Listen to Your Life

Parker Palmer taught me several years back. Palmer came to speak in Nashville when I was a graduate student at Lipscomb University.

I remember sitting next to my friend and mentor, John. He leaned over and said, “This guy is incredible. You will really enjoy this.”

Palmer is well known in academia for his work on education, learning, and teaching. I expected a technical lesson on the finer points of communication. Instead, Palmer brought a prophetic word. This is how I remember the hour we spent with him.

“All of us live our lives as if we were on stage,” Palmer quipped at one point. I leaned in, conjuring up my own images of Shakespeare’s conviction that “all the world’s a stage and we are merely players.”

Palmer continued.

“Many of us live on this stage unaware that we’ve constructed a curtain which divides the front stage from the back stage. The front stage is our public persona—who we want people to think we are. Smart, funny, successful, beautiful, talented, organized, brilliant, caring . . . these are merely some of the characteristics we display while acting and living on the front stage.”

He had me.

“The problem is that we tend to be very different people once we are on the other side of the curtain. Behind the curtain, we take off our hypocrite mask. We lay it down and we allow our true selves to come out. We usually do this when we are alone or in the company of a select few. We speak what we really think. We respond to what really matters to us. We are cynical, jaded. We are full of joy and confidence. We let our hair down, as it were, and allow our true selves to emerge from the cave in which we’ve been hiding.”

This was one of those moments in which I was listening intently while also drowning in my own background and history—remembering times I’d done exactly what Palmer was describing.

“The greatest danger in this identity construct,” Palmer’s voice now rose with passion. “ . . . The greatest danger in this is that we live our lives on the front stage that we completely begin to believe that the front stage is all there is. We act, we pretend, and we perform. And when we do, we eliminate the things that make us human: raw emotion, hurt, pain, joy, passion are thrown away.”

This is one of my fears for our churches . . . that we convince ourselves it is all about having the perfect sermon, the right program, or the slick pr approach. We work, work, and work some more (and ask you to join us in that busyness) and we rarely, if ever, stop to ask for God to quiet our performance and instill us with his power and his presence.

His power raises us from the dead. Our power put him on the cross in the first place. His presence allows us to live with hope amidst a broken world. Our presence leads to division and strife.