Way opens?

"Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent." "Let your Life Speak," by Parker J. Palmer

I've spent the week doing lots of reading - most of the texts Quaker related. I have two conflicting feelings: I have a deep and unexplained feeling of peace when I am at a Quaker meeting, and yet I am surprised at this since the whole concept of Quakerism is contrary to my usual mode of conversation, action, and measures of success.


I have been blessed to spend time in the presence of some amazing people in these past few months. It has been terrific to see how effective people can be when they find their "mission" or calling in life, or manage to combine "soul to role" as Parker Palmer puts it. It has, however, brought up in me a surprising and lingering discomfort on some level.


The details aren't yet all clear - but I know when I am feeling most effective, most able to make an impact on the world, it is usually in a classroom. And the music, while enjoyable in itself, is just a vehicle - a pretty convenient one that allows me to break down barriers and reach the "unreachables" in my school community. And that might all be going away in the next round of layoffs. Thus I lose my voice, my medium? I am not sure yet how this part of the journey plays out in my favor. But still, I'm not convinced that losing this particular job is such a disaster.


Quakers have this way of sitting, waiting, for a "way to open". I see myself at a juncture right now - but I need to let go of where I am in order for the new paths to emerge. For the first time, I am just sitting. I am not trying on paths of others, venturing into new territories, just sitting. It's not an avoidance of movement out of fear, rather, it's just trying to be still and seek a new awareness of how perhaps I cannot have all the answers right now. I've spent quite a few years trying to do what others have told me is "right" - often, it was right for them but not for me. Too exhausting.

Martin Buber's words came back to me this evening, as I listened to an amazing woman talk about her mission of peace, and how she embarked on what I see as an impossible task. Buber quotes a rabbi who considers the paths to serving God.

Buber says, "this story tells us something about
our relationship to such genuine service as was performed
by others before us. We are to revere it and learn from it,
but we are not to imitate it. The great and holy deeds done
by others are examples for us, since they show, in a
concrete manner, what greatness and holiness is, but they
are not models which we should copy. However small our
achievements may be in comparison with those of our
forefathers, they have their real value in that we bring
them about in our own way and by our own efforts.....

The Baal-Shem teaches that no encounter with a being
or a thing in the course of our life lacks a hidden
significance. The people we live with or meet with, the
animals that help us with our farmwork, the soil we till,
the materials we shape, the tools we use, they all contain
a mysterious spiritual substance which depends on us for
helping it towards its pure form, its perfection. If we neglect
this spiritual substance sent across our path, if we think
only in terms of momentary purposes, without developing a
genuine relationship to the beings and things in whose
life we ought to take part, as they in ours, then we shall
ourselves be debarred from true, fulfilled existence."
- Martin Buber, The Way of Man

I will say I am finding it shockingly easy to draw on all these readings from various and previous days of my life to illustrate the new thoughts that are emerging. I think the Quaker silence is helping with that - I see myself as developing a new "vocabulary" with which to define how I see the world around me. But I do feel that I have a habit of quoting others a little too often....

Oh yes, here's a Quaker commentary for all this quoting of others:
"You will say Christ saith this, and the apostles say this, but what canst thou say? Art thou a child of Light and hast thou walked in the Light, and what thou speakest is it inwardly from God?" (Margaret Fell, quoting from her first encounter with George Fox)

I'm still working on that inner light angle. But the small voice is slowly getting a little easier to hear.....