Quaker Author Parker Palmer on How to Let Your Life Speak

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1. Parker Palmer defines faithfulness as honoring your own gifts, observing the world’s needs, and finding where the two intersect. How can you apply this definition to find your own path of service without burning out from trying to fix everything? 
2. Palmer cautions against trying to conform your life to high ideals, noting it can falsify the “true self”. Have you ever felt pressured to emulate heroes or meet cultural expectations at the expense of your own identity? 
3. Our culture often asks if we are succeeding using narrow, materialistic metrics. How might shifting your focus from “success” to “faithfulness” change the way you approach your daily tasks and life’s work? 

Zack Jackson

Hey friends, it’s Zack with a few words before we start. We are pushing toward our end-of-May goal of bringing on 50 new supporters to help make Thee Quaker Podcast sustainable. So far, 16 of you have stepped up—thank you so much! We just need 34 more listeners to sign up to meet that goal, and I know we can get there in the next two weeks!

We make this show because we believe stories of spiritual courage act like an anchor in a loud world. But when you support the show, you aren’t just fueling that mission—you also get access to special content, like bonus episodes and extended interviews.

Today’s episode features a conversation with Parker Palmer. It’s a fantastic interview, but we had to cut so much great material just to fit it into our normal runtime. Later this week, our supporters will get exclusive access to the full, uncut audio and video of that conversation.

If that sounds exciting to you, now is the time to join! By pitching in a little each month, you get that bonus content, and you directly help get these episodes out into the world, reaching more people who didn’t know they were Quaker or who just really need this ministry right now. If this feels valuable to you, please go to quakerpodcast.com and click ‘Support’ in the top right corner. Again, that’s the Support button in the top right corner at quakerpodcast.com. Thank you so much, and here’s today’s episode.

Parker Palmer  

The problem with success or effectiveness being the primary norm of our work is that if we are truly called to take on big tasks like love, truth and justice, we will never achieve success in our lifetimes, I have a bunch of heroes historically who’ve devoted their lives to that kind of thing, and not one of them was able to die saying, “I’m sure glad I took on that task. So now everyone in the world can check it off their to do list”.

Jon Watts  

Hi Friends, it’s Jon Watts. I know it’s been a little while since I’ve made an appearance on the show here. That’s partly because Zack has just been doing such a wonderful job. But it’s also because I’ve been working on lots of stuff behind the scenes to make sure this show is sustainable, and to get our brand new video project launched successfully. 

Of course this podcast is the first project we launched back in 2023 and it is my happy place to be able to join you today for this very special episode with Parker Palmer.

Parker Palmer’s work as a teacher and author has found its way far outside the bounds of Quakerism. He has introduced people all over the world to Quaker concepts like the clearness committee and vocational discernment. And he’s just a deep guy to talk to. I love his method of setting up a spiritual concept in a mind-bendingly useful way—like you’ll hear in the interview how he compares our inner and outer lives to a mobius strip. After he said that the idea has just stuck with me, I think about it nearly every day. He speaks eloquently about the  challenge of being faithful in a success-driven world.

Anyway that’s enough from me. It’s so nice to be with you today, and here’s the conversation with Parker Palmer.

Jon Watts  

Parker Palmer, we’re delighted to have you with us today. I wonder if we could start with a little bit of your spiritual biography. Of course, it’s a Quaker show, so you know, let’s focus on that part. But as much of your story as you want to share, you know, how did you discover Quakers? What drew you to them and what? What has kept you coming back?

Parker Palmer  

I was born into the Methodist Church. My parents were active members of a mainline Methodist congregation. And for a whole lot of reasons, I was very curious about faith and religion and God and spirituality from a very young age. So when I finished college, I think my social conscience was awakening after a life experience that had been almost exclusively white and middle, upper, middle class. And so after a while, it just became very clear that God didn’t want me messing around with her church, and instead sent me to Berkeley in the 60s to do a PhD in Sociology with a focus in the sociology of religion. But as the completion of my studies drew near, it really became clear to me that I was not called, and there’s that spiritual word again, I was not called to use my sociology in the classroom, but instead was called to use it on the streets of the city. 

So I went to Washington, DC, joined with a couple of other people, and became a community organizer working on issues of racial justice in the Takoma Park, East silver spring area. I did that work for five years with a coalition of churches, congregations, Jewish, Seventh Day Adventist, Protestant, Catholic in that community, and so deepened my connection with institutional religious life. But what’s fascinating to me is that to this point, despite my focus on religion and religious studies and my involvement with religious institutions. I knew nothing really about Quakers, and there I am working as a community organizer in DC between ages 29 and 34 or 35 knowing nothing about the Quaker tradition and its and the history of non violence, even though that’s what I was drawn to, instinctively. 

I burned out basically at the end of five years of organizing and with my wife and our three children. At that time, we looked for a place where we might spend a sabbatical year so that I could renew and go back to my organizing work. We ran across Pendle Hill, and, long story short, we ended up staying for a year at this Quaker Living Learning Community, which had been around since 1930s and had a really remarkable, intense round of daily life together, worship, communal meals, physical work to maintain the place, study, outreach, etc, etc, and radical economic sharing. During that year, a position opened up as dean of studies, and I applied, and I was accepted, and so that sabbatical year stretched into 11 years of really transformative living, and it was transformative in every possible way. I started writing there, and that led to some speaking on the road and to a vocation that essentially I’ve been pursuing ever since as A traveling teacher and independent writer and activist.

Jon Watts  

You gave us a great segue. You’ve had a prolific career as a writer. Can you walk us through some of your work in this area? What drew you to this kind of writing, and what role has your Quakerism played in your writing?

Parker Palmer

So I had been a student for many years through a BA and MA and a PhD at Berkeley and education as I knew it, as most people still know it, involved sitting in rows facing forward while a professor lectures from behind the podium, and when I arrived at Pendle Hill, I found some very gifted teachers seating their adult students, not in rows, but in a circle, putting a text or a poem or a question or a piece of data or a proposition, an idea, a thought, a probe in the middle of the circle, as it were, and then hosting in a skillful way, a corporate inquiry, a communal inquiry into what is this and what’s it all about, And how does it speak to us? And I was fascinated by the way teaching in in that in that circular mode, rather than that line them up and shut up and memorize mode evoked people’s experience, brought more and more knowledge into the room as good teachers did what education is supposed to do, which is lead out from within, what people know that connects with what it is we’re trying to learn, each of us, eyes and ears, hearing and seeing different things, amplifying each other’s experience, and the result being this very rich tapestry of knowledge so much richer than you can get from one person holding forth and allowing a little time for questions. 

Robert Frost once, once wrote, we, we, we stand round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the center and knows. I just love that notion. We stand round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the center and knows. And it felt like me, that it felt to me like a meeting properly convene, had that quality to it of a mutual knowing that’s evoked and connected with some mystery at the center of the circle, where, where we meet each other, not kind of on our left and on our right and across the circle, but In the center of the circle, where, our when our own centers move to that the Corporate Center, we meet each other in a new and deeper way. 

So I wrote a little essay called meeting for learning, imagining that that was a phrase that had long been used by Quakers. I learned that it had never been used by Quakers. And so, you know, I started feeling more at home. I started feeling, maybe I get this, you know, and maybe I can make a contribution to it. And what really fascinates me about that little essay meeting for learning, which probably wasn’t more than. I don’t know four or 5000 words long is that it contains the seeds of a lot of the 10 books I’ve done since then.

Jon Watts  

I imagine most of our listeners will at least be familiar with your book, “Let Your Life Speak”. So I wonder if you could, if we could start there, if you could tell us a bit about that book, where, where the idea for it came from, and where the title came from.

Parker Palmer  

Well, as you and every good Quaker know, I ripped the title off from the Quaker tradition altogether. I probably owe somebody, you know, a lot of royalties. I don’t know, but it’s that, it’s that Quaker phrase that I started hearing when I arrived at Pendle Hill when I was 35 years old. First exposure to Quakerism and language like that just struck me with sort of blunt force. But as I say in the book, in some significant way I misinterpreted what I was hearing. I thought, let your life speak meant something like, line up the highest ideals you can get your hands on and then try to conform your life to that. And that’s a path that I don’t recommend to anyone, because I think it’s it results in a falsification of what Thomas Merton called true self. 

For Merton, True Self was very close to what Quakers mean, if not the same, really is what Quakers mean by that of God in every person you know, it means that inborn being, that we all come into this world with that, that I’m absolutely convinced has a shape and a character and a form when we arrive, I talk about it in terms of true self or soul. Hasidic Jews talk about it as the spark of the divine in every person. Secular humanists talk about it as identity and integrity. It’s one of these words for which no one has the true name. And so it’s never mattered to me much what you call it, but that you call it something, I think does matter, because if we don’t have some way of naming the beingness of a human being, some way of naming identity and integrity, some way of naming soul, or that solid core of self, we end up just being raw material to be shaped in whatever form a market economy needs us to take, or our culture tells us to take. 

So as I think most people who wrestle with these questions are aware, we spend a lot of time in life just trying to resist what the model of life that other people have been trying to impose on us, whether that comes from family or culture or race or gender or sexual orientation or whatever its source may be, we’re all subject To to pressures toward being other than who we are. Pressures toward being somebody or something that’s acceptable in our circles. So I spent a lot of time as a young social activist trying to emulate my heroes, which meant not being who I am and so distortion sets in, and ego sets in, and you become embattled trying to reach a goal that isn’t yours to reach.

Jon Watts  

So Let Your Life Speak was pretty successful. Lots of people outside of Quakerism have encountered that book and been affected by it. You know, Quakers have this idea that when we follow our leadings faithfully, we sort of let go of the outcome, that our goal isn’t to be faithful in order that there be. A certain outcome, but faithfulness is the goal. So I wonder what your experience is of having put wheels on that idea. What is, what is the life of Let Your Life Speak out in the world? What have you heard back about how it’s impacted people?

Parker Palmer  

Yeah, I hear a lot about it, and I hear a lot about the chapter on depression. I think of all the of all the words I’ve written, probably those have packed more punch per square inch than most others. But what really interests me about your question, is the seduction, the temptation of doing, of doing something in order to achieve a particular result, and most often in this culture, the result is, goes under the general title or label of success, right? In fact, there’s a very important piece of my thinking about social change that has to do with this, which is that we live in a culture, this American culture of ours, that is always asking the question of, are you succeeding? And in the metrics for success are very narrow, very mechanistic, very materialistic, and people want to ask that question every day, as someone has said, it’s like, we plant a flower and then we rip it up the next day to see how the root system is doing. And therefore flowers never grow. 

The problem with success or effectiveness being the primary norm of our work is that if we are truly called to take on big tasks like love, truth and justice, we will never achieve success in our lifetimes, I have a bunch of heroes historically who’ve devoted their lives to that kind of thing, love truth and justice kind of thing, and not one of them was able to die saying, I’m sure glad I took on that task. So now everyone in the world can check it off their to do list. If we live and die by effectiveness and success, the results are very predictable. We will start taking on smaller and smaller tasks, because they’re the only ones you can get you can be effective with. 

So I think, while I don’t want to give up on effectiveness, that’s a real world question that we have to hold responsibly, I think we need a higher standard, and for me, I call the standard faithfulness, which I define very simply. Have I been faithful to my own gifts? Have I been faithful to an honest observation of needs in the world? And have I been faithful to those points at which my gifts might intersect those needs on a path of service. You know, if I can say yes, even in a small way, at the end of the day to that question, I think on balance, I’m probably doing okay, and probably can maintain some sort of witness for love, truth and justice, without racking myself on on guilt for not have not getting the job done, which then leads to burnout, and me exiting the field.

Jon Watts  

We’re going to take a quick break. When we return, we tackle the friction between our deep inner lives and the dominant culture that we interact with every day. Parker shares his philosophy about how we stop letting the world break us down and start reshaping it instead. So stay tuned. We’ll be right back.

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Zack Jackson: I recently had a simple question for the rest of the Thee Quaker Staff. What were you doing when you were 22?

 Hannah: I, uh, was at Pendle Hill for the Young Adult Leadership Development Program

Jon: I was a resident student, on the campus there at Pendle Hill.

Maeve: When I was 22, um, I was the English tutor for, um, a Buddhist Lama in Dharamsala, India.

Zack Jackson: Your early 20’s are such a unique period of life. It’s this beautiful, energetic time of radical change and hope. But it’s also a time of limited resources and scattered direction. Which is exactly why Quaker Voluntary Service was founded. Here’s Haley Castle-Miller, the operations manager at QVS.

Haley Castle-Miller: Quaker Voluntary Service is a service year opportunity for young adults ages 21 to 30. And it offers an opportunity for young adults to live in community with one another, work at a local service-based organization, and explore Quaker spirituality.

Zack Jackson: Haley is also a QVS alum…

Haley Castle-Miller: I’ll just add that I feel so lucky to have had the QVS experience right out of college. And it really provided me with something that was grounding at the time. 

Zack Jackson: QVS gives young adults a concrete framework to explore their purpose, built on three pillars: community, service, and spirit. And for current fellows like Lauren Lee, that framework is life-changing.

Lauren Lee: Learning that there was a safe place to explore all these things I’ve been thinking about for years with funding and support from people, just so many people. That’s what drew me to QVS. It’s been an absolutely spiritually transformative year for me.

Zack Jackson: But transformation like that doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It takes an organization of people who care, people who can pay the rent, keep the lights on and buy groceries, so that these 20 somethings have the time and space to do the heavy, world changing work that they’re called to do. I asked Executive Director Greg Stefanski how our listeners can support this work.

Greg Stefanski: The program is supported by many volunteers who wear a variety of hats, and the fellows have really benefited from the wisdom of their elders and those who have life and work experiences. And so we’re inviting folks to reach out, if they feel led by spirit to connect and want to support our fellows, because we have a variety of ways that they can do that, and certainly the financial support makes a big difference too.

Zack Jackson: Whether you’re 22 or 82, you can make a difference too. By donating to QVS, you are providing young leaders the freedom to pour their entire selves into our communities and to become the change makers that we desperately need for the world of tomorrow.

Go to QuakerVoluntaryService.org to make your donation or to learn more about how you can get involved. Help empower the next generation of leaders today at QuakerVoluntaryService.org.

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Jon Watts  

In researching your work, I have been captivated by your message about the inner and the outer life. I think it’s something that Quakers and maybe people of all faith struggle with, is kind of a compartmentalization of our spirituality, that it becomes easy to just be a Quaker on Sunday morning and then the rest of the week. You know, you’re just a normal member of the dominant culture, you suggest that there’s a more nuanced way to look at the relationship between our inner spiritual lives and how we are in the world outwardly. Can you tell us a little bit about that, and what’s the impact of changing our mindset around this?

Parker Palmer  

Yeah, that’s another great question. You have a lot of great questions. So one of the images I use to talk about this is the image of the Mobius strip. It’s a little hard to explain in a non visual way, but it’s spelled M, O, B, I, U, S, and if anyone wonders what it is, you can Google it and get a physical image of a mobius strip pretty quickly. Basically, it’s a geometric form that is, of course, that you can make out of a strip of paper that is three dimensional, but it only has one side, so it sort of defies common sense. It’s a form in which one side of this strip of paper is twisted in a way to join to the other end of that strip of paper, so that the inner, what looks like the inner side of the Mobius strip. Keeps blending into what looks like the outer side of the Mobius strip. And if you travel around it with your finger, you have to keep saying what looks like the inside becomes what looks like the outside and back to what looks like the inside, because, as the finger test will prove, there is only one side to it. And so when I ran across the Mobius strip as just a geometric shape, that intrigued me. I realized that’s how life works. We have stuff inside us, all kinds of stuff inside us. 

You know, we have, not only that of God in us, we have a lot of other voices as well, and and we have to be constantly at work, sorting and shifting among those voices, I think, in solitude and in community and making purposeful decisions about which of those voices or energies or forces, whatever you want to call them, we want to bring into the outer world as that Mobius strip merges from inner to outer. And when we do that, we reshape a little part of the world, as one of my friends says, You can’t change the world, but you can change whatever is within five feet or so. And so we change at least a little bit of the world as we decide I’m going to go out with this voice or this attitude or this action or this spirit, and then the world gets hold of that, and it sends stuff back at us. Sometimes it’s affirmation, sometimes it’s negation, sometimes it’s love, sometimes it’s hate, and all kinds of stuff in between. 

And then we have a decision to make about how we want to process that which the world has sent back and respond to it as we take our next breath, as it were, inhale, exhale, in and out, shaping the world and ourselves as we go and where we are then, receiving the world’s feedback on whatever we’ve put out there asking ourselves, How am I going to hold this? How am I going to process this? Am I going to return anger for anger? Am I going to try to absorb that anger and return it in some form of more creative response at every point of exchange, being deeply thoughtful about how we want to shape ourselves in the world, because whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not, that’s exactly what we’re doing. We won’t always get it right. That’s not the point. But the point is to keep learning from our experience. What, what is it that does harm in the world? And what is it that does harm to us when we breathe the world back in?

Jon Watts  

Parker, I really resonate with your spiritual journey, and it also it feels like we’re in another sort of 17th Century moment of deep upheaval right now where this tradition is desperately needed. So I wanted to ask, you know, what is your prayer for the future of Quakerism, and what does it have to offer the world right now?

Parker Palmer  

I think it has several dimensions to it. I don’t normally pray in terms of dimensions, but since we’re doing a podcast, I think I’ll maybe lower my standards a bit. Prayer is often just help or Thank you, or what, but I can’t do that here so effectively. So first of all, I pray that Quakers, who are by and large, older, a good deal older, if I understand the demographics correctly, will start taking their lead from young people who are on this path or finding their way onto this path and. Yeah, and so my prayer is that the older friends can let the tradition go into the trustworthy hands of younger friends, which older friends once were. And no doubt, a previous generation of Quakers was appalled by the way they were doing stuff. So a good historical memory helps, but even more, the grace that says the Spirit moves in wondrous ways, and we can’t contain it. We can’t judge it. We must encourage it, and we must listen. And I’m really, really grateful for the work you folks are doing with with thee Quaker and others who are have been working for some time now on cultivating a younger generation of friends to help in practical ways to help all of that along, and my prayer is that your work, too would be acknowledged and supported by an older generation. A lot of people my age don’t know what a podcast is, and that’s okay, but at age 87 i My message to them is, trust it. Go with it. It’s good stuff. It’s just like the gramophone you grew up with in your grandmother’s living room, you’re listening to talking voices that have something to Say, and that’s what the younger folks are doing. You

Jon Watts  

Jon, thank you. Parker. Zack said you, you might have a poem to share with us that on the way out here that is particularly speaking to you right now.

Parker Palmer  

So I think what I’ll do it’s the first day of spring, which is a wonderful thing to celebrate, especially after the hard winter we’ve had in Madison, Wisconsin. It’s a poem that came to me one day when I was in the depths of clinical depression and I was walking down a country road way out in the middle of nowhere, no traffic, no other people, just fields, crop fields that had been plowed on either side of me. And I recognized that, because I came from people who farmed, I recognized that this particular field had been Harrowed, which is something farmers do as a first step in loosening the earth for for a new season of planting. And this poem started coming to me, which grew in me over the next few days and weeks and had a began to have a healing effect. Didn’t happen right away. It takes time, but I’m convinced that this planted a life giving seed in my tortured consciousness at that time for which I’m grateful. So the poem is called harrowing. 

The plow has savaged this sweet field

Misshapen clods of earth kicked up

Rocks and twisted roots exposed to view

Last year’s growth demolished by the blade.

I have plowed my life this way

Turned over a whole history

Looking for the roots of what went wrong

Until my face is ravaged, furrowed, scarred.

Enough. The job is done.

Whatever’s been uprooted, let it be

Seedbed for the growing that’s to come.

I plowed to unearth last year’s reasons—

The farmer plows to plant a greening season.

So my prayer for Quakerism would be to plant a greening season

Suggest music behind the poem, that fades as we are doing pleasantries at the end.

Jon Watts  

Amen. Parker, thank you so much. It’s been really wonderful talking with you.

Parker Palmer  

Oh, it’s really been a joy to talk with you, too. And thank you so much again for inviting me back.

Jon Watts  

Thank you for listening, and thank you to Parker Palmer for joining us on today’s show. Check out our website, at Quakerpodcast.com, for discussion questions, a transcript of today’s episode and links to more resources. This episode was edited and produced by Zack Jackson, with help from me Jon Watts. I also wrote and produced the music. Thee Quaker podcast is a part of Thee Quaker Project. We are a nonprofit Quaker media organization dedicated to giving Quakers a platform in the 21st Century. If you like what we’re up to, please consider becoming a monthly supporter. You can go to Quakerpodcast.com and click support in the top right corner. It takes less than five minutes, and we really appreciate it. And now our Daily Quaker Message as read by Grace Gonglewski,

Grace Gonglewski  

Parker, J Palmer, 1991 The core message of all the great spiritual traditions is Be not afraid, rather be confident that life is good and trustworthy. In this light, the great failure is not that of leading a full and vital, active life with all the mistakes and suffering such a life will bring along with its joys. Instead, the failure is to withdraw fearfully from the place to which one is called to squander the most precious of all our birthrights, the experience of aliveness itself.

Jon Watts  

To get Quaker wisdom in your inbox every day, just go to dailyquaker.com that’s dailyquaker.com.

Hosted, produced, and edited by Zack Jackson.

Original music and sound design by Jon Watts (Listen to more of Jon’s music here.)

This season’s cover art is by Todd Drake

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