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

was I to become an ordained leader in His or Her church.
Always responsive to authority, as one was if raised in the fifties,
I left Union and went west, to the University of California at
Berkeley. There I spent much of the sixties working on a Ph.D.
in sociology and learning to be not quite so responsive to
authority.

Berkeley in the sixties was, of course, an astounding mix
of shadow and light. But contrary to the current myth, many
of us were less seduced by the shadow than drawn by the
light, coming away from that time and place with a lifelong
sense of hope, a feeling for community, a passion for social
change.

Though I taught for two years in the middle of graduate
school, discovering that I loved teaching and was good at it,
my Berkeley experience left me convinced that a university
career would be a cop-out. I felt called instead to work on "the
urban crisis." So when I left Berkeley in the late sixties --
a friend kept asking me, "Why do you want to go back to
America?" -- I also left academic life. Indeed, I left on a white
horse (some might say a high horse), full of righteous indig-
nation about the academy's corruption, holding aloft the flam-
ing sword of truth. I moved to Washington, D.C., where I
became not a professor but a community organizer.

What I learned about the world from that work was the
subject of an earlier book.5 What I learned about vocation
is how one's values can do battle with one's heart. I felt
morally compelled to work on the urban crisis, but doing so

LET YOUR LIFE SPEAK

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