Spirit in Action
Circles of Trust & the Body Politic - Parker Palmer, Part 2
Parker J. Palmer is author of 9 books including his latest Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit. In his writing and in his work with the Center for Courage & Renewal, he transforms minds & lives.
- Broadcast on:
- 22 Apr 2012
- Audio Format:
- other
(upbeat music) ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ - Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ - Today for Spirit in Action, we'll share part two of my visit with Parker Palmer, writer and activist of the heart. His books have transformed people in their public and private lives, and his latest book is a change agent in the same way. The book is Healing the Heart of Democracy, the courage to create a politics worthy of the human spirit. About seven years ago, his book, Let Your Life Speak, Listening for the Voice of Location, moved me in the direction of Northern Spirit Radio and this program. So speaking with Parker is a fulfilling coming home for me. Parker Palmer is a founder of the Center for Courage and Renewal, and you'll find them at couragerenewal.org, and you'll find him on Facebook at Parker J. Palmer. And if you're close enough, you can see Parker speak in person on Friday, April 27th, 7 p.m., at Madison, Wisconsin's first United Methodist Church. This is a song and spoken word performance with the songs provided by an incredibly gifted singer-songwriter named Carrie Newcomer. The performance is called Healing the Heart of Democracy, a Gathering of Spirits for the Common Good. You can find it by following the links I have on northernspiritradio.org. In the meantime, let's continue our Spirit and Action interview with Parker Palmer, author of Healing the Heart of Democracy. You were just talking, Parker, about entering into that close dialogue, and I want to walk down that road a while, but I want to say that I've also been led personally to this. You know how you said when you get to know someone's story, you can listen to differing views from them, perhaps more easily. And I have a couple cases of that in my life. One of them was kind of surprised to me just recently, roommate from college who's a dear friend, and we stayed connected these years. In a recent conversation, he told me for the first time that he views himself essentially as a conservative and supportive of Governor Walker in our state, which I find myself in a very, very different direction. Of course, I want to be supportive of everybody, but the politics that are happening there are antithetical to my own beliefs. So in speaking with Clay, I wanted to go into this dialogue more so I can understand why he supports that, because I know Clay to be a good person. And if I can only understand why he believes what he does, we're going to find common ground. So exactly what you're talking about, of course, we're going to do that. I'm going to continue moving forward on that. I've also had a bit of a leading that I haven't put into effect because in part, I think I need to do some preparation for it. There are a number of people with signs that say, "I stand with Walker." What I want to do is knock on their door and say, I'm on a different side of the political fence, but what I'd really like to do is just listen to you and understand more, because I want to find where our common ground is. Could you just talk to me about what you see and what you understand? And of course, I won't know their personal stories, but as part of my Quaker experience, I think I'm pretty good at listening to people whether I agree with them or not, without preparing an argument. - What you just said is very important. So it's sort of like I'm not trying to back someone into a corner. I don't have a strategy in this conversation. I simply want to listen. I simply want to be present to whoever you are, whatever your story is. I want to learn as much as I can from that. And then maybe there'll be an opportunity for me to witness to my own truth with you. It's interesting, Mark, that you chose the example of a college roommate, I believe it was, but a person who's a friend. It instantly put me in mind of the sentiments and convictions with which Abraham Lincoln ended his first inaugural address just weeks before the Civil War began, in which he says, I am loathe to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. And he goes on to end with those famous words about being touched again as surely we will be by the better angels of our nature, underlying all the anger in our society right now. There is this desire to kind of reclaim the fact that we are not enemies, but friends, and to release the better angels of our nature. And it seems to me that the story of you and your friend is a good example of them. - I also wanted to share with you, Parker, an experience that I had here. There's a local group, a congregationally-based organizing group called Jonah. And statewide, it's called Wisdom, and I don't know for Madison what they call theirs locally. Micah is what it's called over in Milwaukee. And these are locally organized and congregations come together and they find what rises up that the congregations would like to address in our public life together. So it's a spiritually rooted thing that we're doing. What happened here is, of course, we've got the defecation hidden in the fan in Wisconsin, and there's a desire to engage with and to listen and to have growing mutual respect there. So Jonah organized an experimental thing, a listening session of sorts. And you know, many of the listening sessions that happened in the state were brutal, antagonistic. There wasn't much room for listening at these listening sessions, right? Well, what happened in this, they had an inner circle, and those were the only people talking, and they had an outer circle, which is a lot of us who were there to hold the space. They had a presentation on three different issues, and they had three members of our state Congress who were in the center circle, and they're all Republicans. And Jonah has a history of being on the liberal side of things in general. They had a presentation by a person who had an immediate connection to an issue, transportation or mental health court, drug courts, et cetera. That person spoke of their firsthand experience, which, you know, did part of what you're talking about, that circle, you know, where you hear a person's stories. And then they talked a little bit about how this played out and what worked or didn't work for them in the public sphere. And then there was a chance for another person to have listened to and said, okay, I heard you saying this, and then there was the congressional representative who was there who got to speak of their own experience. And I tell you, considering the atmosphere of ranker in the state at the time, it was incredible to find common ground happening. And I think it's exactly attributable to listening to people's stories. It was amazing. - That's a great story. And I think it is about listening, and you also made it clear that it's about creating a structure for listening that actually supports listening. There's a discipline built into what you described, that inner circle talking and the outer circle holding the space, and some ground rules around how we're going to participate in this, that allow for true speaking and true listening to happen. And I think that that's something, it's a pretty obvious thing, but unfortunately, it's something that often gets missed, which is that people with good intentions invite a bunch of folks to come into a room and say, okay, let's listen to each other. Well, we don't know how to do that. We don't have much experience at it. We need structure. We need containers that hold this intention and keep us on track. And let me just say, Mark, that bouncing off that story a bit or building on that story. And I think probably both of you and I have many stories to tell of how listening and storytelling of a genuine and disciplined sort can really help us break through some of these impasses. Let me just say that this, I think, takes us to another important level of the book for me and also of what's needed in our democracy. So we have these structures that were given to us by the founders that are essentially creative tension-holding structures, but they don't work on autopilot. They need to be inhabited by people who have a tension-holding capacity within themselves in their own hearts. That's where the work of Alexis de Tocqueville, whom I write about in the book comes in, this French intellectual who visited America in the 1830s and went home to write a book called Democracy in America, which may very well be the best book ever written on the subject. So Alexis de Tocqueville, who was only 27 years old when he came here, saw very clearly that the future of American democracy would depend on what he called the habits of the heart, that its citizens developed. Those in turn would depend on the local venues or settings of life where our habits of the heart get formed or deformed. And by those venues or settings, he meant things that are very close at hand that we have daily experience with, the family, the neighborhood, the workplace, the classroom, the congregation, the various spaces of public life that we were talking about earlier, the city streets, the sidewalk cafes, the parks and so forth. I think the example you've just given, which was created as I understand it by a religious community is exactly the kind of thing Alexis de Tocqueville had in mind, where one of these local, close at hand venues or settings creates a situation where a new habit of the heart can be developed or an old habit of the heart can be deepened. In this case, the habit of listening and the habit of both telling and evoking stories from each other. As you know, 50% of my book is devoted to talking about what we might be doing in classrooms, in congregations, in spaces of public life, in what I call safe space for deep democracy to help develop the habits of the heart that allow us to engage as individuals in the future of this experiment, this ongoing, never-ending experiment called democracy. - You know, our society has changed so much. You referred to this earlier when we were speaking. - The fact that we have malls where public speech is not allowed because there's a corporate interest going on within is such an issue. I'm also wondering whether you view specifically talk radio as a downside or an upside. I mean, you've been on public radio a number of times, I've heard you speak there. My sense is that so much of this talk radio has nothing to do with listening, has nothing to do with introspection, but has everything to do with pushing an agenda. - Well, I agree, and of course, what's neat is that we're on talk radio right now, but it's a different kind of talk radio than the one we hear on commercial airways. You have a program that allows people like me and you and your listeners to explore things at more leisure and at more length, and these are complicated subjects which require more leisurely exploration. On talk radio, as we normally think of it, you're absolutely right, the agenda is very different. It's not exploration, it's selling a viewpoint and it's very often selling a product. I think even more than a viewpoint. The reason they take on incendiary subjects and make incendiary statements about them is that they know that that sells and that encourages advertisers to finance their programs in order to sell their wares to the audience until, as recently happened, one of them walks over a line in the case of a Rush Limbaugh who crossed a line, egregiously crossed a line with a young woman who had testified before Congress in a very mature and responsible manner about the healthcare law and the availability of contraceptives. Rush Limbaugh actually ended up, as I understand it, losing advertisers, not simply because of what he said. It would be nice to think that the advertisers would listen to that and simply say this is not right, this is not good, this is not true, we're not gonna support this, but what happened, of course, was that there was a massive uprising in cyberspace from people who were profoundly offended by these remarks and who rushed, as it were, to the defense of not just this young woman. I think in a way she didn't need any defenders, she was perfectly capable of taking care of herself, but rushed to the defense of common decency and civility in public discourse and truth-telling and through that public outcry, a number of advertisers abandoned Mr. Limbaugh and the whole connection between profit and outrageousness, profit, PRO, FIT, and outrageousness got turned around. So it's an interesting force field, but I think when we think about the rise of digital technology, here we have another example of how, you know, once upon a time, whoever commandeered the airways in the way some of these talk show hosts are able to do, had the final word on things because no one else could pay for a studio and a microphone and a huge audience. But now, with the social media at our disposal, lots and lots of ordinary people can get in on the act and sometimes with great consequence. - I'm still waiting to see how that plays out with Rush Limbaugh. I know that there were somewhere closing in on 200 advertisers who would no longer advertise in that time slot, but what I also heard is that only one or perhaps two now stations of the, I think 800, stations that broadcast Rush Limbaugh, that only one or two of them have dropped his program. So it's a temporary hiatus perhaps. On the other hand, I've seen, on the liberal end, people who have been addressed on something they said that was unpopular and immediately they were fired or sent away. So maybe the conservatives need to learn to fire people better. - It's a complicated picture and I don't think that all of the precincts have yet reported on the Rush Limbaugh situation. And I think one of the things that we have to think about as citizens is that in some of these instances, the powers that be are depending on our short attention span, they're depending on the likelihood that we will have forgotten about this whole thing six months from now and some of these advertisers can then come back without creating any ripples. So I think part of being a good citizen is don't forget, keep those memories alive, don't let the rapidly scrolling news at the bottom of your cable TV channel screen con you into forgetting that last week's story or last month's story or last year's story is still important to the people affected by it and don't forget it. - Amen, brother. I mean, that's one that I lament and, of course, you've been connected with education for many decades now to the degree where we really hope that people will carry lessons forward, even if they don't carry individual facts. Sometimes I'm afraid that if Google goes down that many of us will have lost our corporate memory that way, we won't be able to pull up the facts. Did we invade Guatemala in 1954 or not? You know, that kind of thing. One of the things that you talk about in the book, which harkens to some of the topics we've just discussed, one of the topics is the circles of trust. And I think you refer to what maybe 40,000 people having sat in circles of trust, all of that by the center of courage and renewal, that the circles of trust allow people to go to a deeper level of listening and telling their story and then being empowered to live out in the world. You talk, for instance, about a doctor who faces what he has is called to do at work that violates his Hippocratic oath. Is there a slant to the people who are willing to sit in circles of trust? Is this liberal, conservative, or some other ideological slant that predisposes people to be willing to go into these intense cauldrons of change? Well, I don't think so. I mean, it's a good question, but having worked with probably closer to 45,000 or 50,000 people over the last 10 or 12 years in these long-term retreat programs that the Center for Courage and Renewal has been putting on for K through 12 teachers, for physicians, for clergy, for nonprofit leaders, community organizers, philanthropists, and others. I've seen many occasions when people of quite different viewpoints showed up to take this journey together. And where people really revealed their own shadow side in a way that suggests to me that they didn't have everything figured out before they came in and they were really making themselves vulnerable. One of the stories that I tell in a book called A Hidden Wholeness, which is, if there are folks out there who are interested in a lot more detail about these circles of trust and the work of the Center for Courage and Renewal, my book A Hidden Wholeness is the place where I've written the most about that. One of the stories that I tell there is about a series of retreats that we did for a group of K through 12 teachers. 25 people or so sitting in a circle for a series of eight retreats over a two-year period, each retreat being about three days. And in this one circle, there was a female teacher, middle-aged woman, who spent the first two or three retreats complaining bitterly as a white person about how many problems she was having with the African-American children in her class. And every time she spoke about this, it was kind of gut-clinching time for me because there were African-American teachers in the circle, five or six of them. And I knew how offensive these comments were in my ears and certainly must be to them as well. But one of the ground rules of a circle of trust is that we create safe space for people to say whatever it is that they need to say to sort of get it out and not to have it judged or analyzed or critiqued or picked apart, although other people are free to put their own experience alongside the experience of the last speaker. They are not free to confront the last speaker and say, well, you're wrong about that or whatever. So this is not argumentation and debate. This is witnessing to our own inner struggles and ruminations and having a chance over time to sort them out and to, again, as we were saying earlier, to listen deeply to one another and to listen deeply to ourselves. In this particular case, what happened after two or three retreats where this white teacher had complained bitterly about how her African-American students were making her life miserable, she came to the next retreat and started off by saying, I want to apologize for the way I've been speaking and I want to let you know that the fact that you allowed me to speak that way in a way that I now realize must have been offensive or hurtful to many of you, the fact that you allowed me to do that, that you gave me safe space to do that, allowed me to reflect more deeply on what I was saying and to see that I was pinning the problem on the wrong source. The problem wasn't being created by my African-American students, it was being created by an unconscious racism in me that saw these young people through a filter of judgment that I am working very hard to get rid of. And just in the last three months, she said, between the last retreat and this one, things have really changed because I've understood that this is about me, not them. And I've started re-establishing respect and trust with these young people and things in my classroom are going much better. And by the end of this two-year series of retreats, she had come totally around, was talking about how happy she was to be in a diverse school system and to have diverse classes and how she had learned to help everyone learn from that diversity just as she herself had learned from it, to turn it toward opportunities for self-reflection, and to help these young people develop habits at the heart that will make good citizens of them. So that's an example of someone who, if she had read any of my stuff, she certainly would have known that I would not share her opinions about race in the classroom. But she still was there, and she still felt the safety to explore, even in an unconscious way, very difficult issues. And she said, as many of our other teachers have said, she said, I have learned more about myself in relation to diversity in this very unusual safe space, where I can say anything I want and then am compelled to think deeply about it myself. I've learned more about diversity here and my own relation to it than I have in any of the traditional, more confrontational race training sessions that I've been exposed to as a schoolteacher. So I think our circles attract people who are coming at issues from many different places. And since we try to keep those circles, I think very successfully try to keep those circles, not at the level of ideology or political conviction or social values and beliefs, but to keep them instead at the level of what's going on inside each of us and what do we have to learn from that, as we listen not only to ourselves, but to everyone else in the group. That's how we are able to secure safe space for people of many different viewpoints. - We're speaking today with Parker J. Palmer. His most recent book is Healing the Heart of Democracy, the Courage to Create a Politics, Worthy of the Human Spirit. And that's a big mouthful that you've got there. His website that you can track him down via is couragerenewal.org, and that's associated with the Center on Courage and Renewal. Project, he's birthed and nurtured forward for some time now. That's having great effects in the world. And specifically, this world needs a lot of healing and continual healing. And that's part of what he talks about in Healing the Heart of Democracy. I'm Mark Helpsmeet. This is Spirit in Action. Our website is nerdandspiritradio.org. You find our links and our recordings. And you can hear both parts of this interview with Parker Palmer on that site, as well as some other people we refer to along the way. Gar Alpervitz, for instance. What you were just talking about, Parker, the circles of trust, the way that they can function in the world. I wanna ask you about their relationship to clearness committees, which I think they have a connection to, but also to men's group I go to. I'm wondering how the rules are similar or different in particular implementations in our society of circles of trust. And then, of course, I wanna bring that to the political domain as well. Where did you get the ideas from? How did you modify it for the settings that you were working in? What are the roots here? Well, for me, Mark, the roots are pretty directly traceable to my 11 years of living in a Quaker, living learning community, an adult study center called Pendle Hill, which is near Philadelphia. It's an educational institution that takes the shape of a commune or an ashram or a cabutes or a monastery, but it's for singles as well as married folks and kids and a wide diversity of people. But an educational institution that focuses on both the inner journey and nonviolent social change, where people share a daily round of life together that includes Quaker meeting for worship, the silent meeting for worship, or the unprogrammed meeting for worship every morning, eating meals together, doing physical work together to maintain the place, studying together, making decisions together in community meetings, and engaging in social witness of various forms together in the larger community. So it was 11 years of a full immersion experience in the Quaker tradition. And I learned a very great deal there about a form of community that I found unlike anything I had experienced before. Just a quick word about my prior experience. I was at Pendle Hill from 1974 to 1985. The prior five years to that, I had been a community organizer in Washington, and the five years prior to that through the '60s, I had been a graduate student in Berkeley, which of course was a very interesting time to be at the University of California Berkeley doing a PhD in sociology. In Berkeley in the '60s, there were a lot of communities under development. The '60s and '70s were one of those periods in American history where communes and communal forms of living started popping up in various places around the country. And certainly that was happening in Berkeley. But when I got to the Quaker community at Pendle Hill, which as I say, began in 1930 and is still going strong to this day, I found a very different model of community. And it's a model that's hard to describe, but the phrases that I use to talk about it are phrases like a community of solitudes or being alone together. It's a form of community in which we're not, while we are doing things together, there's a great respect for the paradox of solitude and community. There's respect for the fact that every individual needs safe space in which to conduct individual explorations as well as a sense of connectedness with and responsibility to the larger group. And Quakers over the years have found various ways to institutionalize that notion of a community of solitudes or being alone together. This was so very different from what I had experienced at Berkeley in the '60s, where I had found the forms of community that were developing at that time to be basically invasive of individual solitude, of individual identity and integrity. More really a call, whether conscious or unconscious, to conform to the group or a call to bear your soul, whether you wanted to do that or not. And at Pendle Hill, I found something very different, something more graceful, something that to me was more illuminating and more healing than what I had seen before. Well, one feature of Quaker communal life is this institution called the Clearness Committee that you mentioned a moment ago. And I'll just describe very briefly if you'd like what the Clearness Committee is. The Clearness Committee was really invented by Quakers because they did not have ministerial leadership and the Quakerism, at least the branch of Quakerism that I'm talking about, unprogrammed or silent meeting Quakerism, is a branch of the Christian Church that does not have clerical leadership of any sort. So when people had an issue or a problem that they wanted to wrestle with in a Quaker meeting, there was no pastor to take it to. You couldn't go into the privacy of the pastor's study and get pastoral counseling as you can do in many courses. So the Clearness Committee was invented as a way for a small group of people within the community, let's say five or six people, to gather around an individual with an issue. It might be a vocational issue, for example. I'm trying to figure out what's the best use of my gifts in the world. How can I best serve given who I am and what it is that I'm able to do? You sit in a small circle for two or three hours and after the person has described his or her dilemma, taking no more than 15 minutes to do so. Basically for the rest of that time, the members of the Clearness Committee are prohibited from speaking to that person in any way except to ask an honest, open question. So if you think for a moment about what that rules out, it rules out all of the things that we normally do when someone brings us a problem. As we say in our circles of trust, no fixing, no saving, no advising, and no correcting each other. Since those are the things we normally do, people always say, well, what in heaven's name are we going to do? And the answer is, one of the answers is we're going to learn to ask each other honest, open questions. It turns out to be a very high art, the art of asking honest, open questions. Something that we're not very skilled at because in so many settings, the questions we ask are really little advices or speeches in disguise or ways of slipping in our own opinion. For example, have you thought about seeing a therapist is not an honest, open question? It's really a question asked in the hopes that the question itself will nudge people toward seeking therapeutic help. So what is an honest, open question? Well, it's a question that you, among other things, that you can't possibly ask. While sitting there saying to yourself, I know the right answer to this question and I sure hope you give it to me. So an honest, open question is one that helps the other person dig more deeply into their own experience, their own convictions, their own questions. To hear them into speech, that's what an honest, open question does. It helps the person who's being asked to hear more clearly what Quakers call the inner teacher. What is that voice of truth within me trying to say to me? And what is it that this particular question evokes? It's very hard to describe, although you've, I know, have had the experience. It's very hard to describe to someone who hasn't had the experience, but let me just put it this way. I've taught this clearness committee process for 25 years and have sat in on, I have no idea how many committees. It's certainly in the couple hundreds by now. And every time I've taught it to a group, I have asked them when it was over. When is the last time you spent two or three hours sitting with a group of trusted adults who were willing for that whole period of time to suspend their own agendas and to simply focus exclusively on trying to help hear you into speech, not to nudge you in any particular direction, but to help you have a deepening conversation with yourself that will move you closer to your own inner truth. When was the last time that happened to you? And the only answer I've ever gotten is that's never happened to me before. And it was an astonishing experience. I do hope that there will be those who listen to this, who are interested enough in what that might be like, that they would maybe pick up, go to the library, get a copy of a hidden wholeness, my book, a hidden wholeness, and read the chapter. I think it's called "Living the Questions" that is devoted to a detailed description of how to do a clearness committee. It takes discipline. It seems easy on the surface, but it's actually very challenging. But it's an experience that I think people who've had it find unforgettable and powerful in their lives. It does make a difference when we listen deeply without agendas there. I kind of think we need a big clearness committee for the state of Wisconsin and the USA, and then the world. I mean, we just have to keep expanding it. Except, of course, we need to have small enough groups so that we're actually seeing each other as individuals. Yeah, that's exactly right. We can't keep taking this kind of mass view about them, whoever they are, and expect to get anywhere with healing the heart of democracy. We really need to remember that we're talking about human beings, about individual lives, about rich and complicated stories, and that reducing things to sound bites or caricatures of what's going on in the world really, really doesn't help at all. It gets us into law, law, and where we start doing really destructive things to each other and to ourselves. You know, there's a message that I wanted to share with people who are probably on different side of the political fence than I am about the situation in Wisconsin and why I think it's so important to not have Scott Walker as our governor. The thing is, I'm not sure if people would be able to hear me, but here's what I think we hold as a common value that if we looked at it squarely, we would say, yes, I agree, that's not the way we want to do things. And that is, the way I read the electorate here, it's very close to evenly divided those who are supportive of a number of policies of Scott Walker and those who are opposed to it very strongly. And very close to this little precipice of equally divided, I think the recall election will be successful, that is to recall him, but I wouldn't want to glow to neither direction on that. The point that I have is any government leader, and this I think of Abraham Lincoln from your book Healing the Heart of Democracy, he had to do this, any leader who looks at a nation closely divided and says to hell with the other 50% there is going to destroy democracy in that place. Abraham Lincoln fortunately chose a tone of reconciliation and honoring at the end of the Civil War. And I think that was, that's why he's a great president. I think Scott Walker chose a tone of dismissal and said I've got the 51% I need, I can do whatever I want. That is inimicable to a good democracy. I don't know what the percentage is that's good and maybe that's one of the things I have to reflect on further before I talk to people about this too much. But if you have half of the state plus one on your side, it seems to me at least very vulnerable to make a position because one person may defect and then you're up the creek. Given that you have a way with words that perhaps I lack, do you have a way of delivering that message if it's one that resonates with you? - Well, I think you have your own good way with words, Mark, and I'd never try to replace or substitute for that. I have a lot of respect for your public voice and what you're doing on this program. You know, one of my principles in this conversation about democracy is that I would prefer not to talk about people who aren't here. And what I mean by that is that I like as much as possible to keep the focus in my contribution to this complicated problem, to keep the focus off of quote them and on us. If I look at politics objectively, I can think of all kinds of leaders and I'm sure you can too on both sides in both parties and in every ideological position who have taken that one more than half vote and run with it, claiming a mandate. I can also think of leaders who, like Governor Walker, have not told us during the course of the campaign what their true intentions were and then have sprung them on us once they got into office, which is another problem, of course, that some of us have with the Walker administration. I can also think of other leaders and, again, where I'm talking about from both parties who seem clearly beholden to big money that doesn't necessarily have the citizens' interests at heart but their own corporate interests at heart. And that's a problem that has been fed, of course, by people on both sides of the aisle. When I get into that kind of discussion, I feel like, well, there's certainly, I certainly want to hear people's points of view on that but I want to keep my focus on what's the responsibility of the citizen in all of this and I think the responsibility of the citizen as we discussed earlier is one that has been exercised in some quite remarkable and quite wonderful ways by folks in the state of Wisconsin. As I said earlier, I participated in those rallies around the state capital that initially signaled, in a very public way, in a way that caught headlines around the world, signaled the dissatisfaction of many Wisconsin residents with what the new administration was doing. So my own political convictions on that are not a secret. I think what I would like to do, though, is to say, whatever your political convictions may be, how is it that you can, in these close to home venues that Alexis de Tocqueville talked about, the family, the neighborhood, the classroom, the congregation, and so forth, how is it that you can host a conversation across lines of difference between people who are for Governor Walker and people who are against Governor Walker, between people who are very happy, the recall election is happening and those who think it was a bad idea from the get-go. How can you host a conversation between those people that upbuild the body politic and put this in a position where we might, as time goes on, identify common elements of the common good, conceptions of the common good that we all share? You know, I suspect that nobody likes to be fooled politically by someone who doesn't tell us what they're going to do when they're elected and then uses a fairly slim majority to go ahead and do whatever they wanted to do. I think that's probably something that people of every political conviction would share and I am interested in hosting conversations where we can identify those sorts of commonalities and detach them in some way from the immediacy of the moment so that we can return to the immediacy of the moment, looking at it through more of a shared lens or perspective. I don't think we're going to get there, though, if we start with the particulars of this or that governor, this or that policy, I think we need to have that more fundamental conversation about what do we expect of our political leaders, of our candidates for office when it comes to candor about what it is that they intend to do if elected. I think one of the sad things in American democracy is that we've become so accustomed to the political rhetoric of campaigning that we don't hold people accountable anymore or anybody for the difference between what they say and what they end up doing. And, of course, there are a great many progressive Democrats who are extremely unhappy with President Obama right now for not doing what he said he was going to do about some pretty critical issues that range from Guantanamo to the American economy, to who's in charge of the American economy. Lots of ways to look at it and to find error and to look at ourselves. And I'm so thankful that you keep reminding us that we have to talk about us instead about you. And I think our nation will be much better if we do that. We're almost out of time. And I wanted to just finish off with a couple threads dealing with healing the heart of democracy. But first, in your journey to being involved with Quakers, you didn't say where you start from. I don't think you grew up Quaker, did you? How did you get to Pendle Hill? How did you get to this different way of being? 'Cause I think it's not what you had as a foundation starting as a youngster. - You know, that's correct, Mark, I grew up in the Methodist Church in a suburb of Chicago. And I was in the Methodist Church as a child simply because my parents were active there. They had grown up Methodist, came under the influence of a wonderful, wonderful youth director during my high school years who really had this gift for creating the beloved community among high school students who otherwise were pretty stratified by various sorts of social strata at the local high school ranging from the geeks to the jocks and, you know, all the divisions in between. But this youth director really gave us a model of community that was very formative in my life. From there, went to Carleton College in Minnesota where I was influenced by some very remarkable people who were scholars in a way that spanned or bridged faith in reason, religion, and science. I've never understood the so-called warfare between those two because of Carleton. I was exposed to some truly brilliant people. In a couple of cases, some scholars of world renowned in whom faith and reason cohabited with great ease and grace. I actually spent a year at Union Theological Seminary exploring the possibilities of going into the ministry when I realized that that was not for me, not my calling, and then I went out to Berkeley to do a PhD in the sociology of religion working under a man named Robert Bella whom some will know for his book Habits of the Heart. So Quakerism was really not on my radar. I knew hardly anything about it when I went to Pendle Hill. In 1974, I went initially not as a staff member but as an adult student taking what I thought was a year-long sabbatical from my work as a community organizer, went with my wife and our three then young children and largely went because this was a place that had an educational program, offered an experience of intentional community and was friendly to families. And once I got there, started learning about this Quaker tradition, founded enormously fascinating, founded speaking to my condition during my year there as an adult student, a position opened up as dean of studies and I applied for that position and got it so I ended up staying another decade beyond my student year. So I really came into Quakerism by accident. I do believe that at age 73, looking back that some of the best things that have happened in my life were complete accidents and had nothing to do with my skillful planning. I think that's a happy happenstance for everyone involved. We've certainly been blessed within Quaker circles and I think in the wider society, the reflection, the depth, the thought that you've put into all of the books, the nine books you've got out there really make a difference in society. - So thank you, Mark. - I had one last question before I have to let you go, Parker and that is having looked at the dynamics of our society and what's necessary for a democracy to thrive and to be healthy. All of which you've done in healing the heart of democracy. Having done that, are you optimistic about our situation here in Wisconsin or in the US? How do you feel about that having looked deeply? - I'm hopeful. I think of hope as different from optimism and I think this may just be word play but I think hope is a posture you take after you've taken a long hard look at the hard facts and there are many hard facts that we need to deal with today and you're able to see through those challenges to some potentials and possibilities on the other side. I think optimism sometimes is a rather thinner virtue than that where people aren't looking as hard as they need to at the facts. - You know, Mark, I think probably the best answer I can give to your question is I will always put my money on hope because that gives me something life giving to do. The thing I disbelieve in profoundly is cynicism, corrosive cynicism that says everything's rigged, there's nothing to be done. And the reason I disbelieve in it profoundly is it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you believe that and you follow that, then you really take yourself out of the action and I think cynicism is a cheap excuse very often for not doing anything. Hope on the other hand is a source of energy and motivation for doing something, for doing what's within reach, what's at hand, for doing what you can. And so I'll always put my money on hope because as long as I'm drawing breath, I would like to be involved in whatever kind of life-giving activity is available to me, simply because it's life and life is good. - I guess it's fair to say, I'd rather die hopeful than to be smug and cynical and die. - Absolutely, I think if when we die, we can say, well, you know, the things I stood for, I can't check them off the to-do list by saying love, truth and justice have been accomplished once and for all. But I can say that I was faithful to my highest values and to my best lights in following those things to the best of my ability. And I think we can die satisfied that we showed up as ourselves with the fullness of ourselves and did what we could to contribute to the common good, which is always a gift to ourselves as well as we hope a gift to other people. - You've given us such great gifts through your books and through your words here today. Thanks so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. - Thank you, Mark. It's been a real privilege and pleasure and I wish you all the best with your good work too. - Thank you again, Parker. Parker J. Palmer was here today and also last week for Spirit in Action. He'll be on stage with one of my favorite musicians, Kerry Newcomer, for a song and spoken word performance called Healing the Heart of Democracy, a Gathering of Spirits for the Common Good. That's on April 27th and in Madison, Wisconsin. And you can follow links on nerdenspiritradio.org to find more info. We'll take you out today with a snippet of music from Kerry Newcomer. The song is, "I Heard an Owl." Thanks so much for joining us today and we'll see you next week for Spirit in Action. Kerry Newcomer, "I Heard an Owl." ♪ Couldn't I call last night ♪ ♪ Homeless and confused ♪ ♪ And us to naked and bewildered at ♪ ♪ The evil people do ♪ ♪ And up upon the hill there is a tale of sin ♪ ♪ That tells the story of what darkness waits ♪ ♪ If we leave the light behind ♪ ♪ So don't tell me hate ♪ ♪ It's ever right ♪ ♪ Walk on to it ♪ ♪ These are the wheels we put in motion ♪ ♪ Ourselves ♪ ♪ And the whole world weaves ♪ ♪ And as we paint still ♪ ♪ The world's shaking us ♪ ♪ Still believe the best ♪ ♪ Of what we all can be ♪ ♪ And the only peace this world will know ♪ ♪ Can only come from love ♪ - The theme music for this program is "Turning of the World," performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. (upbeat music) ♪ With every voice ♪ ♪ With every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world ♪ ♪ All along ♪ ♪ With every voice ♪ ♪ With every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ I'm leaving ♪