "You need
to be a writer like them." Instead, what was being awakened in me was
something I shared with these writers: A desire to stand on the rooftops and
fight the conservatism and the complacency and the consumerism that characterized
life in the 80s. That was what I was missing, and only years later, was I able
to realize that this prophetic tradition was a part of my calling to the
ministry!
Wanting to be Bret Easton Ellis, wanting to be someone that you
are not, is part of the process of self-discovery and part of the process of
discovering vocation.
May Sarton, puts it this way.
Now I become Myself.
It’s taken time, many years and places.
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces…
Discovering vocation takes time, takes going places, being
dissolved and shaken. The biggest challenge is in wearing other people’s faces.
How often, in the process of becoming the person we’ve always been, how often
we mask ourselves in faces that are not our own.
There is a Hasidic tale that reveals with amazing clarity, both
the universal tendency to be someone else and the importance of becoming one’s
self.
Rabbi Zusya, when he was an old man, said, "In the coming
world, they will not ask me: Why were you not Moses? They will ask me: Why were
you not Zusya?
In my seminary classes, it was often repeated to me, It is more
important who you are than what you do. If it is true of me, it is true of you
too. Consider for a moment the movements that transform us and our world. They always
emerge from the lives of people who decide to care for their authentic
self-hood. We have talked about such people in this setting—Dorothy Day, Thomas
Merton, Theodore Parker. They decide no longer to act on the outside in a way
that contradicts some truth about themselves that they hold deeply on the
inside.
Parker Palmer tells the story about Rosa Parks. Rosa Parks on a
December day in 1955 in Montgomery Alabama decided to do something that she was
not supposed to do. She sat down at the front of a bus in one of the seats
reserved for whites—a dangerous act in a racist setting. And Parker Palmer
tells of how one day, years later, a graduate student came to her and said,
"You did not know how all of this would turn out. Why did you sit down at
the front of that bus that day?" And Rosa said, "I sat down because I
was tired." Not necessarily because her feet were tired, but rather her
soul was tired, her heart was tired; her whole being was tired of playing by
racist rules, of denying her soul’s claim to selfhood.
Rosa Parks sat down because she had reached a point where it was
essential to embrace her true vocation—not as someone who would reshape our
society, but as someone who would live out her full self in the world.
Now what we want to do, when we mention Dorothy Day or Rosa
Parks or Theodore Parker, is not make them into some super-people, but lift
them up as ordinary people who heard the callings of their times and the
stirrings of their souls in such a way as to discern their vocation, their calling
and in the process help us to understand our own sense of call, of vocation.
Listening to the voice of vocation applies as much to each of
you individually as it does to all of us as a congregation. If it is true that
we are made for community, then the vocation of leadership belongs to all of
us. When we live in the close-knit ecosystem called community, especially in a
church setting, everyone follows and everyone leads.
I lead by word and deed simply because I am here doing what I
do. If you are also here, doing what you do, then you also exercise leadership
of some sort.
My first mentor was Rev. Roberta Finkelstein, the minister at
our congregation in Sterling, Virginia. She will be with us at my ordination
and installation on March 23rd. In her office, she had a question
that she always asked of her parishioners: Given who we are, what shall we do?
The question of vocation always begins with identity.
If we are all leaders, can we help each other deal with the
inner issues inherent in leadership? If so, how?
We can lift up the value of inner work—I have a spiritual
director. She is a Franciscan Nun. She works as a chaplain at Genesis. She is
my spiritual friend, walking with me in a time of great transition. And she
simply asks me the right questions, gently and quietly.
With regard to this idea of inner work, there was nothing she
said in those first sessions that had any greater impact than this. Where we
sat, there was a waterfall. The water was so soothing and so peaceful and so
meditative, that I immediately went out on a journey to build such a thing for
my own office. Inner work is like that—you never know in the midst of
journaling, reflective reading, spiritual friendship, meditation and prayer,
what will grab hold of you. It is a magnet this approach to lifting up the
value of inner work.
You have called me and really I have two things to offer you: My
self (communications about my failures, my triumphs, my sadness, my stories, my
presence) and my spiritual health (those insights that come from listening to
my authentic life, the life that wants to live within me). When I bring my dog
for a walk on these grounds, when you call and I am watching a movie with
Marta, when you hear that I have a spiritual director that I see once a month,
when I am off at a clergy meeting, you will know that I care enough about what
I have to offer you to work on my inner life. Your inner life is what you offer
to this place as well.
When you hear me talk about Wonderful Wednesdays, the vespers
there, the time together at simple meals, you will hear me say that the inner
work of our inner journey is not such a private matter. It is deeply
personal—only you can say what your life is telling you—but it can be helped
along in community. When Marta tells me that her own sense of spirituality is
made known only in those settings, like Appalachian Service Project, where she
can get her hands dirty, what she is telling me is that her inner journey is
realized in community. She went to Appalachian Service Project from the time
she was 12 until 21. She knew instinctively that, though she was there to put
roofs on houses, that the real learning came when she could sit with an old
mountaineer on his front porch and hear the stories of his life.
This is the paradox. We come together in ways that acknowledge
and protect our aloneness. We are both separate and connected, but that we are
not out to set each other straight. She held no pity for those Appalachian
souls. She learned from them. She, and her fellows there, were in no way interested
in saving those old Appalachian men and women, but rather holding them, walking
with them, learning from them.
Because she was not motivated by her fears or anxieties, she was
lead to neither fix nor abandon them. But just to be with them.
To the extent that I can be with you, then we will have a strong
model of leadership on our hands. I will surely not abandon you. And there is
nothing in you that needs fixing. But my promise is the promise of presence.
Presence in the pulpit—these 15 minute sermons are a kind of love letter to
you. Presence when you are in tight spots, sitting with you in your sickness
and celebrating when you get better. Presence at those moments of great joy,
the birth of a child and the uniting of lives. Presence at those moments when
we draw strength from one another in moments of family, community, or global
distress.
The vocation of the ministry, the call of my heart, is nothing
more than the answer I provide to you by saying this is who I am, in my
creatureliness and in my creatorliness, in my engaging in freedom and dignity
the questions that you take up, the ones that are of intimate value and
ultimate value.
October 13, 2002, Unitarian Church, Davenport, Iowa. Roger
Butts