Let Your Life Speak
by Parker J. Palmer
Chapter II
"Now I Become Myself"
Copyright ©2000 by Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers
San Francisco, CA

become someone else! I have sometimes responded to that
demand by ignoring the gift, or hiding it, or fleeing from it, or
squandering it--and I think I am not alone. There is a Hasidic
tale that reveals, with amazing brevity, both the universal ten-
dency to want to be someone else and the ultimate impor-
tance 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?"'2

If you doubt that we all arrive in this world with gifts and
as a gift, pay attention to an infant or a very young child. A few
years ago, my daughter and her newborn baby came to live
with me for a while. Watching my granddaughter from her
earliest days on earth, I was able, in my early fifties, to see
something that had eluded me as a twenty-something parent:
my granddaughter arrived in the world as this kind of person
rather than that, or that, or that.

She did not show up as raw material to be shaped into
whatever image the world might want her to take. She arrived
with her own gifted form, with the shape of her own sacred
soul. Biblical faith calls it the image of God in which we are
all created. Thomas Merton calls it true self. Quakers call it
the inner light, or "that of God" in every person. The human-
ist tradition calls it identity and integrity. No matter what you
call it, it is a pearl of great price.

In those early days of my granddaughter's life, I began
observing the inclinations and proclivities that were planted in

Now I Become Myself

11

Next>

<Previous