(Today, I'm beginning an eight-week book study on Parker Palmer's, The Active Life: A Spirituality of Work, Creativity, and Caring at Pine Ridge Presbyterian Church from 11:30 to 12:30. If you are in the area and want to attend, please join us. Bring lunch if you like. In addition to the face-to-face study, I will post a blog on each chapter here at the Kruse Kronicle every Tuesday, hopefully broadening the conversation.)
Parker Palmer begins The Active Life with this statement: "This book – this exploration of work, creativity, and caring in the world of action – is the result of my long journey toward the knowledge that I am not a monk." (1) Writing a decade ago, Palmer points to a spiritual renaissance in monastic spirituality over the preceding thirty years, a development he attributes to the influence of notable people like Thomas Merton. He welcomes the positive contributions of this renaissance but finds some aspects troubling:
"In the spiritual literature of our time, it is not difficult to find the world of action portrayed as an arena of ego and power, while the world of contemplation is pictured as a realm of light and grace. I have often read, for example that the treasure of the "true self" can be found as we draw back from active life and enter into contemplative prayer. Less often have I read that this treasure can be found in our struggles to work, create, and care in the world of action.
Contemporary images of what it means to be spiritual tend to value the inward search over the outward act, silence over sound, solitude over interaction, centeredness and quietude and balance over engagement and animation and struggle. …" (2)
Palmer says that, like many others, he retreated into a contemplative life when the coherence of his active life became ambiguous. The contemplative life can become a counterweight to, or even an escape from, the activist orientation of our age instead of being an avenue for discovering significance in the active life.
This divide between the contemplative life and the active life has been with the Church almost from the beginning. The ancient Greeks considered work as a means to survival, while contemplation offered the opportunity for transcendence. That mindset influenced Christianity from an early date. Palmer writes:
"Rooted in this bias, the church and the university became the preeminent institutions of Western culture, in part because they harbored the life of contemplation in a world where the active life was merely what the masses did to survive." (6)
But with Enlightenment came the rise of science and technology:
"Now we can use the tools of action to change the world, to invent our own reality, to make an historical mark. Knowledge, once seen as an end in itself, becomes the pathway to personal virtue, social status, and even to "salvation" for many modern men and women."
There is a tendency in our time for people to either embrace one mode (active or contemplative) over and against the other or to compartmentalize the two. Palmer sees the two as a polarity where both poles must be embraced and celebrated, even though we may have a call that gravitates to one another. I don't think Palmer doubts for a minute that our culture has typically overemphasized the active life to the detriment of the contemplative life. But his concern here is that so many in the Church elevate the contemplative life in unhealthy ways as a response. He writes:
"I struggle with those parts of our spiritual tradition in which the energies of the active life are more feared than revered, pictured as wild horses to be brought under control rather than life-giving streams that flow from the source. The feelings of diminishment and guilt that such spiritualties can engender may have some short-term role as prods to self-discovery. But they have no-long-term place in the life of the spirit. People called to the active life need to nurture a spirituality that does not fear the vitalities of action." (7-8)
He then follows with this paragraph, which I think is key:
"The core message of all the great spiritual traditions is "be not afraid." Rather, be confident that life is good and trustworthy. In this light, the great failure is not that of leading a full and vital active life, with all the mistakes and suffering such a life will bring (along with its joys). Instead, the failure is to withdraw fearfully from the place to which one is called to squander the most precious of our birthrights – the experience of aliveness itself." (8)
Palmer says that most of us are not so much seeking meaning, though there is likely an element of this, but seeking the "rapture of being alive." He affirms this quest not in some "narcissistic celebration of self" but in the sense of being connected to life that transcends us.
Finally, Palmer identifies three forms the active life takes:
- Work – "Work is action driven by external necessity or demand. We work because we need to make a living, because we need to solve a problem, because we need to surmount to survive." (9)
- Creativity – "Creativity … is driven more by inner choice than by outer demand. … In creative action, our desire is not to "solve" or "succeed" or "survive" but to give birth to something new …" (9)
- Caring – Caring is freely chosen action where "… we aim not at giving birth to something new; we aim at nurturing, protecting, guiding, healing, or empowering something that already has life." (9-10)
These are not mutually exclusive categories and are often intertwined. Palmer acknowledges that these definitions may seem a little abstract, but that may be partly because they are so deeply embedded in everyday life … we barely notice them. He is also keen for us to know that while a deep richness to life is connected to each of these modes of action, so is there an opportunity for violence and destruction. Palmer writes:
"My aim in this book is to celebrate and criticize the active life, to explore its joys and pains, its problems and potentials, to understand the forces that both drive and deform our activity – but to do all this with reverence for the mystery of self-discovery and creation which is at the heart of human action." (11)
Some questions for discussion:
What are some moments when you have felt truly alive? Do you see any connection between those moments and the active or contemplative life? Do you agree with Palmer's statement that what we are seeking most is a sense of aliveness?
Does Palmer's framing of work, creativity, and caring ring true for you? My experience has been that the Church does a much better at identifying value in creativity and caring but much less so in work. Do you agree? Why do you think this is so?
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