Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The text below has not been proofread. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.
Reading
The reading was from “Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation,” by the Quaker author Parker Palmer.
“Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about — quite apart from what I would like it to be about — or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions.
“That insight is hidden in the word vocation itself, which is rooted in the Latin word for ‘voice.’ Vocation does not mean a goal I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. I must listen for the truths and values at the heart of my own identity, not the standards by which I must live — but the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life.”
Sermon
Let me tell you a brief story about how someone I know lost their vocation, their purpose in life, and finally found a new purpose.
My father had a job he absolutely loved, working as an electrical engineer. It was more than a job for him, it was a kind of vocation or calling, and he worked long hours at it, sometimes six days a week. But in his mid-sixties, his energy began to flag a bit, so he asked his employer if he could work part-time. Since that was against company policy, at age sixty-seven, he retired. I still remember the sign he put up over his desk in the basement, which read “Retire — and Die.”
He moped around for several months, and I think that was the most downbeat I ever saw him. Then two disasters struck which gave him no time for feeling downbeat. The first disaster was a house fire, which meant he had to oversee rebuilding the house. The second disaster was my mother’s terminal diagnosis, giving her a life expectancy of about six years, which meant he had to spend more and more time being a caregiver. Both these disasters provided him with a vocation or calling; maybe not the vocations he would have chosen, but vocations nonetheless.
After my mother died, my father once again felt himself adrift. The house had been rebuilt long ago, and he was no longer a full-time caregiver. He had to figure out what he was going to do with his life all over again.
At about this time, he found a book in the local library called “Let Your Life Speak,” written by the Quaker author Parker Palmer (that’s the book this morning’s reading came from). I happened to discover this book at just about this time, and my father and I wound up talking about this book. I was in the middle of my own slow career change right then, a multi-year transition from the residential construction business to working in congregations. As I recall our conversations, there were two things about that book that both of us particularly liked.
First, Parker Palmer, good Quaker that he is, consistently assumes that a person’s individual vocation has to help wider society in some way. Here a problem arises for many of us: the jobs we have don’t necessarily help wider society. Much of my father’s work as an electrical engineer went towards military applications, and he was entirely not comfortable with that. This is a common problem where many jobs in our society have at least some ethically challenging aspects.
Yet as we talked it over, my father pointed out that a big part of letting your life speak was how you treat other people in your life. You let your life speak when you treat everyone the way you yourself would like to be treated, especially to people who were lower in social status than you were. As an example, my father talked about the social and class divide that existed in his workplace between the technicians who worked on the shop floor, and the managers and engineers. My father drew a contrast between a manager, known as “Nasty Frank,” on the one hand, and on the other hand an engineer he greatly respected. Nasty Frank was notorious for his obscenity-laden tirades, which he unleashed at anyone subordinate to himself. Nasty Frank was letting his life speak in a way that gave him no credit. By contrast, the engineer who treated the technicians on the shop floor with respect was letting his life speak in ways that reflected a higher moral ideal.
There was a second aspect of Parker Palmer’s book that we both liked. Parker Palmer did not try to pretend that letting your life speak was going to be easy or straightforward. At one point in the book, Parker Palmer describes a vocational crisis that he was going through, where he felt he needed to change jobs but he had no idea what job he should try to get. There’s a traditional Quaker saying that, in difficult times like that, you should have faith and “way will open.” But Parker Palmer had no sense at all that some kind of way was opening before him. So he turned to an older Quaker friend, and asked her about this notion of “way opening.” She replied, “In sixty-plus years of living, was has never opened in front of me”; then she added with a grin, “but a lot of way has closed behind me, and that’s had the same guiding effect.”
This was true for both my father and for me. Neither one of us had had the experience of “way opening” before us. Neither one of us had ever had some delightful opportunity dropping into our lives just when we needed it. But both of us had had the experience of “way closing” behind us. When my father was forced to retire, way closed behind him. He could no longer do the thing that had given his life meaning and purpose for several decades. Way closed behind him, as Parker Palmer would say, and my father was forced to find a new vocation, a new way to let his life speak. Then again, after my mother died and my father was no longer a caregiver, way closed behind him, and he felt adrift for a time — until he volunteered through the League of Women Voters to monitor the meeting of the town’s municipal plant, which in turn led him being appointed to that board, eventually serving as its chair, and allowing him the opportunity to help move the municipal light plant to buy as much renewal energy as possible. My father’s experiences also make clear that sometimes your life speaks, not through paid employment, but through your family responsibilities or through your volunteer work.
The Quakers talk about letting your life speak, but this notion that everyone has a vocation in life is widespread throughout Protestantism, and throughout Western societies that have been shaped by Protestant values. It is not just clergy and monks and nuns who have a religious vocation — so said the Western Protestants — everyone has a religious vocation, because every human being is a part of God’s vision for the universe. This Protestant Christian understanding has permeated even secular Western institutions, so that it is commonplace for all of us, theists and atheists, to talk about having a purpose in life; and that purpose is to make the world a better place — not just a better place for me and my family, but a better place for all human beings. And some Christians and some atheists have extended this vision of a better world beyond just human beings. There are Christians who hope to make the world a better place for all living beings, since every being is a creature made by God; and there are atheists who hope to make the world a better place for all living beings, since all living beings are connected through their existence in earth’s ecosystems. This strand of Western culture sets a very high ethical standard for each and every one of us.
Based on my own experience, I’d say that it’s incredibly difficult to live up to this very high standard. If you have any humility at all — that is, if you’re not a pathological narcissist — then knowing that you’re supposed to live your life in such a way that you make the world a better place is knowledge that can easily overwhelm you. Yet at the same time, a sense of humility requires us to acknowledge that each of us, as an individual, has very little impact on the world. Because of that, many people give up on trying to attain such a high ethical standard in their lives. But it becomes easier if we understand that that same sense of humility also teaches us that we’re not supposed to save the world all by ourselves. That sense of humility allows us to understand that each individual only has to do their small part of the greater whole. Together, all these little efforts will eventually make the world a better place, but it’s not up to just one person.
Thus as we think about how to let our lives speak, it’s probably a good idea to recall that we only have to let our lives speak; we don’t have to make our lives shout. You don’t have to amplify your life’s voice so that it’s louder than everyone else’s. In fact, you really only have to live your life so that it speaks to those immediately around you. You may have a job with no morally redeeming features — I’ve had jobs like that — but you can let your life speak in other ways. Any one of us can let our life speak by treating the people immediately around us with respect and dignity. Nor is that an easy task. Many of us men have been caught out by women who drily point out those moments when we men were talking down to women. And when I worked in service-class jobs, I was all too aware of the managerial-professional class people who thought they were treating me with respect, but weren’t. At the same time, we don’t have to like everyone we come into contact with. My father didn’t like Nasty Frank, that obscenity-prone supervisor, but my father did his best to treat him as a human being. Jesus of Nazareth, echoing generations of rabbis, summed it up neatly when he said: Love your neighbor as yourself. If my life speaks in no other way, it is enough that my life speaks through loving my neighbor as I love myself.
Loving one’s neighbor is something you can do no matter what job you have, where “job” can mean paid employment, or volunteer commitments, or caregiving, or maintaining a household, or simply engaging in essential day-to-day tasks. And it is also possible to have a job where you’re literally helping to save the world, but if you treat the people around you with contempt, you’ve still failed ethically. If you want to let your life speak in the best possible way, it’s probably a good idea to reflect on how you conduct yourself in your job. Personally, I ask myself questions like this: In my job, am I mindful of how what I do affects others? When it comes to my work life, am I mindful of seeking clarity in matters of conscience? Am I mindful of how others around me might be struggling with matters of conscience, and can I perhaps help them seek clarity? Am I mindful of how my actions affect not just the immediate circle of people around me, but wider circles beyond that? These are just some of the questions a person can ask when thinking about whether one actually loves one’s neighbor as oneself.
These are the kinds of questions anyone can ask of themselves, whatever their work situation. These are the kinds of questions my father confronted during his long work life. He confronted these questions while working as an engineer, knowing his actions had an effect on both his managers and the technicians on the shop floor. After his forced retirement, he confronted these questions as he struggled to figure out how best to care for my mother’s deteriorating health. Then, after her death, he struggled to figure out how to find some volunteer work where he could mindfully affect the people around him, and maybe even the wider circle of his local community.
You’ll notice I haven’t tried to answer the question of how a person can find work that’s meaningful. That’s because I don’t have an answer to that question. There have been so many years in my own work life when I had to hold onto a meaningless job; including, if I’m honest, some of the church jobs I’ve had. Yet you don’t have to have a job that will put you in the running for the Nobel Peace Prize, you don’t have to have a job where you save the world. If you have a job like that, that’s fabulous, and congratulations! But the thing to remember is that the most important vocation is to let your life speak in the way you live your life. Each of us can strive to do whatever little bit we can to make this a gentler, kinder world where we really do love our neighbors as we ourselves hope to be loved. This is how everyone can let their life speak. This is the true vocation that everyone has.