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Struck by the force of truth
As that awareness grows within us, we join in the potential for personal and social change that, in the words of Václav Havel—architect of the Velvet Revolution, former president of Czechoslovakia, and seeker of political integrity—is “hidden throughout the whole of society.†This potential, Havel writes, is found in “everyone who is living within the lie and who may be struck at any moment by the force of truth.â€
The divided life is a wounded life, and the soul keeps calling us to heal the wound. Ignore that call, and we find ourselves trying to numb our pain with an anesthetic of choice, be it substance abuse, overwork, consumerism, or mindless media noise. Such anesthetics are easy to come by in a society that wants to keep us divided and unaware of our pain—for the divided life that is pathological for individuals can serve social systems well, especially when it comes to those functions that are morally dubious.
When the man from Agriculture distances himself from his soul, it is easier for his department to report to the agribusiness lobby instead of the land. But when he, or any of us, rejoins soul and role, the institutions in which we work find it just a little bit harder to ransack another ecosystem to satisfy corporate greed or to lay off another 10,000 working poor to maximize the profits of the rich or to pass another welfare “reform†that leaves single mothers and their children worse off than they were.
No one wants to suffer the penalties that come from choosing to live divided no more. But there can be no greater suffering than living a lifelong lie. As we move closer to the truth that lives within us—aware that in the end what will matter most is knowing that we stayed true to ourselves—institutions start losing their sway over our lives.
This does not mean we must abandon institutions. In fact, when we live by the soul’s imperatives, we gain the courage to serve institutions more faithfully, to help them resist their tendency to default on their own missions. If the man from Agriculture acted on his “farmer’s heart,†he did not renege on his institutional obligations but embraced them more fully, helping to call his department back to its higher purpose.
It is not easy work, rejoining soul and role. The poet Rilke—who wrote about childhood’s “wingèd energy of delightâ€â€”writes about the demands of adulthood in the final stanza of the same poem:
Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the chasm between two
contradictions. . . For the god wants to know
himself in you.
Living integral lives is daunting. We must achieve a complex integration that spans the contradictions between inner and outer reality, that supports both personal integrity and the common good. No, it is not easy work. But as Rilke suggests, by doing it, we offer what is sacred within us to the life of the world.
Parker J. Palmer is an independent writer, teacher, and activist who lives in Madison, Wisconsin. He serves as senior associate of the American Association of Higher Education, senior advisor to the Fetzer Institute, and founder of Fetzer’s Teacher Formation Program. His prolific writing includes Let Your Life Speak, The Courage to Teach, and A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life (Jossey-Bass, 2004) from which this article is adapted. The book contains detailed information about the “circles of trust†Palmer and his colleagues have established around the country to help people in many walks of life rejoin soul and role. See www.teacherformation.org and click on the section for readers of A Hidden Wholeness.
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