Quotes from Parker J. Palmer

heart's darkness or its light, the closer we get to the ultimate mystery of God. But our culture wants to turn mysteries into puzzles to be explained or problems to be solved, because maintaining the illusion that we can "straighten things out" makes us feel powerful. Yet mysteries never yield to solutions or fixes-and when we pretend that they do, life becomes not only more banal but also more hopeless, because the fixes never work.

We grow up in educational and religious institutions that treat us as members of an audience instead of actors in a drama, and as a result we become adults who treat politics as a spectator sport.

I believe in democracy—in its indisputable achievements and its unfulfilled promise. I believe in American political institutions—in the genius inherent in their design and in the undeniable good they have done when put to their best use. I believe in the power of the human heart—in its capacity for truth and justice, love and forgiveness.

Every profession that attracts people for reasons of the heart is a profession in which people, and the work they do, suffer from losing heart.

This book is for teachers who have good days and bad and whose bad days bring the suffering that comes only from something one loves... when you love your work that much, and many teachers do, the only way to get out of trouble is to go deeper in.

Old is just another word for nothing left to lose, a time of life to take bigger risks on behalf of the common good.

First, the subjects we teach are as large and complex as life so our knowledge of them is always flawed and partial. No matter how we devote ourselves to reading and research, teaching requires a command of content that always eludes our grasp. Second, the students we teach are larger than life and even more complex. To see them clearly and see them whole and respond to them wisely in the moment requires a fusion of Freud and Solomon that few of us achieve.

It is in the common good to hold our political differences and the conflicts they create in a way that does not unravel the civic community on which democracy depends. My

In a prose passage on a life in art—without explanation or elaboration, as if the idea had just popped into his head and he had to capture it before it fled—Thoreau drops this simple couplet: My life has been the poem I would have writ But I could not both live and utter it.

where conventional education deals with abstract and impersonal facts and theories, an education shaped by Christian spirituality draws us toward incarnate and personal truths...it is embodied in personal terms, the terms of one who said, 'I am the way, the truth, and the life.

My core religious beliefs include this simple article of faith: the God who gave all of us life wants us to do the same for each other. When people or groups who claim religious motivation make their points by using violence in any form—spiritual, psychological, verbal, or physical—it seems clear to me that they are driven by fear rather than faith, committed to control instead of trust in God.

But if the teacher does little more than dictate that information and then demand that students memorize and parrot it on tests, they are not learning democratic values. Instead, they are learning to survive as subjects of an autocracy: keep your head down, your mouth shut, and repeat the party line whether or not you understand it or believe it.

Our deepest calling is to grow into our authentic selfhood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks—we will also find our path of authentic service in the world. True vocation joins self and service, as Frederick Buechner asserts when he defines vocation as "the place where your deep gladness meets the world's deep need.

if we who are privileged find ourselves confined, it is only because we have conspired in our own imprisonment.

But before we come to that center, full of light, we must travel in the dark. Darkness is not the whole of the story—every pilgrimage has passages of loveliness and joy—but it is the part of the story most often left untold. When we finally escape the darkness and stumble into the light, it is tempting to tell others that our hope never flagged, to deny those long nights we spent cowering in fear.

Who's in Charge Here? When a congregation is profoundly clergy-centered—when the pedagogy consists of a clergyperson (performer) downloading information and inspiration to parishioners (audience)—the game is rigged. The theological message may be one of community, but the lived experience is one of dependence on an authority. Under those conditions, not much can be done to build the communal trust that allows compassion to flower, no matter how benign the leader is.

Hidden in my desire to become a naval aviator was something more complex: a personal engagement with the problem of violence that expressed itself at first in military fantasies and then, over a period of many years, resolved itself in the pacifism I aspire to today.

But our democratic institutions are not automated. They must be inhabited by citizens and citizen leaders who know how to hold conflict inwardly in a manner that converts it into creativity, allowing it to pull them open to new ideas, new courses of action, and each other. That kind of tension-holding is the work of the well-tempered heart: if democracy is to thrive as that restored prairie is thriving, our hearts and our institutions must work in concert.

Vocation at its deepest level is not, "Oh, boy, do I want to go to this strange place where I have to learn a new way to live and where no one, including me, understands what I'm doing." Vocation at its deepest level is, "This is something I can't not do, for reasons I'm unable to explain to anyone else and don't fully understand myself but that are nonetheless compelling.

We must judge ourselves by a higher standard than effectiveness, the standard called faithfulness.

Perhaps there is a lesson here about the complexity, even duplicity, we must embrace on the road to vocation, where we sometimes find ourselves needing to do the right thing for the wrong reason.

Here, I think, is another clue to finding true self and vocation: we must withdraw the negative projections we make on people and situation—projections that serve mainly to mask our fears about ourselves—and acknowledge and embrace our own liabilities and limits.

the movements that transform us, our relations, and our world emerge from the lives of people who decide to care for their authentic selfhood.

A good education teaches us to hold contradictions reflectively rather than reactively, a habit of the heart that lies behind all social, cultural, and scientific breakthroughs.