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Let Your Life Speak
by Parker J. Palmer
Chapter II
Now I Become Myself
Copyright ©2000 by Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers
San Francisco, CA
You
and I may not have Rosa Parks's particular battle to
fight, the battle with institutional racism. The universal ele-
ment in her story is not the substance of her fight but the self-
hood in which she stood while she fought it -- for each of us
holds the challenge and the promise of naming and claiming
true self.
But if the
Rosa Parks story is to help us discern our own
vocations, we must see her as the ordinary person she is. That
will be difficult to do because we have made her into super-
woman -- and we have done it to protect ourselves. If we can
keep Rosa Parks in a museum as an untouchable icon of truth,
we will remain untouchable as well: we can put her up on a
pedestal and praise her, world without end, never finding our-
selves challenged by her life.
Since my
own life runs no risk of being displayed in a
museum case, I want to return briefly to the story I know
best -- my own. Unlike Rosa Parks, I never took a singular, dra-
matic action that might create the energy of transformation
around the institutions I care about. Instead, I tried to aban-
don those institutions through an evasive, crablike movement
that I did not want to acknowledge, even to myself.
But a funny
thing happened on the way to my vocation.
Today, twenty-five years after I left education in anger and
fear, my work is deeply related to the renewal of educational
institutions. I believe that this is possible only because my true
self dragged me, kicking and screaming, toward honoring its
nature and needs, forcing me to find my rightful place in the
Now
I Become Myself
35
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