To William Stafford’s, “Ask me if what I have done is my life,” Parker Palmer reflects on the old Quaker mantra, “Let your life speak,” saying, I found those words encouraging and I thought I understood what they meant: “Let the highest truths and values guide you. Live up to those demanding standards in everything you do.” He goes on to describe his noble
intentions that led him to pursue lofty goals and dead end best hopes and dreams to the likes of our world’s most accomplished saints, MLK Jr., Mother Teresa, Gandhi, stating that he had “simply found a noble way to live a life that was not [his own], a life spent imitating heroes instead of listening to his heart. He goes on to say that “today, some thirty years later, “Let your life speak” means something else to me, a meaning faithful both to the ambiguity of those words and to the complexity of my own experience: “Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you”. My prayer for you this Easter Season, Beloved, is that you will slow down to Joy, that you will slow down to love, that you will slow down to the gift of yourself, and let your life speak. We all have a picture in our heads, a storybook tale that has woven it’s golden bound pages into the stories of our lives leading us both to dream of all that could be, and to forget where the magic is actually found: not inside the book where the pages lie flat, but after the last page is read and the real work of the Spirit begins.
May the power of resurrection life find it’s way into the pages of your days, and rather than simply letting “what you do” be your life, let “who you are” bring life and meaning to others.
May the Spirit lead the way,
Rev. Jenny Shultz-Thomas