Cite
SDI Parker Palmer 2015, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4orinVOFmE.
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FirstDirector:: SDI - The Home of Spiritual Companionship
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Title:: SDI Parker Palmer 2015
Year:: 2015
Citekey:: sdi-thehomeofspiritualcompanionshipSDIParkerPalmer2015
itemType:: videoRecording
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Abstract
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Notes
Speaker: Parker Palmer Length: 17:45
Transcript
I’m delighted for this opportunity to speak via video to the Spiritual Directors International, and especially delighted to be on the program even this way with my good friends Krista Tippett, and Karen Ehrlichman, and Valerie Brown. Also delighted to have a chance to say a little bit about my relation to Thomas Merton, my relation to Spiritual Direction, and the journey that’s brought me to the place where I have this chance to speak with all of you. I was raised in the mainline Protestant tradition, specifically in the Methodist Church. I studied religion in college. I went to Union Theological Seminary in New York for a year, and did a PhD at Berkeley in the Sociology of Religion. The only reason I'm rehearsing that academic background, I'm actually a recovering sociologist, so none of that counts anymore, is to say that despite all of those stops in the religious world that I made early in my journey, I learned nothing along that way about the mystical contemplative stream that I later learned runs through all the great religions of the world. Nothing at all. Looking back, it's kind of astonishing to me that that was the case.
So in the late 60s, having finished my PhD, having thought I was going to become a college professor, the cities were burning, my heroes had been assassinated, and instead of entering the academic life, I went to Washington, D. C. to become a community organizer working on race relations. It was very hard work. I was pretty thin-skinned, and by the end of that first year, 1969 to 70, I was burned out. I was nearly defeated.
And one day, having a bag lunch on DuPont Circle in downtown D. C. , I had a little extra time, and I wandered into a used bookstore to see if I could find a book that a friend had recommended to me. The book I was looking for was The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. It wasn’t on the shelf, but in the space where it might have been or should have been, was a book called The Seven-Story Mountain by Thomas Merton. And I thought, well, both last names begin with M, and both books are about mountains, so I’ll buy this one instead. I had no idea who Thomas Merton was.
But I took The Seven-Story Mountain home, having glanced at it and found it mildly interesting, and by the next day, I was deeply immersed in that story, heart and soul, as millions of readers had been over the years and still are today. The Seven-Story Mountain, this remarkable account of this young man’s journey into the monastery and his deep dive into the contemplative life. So I discovered Merton in 1969, a year after he died, and yet through that book and the many other books he wrote, 60 of them in his lifetime, Merton became, in very significant ways, my first spiritual director. He did with his writing what I think good spiritual directors do, which was to create a safe space through his story for me to explore some of the deepest issues of meaning and purpose in my life, to ask questions about where this pain was coming from, to ask questions about why I was doing what I was doing, is this my true vocation, and how might I transform the suffering I was undergoing into something that would serve well the suffering people that I wanted to serve. So Merton became this extraordinarily important person in my life, and for a while, probably for a couple of years, my sense of why he was important had mainly to do with his ability to help me find inner peace, some kind of ground on which to stand. And of course for some people, that's where the spiritual life ends. It ends in an inward place.
But for me, that wasn’t enough. I needed to be on some sort of journey that would take me into the external world, some sort of journey that didn’t end up locked into or lost in an inward place, which eventually, I think, becomes narcissism, a form of spiritual self-centeredness. So I began to learn more about Merton’s life, because as many of you will know, in his career as a writer, he began to shift from writing exclusively about inner life issues, to writing about life in the world, to writing about the great issues of his time, to writing about race, and about war and peace. And I began to understand that his grasp of what was happening in our world from inside that monastery in the wooded hills of Kentucky was more profound than mine, or than the grasp shown by a lot of people who were working as activists on the front line. In fact, there’s a famous story about Merton that symbolizes this, I think, in a way that had a great impact on me. So at some point in the late 50s or early 60s, Merton wrote a book called Seeds of Contemplation.
And people loved it. It was one of those pious books, as Merton later said, that drew folks deeply inward. A few years later, as American society began to come apart around race and war, Merton wrote another book called Seeds of Destruction. And it was all about the coming racial crisis, the fire next time, as James Baldwin famously said in one of his books. There was a review of Seeds of Destruction, which, a book that lost Merton many friends because they wanted a pious monk, they didn’t want a rough-edged, sharp-voiced prophet in their midst. There was a review of this book in the Christian century by a man named Martin Marty, a very fine scholar, himself an urban activist located in the heart of Chicago. And the review was sharply critical of Merton’s book Seeds of Destruction.
Basically, Martin Marty said in this review, how dare this monk, tucked away safely in the wooded hills of Kentucky, suggest to those of us who are working on the front lines that things aren’t going to work out well, that there will be a fire next time, that this racial crisis is driven into the heart of America’s DNA, and that solutions of the sort we’re offering aren’t going to work. How dare he? What arrogance? Well, Martin Marty is a good man. And a year or two later, when Merton’s prophecy had proven to be true, when the cities began burning, Martin Marty wrote a public apology to Thomas Merton for this review, and I just want to read it to you. He said, At the time that I, Martin Marty, published my criticism, you seemed to me to be trying to be a white James Baldwin. Now it seems to me that you are telling it as it is, and maybe as it will be.
As I began to understand that part of Merton’s work, that part of his spiritual virtuosity, I began to understand that by going deeply inward, we don't escape from the world, but we reach more profoundly into the world at deeper and deeper levels of truth. Merton did that partly through reading scripture. He did that partly through prayer and contemplation. But he also did it through listening to African American music, to jazz, to gospel music. He did it through reading African American novels and essays. But he read all of that and heard all of that with an eye and an ear that was attuned and made more acute by contemplation. I want to say a few words about the importance of people under roughly 40 years of age, which from where I sit are young people, joining in with this global movement to provide spiritual direction for people in need My own sense is that the under 40 generation has an enormous amount of wisdom to offer us, and by us I mean everyone, but people of my generation in particular.
I was working a couple of years ago with some under 40 people whom I invited to my home to talk about the work of the Center for Courage and Renewal and to learn from them how they saw that work and how they responded to it. And I remember in the middle of that three-day meeting that we had, it was so illuminating and edifying for me. I remember saying to these young people, as I have been talking with you here for the last day and a half, an image has come to me, which is that at my age, and I think I was probably 71 or two then, I feel as if I'm standing somewhere down the curvature of the earth at a place where I can't see the same horizon you're able to see from where you're standing higher up on that curve. So I need your eyes and ears. I need you to tell me what you’re hearing and what you’re seeing because the horizon you’re looking at is coming at me whether I know it or not. There is a new world arriving. There always is a new world arriving.
And it’s not just about high technology. It’s about all kinds of things. It’s about how people understand their individual lives. It’s about new forms of community. It’s about new kinds of social action and social change. I need you to tell me what you’re seeing and hearing because it’s coming at me. And I said, incidentally, I need you to speak very clearly and distinctly because at my age, I want to hear what you have to say.
They were very kind by saying that they had things they wanted from me as well. And so part of what's important here in increasing the age range of folks who do spiritual direction is that an intergenerational dialogue at this time in history is invaluable. In fact, I think it's critical to our future. And the older I get, the more I understand that. And the more new life I get from connecting with people one and two generations younger than myself. I think this new world that's coming at us, this new horizon, is way too complex to be understood without that intergenerational dialogue. And so I want to urge spiritual directors international to continue their outreach to younger people to bring them into their ranks.
I also want to say something to the folks who started telling me 20 years ago that these questions of soul and role that the Center for Courage and Renewal is focused on are questions that are mainly of interest to older people, not of interest to the younger generation. I think they are, in fact, of great people all the way down to junior high, high school, younger than that even, and certainly to young adults. The problem, I think, is that a lot of young people have been told by their schools, if you've got inner life questions, don't bring them here. Tuck them away. They're of private interest only. They have nothing to do with the educational process and really nothing to do with the living of your life. So younger people have heard a message of discouragement from some of our major institutions about not bringing those inner life questions to the table. But my constant experience is that when there’s an open invitation and a hospitable and safe space to bring them, younger people want to bring these questions of meaning and purpose just as profoundly and powerfully as some of us elders do.
Spiritual direction has been a huge gift in my life because as someone who's received spiritual direction at various points on the journey, not only from Thomas Merton, but from people like Douglas Steer and my friend Henry Nowen, Father Timothy Kelly, who was novice master at St. John’s Monastery in Minnesota when I spent a year there at the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research. On my journey, people like that have helped me come back to true north, have helped me reclaim the best gift I have to give, which is true self, and have helped me walk back into the world through whatever wounds and hurts and fears and ego issues I may have brought to them to walk back to the world in service. That, it seems to me, is what all of you good folks are doing for people around the world, and for that you have my and our gratitude.