“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 indignation about the academy’s corruption, holding aloft the flaming sword of truth. I moved to Washington, D.C., where I became not a professor but a community organizer.
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 went against a growing sense that teaching might be my vocation. My heart wanted to keep teaching, but my ethics—laced liberally with ego—told me I was supposed to save the city. How could I reconcile the contradiction between the two?
Georgetown University offered me a faculty post—one that did not require me to get off my white horse altogether: “We don’t want you to be on campus all week long,” said the dean. “We want you to get our students involved in the community. Here’s a tenure-track position involving a minimum of classes and no requirement to serve on committees. Keep working in the community and take our students out there with you.”
“ I had been driven more by the “oughts” of the urban crisis than by a sense of true self. Lacking insight into my own limits and potentials, I had allowed ego and ethics to lead me into a situation that my soul could not abide.
I was disappointed in myself for not being tough enough to take the flak, disappointed and ashamed. But as pilgrims must discover if they are to complete their quest, we are led to truth by our weaknesses as well as our strengths. I needed to leave community organizing for a reason I might never have acknowledged had I not been thin-skinned and burned-out: as an organizer, I was trying to take people to a place where I had never been myself—a place called community. If I wanted to do community-related work with integrity, I needed a deeper immersion in community than I had experienced to that point.
I am white, middle-class, and male—not exactly a leading candidate for a communal life. People like me are raised to live autonomously, not interdependently. I had been trained to compete and win...But something in me yearned to experience communion, not competition ...
So I took a yearlong sabbatical from my work in Washington and went to a place called Pendle Hill outside of Philadelphia. Founded in 1930, Pendle Hill is a Quaker living-and-learning community of some seventy people whose mission is to offer education about the inner journey,...
Though I felt called to stay at Pendle Hill, I also feared that I had stepped off the edge of the known world and was at risk of disappearing professionally.
I’ll tell you what I was doing: I was in the craft shop making mugs that weighed more and looked worse than the clay ashtrays I made in grade school, and I was sending these monstrosities home as gifts to my family. My father, rest his soul, was in the fine chinaware business, and I was sending him mugs so heavy you could fill them with coffee and not feel any difference in weight!
Family and friends were asking me—and I was asking myself—“Why did you get a Ph.D. if this is what you are going to do? Aren’t you squandering your opportunities and gifts?” Under that sort of scrutiny, my vocational decision felt wasteful and ridiculous; what’s more, it was terrifying to an ego like mine that had no desire to disappear and every desire to succeed and become well known.
Did I want to go to Pendle Hill, to be at Pendle Hill, to stay at Pendle Hill? I cannot say that I did. But I can say with certainty that Pendle Hill was something that I couldn’t not do.
Excerpt From: Parker J. Palmer. “Let Your Life Speak”. Apple Books.
