“Soul-Making” in Circles of Trust

by Parker J. Palmer

In times of trouble like our own, earlier generations referred to the world as “a vale of tears.” But John Keats, the nineteenth century British poet, rejected this misleading image of the world and the opportunities it offers us, even in hard times. In a letter to a friend Keats wrote, “Call the world if you please ‘the vale of Soul-making.’ Then you will find out the use of the world… Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a Soul?”

In the “stump speech” I’ve been giving as I travel the country celebrating the tenth anniversary of The Courage to Teach and the Center for Courage & Renewal, I’ve been lifting up three “pains and troubles” of our time that invite us to become more soulful, for our own sake and the sake of the world. Exploring them has given me a deeper understanding of what we are doing when we support “soul-making” in circles of trust—and of the importance of doing it.

First, our culture has become addicted to violence as a solution to our problems. Violence comes in many forms, of course: war as a fix for international problems; incarceration as a fix for domestic problems; environmental pillage as a fix for consumer hungers; economic injustice as a fix for the insecurities of the wealthy; discrimination as a fix for fear of diversity; forcing children through the templates of high-stakes standardized testing as a fix for our need to pretend that we are improving education.

But it’s not simply that our society is riddled with violence: we have become addicted to it. Like the addict, it does not matter to us that the “fix” ultimately fails to work, leaving us worse off than before. We get the high we seek simply from using—and we need the fix no matter how temporary it may be. We needed a fix after the horrors of September 11, 2001, and today we are living in the wake of its widespread devastation. Anyone with wits knows that violence breeds more violence, but we seem unwilling to endure the pain of withdrawal from our cultural drug of choice and do the hard work required to get clean and sober.

Second, our institutions have become major enemies of their own missions, in part because they operate on signals from another planet. For example, too much of what goes on in health care is shaped by the insurance industry, not the values of doctors and nurses. That’s the reality behind one physician’s comment in the midst of a Courage retreat: “The health care system I work in has me right on the edge of violating my Hippocratic Oath several times a week.”

By the same token, too much of what goes in our schools is shaped by politicians who are more interested in winning elections than in winning good futures for our kids. They know that being tough about “getting results” wins votes, whether or not it fosters learning. As a result, many teachers feel that their version of the Hippocratic Oath is constantly compromised by the system they work in.

Third, we are experiencing a resurgence of what I call “the empty self,” a self that turns to external authority for a sense of meaning and purpose because it can’t find authority within. As in the build-up to Nazi Germany, this condition leads people to embrace any authority that promises “strength” and “security”—even when that authority works against their economic and personal self-interests. And inner emptiness easily fills up with fear, leaving people especially vulnerable to leaders who play the fear card.

No one is born with an empty self, and no one’s self is truly empty, but our sense of self can be drained away by social conditioning. When our schools and religious institutions, for example, approach people as empty vessels to be filled with wisdom “from on high,” why should we expect anything other than people who have never known the authority that comes from within?

What does Courage work have to do with all this? Everything! When I let my imagination roam and picture a society dotted with circles of trust large and small—not only at retreat centers but in neighborhoods, congregations, and workplaces—I envision a world of “soul-making” where we could slowly but surely address these “pains and troubles.” I’ll take my three points in reverse order to make my case.

First, the empty self arises when people cannot find inner authority: establishing inner authority is the work of the soul. Time and again in the work we do, we have seen people who felt empty reclaim their identity and integrity, find and speak their own voices. The self may feel empty but the soul is always full. We need to create more spaces where the soul can show up and fill that emptiness with authentic selfhood.

Second, we would confront and try to change institutions that defeat vital missions if we were not beholden to them for everything from income to life-meaning: declaring personal freedom is the work of the soul. The Rosa Parks’s and the Vaclav Havel’s of our world are people who do not depend on institutions for their well-being, and from that place of personal freedom are able to call institutions back to their highest purposes. When we see this impulse arise in a circle of trust—as when a teacher says, “My vocation is to teach kids, not test them, and I’m going to fight the deformations of No Child Left Behind!”—we are reminded of why we call this “courage” work.

Third, violence arises when we do not know what else to do with our suffering: transforming suffering into something life-giving is the work of the soul. We are, as they say, “hard-wired” for the fight-or-flight response when we experience sudden suffering. But soul-work allows us to transcend our wiring and invoke the better angels of our nature. Then we can respond to violence in ways that say “the death-dealing stops here.”

Behind every social movement that has wrested freedom from oppression, equity from injustice, life from death, soul work is the secret hidden in plain sight. We see this, in microcosm, in our circles of trust every time a teacher says, “Now that I’ve reconnected with my soul, I can take twenty years of being dissed and dismissed and turn it into energy to serve children well, witnessing to the need for my school and my community to do the same.”

This is just a sketch of what I’ve been talking and learning about on the “Hell Freezes Over Tour,” so-called because I’ve always said that I’d do a book tour only when it became possible to ice skate on the Lake of Fire! If you want to participate in the conversation, check here for upcoming tour stops. The “pains and troubles” of our era run deep, but so do the healing and uplifting powers of the soul.