Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

by Parker J. Palmer

112 pages, Hardcover

Published May 7, 2024

About the author

Parker J. Palmer (Madison, WI) is a writer, teacher and activist whose work speaks deeply to people in many walks of life. Author of eight books--including the bestsellers Courage to Teach, Let Your Life Speak, and A Hidden Wholeness--his writing has been recognized with ten honorary doctorates and many national awards, including the 2010 William Rainey Harper Award (previously won by Margaret Mead, Paulo Freire, and Elie Wiesel). He is founder and senior partner of the Center for Courage Renewal, and holds a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.

Reviews

[Karla Osorno · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating 4.25 stars.

Anne Bogel from What Should I Read Next podcast talks about this book often. Finally, I picked it up and was overjoyed by the writing. Parker Palmer shares essays with his reflections on the vocational journey. His vulnerability and the examples from his life, combined with quotes from Henri Nouwen, Thomas Merton, and more make this a powerful read. It’s rich, so at times I had to reread the same passages few times to grasp Palmer’s meaning. I’m certain I now know why Anne Bogel rereads it, and I will too.

Values, vocation, and inner work are all important topics to me so reading this felt like a conversation with the author. Understanding limits, listening, and learning from experiences and wise community is the path for humans to be, to contribute, and to live content. Reading this book helps us to process that we are “led to truth by our weaknesses as well as our strengths.”

“From the beginning, our lives lay down clues to selfhood and vocation, though the clues may be hard to decode. But trying to interpret them is profoundly worthwhile – especially when we are in our twenties or thirties or forties, feeling profoundly lost, having wandered, or been dragged, far away from our birthright gifts.”

[Zeke Merlis · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very pleasant little book about discerning one’s vocation, reading the “true self” amid the ego’s noise. I’ve never been into self-help but you could certainly do a lot worse.

Favorite sentence: “But if the self seeks not pathology but wholeness, as I believe it does, then the willful pursuit of vocation is an act of violence toward ourselves—violence in the name of a vision that, however lofty, is forced on the self from without rather than grown from within.”